Sam originally planned to leave San Francisco on Monday, October 8, for New York, traveling across the continent via the Columbia River, the Pend Oreille Lakes, overland through Montana, then down the Missouri River to St. Louis to visit his family—a route that included only two hundred miles of land travel. He expected then to circumnavigate the globe, journeying from New York to Europe, including Italy and the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and from there overland to India, Japan, and China, where he would be Burlingame’s guest, before voyaging back across the Pacific to San Francisco. Instead, he decided to postpone this trip in order to capitalize on his celebrity by delivering his Sandwich Islands lecture throughout California and Nevada. He arranged to send the San Francisco Bulletin an occasional column during his tour and he hired Denis McCarthy, the former co-owner with Joe Goodman of the Territorial Enterprise, as his agent and advance man. Since selling his interest in the Virginia City paper in September 1865, McCarthy had lost a fortune in stocks; sold his interest in the San Francisco American Flag in December 1865; been imprisoned by the California State Senate for contempt in March 1866; been sued for libel by William Ralston, the founder of the Bank of California; and in turn sued O. M. Clayes for failing to pay twenty thousand of the twenty-eight-thousand-dollar price tag of the American Flag.16
McCarthy hastily organized a monthlong, twelve-stop speaking tour—Sam called it another “missionary expedition”—beginning at Metropolitan Hall in Sacramento on October 11. The first advertisements for the Sacramento date did not begin to appear until October 8, after the reviews of the lecture in San Francisco had been published. Sam and McCarthy heavily promoted this lecture for only three days. They placed ads in newspapers similar to the ones Sam had published in San Francisco:
FOR ONLY ONE NIGHT!
And Only a Portion of That!
MARK TWAIN,
WILL DELIVER A
LECTURE
—ON THE—
SANDWICH ISLANDS,
AT THE METROPOLITAN THEATER, ON
THURSDAY . . . October 11th
The Celebrated Bearded Woman!
Is not with this Circus.
The Wonderful
Cow with Six Legs!
Is not attached to this Menagerie.
That Curious and Unaccountable Freak of Nature,
The Irish Giant!
Who stands 9 feet 6 inches in hight [sic] and has a breadth of beam in proportion, and who has been the pet of kings and the honored associate of the nobility and gentry of the old world, will not be present and need not be expected.
The King of the Islands!
Failed to arrive in season for the Lecture in San Francisco, but may be confidently expected on this occasion.
Doors open at 7 P.M.—The Trouble to begin at 8.
The posters they distributed in Sacramento also foreshadow the playbill of the Duke and King in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), even to a mention of the sword fight in William Shakespeare’s Richard III:
BEHOLD THIS GALAXY OF TALENT!
UNPARALL[EL]ED!
RICHARD III
This tragedy is justly regarded as one of the ablest ever written by the immortal Bard. It is replete with thrilling incidents and startling situations, and the Great Sword Combat in the third set is said to be infinitely more savage and exciting than the actual combat, which took place between the two principal parties on Bosworth Field, in the fifteen[th] century. This superb play would have been produced on this occasion but for the much regretted absence of America’s Great Tragedian,
Edwin Forrest!
RICHELIEU!
The character of this extraordinary statesman is felicitously set forth in Bulwer’s well-known Drama. His most prominent characteristic was a disposition to hoe his own row after his own fashion and to show a disinclination to put up with any nonsense. Upon one occasion he observed that in the bright lexicon of youth there was no such word as fail. He had not been drinking at the time, and consequently the sentiment thus expressed has always been accepted as his deliberate opinion. In all respects, Richelieu was a great man—a commanding genius—a luminous, intellectual sun, set in the midst of an age of darkness. Take him as you will, he was a brick. This noble play would have been presented this evening save that circumstances over which he had no control compelled the continued presence of the Renowned Tragedian,
Edwin Booth, in New York.
Such bizarre marketing packed the house in Sacramento, and Sam’s lecture there was another critical success. Sam “was gratefully received by one of the finest audiences that was ever gathered together this side of the Sandwich Islands,” according to the Sacramento Bee. He “was in good trim,” and “it was pleasant to listen to a lecturer, who felt so well and talked so wisely, mixing (so to speak) as with a blender, the pathetic with the humorous.” He delivered “a delightful production” in “an easy, colloquial style,” his friends at the Sacramento Union observed, and served “a large dish of genuine information with spicy anecdote.” McCarthy hired Henry George, a young journalist, future advocate of the so-called single tax on “unearned increment” on land values and runner-up candidate for mayor of New York in 1886, to check tickets at the door of the hall.17 A quarter century later Sam’s publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Co., issued George’s polemic A Perplexed Philosopher (1892) and reprinted six of his other books and pamphlets.
From Sacramento Sam and his front man headed east to the interior mining towns. They steamed inland on the Flora to Marysville on the Feather River—Sam thought it was “the most generally well built town in California”—where he “gave the best satisfaction” to “a very respectable audience” on the evening of October 15. They then took a stage to Grass Valley for a performance on October 20. The town reminded Sam “of Virginia [City] in her palmy days,” particularly because he met “a great many old time Washoe miners,” some of whom were “doing remarkably well.” He also crossed paths there with a rival entertainer, a tightrope walker or “rope dancer” named Rosa Celeste, and her husband, a former compositor on the staff of the Territorial Enterprise. They wanted Sam to join forces with them. As Goodman later explained, Sam “was drawing crowded houses” and the husband proposed that Mlle Celeste, famous for walking a rope stretched four hundred feet between the Cliff House and Seal House in San Francisco, “walk a rope across the street to draw the crowd.” Sam would then lecture for a half hour, followed by “an intermission during which she walked a rope from the stage to the dress-circle,” Sam then finishing his talk. But Sam “was disgusted” by the idea, considered the proposal “little short of sacrilege,” and declined. Instead, as the local paper reported, he prepared for his performance “with a copious dose of gin and gum, after which he started for the Hall with the irregular movement of a stern wheel boat in a heavy wind.”18
Between October 23 and 25 Sam spoke in Nevada City, California, and in two decaying but nearby mining camps, Red Dog and You Bet. He publicized the first of these three lectures in the Nevada City, California, Transcript with yet another variation on his comic advertisements:
LECTURE BY
MARK TWAIN,
—ON THE—
SANDWICH ISLANDS.
After the lecture is over, the lecturer will perform the wonderful Feats of
SLEIGHT OF HAND,
If desired to do so.
At a given signal, he will go out with any gentleman and take a drink. If desired, he will repeat this unique and interesting feat—repeat it until the audience are satisfied that there is no deception about it.
At a moment’s warning he will depart out of town and leave his hotel bill unsettled. He has performed this ludicrous trick many hundreds of times, in San Francisco and elsewhere, and it has always elicited the most enthusiastic comments.
At any hour of the night, after 10, the Lecturer will go through any house in the city, no matter how dark it may be, and take an inventory of its contents, and not miss as many of the articles as the owner wi
ll in the morning.
The Lecturer declines to specify any more of his miraculous feats at present, for fear of getting the police too much interested in his circus.
Doors open at 7 o’clock, trouble begins at 8.
The lecture by the “irrepressible humorist,” according to the Transcript, was attended by a “large” and “delighted” audience, and Sam’s performance was “far superior to ‘Artemus Ward’ or any of that class” of literary comedians. McCarthy telegraphed Goodman from Nevada City the morning of October 26: “Our circus is coming. Sound the hewgag.”19
Sam and McCarthy spent that night in Meadow Lake, the mining camp where his brother Orion had formerly lived, though Sam did not lecture there. It would not have paid. “Meadow Lake is the prettiest site for a town I know of,” he reported in the San Francisco Bulletin,
and the town already built there is the wildest exemplar of the spirit of speculation I have ever stumbled upon. Here you find Washoe recklessness and improvidence repeated: A lot of highly promising but unprospected ledges, and behold! on such guarantees as these they have built a handsome town and painted it neatly, and planned wide, long streets, and got ready for a rush of business, and then—jumped aboard the stage coaches and deserted it! . . . Here is a really handsome town, built of two-story frame houses—a town capable of housing 3,000 persons with ease, and how many inhabitants has it got? A hundred! You can have a house all to yourself merely by promising to take care of it. . . . One man has even had the temerity to build a large, handsome dressed stone house, at great expense. A bright, new, pretty town, all melancholy and deserted, and yet showing not one sign of decay or dilapidation! I never saw the like before.
They left Meadow Lake the next morning in an overcrowded stagecoach—“we had 14 passengers” and “there was comfortable room for 9”—for Sam’s triumphant return to Virginia City, from which he had fled in disgrace two years earlier. “We know there will be jollification when ‘Mark Twain’ reaches Virginia City,” his friends at the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle tittered, although “we hope he won’t get so fond of his old home as to be unwilling to return” to the City by the Bay.20
They arrived in the afternoon of October 27 and spent the next two weeks in the vicinity, with Sam delivering his Sandwich Islands lecture six times within a twenty-mile radius. “I did not observe any very great changes in Nevada,” he reported in the Bulletin. “There were many teams on the roads, and the towns looked about as they formerly did. Virginia bore quite a business-like aspect, and it was said that she was enjoying a very fair degree of prosperity. Business there now is on a good, firm, healthy basis, and is steadily recovering from the lapse brought upon her by speculation.”21 One change he did not mention: His old friend Tom Peasley, the proprietor of the Sazerac Saloon, and an assailant named Martin Barnhart had shot and killed each other in the bar of the Ormsby House in Carson City the previous February. The county coroner had ruled, quixotically, that each of them killed the other in self-defense. Sam later memorialized Peasley’s death in the Buck Fanshawe episode of Roughing It.
But mostly Sam reveled in his sentimental journey back to the Comstock Lode. On October 29 he and Alf Doten, now a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise, “had a short chat,” Doten noted in his diary. It was the “first I have seen of him since he was in Como” in 1864. Afterward Sam crossed the Divide to visit his friend John Winters in Gold Hill, and Philip Lynch of the Gold Hill News saluted him on his return. Lynch expected Sam’s talk to “be very amusing and well worth hearing” because he “has few equals as a humorist any place.” Even his old adversaries at the Daily Union welcomed the “old Bohemian” to town: “we are glad to see you at your old home after so long an absence.” Sam reconnected with Goodman, who remembered that while talking with Sam “about his plans for the future, he said, very seriously: ‘I have but one definite purpose in view: that is, to make enough money to insure me a fair trial, and then to go and kill’” his nemesis Albert Evans. On October 31, he spoke from the stage of Maguire’s Opera House, where months before he had seen Adah Isaacs Menken in Mazeppa and the house company in Othello and enjoyed Sam Pride strumming the banjo. On the day of the lecture Goodman puffed it in the Enterprise:
The enthusiasm with which his lecture was everywhere greeted is still ringing through California, and now that his foot is in his native heath we may expect to see the very mountains shake with a tempest of approval. Our state can justify its claim of Mark Twain as its own peculiar production. It was while in residence here and associated with the Enterprise that he assumed the name “Mark Twain” and developed that rich and inexhaustible vein of humor which has made the title famous. True, he has since warmed his fancy in tropical climes, and expanded his thought by ocean pilgrimages, and heated his eloquence in volcanic fires; but all these rest upon the solid foundation which was originally laid in our native alkali and sagebrush. . . . He will receive an ovation seldom if ever equaled in our city.
That evening the theater was packed with “one of the largest and most select audiences that ever assembled in this city,” according to the Union. Including those in standing room, they numbered about eight hundred and they paid on average a dollar per ticket. Doten jotted this entry in his journal late that night: “Mark Twain’s lecture—Crammed house—at Opera House—I heard it all—mighty good—Lecture 1½ hours long—perhaps a little more.” In his review of Sam’s talk in the Enterprise the next morning, Doten was unstinting in his praise. “One of the largest and most fashionable audiences that ever graced the Opera House,” he began,
was in attendance last evening, on the occasion of Mark Twain’s lecture on the Sandwich Islands. The entire dress circle and the outer portion of the parquette were filled with ladies, while all the available space for extra seats and standing room was occupied. It was a magnificent tribute to the lecturer from his old friends. Of the lecture itself we can only speak in general terms, as its points are too numerous and varied to admit of special mention. Combing the most valuable statistical and general information, with passages of drollest humor—all delivered in the peculiar and inimitable style of the author—and rising occasionally to lofty flights of descriptive eloquence—the lecture constitutes an entertainment of rare excellence and interest.
Sandy Baldwin afterward told Sam that he had “made the most sweeping success of any man he knows.”22
Sam was dubious, given the circumstances that had prompted his flight from Nevada two years earlier, that he ought to appear in Carson City. But soon after his return to Virginia City he received—and probably engineered—an invitation to speak there on November 3. Over a hundred citizens, including the governor of Nevada, Henry G. Blasdel; Sam’s friends Abe Curry and Robert Howland; Henry Mighels, the editor of the Carson Appeal; C. N. Noteware, Orion’s successor as secretary of state; and two husbands of women who had belonged to the Carson City Ladies’ Sanitary Committee in the spring of 1864 (though not W. K. Cutler) urged him in an open letter printed in the Appeal on October 31 to lecture in their city. Sam accepted the invitation with alacrity. Without referring explicitly to the scandal that had caused him to leave the state, he thanked “my old friends in Carson” for “this generous recognition—this generous toleration, I should say—of one who has shamefully deserted the high office of Governor of the Third House of Nevada and gone into the missionary business,” an act “which, but for your forgiving disposition, must have stamped my name with infamy.” Of course, he was apologizing not for deserting “the high office of Governor of the Third House,” as he said, but for his offensive miscegenation joke. “I take a natural pride in being welcomed home again by so long a list of old personal friends,” he concluded, “and shall do my level best to please them, hoping at the same time that they will be more indulgent toward my shortcomings than they would feel called upon to be toward those of a stranger.” The Carson Appeal graciously greeted him on the day of the lecture: “This notice is quite enough to ensure the filling of every
available sitting and standing place in the Theater. His promise to do his ‘level best’ before the good people of his old home is quite assurance enough from the illustrious Mark that his lecture will be a highly entertaining one.” The prediction proved accurate. Sam spoke before a crowded theater.23
The Life of Mark Twain Page 53
