One of the journalists, probably De Quille, sent a copy of the photo to Sam in San Francisco, who commented on it in his Enterprise column on December 31. It appeared to picture, Sam remarked, a “group of notorious convicts, or something of that kind. I only judge by the countenances, for I am not acquainted with these people, and do not usually associate with such characters. This is the worst lot of human faces I have ever seen.” The countenances of “the murderer Doten,” “the burglar Parker,” “the thug de Quille,” and “the light fingered gentry, Lowery and Gillespie” exhibited “that ineffable repose and self-complacency so deftly assumed by such characters.” He had forwarded a copy of the rogues’ gallery to the police chief “for obvious reasons.” Even such innocent badinage sparked an ill-humored response from the Virginia Daily Union. “We cannot allow Mark Twain or anyone else to accuse our fellow-reporters of being guilty of crimes,” the Union editorialized, as if Sam’s column was anything other than a joke. In fact, Sam was “the concentrated essence of a rebel deserter, murderer and outlaw,” and since his departure from Virginia nineteen months earlier “to avoid the wrath of an outraged people, who would undoubtedly have taken the law in their own hands,” he had been “allowed to roam at large in the city of San Francisco.”80 The editorial revealed, at the very least, the extent to which Sam was dogged by questions about his abbreviated military service in the Marion Rangers.
The Fourteenth Regiment of the U.S. Infantry, a group of rowdy Civil War veterans from New York known alternatively as the Fighting Fourteenth and the Bloody Fourteenth and who believed they were above the law, was temporarily assigned to the Presidio in November 1865. As a result, Sam was quick to report in his Enterprise correspondence the resulting spike in such crimes as shoplifting, assault, and breaking and entering. He branded the soldiers “thieving scalawags” in late December and detailed a couple of their felonies: “Two soldiers of the bloody Fourteenth entered a store on the corner of Montgomery and Washington streets, San Francisco. One engaged the storekeeper’s attention while the other walked off with a showcase full of fancy articles. Another forcibly entered a house” and “smashed the furniture and threatened the occupant.” Sam soon informed the Enterprise that their commander, General Irwin McDowell, forbade more than two soldiers of any company in the regiment from congregating off barracks. A week later, several of the troops were injured during a riot at the Presidio. In mid-January, Sam spoofed the misbehavior at the Pacific Market of three privates in the regiment. The first “warrior confiscated a sheep’s heart and put it in his pocket,” the next “man of war selected a fresh fish and put it in his pocket,” the third “soldier of the Union gazed upon a string of sausages in silent rapture for a moment and then transferred them to his pocket.” Finally, one of them, a “bronzed veteran” with “an elaborate wink of the profoundest meaning” and “swinging a recently slaughtered cow over his shoulder by the tail,” fled to the barracks “followed by his two comrades, bearing handkerchief, pencil, and other trophies captured from the reporter”81—that is, Sam. So much for the noble saviors of the Union.
Sam demonstrated the power of the press in ways both large and small. “The importation of oysters from the Gulf of California had become quite a business in San Francisco,” Joe Goodman remembered, and “notwithstanding they were huge gristly things that had to be carved and chewed like a beefsteak, they were getting to be very popular.” P. M. Scoofy, a local entrepreneur, raised oysters for two years in the Gulf of California before his first harvest of eight tons of seafood arrived in the city on December 22, 1865, aboard the John L. Stephens, commanded by Edgar Wakeman of the Mexican Steamship Line. Sam initially hailed the addition to the menus of the restaurants around the bay. The oysters “arrived in admirable condition—finer and fatter than they were when they started; for oysters enjoy traveling, and thrive on it,” he reported, and Scoofy would “hereafter endeavor to keep this market supplied with his delicious marine fruit; and another great point is that his Mexican oysters are as far superior to the poor little insipid things we are accustomed to here.” The next month, however, he abused the “scoofy oysters” he had eaten at McDonald’s saloon in the city, which he claimed were “poisonous” and caused “diarrhea and vomiting.” In his own defense, McDonald explained to the Dramatic Chronicle that Sam and six friends had visited his establishment and “after eating fourteen dozen” oysters they “disputed the bill” on the grounds they were members of the press and entitled to a discount. McDonald insisted on payment at full price, whereupon Sam paid the bill and swore that he would “get even.” Evans contested even this version of events. He alleged that the “Bohemian exile of the sage-brush,” aka “Markey,” had not actually paid the bill but “only promised to pay” lest he risk his membership in the “Bohemian Mutual Admiration Society. . . . His bill is still unliquidated.” Nor did Evans concede that the “scoofy oysters” were poisonous. “Where there is a barrel of whisky and only a half bushel of oysters,” he contended, “it is hardly fair to assume that the poison is all in the said oysters. The next time Mark gets poisoned, the police propose to have him ripped open and analyzed at once by a practical chemist. . . . I am in favor of the proposition; he could be made of some use to his fellow men in that sort of manner.” Whether McDonald or Evans or neither of them told the truth, according to Goodman, Sam single-handedly “killed the Mexican oyster trade as dead as a door nail.”82
During these months Sam planned a number of literary projects that were stillborn or had a long gestation. He quit the Californian in the fall of 1866 to contribute to the New York Weekly Review and the Saturday Press, though he admitted to his family in St. Louis that he was “too lazy to write oftener than once a month” for these magazines. As early as September 1864 he contemplated writing a book about the West based on his columns in the Enterprise and Californian. He and Harte hatched a scheme “to club a lot of old sketches together” and publish a book on the condition they were offered an advance contract by a New York publisher. “My labor will not occupy more than 24 hours,” he explained to his family, “because I will only have to take the scissors & slash my old sketches out of the Enterprise & the Californian.” In the first blush of their friendship, he and Harte also planned to collaborate on a collection of burlesque poems, a parody of Outcroppings. “We know all the tribe of California poets, & understand their different styles, & I think we can just make them get up & howl,” Sam declared. Nothing came of either idea. And then there was a report in the San Francisco Examiner in January 1866 that Sam had “commenced the work of writing a book” on “an entirely new subject.” He explained to his family that “the bulk of it will not be finished under a year. I expect it to make about three hundred pages, and the last hundred will have to be written in St Louis, because the materials for them can only be got there. If I do not write it to suit me at first I will write it all over again, & so, who knows?—I may be an old man before I finish it.”83 This bud eventually blossomed into “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875) and Life on the Mississippi (1883).
Another path to prosperity seemed to open in mid-December when the San Francisco mining magnate Herman Camp offered to help Sam sell the Tennessee land or even buy it himself to start a vineyard. Marshall Clemens once had the wild grapes on the land tested by a Cincinnati vintner, who concluded they were suitable for Catawba wine. Camp’s plan, as Sam described it in 1906, “was to import foreigners from grape-growing and wine-making districts in Europe, settle them on the land, and turn it into a wine-growing country. . . . I sent the contracts and things to Orion for his signature, he being one of the three heirs.” At the time, Sam admonished Orion that he did not
want that Tenn[essee] land to go for taxes. . . . I am tired being a beggar—tired being chained to this accursed homeless desert,—I want to go back to a Christian land once more—& so I want you to send me immediately all necessary memoranda to enable Camp to understand the condition, & quantity & resources of the land, & how he must g
o about finding it. He will visit St Louis & talk with the folks, & then go at once & see the land, & telegraph me whether he closes with my proposition or not.
As Sam explained, Camp believed “the land is valuable now that there is peace & no slavery.” Camp certainly could afford the investment because he had acquired the Virginia City claim of Henry Comstock. Unfortunately, as Sam recounted in his autobiography, Orion blocked the deal because as a teetotaler he would not sell to a prospective winemaker. He replied to Sam “that he would not be a party to debauching the country.” He also questioned “whether Mr. Camp was going to deal fairly and honestly with those poor people from Europe or not?—and so, without waiting to find out, he quashed the whole trade, and there it fell, never to be brought to life again.” As Lawrence Howe adds, however, Camp “never visited Tennessee to assess the land, so it’s not clear that Orion’s scruples had anything to do with why they failed to execute the deal.”84
In his San Francisco letters, Sam also took the opportunity to express his religious skepticism, ridiculing in particular a spiritualist enthusiasm that was sweeping the city. Despite his adolescent ambition to pursue a ministerial career, after attaining his majority he professed no orthodox belief. “I have a religion,” he affirmed to his brother in October 1865, “but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.” In late January 1866, along with four hundred others, he attended a séance conducted by the medium Adah Hoyt Foye at California Hall on Bush Street. “Many spirits came forward and rapped out their ages, names, the diseases they died of, and other interesting particulars,” the Dramatic Chronicle reported. In his account of the event, Sam stated that he “saw a good-looking, earnest-faced, pale-red-haired, neatly dressed, young woman standing on a little stage behind a small deal table with slender legs and no drawers—the table, understand me; I am writing in a hurry.” Mrs. Foye’s séance “was a very astonishing affair to me—and a very entertaining one.” He attended a second séance led by Foye the next month and was selected by the audience to “see that everything was conducted with perfect honesty and fairness”—the honor was “grateful to me when I reflect that it took me two days to get it up” by recruiting other attendees to vote for him. He was not persuaded that spiritualism was an authentic form of faith. He maintained that it was “safest to stick to the old regular plan of salvation and not speculate in these new and unprospected wildcat religions. I regard spiritualism as wildcat—and shall continue to do so until they get down on it deeper, and show wall-rock on both sides, and prove that they have got a ledge.” He identified a pair of “Friends of Progress” driven insane by spiritualism who had been confined to the State Asylum in Stockton. He added in his essay “Spiritual Insanity,” published in the Territorial Enterprise at the time, that he had “watched, with deep concern, the distress being wrought in our midst by spiritualism.” He even suggested that the new “wildcat” religion had caused the entire San Francisco Board of Supervisors to go mad.85
In addition to writing humorous sketches during these months, Sam leveled attacks on corrupt California state officials. He never shied from a fight—at least in print—and as a columnist for the Enterprise, an out-of-state newspaper, he enjoyed a measure of immunity from retaliation. Much as he had satirized the Spring Valley Water Company for cooking dividends in his “bloody massacre” hoax, indicted the undertaker in Carson City for exploiting the grief of families by overcharging for services, and lambasted the San Francisco coroner for withholding information from the press about deaths in the city, Sam in some of his earliest letters to the Enterprise blasted John Conness, the recently elected U.S. senator from California. If half of what Sam said “about John Conness ‘is true and he can prove it,’ it is a disgrace to California to be represented by such a man,” the Nevada City, California, Transcript concluded. (In truth, Sam seems to have been mostly troubled by Conness’s support for Chinese immigration and “negro suffrage.”) He also noodled William M. Gwin Jr. or “traitor Gwin,” a former U.S. senator from California who had defected to Mexico to join the staff of Maximilian I, the Austrian-born monarch of the Second Mexican Empire. Maximilian’s government was on the brink of collapse, and on December 15, 1865, in a rush to escape the catastrophe, Gwin sailed from San Francisco for France. Whether Gwin had “deserted Maximilian’s ship in its present stress of weather,” planned to help “Napoleon to steer his vessel,” or was retiring “to France to squat down and keep quiet for the future,” Sam wrote, “are questions I am not able to answer.”86 In any case, Gwin was arrested when he reached New York.
But Sam turned his heaviest guns on Martin J. Burke and his minions in the police department. Not to put too fine a point on it, from Sam’s point of view they were another “Irish Brigade.” Born in Galway, Ireland, Burke was trained as a physician in London and immigrated to California during the Gold Rush. He was active as a member of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance in 1856 and vigorously defended its execution of “justice” in later years: the committee “was composed of the most intelligent, best educated and property owning class in the city, and without the action which was taken by it, it would have been impossible for any industrious people to remain in the city. The police force was utterly demoralized. . . . At our final parade we had 6,500 men under arms and during the whole time of the operation of the committee there was hardly any crime committed.” The second chief of the San Francisco police, Burke was elected to the office in 1858. But by his own admission “I was rather autocratic in those days and did not keep exactly within the law.”87
At first Sam was impressed by Burke’s heavy-handed policing methods. In July 1864 he referred approvingly in the Morning Call to the city jail as the “Hotel de Burke” and in August he described the tough police response to an attempted murder. Within fifteen minutes, “Burke’s campaign commenced, and he was dictating orders to a small army of Policemen, with a decision and rapidity commensurate with the urgency of the occasion.” Burke directed officers to scour the docks and train stations and to “arrest every Chinaman and every suspicious white man that tries to go on board.” Burke publicly drilled a battalion of over fifty policeman on Commercial Street and, as Sam reported, in case of a riot they “would be able to cope with a mob comprising ten times their number. The Chief is not overrating the importance of keeping the force on a thorough military footing.” A month later Sam commended Burke and his “well drilled army of Police soldiers.” He also praised the “liberality and patriotism” of the police who contributed to the U.S. Sanitary Fund, including Burke, who donated fifteen dollars from his salary each month.88 Once Burke had even served as Sam’s source for details about a local suicide.
But Sam soon changed his tune about the chief and his arbitrary administration of justice. In late September 1864, he reported, Burke and his goons broke a threatened strike by steamship firemen protesting a reduction in their wages by beating two of them, arresting fifteen, and issuing warrants for thirty others for “attempting to incite a riot.” After Steve Gillis and Lewis P. “Little” Ward, another of Sam’s friends who had once worked as a compositor for the Enterprise, were arrested on assault charges, Sam became unyielding in his condemnation of the thugs who patrolled the city, and in December 1865 he launched a quixotic one-man crusade against police corruption. Over the months he charged Burke with venality and cronyism and some of his subordinates with a variety of crimes, including graft. Sam fired a shot across the chief’s bow on December 12, when in a piece for the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle he alleged that the police were guilty of discriminatory enforcement of the law, particularly in their aggressive prosecution of the Chinese and their failure to protect them. “If a Chinaman steals a chicken he is sure to be recognized and punished,” he wrote, “through the efforts of one of our active police force. If our active police force are not too busily engaged in putting a stop to petty thieving by Chinamen, and fraternizing with newspaper reporters, who hold up their wonderf
ul deeds to the admiration of the community, let it be looked to that the boys who were guilty of this murderous assault on an industrious and unoffending man are recognized and punished.”89 Three years later in the New York Tribune he reiterated the point and underscored the complicity of the local press in permitting the injustices:
In San Francisco, a large part of the most interesting local news in the daily papers consists of gorgeous compliments to the “able and efficient” Officer This and That for arresting Ah Foo, or Ching Wang, or Song Hi for stealing a chicken; but when some white brute breaks an unoffending Chinaman’s head with a brick, the paper does not compliment any officer for arresting the assaulter, for the simple reason that the officer does not make the arrest; the shedding of Chinese blood only makes him laugh; he considers it fun of the most entertaining description.
Like a bullfighter flourishing a red capote, he antagonized the San Francisco police again in his Enterprise column on December 19: “Several members of Chief Burke’s civilian army” were guilty of “laziness and uselessness,” he declared. A week later, he assailed two members of the department who had been sued by a citizen for false imprisonment, prompting the Dramatic Chronicle to wonder why Sam had “made up his mind to dethrone Chief Burke and demolish the Police Department.” That he harbored “some grievance” was clear because “he never loses an opportunity to sail into the Police after the tomahawk and scalping knife style of Joe Goodman.” The San Francisco Weekly Mercury claimed “that to its certain knowledge” Sam had arrived in the city “during the last flood on a dilapidated hen-coop which he stole and launched from a poultry ranch on the Sacramento river. . . . That little circumstance . . . sheds some light” on his “mortal antipathy to the police.”90
The Life of Mark Twain Page 46
