The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Orion’s loss of political office sparked other unanticipated consequences. As late as February 1865, the Territorial Enterprise still performed more work for the state than any other of the print shops in Nevada. But with Sam no longer on its staff and his brother no longer in office, the situation soon changed. The state printing contract was awarded to a well-heeled broker who outsourced the work to a company in California. Orion was admitted to the Nevada Bar and hung out his attorney’s shingle in Carson City but, as Sam recalled, “he got no clients.” He somehow eked out a living in 1865, when Sam also was mostly un(der)employed. “You are in trouble, & in debt—so am I,” Sam wrote Orion in October. “I am utterly miserable—so are you.” On his part, Sam resolved to commit suicide rather than live permanently in poverty like his father: “If I do not get out of debt in three months—pistols or poison for one—exit me.” A decade later he likened debt to “cancer among the tortures of the body. I suffered it once, ten years ago.”53

  Fortunately, Orion was elected to the state assembly on November 7 as a representative from Ormsby County. Selected as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee in January 1866, he seemed on the verge of rehabilitating his political and legal career. He sponsored another bill to regulate the mines and vigorously campaigned for its passage. “Instead of placing the power to appoint and discharge all officers in the hands of the Trustees” selected by mine owners, he explained in an open letter to the voters of the state, the prerogative “should be reserved to the stockholders. The stockholders, under the present system, have so little power in the management of the mine” that “the competition in purchasing” is reduced “to a comparatively few men, and by thus narrowing the market, reduces the prices of our mines to what, compared with their real value are mere nominal rates, thus causing a loss annually to this State of millions of dollars. No wonder we have hard times!”54

  But Orion was tacking into the political winds that had swept the state legislature into office. His proposal was tabled and thus killed on February 8, after clearing the committee but before reaching a vote on the floor of the House. Frustrated by this turn of events, Orion resigned as chair of the committee a few days later, three weeks before the end of the session. “I desired to increase the revenue by raising the value of the basis of taxation, beginning at the fountain head, by effectually protecting every man, poor or rich, who might buy shares in any mining corporation,” he declared. “With this view I introduced a bill ‘to provide for the formation and regulation of mining corporations,’” including a provision for the election of company officers by the stockholders. Orion “desired to change our present revenue system” by taxing revenue from the mines. But failing “to be as useful to the State as in my opinion I should have been, and the Committee having finished all the business so far referred to it, I respectfully resign my position as Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means.” The Virginia Daily Union lamented the loss of his talent: “Mr. Clemens was an industrious committee-man, and is, perhaps, as familiar with the wants of the State as any man at Carson.”55 He and Mollie soon put their house on the market—they would sell it for less than half what it had cost to build—and left Nevada for good.

  On March 17 Mollie headed to the California coast for three months while Orion took a last flier at a legal career in the boomtown of Meadow Lake, California, at the summit of the Sierras in the Excelsior mining district about forty miles northwest of Carson. He planned to see the elephant during the summer there, practicing law and working as a mining agent, and he hoped “to make some money and go home in December.” Excelsior was supposedly the next Comstock, despite its inhospitable climate. Mining was only practical there, at an elevation of about eight thousand feet, during four months of the year. Two feet of snow fell in a single day as late as May 27, 1866, but building lots nevertheless were selling for as much as fifteen hundred dollars apiece. By mid-April 1866, a month after Orion’s arrival, the district was home to some three hundred dwellings, three sawmills, a weekly newspaper, three quartz mills, seven hundred mines, but only two lawyers. Orion was one of them, with an office on C Street opposite the Bank Exchange. Under the pen name Norio, he contributed a dozen weekly columns to the Meadow Lake Morning Sun between early June and early August for which he was paid five dollars apiece and in which, like Sam in Aurora, he touted the prospects of the region. “Thousands of enterprising people who desire to seek their fortunes in this new, rich and wide field” were thronging to the Excelsior district, he reported. “Over an extent of territory six miles long by three broad, many gold and some copper ledges indicate the presence of riches enough to build up a great and prosperous community,” he announced the next week. Then a sober cautionary note by the former territorial secretary who had repeatedly advocated measures to regulate the mines: “Let the people [of Excelsior] avoid the breakers through which the State of Nevada is driving toward bankruptcy with the speed and destructiveness of a whirlwind—and she will reach that appalling goal if she does not change her course.” Under the pen name Snow Shoe he also corresponded with the San Francisco American Flag.56

  On the surface Orion seemed poised to make a fortune. As historians Warren Hinckle and Fredric Hobbs note, the silver mines of Nevada “created more millionaire lawyers” like William Stewart “than millionaire miners.” Between 1860 and 1865, according to Marion Goldman, twelve Comstock mining companies “were involved in 245 different lawsuits, generating an estimated ten million dollars in litigation fees” for their legal representatives. Lawyers flocked to Virginia City “like buzzards after carrion,” as Grant Smith observes, “and engaged in an orgy of litigation over mining claims, much of it incubated in blackmail and reeking with perjury.”57 The interminable litigation between the Ophir and Burning Moscow Mines was sometimes compared to the interminable Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. It was much easier to make money in the West by selling shares in a mine, litigating ownership of mining property, selling whiskey and slumgullion to miners, or milling ore than it was actually working a mine.

  But as luck would have it, Orion opened a law practice in one of the least productive and least litigious mining districts in the West. The Excelsior correspondent for the Virginia Daily Union remarked in late May 1866 that “I do not think a single suit has been brought as yet concerning the mines here.” By early June, Orion admitted to Mollie that his “only hope is that in July I may be able to sell out here for enough to take me home. If I can do that I shall be satisfied, as I can make a living there writing for newspapers, I think.” Even that modest hope was dashed, however. “I am anxious to go to the States on the next Steamer, with my wife, to attend to our Tennessee land, for which of course some capital will be required,” he wrote in mid-July to a friend with instructions to sell the last of his mining stocks. By mid-August, five months after Orion settled in Meadow Lake, the Excelsior correspondent for the Daily Union reported that “business is today really duller than it was a year ago. There is less energy—less prospecting—less money” and property values had fallen by at least a third. A year after the first claims were filed, the Excelsior mines finally shipped to San Francisco about a thousand pounds of gold and silver bullion extracted from low-grade ore, worth about twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars—by comparison, less than the average amount of precious metal removed from the Gould & Curry Mine in Virginia City every day. With apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a local wag parodied the poem that had christened the district:

  Down in the distant valley shone

  The firelights of the ranchman’s home;

  And spectral snow drifts, white as milk,

  Surrounded that most famous bilk—

  Excelsior!

  Two weeks after this ditty appeared in the Carson Appeal, Orion announced that he was leaving for San Francisco, though he qualified his reasons: “It is too abominably dull here for human endurance; but next year it will be booming on a high tide.” Of course he never returned. The
professional gamblers had been the first to decamp, always a bad sign. Sam later reported that Orion sailed from San Francisco “with all his worldly possessions in his pocket.” Predictably, the Excelsior correspondent of the Union reported in late October, after the start of the winter snows, that the “flight of the Israelites from Egypt in the days of Pharaoh, or the sudden departure of Mohammed from Mecca, is but a weak parallel of the grand hegira from Meadow Lake.”58 Today it is a ghost town. By the time Orion’s last column appeared in the Morning Sun, he and Mollie had already arrived in St. Louis, their daughter dead and their family finances in shambles. Mollie left for Keokuk, Iowa, to live with her parents while Orion bunked at Pamela’s house, practiced a little law, contributed an occasional column to the San Francisco Times, and considered again how to sell the cursed Tennessee land.

  “When my credit was about exhausted,” Sam remembered in Roughing It, “I was created San Francisco correspondent of the Enterprise.” Joe Goodman rehired him in early June at a salary of a hundred dollars a month. In effect, he closed a circle: once the Virginia City correspondent of the San Francisco Morning Call, he now became the San Francisco correspondent of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. For the next eight months, as Goodman declared in December 1900, Sam submitted “the best work he ever did” to the paper. A. B. Paine echoed the sentiment: Sam contributed “the greatest series of daily philippics ever written” to the Enterprise, high praise indeed considering that only about 20 percent of the 150-plus columns survive whole or in part.59

  Soon after rejoining the staff of the Enterprise, Sam apparently suffered a theft of clothes. Joe Goodman or Dan De Quille reported the crime in the paper based on a private letter, though the victim’s name was not mentioned in the piece, only that he was a “newspaper man of San Francisco.” He had “retired to bed perfectly sober” at midnight and “awoke at half past 11 a.m.” to discover that his new boots, coat, and pants were missing. He had been robbed “by some prowling jayhawker, and his shirt which he had on, and his vest, which he had under his pillow on account of a keepsake which he had in one of the pockets [no doubt the gold watch he had been given after his facetious and fractious State of the Territory address in Carson City in January 1864], were all that were left him in the line of ‘store clothes.’” He was forced to dress in borrowed motley or “a promiscuous aggregation of the cast off garments of his fellow boarders” for the next several days.60

  Sam devoted one of his first columns as the San Francisco correspondent of the Enterprise to opera. He was not an aficionado, preferring minstrelsy as a musical art form. As he asserted in his autobiography, “[I]f I could have the nigger show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, I should have but little further use for opera.” But as a journalist and theatrical critic he was compelled to review musical revues of every stripe. The evening of June 1 he attended a performance of Martha by Friedrich von Flotow at Maguire’s Opera House starring Olivia Sconcia as Lady Harriet with Adelaide Phillips in a supporting role. “I have always heard that Italian opera was the most charming music in the world after your taste is cultivated up to it,” he began his review.

  Very well; after I had got myself cultivated up to so fine a point that I could close one eye in an opera and tell “Norma” from the “Bohemian Girl,” and “Traviata” from “Trovatore,” I began to acknowledge to myself that this was tolerably true—and finally I deliberately decided that it was entirely and unquestionably true. All San Francisco has laboriously schooled itself up to the same conviction in the same way. But to-night myself and a gorgeous concourse of other musical thoroughbreds were taken unawares and startled from our proprieties in this respect. The opera was “Martha,” and we sat and listed to the greasy, mushy Italian accents in a trance of ineffable delight, understanding little or none of it, of course, but applauding every two minutes and a quarter, as is customary and proper, and making a little more boisterous demonstration occasionally, when the risk was warranted by a more than usual obscurity in the sentiment.

  But when Sconcia finally stood before the footlights and “launched out into that enchanting old song, ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ in Italian,” Sam confessed,

  the contrast between those sweet, home-like strains, and that infernal foreign caterwauling, was too much for the proprieties of our fine-spun cultivation—the house was suddenly caught off its guard, and came down with a perfect crash of applause! . . . Then the lady came forward again and sang the same song in [the Irish poet Thomas] Moore’s own pure, flowing English, unmarred by an accent of infamous Italian, and then—why then there was an earthquake! I have modified my musical creed a little since that incident. I now hold that when one sings of dukes and duchesses, and imperial asses and brigands, it sounds all the better to do it in Italian words and Italian music, because these latter are well suited to the subject; but when you want genuine music—music that will come right home to you and suffuse your system, and go through you and inflame your whole constitution, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, call for a melody of our own, and have it sung in good, strong, stirring old Saxon!61

  He was annoyed by the musical stylings of Elvira Brambilla, the prima donna soprano of the Italian Opera Troupe who graced the stages of Maguire’s Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Theater during the summer and fall of 1865. Sam dismissed her in one of his San Francisco letters to the Enterprise after her engagement closed as “the preposterously stuck-up screamer who was petted by audiences in San Francisco until she began to imagine she was the bass vocalist of Christendom.”62

  Sam never fully outgrew his bias against opera—classical, light, or modern, it made no difference. He admitted to an interviewer in 1901 that, in his opinion, “opera is spoiled by attempting to combine instrumental and vocal effects. I love instrumental music and I love a good voice, but I don’t like them together. . . . Either the instruments spoil the voice or the voice spoils the instruments.” His comments anticipate his derision of opera in A Tramp Abroad fifteen years later, when he complained about attending a performance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin in Mannheim: “The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.”63

  By mid-1865, a year after his move to San Francisco, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, he began to outgrow his ingrained prejudice against black people. As early as April 1863 Sam had praised the banjo picking of Sam Pride, one of the few black (not blackface) minstrel performers, and he reiterated the compliment in June 1865. William Brief, the San Francisco correspondent of the Carson Appeal, reported in May 1865 that he had seen Sam promenading down Montgomery Street arm in arm with Peter Anderson, the African American publisher of the San Francisco Pacific Appeal, a black newspaper. According to Brief, “Anderson really treated [Sam] with kindness and familiarity.”64 But the clearest barometer of Sam’s changing racial attitudes appears in his column “Mark Twain on the Colored Man,” his commendation of the black folks who marched in the Fourth of July parade that year through the streets of San Francisco—the first time the organizers of the event had allowed them to participate. The decision was a controversial one protested by many whites, even though the black marchers were effectively segregated at the “fag-end of the procession,” as Sam put it. Harte reported that some copperheads tried “to keep the negro out of the procession, and several Irish societies refused to join if the negroes were allowed a place. Nevertheless, the colored people were admitted finally, and an attempt to insult them during the procession by a few rowdies was promptly checked.” Sam noted that the “damned naygurs”—he ironically undercut the racial slur by printing it as though pronounced in an Irish brogue—marched in an order that subtly challenged the essence of racial categories. The fairest skinned of them promenaded in the front ranks, followed by people with gradations of darker skin tones so that “
no man could tell where the white folks left off” and the people of color began. Sam would similarly ridicule in Pudd’nhead Wilson the fiction of law that permitted the enslavement of light-skinned blacks under the one-drop rule. He conceded in 1865 that he had been “rather irritated at the idea of letting these fellows march in the procession myself, at first, but I would have scorned to harbor so small a thought if I had known the privilege was going to do them so much good.”65

  Sam was just as peeved at the illiberality of his fellow citizens for opposing the construction of a new U.S. Branch Mint in downtown San Francisco. In August 1865 the federal government had proposed building the mint on the site of Union Square, and six weeks later the city board of supervisors quashed the idea. “It is a shame that the town and the State will not give a single block to a Government that is constantly spending money upon them,” Sam editorialized. The residents of the “great Metropolis of the Pacific” seemed to him more motivated by praise than generosity:

  They always respond when “Glory” calls, but they are sometimes slow to respond when they are not going to be applauded. They yell “loyalty, loyalty, loyalty” till they are in a fever of noble, patriotic enthusiasm, and then turn around and pull the Government’s nose. . . . They howl “nigger, nigger, nigger—nigger equality, nigger soldier, nigger suffrage, noble nigger brother”—but they wouldn’t walk in procession with the admired nigger last Fourth of July. They glorify themselves, and their soil, and their mines, and their large trees and waterfalls, and their fine metropolis, and their patriotism and munificence, and their mountains and rivers, and their matchless climate—and then get up and skurry [sic] home to the States as soon as they can borrow money enough to go in the first cabin, so as to sign the card immortalizing the captain for attending to his business and being efficient, urbane and accommodating.