Mark Twain - Gold Miners & Guttersnipes: Tales of California

Copyright 1991 by Chronicle Books. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available under ISBN 0-87701-881-2.

Special thanks to The Mark Twain Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, for their considerable assistance with this book. This book is dedicated to the memory of James D. Hart, former Director of The Bancroft Library.

Letters and other material by The Mark Twain Project and the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission.

Cover photograph: Courtesy, The Mark Twain Project, The Bancroft Library. Hand tinting by Kathy Warinner.

Excerpts from The Autobiography of Mark Twain , edited by Charles Neider. Copyright 1917, 1940, 1958, 1959 by the Mark Twain Company. Copyright 1959 by Charles Neider. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

For a note on the text, see .

Book and cover design by Kathy Warinner.

Composition by On Line Typography

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Mark Twain was born in the West. Samuel Clemens, of course, was not; his birthplace was Florida, Missouria little hamlet, he wrote, where nothing ever happened. By the time he came West in July 1861, he was twenty-five: hed retired from school at the age of twelve to become a printer, and later helped his brother Orion edit the Hannibal (Missouri) Journal; he spent four years as a Mississippi river pilot, and finally deserted the Confederate army militia after a single fortnight of rain and retreat in 1861.

At the time, Orion had just been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, so together they traveled overland by stagecoach to Carson City, Nevada. The Civil War may have chased Twain West, but he came laden with some classic American baggage: the glittering hope of striking it rich. Smitten with the silver fever, as he put it, he went out prospecting in Humboldt and Esmeralda counties, and in short order hed accumulated a long string of failures in the pick-and-shovel line. And by September of 1862 he was willing to accept an offer of twenty-five dollars a week to be a reporter for the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise .

The next February, the byline Mark Twain appeared in the newspaper for the first time. The pen name itself already had a history, a family tree. Clemens first pseudonym, which he adopted at the age of sixteen, was W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins. That was followed by the much more concise W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blabthen Rambler, Grumbler, Peter Pencilcases Son, John Snooks, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Quintus Curtius Snodgrass, and the plain but accurate Josh. Mark Twain, of course, was the boatmans call signifying safe water; this final choice was an emblematic one, for most of Twains great work was to hearken back to the past, particularly his own past on the Mississippi, as if he was always looking for safe haven in the depths of memory.

He stayed in Nevada for nearly three years; he was not, at first, a likely candidate for eventual emigration to California. Those rotten, lop-eared, whopper-jawed, jack-legged... Californians.... How I hate everything that looks, or tastes, or smells like California! he wrote. But that was before hed seen San Francisco. He came once in early 1863; then again that May, and stayed through June; once again in early September, and stayed till October. My visit to San F is gradually drawing to a close, and it seems like going back to prison... after living in this Paradise, he wrote back home. I have lived like a lord.

Later, in Roughing It , he described his final departure from Virginia City as the result of a duel fought with a rival editor: the governor had just declared duelling a serious crime, so Twain hightailed it out of town to escape the law. But this story, though nicely dramatic, seems to be a nearly total fabrication. Elsewhere in Roughing It , he comes closer to the probable truth: I wanted to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I wantedI did not know what I wanted.

In May 1864, Twain took the stagecoach over the mountains to San Francisco. His Virginia City newspaper gave him an editorial sendoff: Mark Twain has abdicated the local column of the Enterprise , where by the grace of Cheek, he so long reigned.... The piece went on to call him the Monarch of Mining Items, the Prince of Platitudes, the Profaner of Divinity, and the Detractor of Merit. Twain will not be likely to shock the sensibilities of San Francisco long. The ordinances against nuisances are stringently enforced in that city.

He did not expect to write in California. Hed invested in several silver mines, and came west hoping to sell his stock at enormous profit. So he spent his first days in San Francisco in idyllic if dissolute butterfly idleness. His pal Steve Gillis and he changed lodgings five times in four months. One day Gillis father asked for them at an old address, and their former landlady launched into a tirade. Twain, amused, replicated it in a letter to a friend: She said, They are gone, thank God!and I hope I may never see them again.... They didnt care a snap for the rules of the house.... O, I never saw such creatures.... They used to bring loads of beer bottles up at midnight, & get drunk, & shout & fire their pistols in the room. She closed: They had no respect for God, man, or the devil.

Twains metropolitan idleness didnt last long. His entire life was to be marked by massive investment mistakesculminating in his long, almost-addictive support for the Paige mechanical typesetting machine, which finally caused his bankruptcy in 1894and in 1864 his mining stocks did not take long to crash past bottom. The wreckage was complete, he wrote. I was an early beggar and a thorough one.

In June his poverty obliged him to take a job as city reporter on the San Francisco Morning Call . The Call was the washerwomans paper, the most popular and cheapest (subscriptions twelve and a half cents a week) newspaper in California. In Virginia City, Twain had acquired a considerable following and reputation; as hed written his mother, I am prone to boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor, of any man on the Pacific Coast. On the Call he was forced into an endless, deadening repetition of local items, daily trekking from Police Court to Station House to City Prison, then making the dull nightly round of the all six of the citys theaters. It was fearful drudgery, soulless drudgery, he wrote in his autobiography. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man. Soon hed relegated most of the work to an assistant; editor George Barnes saw no need to pay them both, and fired Twain in October. Later Barnes, with astonishingly acute hindsight, claimed to have told Twain, You are capable of better things in literature.

For two months after the dismissal, Twain wrote, his sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances. Finally, in December, he abandoned San Francisco for Jim and Billy Gillis cabin in Jackass Gulch, near the Stanislaus River in the mountains of Tuolomne County. The Twain-induced legend has it, again, that he beat it out of town because the police were after him; again, theres nothing to substantiate his claim. More likely, he still harbored glimmering hopes of fabulous wealth waiting to be pried from the earthly depths. This time it was gold, and he spent three months pocket-mining in the California hills.