The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Undeterred, Sam next turned his guns on the mismanagement of the police courtroom in city hall, perhaps “the infernalest smelling den on earth,” which he compared to the Black Hole of Calcutta where Bengalese soldiers once incarcerated British prisoners of war. Cholera germs could not stand the place, he grumbled, where “drunken filthy loafers, thieves, prostitutes, Chinese chicken-stealers, witnesses, and slimy guttersnipes . . . belch and issue deadly smells.” As early as September 1864, while reporting for the Morning Call, he had indicted the brand of justice dispensed by the court: “If there is anything more absurd than the general average of Police Court testimony, we do not know what it is.” Early in 1866 Sam escalated the war of words with an exposé of police brutality. A stranger arrested “for stealing six bits’ worth of flour sacks” had been jailed without a medical examination and died in the night “after four hours of refreshing slumber in that cell, with his skull actually split in twain from front to rear, like an apple.” Such “envenomed communications,” according to George Barnes of the Morning Call, “made the official equanimity of the old City Hall boil like a caldron.”91

  In retaliation for these columns and others like them, Sam was threatened with a libel suit by the city and successfully prosecuted for the four-hundred-dollar balance on Steve Gillis’s forfeited bond. He was also jailed overnight on a (trumped-up?) charge of public intoxication. That is, he was an apparent victim of overly aggressive policing, specifically harassment. In a dispatch to the Gold Hill News dated January 19, Evans wisecracked about his arrest. The stench of the local slaughterhouses, he wrote, was “only second in horrible density to that which prevails in the Police Court room when the Bohemian of the Sage-Brush is in the dock for being drunk overnight.” A week later, Evans hinted in the Gold Hill News that Sam had to be dragged to the wagon that carried him to jail and then stood at the grating of his cell cursing the police who had arrested him. Despite Sam’s complaints, Evans added, the local lockup was in his opinion “one of the best managed public institutions in the United States.” An arch-apologist for the San Francisco police, Evans assured his readers that “much of [Sam’s] prejudice” against them “is unjust.” When Sam first arrived in the city “he was so green” that he failed to understand how to behave “and he seems to hold to an old grudge like a Camanche.” Two weeks later, Evans added another allegation to his list: the “Bohemian from the sage-brush” had lost forty dollars “in the house of a lady, under peculiar circumstance,” an intimation that he had been rolled by a prostitute. Meanwhile, Sam apparently began to experiment with recreational drugs. The Dramatic Chronicle reported that he and a bohemian friend had been “seen walking up Clay street under the influence” of hashish.92

  Burke and Evans, whose prose was as inflated as a swollen bladder, were foolish to pick a fight with Sam, an adept counterpuncher with a pen. In his Enterprise column for January 23, 1866, according to Paine, Sam “really let himself go” in condemning “the city’s corrupt morals under the existing police government” of Burke. This piece opened by announcing that the “air is full of lechery, and rumors of lechery” and, Paine adds, “continued in a strain which made even the Enterprise printers aghast.” Lamentably, this letter does not survive in its entirety, but the San Francisco Examiner printed an excerpt from it on February 5, 1866. As a correspondent of the Mariposa, California, Free Press explained, some “leather-head” had (mis)interpreted several deliberately ambiguous pronouns in Sam’s column to mean “that Burke kept a mistress. An explanation was demanded, and they got one which made things worse.” In his ostensible apology two days later, Sam disingenuously protested his innocence even while continuing to heap scorn on the chief:

  You published the following paragraph the other day and stated that it was an “extract from a letter to the Virginia Enterprise, from the San Francisco correspondent of that paper.” Please publish it again, and put in the parentheses where I have marked them, so that people who read with wretched carelessness may know to a dead moral certainty when I am referring to Chief Burke, and also know to an equally dead moral certainty when I am referring to the dog:

  I want to compliment Chief Burke—I do honestly. But I can’t find anything to compliment him about. He is always rushing furiously around, like a dog after his own tail—and with the same general result, it seems to me; if he (the dog, not the Chief,) catches it, it don’t amount to anything, after all the fuss; and if he (the dog, not the Chief,) don’t catch it it don’t make any difference, because he (the dog, not the Chief,) didn’t want it anyhow; he (the dog, not the Chief,) only wanted the exercise, and the happiness of “showing off” before his (the dog’s, not the Chief’s,) mistress and the other young ladies. But if the Chief (not the dog,) would only do something praiseworthy, I would be the first and the most earnest and cordial to give him (the Chief, not the dog,) the credit due. I would sling him (the Chief, not the dog,) a compliment that would knock him down. I mean that it would be such a first-class compliment that it might surprise him (the Chief, not the dog,) to that extent as coming from me.

  Sam conceded that one of his original sentences could have been construed to mean that the Chief had a mistress whom he entertained by chasing his own tail, but of course that had not been his intention. “I was sorry to learn that anyone had placed so dire a misconstruction upon that sentence,” he added, and “the idea was so unspeakably funny that I had to laugh a little, in spite of my tears. . . . I have written hard things about Chief Burke, in his official capacity, and I have no doubt I shall do it again; but I have not the remotest idea of meddling with his private affairs.”93

  As for Evans, Sam repeatedly attacked his rival San Francisco correspondent in his Enterprise columns between December 1865 and February 1866. “Fitz Smythe,” as Evans signed his columns in the Gold Hill News and Alta California, was his “meat,” Sam insisted, and he knew “how to deal with him.” He asserted that Evans was a preening lackey of the police who “invariably and eternally slobbers over them with his slimy praise and can never find them otherwise than pure and sinless in every case.” According to Sam, Smythe sensationalized the news of brutal crime by “gloating over a rape, or a case of incest, or a dismal and mysterious murder, or something of that kind; he is always going into raptures about something that other people shiver at.” Though he conceded that journalists should avoid “furtively venting their private spites through the columns” of their papers, Sam repeatedly hurled insults at his hapless counterpart. For example, soothsayers had prophesied, he declared, that Smythe would finally tell a joke in “the evening of his life” at which time “his head would cave in, and his bowels be rent asunder, and his arms and his legs would drop off and he would fall down and die in dreadful agony.” Sam compared Smythe’s mustache to “a cat-fish’s horns” and alleged that in his writings he slung “a decidedly odorous dung-fork.” He attached “no weight to Smythe’s criticisms, because he don’t know anything about polite literature; he has had no experience in it further than to write up runaway horse items.” In fact, Smythe could “ruin the reputation of any man with a paragraph or two of his praise.” Nor could he “stand ridicule.” It “cuts [him] to the quick” and “makes [him] howl.” He even issued an open threat to Smythe: “I can warm you up with ten sentences, and make you dance like a hen on a hot griddle, any time. . . . I know your weak spot. I can touch you on the raw whenever I please, make you lose your temper and write the most spiteful, undignified things. You see you will always be a little awkward with a pen,” he added as a gratuitous slur, “because your head isn’t sound.”94

  Even Evans’s enemies began to sympathize with him after this attack. According to the Dramatic Chronicle, “‘Mark Twain’ is a malevolent duck. He never lets up on anyone.” His feud with Amigo/Fitz Smythe was somewhere north of his feigned quarrels with Clement “the Unreliable” Rice and south of his row with James L. Laird. In response, Evans threatened to cowhide Sam the next time they met—and they crossed paths at the Ba
nk Exchange on February 14, though they exchanged no blows. The Dramatic Chronicle announced in purple prose that “the ferocious and blood-thirsty proprietor of the Napoleonic moustache and the gorgeously caparisoned charger was ‘laying’ for the unsuspecting and defenseless jokist” and urged Sam “to leave town for a week or two.” Without mentioning Sam by name, Evans then claimed that a “Bohemian, well known to the denizens of the land of silver and sage-brush and to the San Francisco police,” had “done his level best” to “get himself before the public in some manner, no matter how ridiculous,” by asking Edward Jump to caricature him. Jump had refused because “the sagebrush Bohemian’s face does not admit of caricaturing; it is a grand caricature by Dame Nature.” According to Evans, Jump had “turned the fellow’s head in every possible direction—it is not the first time it has been turned—and examined it in all sorts of positions, and still finds nothing whatever in it.” As late as October 1870 Sam remembered Evans scornfully: he had been a “regular dead beat of the first water—or rather a literary fraud. . . . A one-horse newspaper reporter who has been trying all his life to make a joke and never has and never will succeed.”95

  Eventually, however, Sam wearied of the jousting. A month after his arrival in the West, with the lower Mississippi River closed to commercial traffic, he had denied in a letter to his sister Pamela that he planned to return to the river. “I never expect to do any more piloting at any price,” he declared. “My livelihood must be made in this country—and if I have to wait longer than I expected, let it be so—I have no fear of failure.” But in a letter to his mother and sister on January 20, 1866, after the river was reopened following the war and a few days after spending the night in the calaboose, he admitted that “I wish I was back there piloting up & down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.” He went so far as to solicit and receive an appointment as a government pilot on the Mississippi at a salary of three hundred dollars a month. The news quickly made the rounds. The San Francisco Examiner reported on February 9 that Sam “contemplates leaving for the East in a few days to pursue his old calling of piloting on the Mississippi river,” and the Virginia Daily Union added on February 13 that he was attracted by the “enormous salaries” paid to pilots, prompting Evans to cackle: “I understand that [Sam Clemens], who used to run as a deckhand on a stern-wheeler, and was at one time pilot of a broadhorn on the Mississippi, is disgusted with San Francisco. Well, my boy, the disgust is mutual, and I don’t wonder that he wants to leave.” In the end, Sam was dissuaded from accepting the piloting job by John McComb, partly because he would have been paid in greenbacks. Sam became so despondent around this time, perhaps because he was deep in debt with few options in his future, that he briefly contemplated suicide. “I put the pistol to my head,” he recalled in 1909, “but wasn’t man enough to pull the trigger. Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed but I was never ashamed of having tried.”96

  Despite his depression, he was neither bullied into silence nor intimidated into curtailing his attacks on the police. To be sure, he may have been stalked. The Dramatic Chronicle publicly warned him in mid-February that he should “go home early,” “don’t travel late, particularly in dark streets,” “don’t walk alone” at night, and avoid trouble: “Above all things . . . don’t under any circumstances take a drop too much when there is a policeman around, because you know they’re a laying for you.” Sam readily allowed that there were “many honest, upright, reliable and excellent men” in the department, especially Bernard Blitz and George Rose in the detective bureau, but as a whole it was a corrupt institution incapable of internal reform. Burke fired “efficient subordinates who are ‘forninst’ him and retains the worthless” officers who were loyal, as the Mariposa Free Press editorialized. The Board of Police Commissioners, or what Sam called the “Star Chamber of Police Commissioners,” ought to have exercised oversight but merely rubber-stamped the chief’s decisions. The way Burke ran the board, according to Sam, was the “funniest theatrical exhibition in San Francisco.” Its investigations into police misconduct were “all humbug, display, fuss and feathers. The Chief brings his policeman out as sinless as an angel, unless the testimony be heavy enough and strong enough, almost, to hang an ordinary culprit, in which case a penalty of four or five days’ suspension is awarded. . . . If Pontius Pilate was on the police he could crucify the Savior again with perfect impunity.”97

  Sam’s attacks on the San Francisco police were controversial but effective. Some of the mud he flung at them undoubtedly stuck, and Burke was denied renomination to office in late 1866. In his autobiography, however, Burke ignored Sam’s crusade and explained the end of his reign with a lie: “At the termination of the Civil War, politics resumed sway and I resigned from the position of Chief of Police.” He became a real estate agent. On his part, Sam ignored his own role in the campaign to reform the department in Roughing It, though he described the “policemen and politicians” in San Francisco as “dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum” and noted that about this time he grew “unspeakably tired” of the journalistic grind. Before he left California to resume his piloting career on the Mississippi, or so he promised in February 1866, he would deliver a public lecture on “Spiritualism and the San Francisco Police.” The two were linked, he thought: wildcat religion and police brutality were both forms of irrational behavior.98

  In February 1866 Tom Maguire announced that he had booked the sixty-year-old Edwin Forrest to appear at his opera house in San Francisco in May and June. Sam, who had attended performances of The Gladiator and Othello starring Forrest in New York in 1853 and Philadelphia in 1854, predicted in an open letter to Forrest that he would receive a dubious welcome. “Our critics will make you sing a lively tune,” he warned, and they “will soon let you know that your great reputation cannot protect you on this coast.” The rumor soon circulated that Forrest had canceled his San Francisco engagement in response to Sam’s open letter, though the rumor was unfounded. On the other hand, Sam’s prediction proved to be all too accurate. Though Forrest drew reasonably large houses in San Francisco, his “popularity was at first imperiled by the mistaken zeal of his manager, who doubled the price of admission,” Harte reported. The critics were also as severe as Sam predicted. As one theatrical historian has concluded, “Forrest made a great and expansive failure. He appeared, ranting, in tragedies and melodramas familiar to local patrons whose tastes had been formed after Forrest’s heyday. Praise for his strength of delivery and characterization was tempered: his King Lear was ‘not peerless,’ his Othello was marked by ‘echoes of the mannerisms of the Bowery Theatre days.’” Sam attended at least a couple of Forrest’s performances, and though his reviews of them in the Enterprise have been lost, he quipped in The Innocents Abroad that he had been surprised to discover “how much more I knew about Hamlet” than Forrest did.99

  Sam changed his plans to embark for the States when the owners of the Sacramento Union, James Anthony and Paul Morrill—“lovable and well-beloved men,” Sam later called them—offered him a job as special correspondent during a visit to the state capital in late February. “I had a sneaking notion that they would start me east,” he wrote Will Bowen, but instead they assigned him to Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, to promote the sugar industry there. “The vagabond instinct was strong upon me,” Sam wrote in Roughing It. “Fortune favored and I got a new berth and a delightful one.” As George Barnes explained, Anthony and Morrill sponsored Sam’s voyage in exchange for a series of articles “on the social, commercial, and political condition of the Kanaka group.” In other words, he was hired to be a corporate flack and, in fact, according to Barnes, his correspondence would be “exhaustively discussed in our Chamber of Commerce.” Sam planned to stay only a month “and ransack the islands, the great cataracts and the volcanoes completely,” he informed his mother and sister, “and write twenty or thirty letters to the Sacramento Union—for which they pay me as much money as I would g
et if I staid [sic] at home” and continued to contribute to the Enterprise. In mid-February he booked passage aboard the Ajax, a 1,354-ton propeller-driven sail- and steamboat built in London to run Union blockades during the Civil War, with a cruising speed of about twelve knots and a crew of eighteen. It could accommodate sixty cabin passengers and forty more in steerage and carry over 1,200 tons of freight. “The Ajax is the finest Ocean Steamer in America, & one of the fastest,” Sam asserted. Its owner, the California Steam Navigation Company, inaugurated regularly scheduled passenger service between San Francisco and Honolulu on January 13, though it was canceled after only two round-trips because the company lost twenty thousand dollars on the experiment. Sam had been invited to join the maiden voyage of the Ajax to Hawaii but, as he explained to his family, “I could not accept it, because there would be no one to write my correspondence [to the Enterprise] while I was gone.” Instead, he chose to resign his column and travel to Honolulu on the second voyage of the Ajax in March. As soon as Evans got wind of Sam’s plans, he predictably ridiculed him while hinting that the “sagebrush bohemian” was leaving San Francisco because of a recurrence of venereal disease. The bohemian “has been a little out of health lately and is now endeavoring to get a chance to go to Honolulu, where he expects to get rid of one disease by catching another; the last being more severe for the time being, but more readily yielding to medical treatment.” During his absence, Evans added, Sam “will be sadly missed by the police, but then they can stand it; [they are] used to missing men, though the missing men generally go over the Bay instead of out the Golden Gate.” During Sam’s months in Hawaii, his friends at the Dramatic Chronicle lamented his absence because he could not badger Evans from afar. “Fitz Smythe is getting really terrible,” the paper editorialized. “Mark Twain! Mark Twain! will you never come back from those cannibal islands? Fitz Smythe must be attended to.” In particular, Evans was “a maniac on the Chinese question”—that is, in his defense of Chinese immigration: “He is willing to swear to the good character of any Chinaman who happens to be brought up in the Police Court.”100 Sam’s presence was obviously required to contest such racial toleration.