P U L I T Z E R P R I Z E – W I N N I N G A U T H O R o f
G R A N T
a n d
A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T
O N
Mark Twain
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mark twain
Ron Chernow
ALLEN LANE
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001
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To my parents,
who somehow had a
crazy faith in their son’s
quixotic dream of
becoming a writer
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Contents
PRELUDE: THE PILOT HOUSE
xi
PART ONE: AFLOAT
One:
Loveless Marriage
3
Two:
A Wild and Mischievous Boy
19
Three:
Printer’s Devil
31
Four:
“Darling Existence”
47
Five:
“A Ragged and Dirty Bunch”
61
Six:
“The Most Lovable Scamp”
73
Seven:
“Heaven on the Half Shell”
91
Eight:
“Land of Indolence and Dreams”
105
Nine:
“Grave of a Blood Relation”
119
Ten:
A Branch of Hell
137
Eleven:
“My Honored ‘Sister’”
153
Twelve:
Wedding Present
167
PART TWO: FLOODTIDE
Thirteen:
Church of the Holy Speculators
187
Fourteen:
Mississippi Steamboat and a Cuckoo Clock
205
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Fifteen:
Chartering a Comet to Mars
223
Sixteen:
“Invertebrate Without a Country”
239
Seventeen:
Toast to the Babies
259
Eighteen:
“Inspired Bugger of a Machine”
275
Nineteen:
“Hallelujah Jennings”
291
Twenty:
Twins of Genius
303
Twenty- One:
“A Sound Heart & a Deformed Conscience”
325
Twenty- Two:
Pure Mugwump
343
Twenty- Three:
Reparation Due to Every Black Man
363
Twenty- Four:
“No Pockets in the Armor”
383
Twenty- Five:
“The Deriding of Shams”
399
Twenty- Six:
Death and Delusion
413
Twenty- Seven:
“One of the Vanderbilt Gang”
427
PART THREE: RAPIDS
Twenty- Eight:
“Paradise of the Rheumatics”
445
Twenty- Nine:
“A Lady Above Reproach”
461
Thirty:
“Boss Machine of the World”
475
Thirty- One:
“Too Much of a Human Being”
489
Thirty- Two:
“Paris the Damnable”
509
Thirty- Three:
“‘Colossal’ Is a Tame Word for Him”
525
Thirty- Four:
“Clown of the Sea”
539
Thirty- Five:
“Circumnavigation of This Great Globe”
559
Thirty- Six:
“The Only Sad Voyage”
573
Thirty- Seven:
“A Book Written in Blood & Tears”
587
Thirty- Eight:
“Letters to Satan”
601
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Thirty- Nine:
“Stirring Times in Austria”
617
Forty:
“The European Edison”
631
Forty- One:
Dream Self
643
Forty- Two:
“A Hundred Capering Clowns”
657
Forty- Three:
“The Bastard Human Race”
671
PART FOUR: WHIRLPOOL
Forty- Four:
“The Ancient Mariner”
685
Forty- Five:
The Anti- Doughnut Party
697
Forty- Six:
“The United States of Lyncherdom”
711
Forty- Seven:
“Magnificent Panorama of the Mississippi”
727
Forty- Eight:
“Spirit of a Steam Engine”
739
Forty- Nine:
Divine Healing
753
Fifty:
The Dread Cavalcade of Death
767
Fifty- One:
“The War Prayer”
781
Fifty- Two:
“An Artist in Morals and Ink”
793
Fifty- Three:
“The Swindle of Life”
807
Fifty- Four:
Pier 70
817
Fifty- Five:
Angelfish
831
Fifty- Six:
A Fan and a Halo
843
Fifty- Seven:
Wuthering Heights
855
PART FIVE: SHIPWRECK
Fifty- Eight:
Man in the White Clothes
871
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Fifty- Nine:
“A Real American College Boy”
883
Sixty:
“All the Wonders That Are Occurring”
897
Sixty- One:
A Holiday from Life’s Woes
909
Sixty- Two:
Innocence at Home
925
Sixty- Three:
“Mark Twain’s Daughter”
935
Sixty- Four:
The Death of Tammany
949
Sixty- Five:
“An Insane Idea”
961
Sixty- Six:
Grandpa Twain
987
Sixty- Seven:
Letters from the Earth
999
Sixty- Eight:
“An Old Bird of Paradise”
1009
Sixty- Nine:
Halley’s Comet
1019
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1035
ABBREVIATIONS
1041
NOTES
1045
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1121
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
1137
INDEX
1139
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n
PRELUDE
The Pilot House
F
rom the time he was a small boy in Hannibal, Missouri, the Mis-
sissippi River had signifi ed freedom for Samuel Langhorne Clem-
ens (later known as Mark Twain), a place where he could toss
aside worldly cares, indulge in high spirits, and fi nd sanctuary from so-
ciety’s restraints. For a sheltered, small- town youth, the boisterous life
aboard the steamboats plying the river, swarming with raffi sh charac-
ters, offered a gateway to a wider world. Pilots stood forth as undisputed
royalty of this fl oating kingdom, and it was the pride of Twain’s early
years that, right before the Civil War, he had secured a license in just two
years. However painstaking it was for a cub navigator to memorize the
infi nite details of a mutable river with its shifting snags, shoals, and
banks, Twain had prized this demanding period of his life. Later he ad-
mitted that “I loved the profession far better than any I have followed
since,” the reason being quite simple: “a pilot, in those days, was the only
unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.”
In contrast, even kings and diplomats, editors and clergymen, felt muz-
zled by public opinion. “In truth, every man and woman and child has a
master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the
Mississippi pilot had
none
.”
1
That search for untrammeled truth and free-
dom would form a defi ning quest of Mark Twain’s life.
For a man who immortalized Hannibal and the majestic river fl ow-
ing past it, Twain had returned surprisingly few times to these youthful
scenes, as if fearful that new impressions might intrude on cherished
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memories. In 1875, as he was about to turn forty, he had published in the
Atlantic Monthly
a seven- part series titled “Old Times on the Missis-
sippi,” which chronicled his days as an eager young pilot. Now, in April
1882, he rounded up his publisher, James R. Osgood, and a young Hart-
ford stenographer, Roswell H. Phelps, and set out for a tour of the Mis-
sissippi that would allow him to elaborate those earlier articles into a
full- length volume,
Life on the Mississippi,
that would fuse travel report-
age with the earlier memoir. He had long fantasized about, but also long
postponed, this momentous return to the river. “But when I come to
write the Mississippi book,” he promised his wife, Livy, “
then
look out!
I will spend 2 months on the river & take notes, & I bet you I will make
a standard work.”
2
Twain mapped out an ambitious six- week odyssey, heading fi rst
down the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, then retracing his steps
as far north as St. Paul, Minnesota, stopping en route at Hannibal. The
three men sped west by the Pennsylvania Railroad in a “joggling train,”
the very mode of transportation that already threatened the demise of
the freewheeling steamboat culture Twain had treasured.
3
By journeying
from east to west, he reversed the dominant trajectory of his life, en-
abling him to appraise his midwestern roots with fresh eyes. “All the
R.R. station loafers west of Pittsburgh carry
both
hands in their pock-
ets,” he observed. “Further east one hand is sometimes out of doors.”
4
Now accustomed to the genteel affl uence of Hartford, Connecticut,
where he had resided for a decade, he had grown painfully aware of the
provinciality of his boyhood haunts. “The grace and picturesqueness of
female dress seem to disappear as one travels west away from N. York.”
5
To secure candid glimpses of his old Mississippi world, Twain trav-
eled under the incognito of “Mr. Samuel,” but he underestimated his
own renown. From St. Louis he informed Livy that he “got to meeting
too many people who knew me. We swore them to secrecy, & left by the
fi rst boat.”
6
After the three travelers boarded the steamer
Gold Dust— “
a
vile, rusty old steamboat”— Twain was spotted by an old shipmate, his
alias blown again. Henceforth his celebrity, which clung to him every-
where, would transform the atmosphere he sought to recapture. For all
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his joy at being afl oat, he carped at the ship’s squalor, noting passage-
ways “less than 2 inches deep in dirt” and spittoons “not particularly
clean.” He dispatched the vessel with a sarcasm: “This boat built by
[Robert] Fulton; has not been repaired since.” At many piers he noted
that whereas steamers in his booming days had been wedged together
“like sardines in a box,” a paucity of boats now sat loosely strung along
empty docks.
7
Twain was saddened by the backward towns they passed, often mere
collections of “tumble- down frame houses unpainted, looking dilapi-
dated” or “a miserable cabin or two standing in [a] small opening on the
gray and grassless banks of the river.”
8
No less noticeable was how the
river had reshaped a landscape he had once strenuously committed to
memory. Hamlets that had fronted the river now stood landlocked, and
when the boat stopped at a “God forsaken rocky point,” disgorging pas-
sengers for an inland town, Twain stared mystifi ed. “I couldn’t remem-
ber that town; couldn’t place it; couldn’t call its name . . . couldn’t
imagine what the damned place might be.” He guessed, correctly, that it
was Ste. Genevieve, a onetime Missouri river town that in bygone days
had stood “on high ground, handsomely situated,” but had now been
relocated by the river to a “town out in the country.”
9
Once Twain’s identity was known— his voice and face, his nervous
habit of running his hand through his hair, gave the game away— the pi-
lots embraced this prodigal son as an honored member of their guild. In
the ultimate compliment, they gave him the freedom to guide the ship
alone— a dreamlike consummation. “Livy darling, I am in solitary pos-
session of the pilot house of the steamer Gold Dust, with the familiar
wheel & compass & bell ropes around me . . . I’m all alone, now (the pilot
whose watch it is, told me to make myself entirely at home, & I’m doing
it).” He seemed to expand in the solitary splendor of the wheelhouse and
drank in the river’s beauty. “It is a magnifi cent day, & the hills & levels
are masses of shining green, with here & there a white- blossoming tree.
I love you, sweetheart.”
10
Always a hypercritical personality, prone to disappointment, Mark
Twain often felt exasperated in everyday life. By contrast, the return to
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the pilot house cast a wondrous spell on him, retrieving precious mo-
ments of his past when he was still young and unencumbered by troubles.
The river had altered many things beyond recognition. “Yet as unfamil-
iar as all the aspects have been to- day,” he recorded in his copious notes,
“I have felt as much at home and as much in my proper place in the pilot
house as if I had never been out of the pilot house.”
11
It was a pilot named
Lem Gray who had allowed Twain to steer the ship himself. Lem “would
lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not
slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary
adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care- free as I had been
twenty years before.”
12
One morning he arose at 4 a.m. to watch “the day
steal gradually upon this vast silent world . . . the marvels of shifting
light & shade & color & dappled refl ections that followed, were bewitch-
ing to see.”
13
The paradox of Twain’s life was that the older and more fa-
mous he became and the grander his horizons, the more he pined for the
vanished paradise of his early years. His youth would remain the magi-
cal touchstone of his life, his memories preserved in amber.
n
Mark Twain has long been venerated as an emblem of Americana. Pos-
terity has extracted a sanitized view of a humorous man in a white suit,
dispensing witticisms with a twinkling eye, an avuncular fi gure sporting
a cigar and a handlebar mustache. But far from being a soft- shoe, cracker-
barrel philosopher, he was a waspish man of decided opinions delivering
hard and uncomfortable truths. His wit was laced with vinegar, not oil.
Some mysterious anger, some pervasive melancholy, fi red his humor—
the novelist William Dean Howells once told Twain “what a bottom of
fury there is to your fun”— and his chronic dissatisfaction with society
produced a steady stream of barbed denunciations.
14
Holding nothing
sacred, he indulged in an unabashed irreverence that would easily create
discomfort in our politically correct age. In a country that prides itself
on can- do optimism, Mark Twain has always been an anomaly: a hugely
popular but fi ercely pessimistic man, the scourge of fools and frauds. On
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the surface his humor can seem merely playful— the caprice of a bright,
mischievous child— but the sources of his humor are deadly serious,
rooted in a profound critique of society and human nature that gives his
jokes their staying power.
Mark Twain discarded the image of the writer as a contemplative being,
living a cloistered existence, and thrust himself into the hurly- burly of
American culture, capturing the wild, uproarious energy throbbing in
the heartland. Probably no other American author has led such an event-
ful life. A protean fi gure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, jour-
nalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit,
polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick, he courted con-
troversy and relished the limelight. A ferocious bargainer and shameless
self- promoter, he sought fame and fortune without hesitation, and estab-
lished the image of the author as celebrity. In fact, Mark Twain fairly
invented our celebrity culture, seemingly anticipating today’s world of
social analysts and infl uencers.
With his inexhaustible commentary, he bestrode a larger stage than
any other American writer, coining aphorisms that made him the coun-
try’s most- quoted person. He created a literary voice that was wholly
American, capturing the vernacular of western towns and small villages
where a new culture had arisen, far from staid eastern precincts. Starting
with an earthy brand of country humor, he mastered an astonishing
variety of literary forms— the novel, short stories, essays, travelogues,
burlesques, farces, political tracts, and historical romances— publishing
thirty books and pamphlets plus thousands of newspaper and magazine
articles. To that he added twelve thousand extant letters written by him
or his immediate family, fi fty notebooks crammed with ideas, and six
hundred still- incomplete manuscripts.
Whether Twain was our greatest writer may be arguable, if not doubt-
ful, but there’s little question that he was our foremost talker. His oral
output— recorded speeches, toasts, and interviews— is no less bountiful
than his written record. A nonpareil among platform artists, he spent a
lifetime perfecting a beguiling voice that elevated talk into an art form
and made audiences yearn for more. For all his erudition, this many- sided
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man employed a folksy charm and disarming wit that could appeal to mass
audiences. He was so funny that people laughed in spite of themselves,
his droll comments slipping past their defenses and shocking them into a
recognition of their true beliefs. Even as he railed bitterly against the
human race, kicking out the psychological props that sustained it, that
race reveled in his biting depictions of its behavior. What any biography
of Mark Twain demands is his inimitable voice, which sparkled even in
his darkest moments.
No less essential for any life is to capture the massive breadth of
Twain’s interests and travels. Not simply the bard of America’s heartland,
he was a worldly, cosmopolitan fi gure who spent eleven years abroad,
crossing the Atlantic twenty- nine times. His mind was broadened by an
around- the- world lecture tour as well as years of enforced exile in Eu-
rope. One of our great autodidacts, he had a far- reaching intelligence
that led him to consume history and biography and devour tomes on sub-
jects ranging from astronomy to geology to entomology. Our contem-
porary recollection of Mark Twain— mostly a sketchy memory of
The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
and
Life
on the Mississippi
— doesn’t begin to encompass the scope of his interests.
Beyond literature, Mark Twain engaged in an active business life,
which was a constant, often damaging, distraction. He raged against
plutocrats even as he strove to become one. “All through my life I have
been the easy prey of the cheap adventurer,” he confessed sheepishly.
15
A
compulsive speculator and a soft touch for swindlers, he spent a lifetime
chasing harebrained schemes and failed business ventures. His mind
would seize upon an idea with an obsessive tenacity that made him obliv-
ious to contrary arguments. Again and again, he succumbed to money-
mad schemes he might have satirized in one of his novels. He embodied
the speculative bent of the Gilded Age (which he named) with its fondness
for new inventions, quick killings, and high- pressure salesmanship.
After his early days in Hannibal, Nevada, and California, Twain re-
invented himself as a northeastern liberal, even, at times, a radical. Pre-
occupied with the notion that only the dead dare speak the truth, he
thought our need to make a living turned us all into cowards. There
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were some large, controversial topics, such as Reconstruction and the
Ku Klux Klan, that he shamefully ducked for the most part. Neverthe-
less, one is struck by the number of intrepid stands he took. He expressed
quite radical views on religion, slavery, monarchy, aristocracy, and colo-
nialism; supported women’s suffrage; contested anti- Semitism; and waged
war on municipal corruption in New York. A foe of jingoism, he also
took up an array of global issues, including American imperialism in the
Philippines, the despotism of czarist Russia, and the depredations of
Belgium’s King Leopold II in Africa. Indifferent to politics as a young
man, he increasingly emerged as a gadfl y and a reformer, acting as a con-
science of American society. Even as his novelistic powers faded, his po-
lemical powers only strengthened.
Twain proved fi erce in his loves and loyalties. Perhaps his one source
of unalloyed happiness came from his intimate relations with his adored
wife and three daughters. The cynicism he reserved for others was offset
by his implicit faith in Livy— the linchpin of his life— and his deep, if
often more complicated, love for his three offspring, Susy, Clara, and
Jean. His family life was shadowed by a staggering number of calamities.
The saga of the Clemens clan, so full of joy and heartache, lies at the very
core of this narrative.
If exemplary in marriage, Twain could be implacable in his hatreds
and grudges. A man who thrived on outrage, he had a tendency to lash
out at people, often deservedly, but sometimes gratuitously and exces-
sively. He once admitted to his sister that he was a man of “a fractious
disposition & diffi cult to get along with.”
16
A master of the vendetta, he
would store up potent insults and unload them in full upon those who
had disappointed him. He could never quite let things go or drop a quar-
rel. With his volcanic emotions and titanic tirades, he constantly threat-
ened lawsuits and fi red off indignant letters, settling scores in a life
riddled with self- infl icted wounds. Faced with his frequent inability to
govern his temper, the gentle, loving Livy tried gamely to tamp down his
fury. Mark Twain was often rescued by his wife— she was the necessary
ballast of his life— and, consequently, could never quite regain his equi-
librium once she was gone.
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In our own heightened time of racial reckoning, Twain poses special
challenges to biographers and readers alike. Though perhaps the greatest
antislavery novel in the English language,
Huck Finn
has been banned
from most American secondary schools, and its repetitive use of the
N- word has cast a shadow over Twain’s reputation. Born into a slave-
owning family, he transcended his southern roots to a remarkable de-
gree, shaking off most, but never all, of his boyhood racism. No other
white American writer in the nineteenth century engaged so fully with
the Black community or saw its culture as so central to our national ex-
perience. From boyhood, he treated Black people with notable warmth,
affection, and sympathy. He experienced tremendous growth in his atti-
tudes, graduating from the crude racist gibes of his early letters and
notebooks to a friendship with Frederick Douglass, fi nancing a Black
law student at Yale, promoting the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and denouncing
racial bigotry in a wide variety of forms. William Dean Howells termed
him “the most desouthernized southerner I ever met. No man more per-
fectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery.”
17
“Perhaps the bright-
est side of his whole intellectual career is his progress away from racism,”
one scholar has noted, and the statement is true despite some signifi cant
lapses.
18
From unpromising beginnings, Twain’s striking evolution in
matters of racial tolerance will be traced throughout this book.
Twain’s late- life fascination with teenage girls presents yet another
disturbing topic for contemporary readers. In many ways a Victorian
man, he tended to place women on a pedestal and treated his wife with
unfailing reverence. There was never the least hint of scandal in his mar-
ried life. Yet, after Livy’s death, Twain pursued teenage girls with a strange
passion that, while it always remained chaste, is likely to cause extreme
discomfort nowadays. Like many geniuses, Twain had a large assort-
ment of weird sides to his nature, and this account will try to make sense
of his sometimes bizarre behavior toward girls and women.
To portray Mark Twain in his entirety, one must capture both the
light and the shadow of a beloved humorist who could switch temper in
a fl ash, changing from exhilarating joy to deep resentment. He is a fasci-
nating, maddening puzzle to anyone trying to fi gure him out: charming,
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funny, and irresistible one moment, paranoid and deeply vindictive the
next. As he once observed ruefully, the “periodical and sudden changes
of mood in me, from deep melancholy to half- insane tempests and cy-
clones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life.”
19
Perhaps we should
not be surprised that America’s funniest man harbored ineffable sadness
and displayed a host of contradictions. In a life of staggering variety, he
managed to soar and plunge in emotional extremes. In the last analysis,
Mark Twain’s foremost creation— his richest and most complex gift to
posterity— may well have been his own inimitable personality, the larg-
est literary personality that America has produced.
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PART ONE
Afloat
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n
CHAPTER ONE
Loveless Marriage
G
iven the fi ne gusto with which Mark Twain fl ayed hereditary
privilege, it seems fi tting that he delighted in tracing his pater-
nal ancestry to one Gregory Clement, who had served in the
Parliament of England under Oliver Cromwell and joined in signing the
death warrant of King Charles I. Twain confessed to being “wholly ig-
norant” of his forebears but applauded Gregory’s action.
1
“He did what
he could toward reducing the list of crowned shams of his day.”
2
When
the monarchy was restored, Gregory was declared guilty of regicide, his
severed head posted as a warning atop Westminster Hall. Characteristi-
cally, Twain found pungent humor in his fate, declaring that Gregory was
“much thought of by the family because he was the fi rst of us that was
hanged.”
3
Unfortunately, Twain’s descent from Gregory Clement was en-
tirely fi ctitious, but it was hard to deprive him of a good story with such
rich potential for laughter.
The earliest known English ancestor of Mark Twain was Richard
Clements of Leicestershire, who lived in the early sixteenth century. In
1642 his great-grandson Robert boarded a ship for the American colo-
nies and aided in founding the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Over
the years the family drifted south to Pennsylvania and Virginia, where
in 1770 it spawned Samuel B. Clemens, grandfather of our author. On
October 29, 1797, he married Pamela Goggin in Bedford County in the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. In 1742 her grandfather Stephen Goggin,
Sr., had emigrated to Virginia from Queen’s County, Ireland.
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AFLOAT
| 4 |
Samuel and Pamela Clemens, a prosperous young couple, were fully
enmeshed in slavery, their ten workers toiling on four hundred acres in
Bedford County. The couple brought forth a brood of fi ve children, the
eldest being John Marshall Clemens. Born on August 11, 1798, and named
after the future chief justice of the United States, John Marshall, he was
destined to be the author’s father. When he was seven, his father died in
a freak accident— crushed by a falling log during a house- raising— and at
some point before adulthood he labored in an iron foundry. Thus robbed
of a carefree childhood, he developed a grim, driven personality, with
little levity in his nature. He clung to pretensions of supposed descent
from the “First Families of Virginia”; what his son labeled “a sumptuous
legacy of pride in his fi ne Virginia stock.” Having inherited three en-
slaved people, he settled in Columbia, Kentucky— his widowed mother
had moved to Adair County, near the Tennessee border, and remarried—
where he earned a license to practice law.
It was there that he met Jane Lampton, who had grown up in the
town. On May 6, 1823, at twenty- four, he married Jane, who was pretty
and gregarious, just shy of twenty, and brought a dowry of three more
enslaved people. Her father, Benjamin Lampton, was a prominent local
citizen, having served as a lieutenant colonel during the War of 1812. As
a skilled brick mason, he had constructed many fi ne buildings in town.
Jane’s maternal grandfather, William Casey— Indian fi ghter extraordi-
naire and Kentucky legislator— was so illustrious that the state named an
adjoining county after him. A lively young woman, Jane enjoyed the
social opportunities available to the daughter of two prominent families.
“During her girlhood Jane Lampton was noted for her vivacity and her
beauty,” her eldest son said.
4
“She was a great horsewoman when she was
young and riding parties were a feature of Kentucky life . . . she was
known as the best dancer in Kentucky,” a descendant added.
5
Her fa-
mous son would inherit her wealth of red hair as well as her spunk, gift
for language, and sprightly spirit.
Jane Lampton proudly claimed ancestry from the British Lambtons
of Durham, giving her a dubious connection to a string of earls. As her
famous son noted, “I knew that privately she was proud that the Lamb-
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tons, now Earls of Durham, had occupied the family lands for nine hun-
dred years; that they were feudal lords of Lambton Castle and holding
the high position of ancestors of hers” at the Norman Conquest.
6
Twain
later poked fun at this family vanity, especially when one of Jane’s rela-
tives cooked up a preposterous claim to being the genuine Earl of Dur-
ham. Such genealogical pretensions would set up Mark Twain as a perfect
satirist for big talkers, delusional dreamers, social climbers, and infl ated
windbags of every description.
The marriage of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton was fated
to be a loveless affair, and not solely because of strikingly dissimilar per-
sonalities. Jane had been jilted by a young doctor whom she loved and in
retribution married John Marshall on the rebound. In a thinly veiled
portrait of his father, Twain sketched the tragic consequences: “Stern,
unsmiling, never demonstrated affection for wife or child. Had found
out he had been married to spite another man.”
7
Though his parents be-
haved in dignifi ed fashion, making a point of mutual courtesy, Twain
recalled no signs of outward affection, just a frosty arrangement that
substituted handshakes for hugs at bedtime. This arid match would fos-
ter in Mark Twain a huge craving for affection in his own marriage.
After a year or two, the newlyweds moved across the border to Gaines-
boro in northeastern Tennessee. Plagued by headaches and a weak chest,
John Marshall Clemens hoped the salubrious mountain air might
strengthen his health. Their fi rst son, Orion— pronounced
Or
- ee- on—
was born in 1825, his astral name a refl ection of Jane’s taste for the oc-
cult. Although John Marshall was an ambitious man, it soon grew
apparent that the backwoods hamlet lacked any hint of a future. When
Orion visited the cheerless spot more than forty years later, he encoun-
tered the “melancholy spectacle of doors closed with signs over them
indicating past business; windows broken; houses faded or guiltless of
paint.”
8
The young family pushed forty miles farther east to Jamestown, in
Fentress County, a scenic hinterland of low, rolling mountains called the
Knobs, where the career of John Marshall Clemens seemed briefl y to
fl ourish. Unlike Gainesboro, this new town breathed an air of possibility,
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having recently been named the county seat, and John emerged as a model
citizen, serving as the county commissioner and clerk of the circuit court
and even taking a hand in building the county courthouse and jail. He
erected an impressive house that set envious tongues wagging. With their
future more secure, the Clemenses expanded their progeny to include two
daughters— Pamela (pronounced Pa-
mee
-
la) born in 1827 and Margaret
in 1830— and another son, Benjamin, in 1832; a fi rst son, named Pleas-
ant, died in infancy.
As he strode about town in a blue coat with brass buttons, John Mar-
shall seemed to have satisfi ed his hunger for respectability. He even
branched out into land speculation, amassing virgin forest at a time when
real estate could be acquired for less than a penny an acre. Of his total
investment, his author son Sam would later bandy about a fi gure of
seventy- fi ve thousand acres, while Orion could only establish title to
thirty thousand acres.
9
With an overheated imagination, John Marshall
daydreamed that his forest of yellow pine would someday yield a cornu-
copia of iron ore, coal, copper, and timber. This inheritance of the “Ten-
nessee land” would assume mythic proportions in his children’s minds,
alternately teasing and tormenting them with hopes of future grandeur.
The beckoning mirage of phantom wealth would make ordinary riches
seem paltry in comparison. For Sam Clemens, it would breed lifelong
fantasies of king- size wealth and countless schemes to attain it. He later
pronounced this grim epitaph on the Tennessee land: “It kept us hoping
and hoping, during forty years . . . It put our energies to sleep and made
visionaries of us— dreamers, and indolent. We were always going to be
rich next year— no occasion to work.”
10
The time in Tennessee set a tragic pattern for John Marshall Clemens,
who would attempt to scratch out a living as a lawyer and public servant
only to be forced, for survival’s sake, into the humdrum routine of keep-
ing a store. When his business faltered, he was required to abandon the
fi ne house in town— he was now land- rich but cash- poor— and move
nine miles north to a secluded spot in the woods, Three Forks, where his
family occupied a cramped log cabin, an abrupt comedown from their
previous high status in town. This solitary place at the junction of three
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rivers preyed on his sociable young wife, who had grown accustomed to
material comfort and a buoyant party life in Kentucky. “I had always
been in society,” Jane Clemens later complained, and was “very fond of
company.”
11
In this bleak backwater, John Marshall kept a store and
served as the local postmaster at the nearby hamlet of Pall Mall.
In 1834 fi nancial austerity brought on by Andrew Jackson’s clash with
the Second Bank of the United States snuffed out John Marshall Clem-
ens’s tenuous standing in Tennessee. Although Sam had not yet been
born, the mood of that sudden wreckage must have formed the mental
weather of his childhood; the specter of downward mobility shadowed
his father, spawning constant status insecurity. As Twain recalled, “From
being honored and envied as the most opulent citizen of Fentress
county . . . he suddenly woke up and found himself reduced to less than
one- fourth of that amount. He was a proud man, a silent, austere man,
and not a person likely to abide among the scenes of his vanished gran-
deur.”
12
Stymied by ill luck, battered by hardship, John Marshall became
a dour, defeated character, his ambitions thwarted in the wilderness. As
Mark Twain wrote, in a character patterned after his father in
The Gilded
Age,
Squire Hawkins was “not more than thirty- fi ve” but with “a worn
look that made him seem older.”
13
Between the two of them, John and
Jane Clemens had inherited six enslaved people, but by the time they left
Tennessee, austerity had thinned that number down to one— a young
woman named Jennie.
Twice disappointed in Tennessee, John Marshall Clemens uprooted
his family again in 1835, piled them into a two- horse carriage, and
headed north to Louisville, Kentucky, where they boarded a steamer
and rode down the Ohio River to St. Louis. “They had intended to settle
in St. Louis, but when they got there they were horrifi ed to hear that a
Negro boy had recently been lynched,” one Clemens descendant re-
ported. “Moreover, there was cholera in the city. So they moved on to
Florida [Missouri].”
14
A more likely story was that the Clemenses had
planned to settle in Florida all along since Jane’s brother- in- law, John A.
Quarles, had warmly encouraged them to join him there. The new town
of Florida, born four years earlier in the state’s northeast corner, stood
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on the ragged edge of western settlement. The Missouri Compromise of
1820 had thrown the state wide open to slavery, spurring migration from
Kentucky and Tennessee and lending the territory a southern character
in the run- up to the Civil War.
Orion recalled their dismal fi rst Florida residence as “a little white
frame [house], one- story, with two small rooms, or a room and a shed
under the same roof.”
15
Since Jane Clemens was pregnant with Sam dur-
ing the westward journey, Orion would tease his brother that this early
“travel had something to do with your roving disposition.”
16
With as
sharp a tongue as her famous son, Jane Clemens later derided the frail
house as “too small for a baby to be born in,” yet she gave birth, two
months prematurely, to Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30,
1835. The baby was named after his paternal grandfather, while John
Marshall Clemens supplied the middle name in homage to a boon com-
panion from his Virginia youth. With a fl air for showmanship, mother
and son converted Sam’s birth into a cosmic event, marked by the ap-
pearance of Halley’s Comet, which revisits the Earth at seventy- fi ve-
year intervals. Later endowed with a quip for every occasion, Twain
remarked of his birth: “The village contained a hundred people and I
increased the population by 1 per cent . . . There is no record of a person
doing as much— not even Shakespeare.”
17
At a time of rampant infant mortality, the baby proved a runt with a
sickly nature, and his parents grew concerned. “When I fi rst saw him [I]
could see no promise in him,” Jane admitted in afteryears. “But I felt it
my duty to do the best I could . . . But he was a poor- looking object to
raise.”
18
When she was in her eighties, her son asked about his troubled
infancy. “I suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me.”
“Yes, the whole time,” she agreed. Twain persisted: “Afraid I wouldn’t
live?” With a perfect deadpan worthy of her son, Jane retorted, “No,
afraid you would.”
19
Mark Twain would lampoon “the almost invisible village of Florida,”
evoking a settlement of two unpaved streets and scattered lanes. “Both
the streets and the lanes were paved with the same material— tough black
mud, in wet times, deep dust in dry.” With fl imsy houses made of logs,
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even the church was propped up on timber, allowing local hogs to root
around underneath and squeal noisily during services. John Marshall
entered into a partnership with John Quarles in a dry goods shop that
sold a bit of everything: calico and coffee, shovels and brooms, hats and
bonnets, even offering a swig of corn whiskey to every customer. Be-
cause John Marshall was a rigid man, he didn’t cotton to the easygoing
ways of John Quarles. Soon the partnership was dissolved and Clemens
set up a rival store across the street.
As in Tennessee, John Marshall Clemens strove to lift a nascent town
from obscurity and set it on the high road to progress. A political Whig,
with an abiding faith in internal improvements, he was appointed presi-
dent in 1837 of the Salt River Navigation Company, assembled to dredge
the nearby river and open it to steamboat commerce from the Missis-
sippi River. He was likewise made a commissioner of the Florida & Paris
Railroad, both projects wiped out by the Panic of 1837 and a dearth of
political support. John Marshall did land one coveted accolade: he was
named a judge of the Monroe County Court, forever after bearing the
proud title of Judge Clemens. He traded up to a larger house— three rooms
and a kitchen— where Sam Clemens’s beloved younger brother, Henry,
was born in 1838.
The following year, Twain’s sister Margaret died at age nine of a bil-
ious fever. One day she returned from school in a delirious state and lay
dead within a week. Jane Clemens always maintained that the girl “was
in disposition & manner like Sam full of life” and enjoyed taunting her
sister, Pamela.
20
As she lay dying, Sam glided fast asleep into her room
one night and stroked her bedclothes, exhibiting the somnambulism that
would mark his childhood. Perhaps, if informed of the episode, it was his
fi rst intimation that he harbored an inner self free from his conscious
control— a spiritual twin— which would form a recurrent theme in his
later writings.
The next year Judge Clemens concluded that the tiny village of Flor-
ida would never shake off its rustic slumber. Once again he had hitched
his luckless fate to a dying town. In Mark Twain’s mordant view, “He
‘kept store’ there several years, but had no luck, except that I was born to
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him.”
21
When Sam was nearly four in 1839, the judge turned his eyes to
the Mississippi port town of Hannibal, thirty- fi ve miles to the northeast.
Then a raw and relatively new country town with a vigorous, enterpris-
ing people and a diversifi ed economy, Hannibal was a thriving metropolis
compared to Florida. It already had the hallmarks of a genuine town,
including sawmills, blacksmith shops, saloons, and a distillery. A fast-
growing commercial hub, it exported wheat and tobacco harvested from
inland farms while drovers herded swine through its streets to two
slaughter houses.
As Orion later observed in the town paper, “Our peo-
ple have a horrid aversion to the jury box and the witnesses’ stand. They
greatly prefer the study of pork and fl our barrels, tape, cordwood, and
the steamboat’s whistle.”
22
For Sam Clemens, the move to Hannibal was
monumentally important, for it is impossible to picture his career with-
out the front- row seat that Hannibal afforded for the abundant traffi c
steaming by on the Mississippi River.
After selling his farm acreage and house in Florida, Judge Clemens
plowed the proceeds into purchasing a cluster of buildings in downtown
Hannibal, including a corner hotel at the foot of sloping Hill Street, where
his family fi rst lived. He commenced yet another general store, facing the
nearby Mississippi wharves, and stocked it with dry goods and groceries
bought on credit from St. Louis merchants. The teenage Orion, clad in a
brand- new suit of clothes, worked as a clerk. By autumn 1841, the judge’s
congenital bad luck and poor head for business ushered in yet another
commercial collapse as economic conditions exhausted his credit in
St. Louis. Orion remembered the store’s chief creditor ruthlessly strip-
ping the shelves bare for repayment— “all the dry goods, groceries, boots
and shoes and hardware in his store”— so that his father “began his fi rst
acquaintance with poverty.”
23
To help support the family, a resentful
Orion was apprenticed to the
Hannibal Journal
before being shipped off
to St. Louis to work as a printer.
The embarrassment of ingrained failure must have seeped deep into
the pores of John Marshall Clemens. Snappish, moody, and temperamen-
tal, he wasn’t the sort to be amused by the comic relief of his son Sam’s
compulsive pranks and mischief. His few surviving letters portray a man
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riddled with anxiety and ground down by monetary stress; they are de-
void of gaiety, charm, or humor. To raise cash in 1842, he traveled down
the Mississippi and sent home a letter that reeked of desperation. “I do
not know yet what I can commence at for a business in the spring. My
brain is constantly on the rack with the study, and I can’t relieve myself
of it— The future taking its complexion from the state of my health, or
mind, is alternately beaming in sunshine, or overshadowed with clouds;
but mostly cloudy, as you will readily suppose.”
24
When he got home and
Jane berated him for the costly but fruitless trip, John Marshall pleaded
that he meant well, saying plaintively, “I am not able to dig in the streets.”
Orion always remembered the “hopeless expression of his face.”
25
Adding to the fatalistic mood, Benjamin Clemens, nearly ten, died
on May 12, 1842, and his parents’ grief was so profound that Orion saw
them kiss for the fi rst time. The experience disclosed to Sam the depths
of emotional pain bottled up inside Jane Clemens. As she and Sam knelt
beside the dead boy stretched on the bed, she erupted in tears and moans
of “dumb” sorrow that startled her son. “The mother made the children
feel the cheek of the dead boy,” Sam recalled, “and tried to make them
understand the calamity that had befallen.”
26
Childhood mortality, how-
ever commonplace, was still exquisitely painful for parents. This was the
third child John Marshall and Jane Clemens had lost, and the harrowing
scene was forever lodged in the memory of Sam Clemens, who, for some
nameless reason, believed he had treacherously betrayed his dead brother.
There was both nobility and futility in the striving of Judge Clemens,
who could never establish abiding security for his family and exhibited
the bone- deep fatigue of a desperate man. Orion spoke of irritability from
“disordered nerves” as he strained to fi nd his elusive niche in the world.
27
His fortunes rebounded modestly as he picked up fees from practicing
law, and around 1844 was named Justice of the Peace, which meant set-
tling civil complaints and lawsuits over debt. He also oversaw slavery
disputes and twice ordered lashes meted out to enslaved offenders. In
his humble courtroom, he sat squarely on a three- legged stool, with dry
goods boxes serving as his desk, rapping out decisions with a mallet
and recording them with “his sharp pen,” recalled Orion.
28
Though a
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respectable man, Judge Clemens could be forbiddingly humorless, the
antithesis of the waggish Sam. One newspaper painted him thus: “He
was a stern unbending man of splendid common- sense . . . the autocrat
of the little dingy room on Bird Street, where he held his court . . . and
preserved order as best he could in the village.”
29
With his fi nances in
somewhat better shape, Judge Clemens constructed a house for his fam-
ily on the steeply inclined Hill Street, a two- story white frame, narrow
but deep, with Sam likely occupying the last bedroom on the upper fl oor.
Outside stood a certain fence that would be immortalized in
The
Ad-
ventures of Tom Sawyer
.
From a fi ctional portrait Twain wrote of his father, we know that he
was tall and lean with lank black hair drooping to his shoulders, showed
“courtly, old- fashioned” manners, and was impeccably honest.
30
He scru-
pulously adhered to social convention and got precious little for it. Op-
pressed by worry, his face unsmiling, he walked the streets with such
extreme formality that he cringed when someone accosted him and
slapped his back. His scholarly bent made him a stickler for grammar—
he shipped Orion an entire course of twenty lessons on the subject— and
he presided as president of the Hannibal Library Institute. Hannibal’s
citizenry viewed him with respect, not warmth, and nicknamed him
“Squire,” suggestive of his superior airs. A local minister claimed he was
“a grave, taciturn man, a foremost citizen in intelligence and wholesome
infl uence.” A local school principal called him “never a practical man, but
an energetic dreamer . . . courteous, well- educated . . . a good conversa-
tionalist.”
31
For all his moralistic zeal, Judge Clemens shied away from
church attendance, and this may be the one trait that endeared him to
Sam and infl uenced his later freethinking ways.
The father who found humor in nothing spawned a son who found
humor in everything. It is easy to see how the aloof Judge Clemens, who
hated disorder and was emotionally remote, produced a rebellious, devil-
may- care son and left him with an enduring ambivalence toward author-
ity fi gures. At thirty- four, Mark Twain recalled the “judicial frigidity”
of a father who could discover no charm in his juvenile antics. Never
cruel toward his children, John Marshall nonetheless threw a distinct
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LOV ELESS M ARRI AGE
chill in the air around him. As Twain said, he was “ungentle of manner
toward his children,” though he “never punished them— a look was
enough, and more than enough.” Father and son circled each other
warily. “My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I
was a boy— a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak.”
32
Another time
Twain said that “my own knowledge of him amounted to little more
than an introduction.”
33
He remembered only a single time when his fa-
ther hazarded a joke. They had come upon a room full of loaves of bread
moldy with blue cobwebs, and the startled boy asked where they came
from. “From Noah’s Ark,” the judge responded.
34
Curiously enough, it
is a very Mark Twain line. If there is a source of the rage that informed
Mark Twain’s career, it probably originated with a repressed fear of his
father, whom he never dared to confront directly. Instead that rage ex-
pressed itself indirectly, played out in boyhood hijinks and a cynical de-
fi ance toward elders. Humor proved a survival strategy with a humorless
father. Where Judge Clemens gravitated to the safety of courts, railroads,
and libraries, his son would become a confi rmed renegade against insti-
tutions and pride himself on a wild, lawless streak.
Luckily, with her joie de vivre, Jane Lampton Clemens provided
compensatory warmth and brightness in her son’s life. From her he de-
rived all his emotional sustenance. Slim and pretty, with the erect car-
riage of a dancer and keen blue eyes, she moved through her day with
good- humored energy and was a popular fi gure around town. If Sam
carried the Clemens name, he clearly manifested the Lampton genes. “He
is all ‘Lampton,’ ” Orion’s wife, Mollie, said, “and resembles his mother
strongly in person as in mind.”
35
Mother and son bore a comical resem-
blance, especially in their sharp but slightly melancholy eyes and exag-
gerated drawls. From his mother Sam inherited a storytelling passion
and an insatiable curiosity about people. However kindly she was, Jane
Clemens also exhibited a certain midwestern reserve, never kissing her
children and maintaining a ladylike sense of propriety. Her puritanical
side was observed by her son on a trip to New Orleans as a teenager.
“Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls for
allowing me to embrace and kiss them.”
36
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With tender solicitude, Jane Clemens watched Sam perpetrate one
outrageous prank after another. She adored but was bemused by this
wayward son, taking an exasperated pride in his constant skylarking.
He captured her ambivalence in his affectionate portrayal of Aunt Polly
in
Tom Sawyer
. “My mother had a good deal of trouble with me,” Mark
Twain confessed, “but I think she enjoyed it.”
37
Even as he got older,
Twain relished prodding and teasing her, much like Tom with Aunt
Polly. Whenever Jane, with a straight face, lectured Sam for some mis-
deed, he would rebut her with an unexpected witticism that made her
break down in laughter. Early on she recognized his instinctive tendency
to embellish the truth, and though she made an effort to quash it, she
came to accept him on his own terms. “I discount him ninety per cent,”
she remarked of Sam’s tall tales. “The rest is pure gold.”
38
From his
mother, Mark Twain learned that he could trust women and express a
richer spectrum of emotion than with men. With his father, Sam had to
suppress his personality; with his mother, he could fl aunt it.
With her broad sympathies, Jane Clemens was likely to spy redeem-
ing traits even in hardened sinners and outcasts. As her son expressed it,
she had the “larger soul that God usually gives to women.”
39
Despite
struggles with her husband and the death of several children, she kept
darkness at bay with a ready friendliness, her high- spirited and fun-
loving nature refl ected in her passion for the color red. “Grandma’s room
was always a perfect riot of red; carpets, chairs, ornaments, were all red,”
said a granddaughter. “She would have worn red, too, if she had not been
restrained.”
40
“She was of a sunshine disposition,” agreed Twain, “and
her long life was mainly a holiday for her. She always had the heart of a
young girl.”
41
Jane fl ocked to spectacles: circuses, Fourth of July parades,
theatrical performances, and church revivals, and she boasted of never
skipping a funeral. To those mystifi ed by her fondness for funerals, she
explained that “if she didn’t go to other people’s funerals they wouldn’t
go to hers!”
42
Sam’s life would refl ect his mother’s love of pageantry. Her
curiosity was also piqued by anything that savored of the occult, spiritu-
ality, or mysticism.
Another area where Jane Clemens left a profound imprint on her au-
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LOV ELESS M ARRI AGE
thor son lay in the realm of language. She wasn’t literary or sophisti-
cated, and read little beyond Bibles and newspapers, yet she had a
plainspoken eloquence when protesting injustice or indulging in pathos.
She preferred short, simple words and fl avored her conversation with
banter in a way reminiscent of her son. A natural raconteur, she could
spin large tales by embroidering scanty facts. When Twain later said his
mother had “the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of
not knowing it to be humorous,” he described his own trademark tech-
nique.
43
From her he also learned how the right manner could make the
matter more affecting. In a story called “Hellfi re Hotchkiss,” he sketched
this picture of Jane as a speaker, saying, “there was a subtle something in
her voice and her manner that was irresistibly pathetic, and perhaps that
was where a great part of the power lay; in that and in her moist eyes and
trembling lip. I know now that she was the most eloquent person I have
met in all my days, but I did not know it then.”
44
Often Jane Clemens
was inadvertently funny. When a distraught neighbor informed her that
a man had died when a calf raced in front of him, throwing him from his
horse, Jane responded unexpectedly, “What became of the calf?”
45
Jane Clemens communicated to her son a deep love of animals, most
notably cats. Unable to resist strays, she at one point had collected nine-
teen cats, a fondness for animals that moved her granddaughter to pro-
test, “Grandma, I believe you like cats better than babies.” A bit miffed,
Jane defended her behavior: “When you’re tired of a cat you can put it
down.”
46
She would never swat a fl y, punished cats sneaking off with
mice, and forbade caged pets in her household. As Twain put it, “An im-
prisoned creature was out of the question— my mother would not have
allowed a rat to be restrained of its liberty.”
47
This sympathy for living
creatures would be amply refl ected in the animal rights activism of her
son and granddaughters.
Mark Twain retailed stories of his mother’s bravery in standing up for
the oppressed, how she blocked a Corsican father pursuing his grown
daughter with a rope and scolded a St. Louis driver lashing his poor
horse. She also showed sympathy for the enslaved of Hannibal that never
extended to outright criticism of the institution itself. At one point, the
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Clemenses hired for housework an enslaved boy, Sandy, whose incessant
singing drove Sam (always hypersensitive to noise) to distraction. When
he complained to his mother, she lectured him in terms of simple hu-
manity. “Think; he is sold away from his mother; she is in Maryland, a
thousand miles from here, and he will never see her again, poor thing.
When he is singing it is a sign that he is not grieving . . . it would break
my heart if Sandy should stop singing.”
48
Yet this same Jane Clemens could mistreat their house slave, Jennie,
tended to badmouth “Yankees,” and grumbled about “black Republi-
cans.”
49
When Twain attempted to trick Jane and her friend Betsey into
staying at a Black minstrel show in St. Louis, saying they would hear
African missionaries, the ladies were not amused by the stunt. Instead,
they “began to question the propriety of their countenancing the indus-
tries of a company of negroes, no matter what their trade might be.”
50
Because Hannibal was a slave- owning town, its institutions all con-
spired to certify the justice and legality of involuntary servitude. “Kind-
hearted and compassionate as she was,” Twain refl ected of his mother, “I
think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and un-
warranted usurpation . . . As far as her experience went, the wise, the
good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right,
righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which
the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for.”
51
Few, if
any, contrary voices were heard on Hannibal’s streets, and children were
taught to dread abolitionists as sinister bogeymen who preyed on God-
fearing, slave- owning folk. That the compassionate Jane Clemens could
be trained to regard slavery as a humane system instead of a monstrosity
would serve as an object lesson for Mark Twain in the terrifying power
of environment to shape and distort human behavior.
While Twain maintained that his father opposed slavery in principle,
deeming it “a great wrong,” it is diffi cult to square that with his actions.
52
In September 1841, John Marshall Clemens served as foreman on a jury
that convicted three abolitionists who had crossed the Mississippi to
emancipate fi ve slaves, and they were sentenced to twelve years’ hard
labor. The following year, during the Mississippi River trip that so upset
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Jane Clemens, Judge Clemens tried to scrounge up money by selling a
Black man named Charley for “whatever he will bring where I take water
again,
viz,
at Louisville or Nashville.”
53
Reading this letter late in life,
Mark Twain was dismayed by the sickening way his father talked about
the man as if he were “an ox— and somebody else’s ox. It makes a body
homesick for Charley, even after fi fty years.”
54
Even when Judge Clem-
ens did not own enslaved people, he rented them from others.
As the years passed and darker truths about slavery surfaced in his
memory, Twain remembered savage punishments infl icted upon the Black
population and how such cruelty was so embedded in the society that
nobody protested or even seemed to notice. In 1896, while traveling in
India, Twain recorded how his father had struck him only twice in child-
hood, yet “he commonly cuffed our harmless slave boy Lewis for any
little blunder or awkwardness, even gave him a lashing now & then, which
terrifi ed the poor thing nearly out of his wits. My father passed his life
among the slaves from his cradle up, & his cuffi ngs proceeded from the
custom of the time, not from his nature.”
55
The following year, while summering in Switzerland, Twain had an-
other fl ashback of how his father had brutalized the enslaved Jennie, who
had nursed the Clemens children. As Jane Clemens was about to whip
her for insubordination, Jennie dared to grab the whip from her hand,
and Judge Clemens was promptly summoned. “Judge whipped her once,
for impudence to his wife— whipped her with a bridle.”
56
It may have
been this notorious act of cruelty that led Jennie to plead for what was
commonly seen as the worst punishment: to be sold down the river by a
hated slave trader named William Beebe, who had, said Twain, beguiled
“her with all sorts of fi ne and alluring promises.”
57
Jane consented to this
and persuaded her husband, who badly needed the money. Mark Twain
remembered that the sale of Jennie was “a sore trial, for the woman was
almost like one of the family.”
58
Years later, he saw Jennie working as
a chambermaid on a steamboat and she “cried and lamented.”
59
Such
barbarism toward Blacks was Hannibal’s underlying reality, and Twain
would spend the rest of his life seeking to acknowledge and understand
how people could have accepted it.
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In later years, yet another terrifying memory of slavery surged to the
forefront of Mark Twain’s mind: “When I was 10 I saw a man fl ing a lump
of iron ore at a slaveman [
sic
] in anger— for merely doing something awk-
wardly, as if that were a crime. It bounded from his skull & the man fell
& never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man had a right
to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and
somehow wrong . . . Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but
of course no one said much about it.”
60
Mark Twain registered these fl eet-
ing impressions as a boy, but only with the benefi t of hindsight would he
fully fathom their true horror.
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CHAPTER TWO
A Wild and Mischievous Boy
I
n his fi ction, Mark Twain would memorably evoke Hannibal as “the
white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning,” a place
where it never seemed to snow despite fi erce Missouri winters.
1
He
presented it as an earthly paradise where youngsters went barefoot in
summer and gorged on cornmeal cakes and catfi sh. “Well, it was a beau-
tiful life, a lovely life,” he once told a dinner audience in his drollest vein.
“There was no crime. Merely little things like pillaging orchards and
watermelon patches and breaking the Sabbath— we didn’t break the Sab-
bath often enough to signify— once a week perhaps.”
2
The town’s chil-
dren may have been poor, but they didn’t know it. “To get rich was no
one’s ambition— it was not in any young person’s thoughts . . . It was an
intensely sentimental age, but it took no sordid form.”
3
He argued that
the California gold rush in 1848, when he turned thirteen late in that
year, introduced “the lust for money which is the rule of life to- day, and
the hardness and cynicism which is the spirit of to- day.”
4
He forever re-
membered the cavalcade of eager townspeople streaming westward in
canvas- covered wagons— “We were all there to see and to envy”— and
even the local schoolteacher, John D. Dawson, fl ocked to join the exodus
with the money- hungry horde.
5
That Twain could portray his boyhood in such sunlit terms shows the
extent to which his frolics with friends enabled him to escape the gruel-
ing insecurity of family life and his father’s fi nancial woes. The carefree
sprees stood in stark contrast to the gloom that enveloped his household,
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and he later traced his dread of debt to the monetary setbacks the Clem-
ens clan endured. Fifty years later, he could still summon up, beneath
the air of nostalgia, the “sordidness and hatefulness and humiliation” of
those early days.
6
Even as a boy, Sam Clemens had a pronounced streak of
nonconformity— he hated being hemmed in by social rules— expressed
in constant clowning as he mocked the conventional piety of the towns-
people. “Sam was always full of fun,” said one cousin. “He could play
more pranks and escape with less punishment than anybody I ever
knew.”
7
With his intelligence concealed behind a mask of insouciance, he
revolted against schoolhouse discipline and rote learning and Jane Clem-
ens’s valiant efforts to tame him. She recollected: “Sam was always a
good- hearted boy, but he was a very wild and mischievous one, and do
what we would we could never make him go to school. This used to
trouble his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced that he
would never amount to as much in the world as his brothers, because he
was not nearly so steady and sober- minded as they were . . . Finally his
father and the teacher both said it was of no use trying to teach Sam any-
thing, because he was determined not to learn.”
8
In many ways, he was a
lazy boy, disorganized and easily bored, always craving novelty, but he
could focus intensely on things that dearly interested him— especially
outside the schoolhouse.
In the manner of all autodidacts, Sam Clemens educated himself by
reading from passion, not duty. He retained his boyhood fondness for
The Adventures of Robin Hood,
both the “quaint & simple . . . fragrant
& woodsy England” as well as its characters, “the most darling sweet
rascals that ever made crime graceful in this world.”
9
He and close friend
Will Bowen would “undress & play Robin Hood in our shirt- tails, with
lath swords, in the woods on Holliday’s Hill on those long summer
days.”
10
Confi ned in the remote little town, Sam escaped into the far-
away exploits of
Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights,
and
The Count
of Monte Cristo,
which gave intimations of the boundless world “cur-
tained away” beyond Hannibal.
11
This willful boy had a penchant for doing shocking things, whether
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A WILD A ND MISCHIEVOUS BOY
teasing girls with garter snakes or leaving dead bats for his mother to fi nd.
With his friends he rolled a giant boulder dangerously down Holliday’s
Hill, fed a tobacco plug to a visiting elephant, and jumped off a ferry
into the river. With pardonable exaggeration, he claimed that he had
nearly drowned nine times in the Mississippi River or Bear Creek, and
on one occasion remembered an enslaved woman grasping his wriggling
fi ngers and fi shing him free from the water. Sam was a sweet burden to
Jane Clemens, who nursed him back to health. “I guess there wasn’t much
danger,” she warned him. “People born to be hanged are safe in water.”
12
Sam’s reputation as a trickster and troublemaker likely came from a
desire to be noticed; being funny was the best way to attract boys, im-
press girls, and ward off his father’s looming presence. “Celebrity is what
a boy or a youth longs for more than for any other thing,” he observed in
his
Autobiography
. “He would be a clown in a circus; he would be a pi-
rate, he would sell himself to Satan, in order to attract attention and be
talked about and envied.”
13
Later on he came up with an aphorism: “There
are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing
it.”
14
The naughty child grew up to be the naughty adult author, with the
same ceaseless need to attract attention by spouting scandalous commen-
tary. The older Mark Twain pointedly noted that the “appetite for notice
and notoriety” had lingered in his adult life.
15
Twain was fond of recounting a story about a measles epidemic that
swept Hannibal when he was ten, killing many children. He was so
steeped in fear that he decided to end the suspense by contracting the
disease on purpose. So he sneaked into the bed of a friend with measles
and duly came home with the disease. Far from suffering, Sam Clemens
found the situation “most placid and tranquil and sweet and delightful . . .
I was the centre of all this emotional attention and was gratifi ed by it and
vain of it.”
16
Early on the boy learned that he could monopolize people’s attention
and cast a hypnotic spell thanks to his unusual facility with language.
When her granddaughter once asked Jane Clemens what distinguished
Sam from other children, she said that “when he had gone anywhere,
if only downtown, when he came home all the children would gather
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around to hear what he had to tell. He knew even then how to make
things interesting. She also said that when she saw a crowd running, she
didn’t ask what was the matter, but ‘what has Sam done now?’ ”
17
If Sam excelled at taunts, sometimes showing fl ashes of cruelty, he
was also credited with a warm heart, a mixture of moods that persisted
into adulthood. Orion praised his younger brother as “a rugged, brave,
quick- tempered, generous- hearted fellow,” with an outsize “capacity of
enjoyment . . . and of suffering” who felt “the utmost extreme of every
feeling.”
18
Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Sam exhibited an outlaw
spirit, preferring to tarry on the fringes of town, Holliday’s Hill and
McDowell’s Cave, but most of all on the river with its mysterious, iso-
lated islands, where he gloried in a sense of freedom. On Glasscock’s Is-
land, Sam and his comrades fi shed and swam, searched for turtle eggs,
and smoked corncob pipes. He was especially enamored of a guttersnipe
named Tom Blankenship, who resided a block from his home in a rude
dwelling dark with poverty. A master of petty thefts, especially of tur-
keys and onions, Tom was scruffy and dirty, a stranger to baths and
schools, and thoroughly happy despite being the son of the town drunk-
ard. Tom’s company was forbidden to Sam, which greatly enhanced his
appeal. In Sam’s view, Tom was “the only really independent person—
boy or man— in the community.”
19
This fascination with marginal and
taboo fi gures previews the radical vision of Twain’s fi ction in which he
found virtue in the low born and vice in the well bred, lending a dark
glamour to boys who fl outed parental strictures.
Mark Twain was born with a natural attraction for the disapproved
thing. “There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably
desirable,” he wrote. “It was not that A[dam] ate the apple for the apple’s
sake, but
because
it was forbidden.”
20
A self- styled enfant terrible, he began
to smoke by age eight, a habit that remained surreptitious while his fa-
ther was alive. He believed devoutly in his later aphorism “Few things
are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
21
He
could never abide obedient, apple- polishing classmates who toadied to
parents, teachers, and preachers, and he reserved a special animus for
Theodore Dawson, the schoolteacher’s son. “In fact he was inordinately
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A WILD A ND MISCHIEVOUS BOY
good, extravagantly good, offensively good, detestably good— and he had
pop- eyes— and I would have drowned him if I had had a chance.”
22
His
hatred for these model boys came from a feeling that they were priggish
and empty, all show but no substance in their subservience.
If Hannibal was a sleepy town, it was galvanized into startling life
twice daily by the arrival of a steamboat either traveling upriver from
St. Louis or down from Keokuk, Iowa. The boat would paint a distant
spot of black smoke in the sky that was usually noticed fi rst by a Black
drayman who uttered a jubilant cry: “S- t- e- a- m- boat a- comin’!” In
Life
on the Mississippi,
Twain reported the tonic effect on the town. “The
town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays fol-
lows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a
twinkling the dead town is alive and moving.”
23
From the steamboat is-
sued everything from carriages to traveling salesmen to minstrel shows to
itinerant circuses. Sam Clemens enjoyed instant access to this excite-
ment: he simply had to exit his Hill Street house, turn left, and there, just
a block or two away, lay the vast, shining Mississippi, three- quarters of a
mile wide, looking especially magnifi cent with a steamboat moored at
the dock. From Holliday’s Hill, three hundred feet up, he could obtain
panoramic, unobstructed views of the river as it meandered through the
rich fl at farmland in northeast Missouri and western Illinois.
The daily advent of the steamboats planted the fi rst ambition that
took root in Sam Clemens: to be a pilot. He craved attention, and no-
body drew more than the pilot, who wore fancy duds and enjoyed an
“exalted respect” as he strutted about town.
24
Of no less interest was the
“princely salary” that the pilot pocketed each month: “Two months of
his wages would pay a preacher’s salary for a year.”
25
The river held many
wonders beyond steamboats, especially the annual arrival of a massive
fl eet of rafts fl oating to markets downriver with “an acre or so of white,
sweet- smelling boards in each craft,” manned by “a crew of two dozen
men or more.”
26
Sam and his friends would plunge into the river, swim to
the rafts, and hitch a thrilling ride.
In the meantime, the future author had to suffer through something
called school, which he viewed as the centerpiece of an unspoken adult
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conspiracy to deprive children of fun. At age four he trudged off to a pri-
vate school run by Elizabeth Horr, who commenced class with a prayer
and a New Testament selection. On his fi rst day, Sam, the class clown,
got into trouble and was punished with strokes from a switch. He would
attend three private schools, one a log schoolhouse with girls on one side,
boys on the other, and wrote scornfully of “what passed for a school in
those days: a place where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight
or ten hours a day to learn incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of
books and reciting it by rote, like parrots.”
27
Restless in school, a born
truant, he yearned on warm days for the barefoot freedom of the sur-
rounding countryside. Perhaps this scanty education enabled him to
develop a literary voice that was fresh and original, unspoiled by any
European or Eastern Seaboard infl uences.
The most- perceptive observations of young Sam Clemens came from
a very pretty girl named Laura Hawkins, who lived directly across Hill
Street but in a more imposing house, which signaled a step up the eco-
nomic ladder, her father having owned a large mill and slave plantation
further inland. She would fi gure as the model for Becky Thatcher in
Tom Sawyer.
Twain sentimentalized her as his fi rst sweetheart and never
lost his soft spot for her. At age fi ve, he said, “I had an apple, & fell in
love with her & gave her the core.”
28
Her fi rst glimpse of her attention-
grabbing young neighbor was indelible: a barefoot boy who “came out of
his home, opposite mine, and started showing off, turning handsprings
and cutting capers just as described in Tom Sawyer.” Sam had “long
golden curls hanging over his shoulders at the time.”
29
His comic per-
sona, she saw, concealed a sensitive boy of natural refi nement, who was
“gentle . . . and kind of quiet,” with a conspicuous drawl reminiscent of
his mother.
30
Even though Sam “played hooky from school” and “cared
nothing at all for his books . . . I never heard a coarse word from him in
all our childhood acquaintance.”
31
From his fi rst encounter with the female sex, Sam Clemens was courtly
and gallant, as in future years. “He used to carry my books to school
every morning,” recalled Laura, “bring them home for me in the after-
noon, and occasionally he would treat me to apples, oranges and such
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A WILD A ND MISCHIEVOUS BOY
things, or divide his candy with me.”
32
From Sam, she must have heard
the family saga of past Virginia gentility— aristocrats down on their
luck— for she noted that the Clemenses “came from very fi ne stock, but
were very poor.”
33
Appreciative of his special humor, she noted his abil-
ity to discern the absurdity in situations and said his success in telling a
funny story lay not so much in its content than in his “drawling, appeal-
ing voice.”
34
School wasn’t the only adult institution that Sam Clemens had to put
up with: the Church also conspired against the pleasures coveted by small
boys. In later years, Mark Twain came to believe that the creation of hu-
manity, with its deeply fl awed nature, was nothing for the Lord to boast
about and would inveigh against “the superstitions in which I was born
& mistrained.”
35
That perspective came later. In Hannibal, atheists were
about as popular as abolitionists, and Sam’s boyhood was saturated with
religious training. By age twelve he was steeped in the Old and New
Testaments, which left their mark on his writings. While the skeptical
John Marshall Clemens evaded church services, Jane Clemens was a fer-
vent Presbyterian, and Sam was affected by all the fi re- and- brimstone
sermons about the afterlife. As he phrased it, “The Presbyterian hell is
all misery; the heaven all happiness.”
36
So far did early religious experi-
ence permeate his mind that heaven and hell became lifelong fi xtures in
his humorous repertoire, with Satan his best comic character. The only
profession that ever vied with piloting in Sam Clemens’s fantasy life was
that of becoming a preacher, which seemed a sure way to forestall dam-
nation. “It looked like a safe job,” he confi rmed.
37
Another time he con-
fessed about being a preacher that he lacked “the necessary stock in
trade— i.e., religion.”
38
Though he suffered through services in the Presbyterian church with
its high pulpit, Bible on a red plush pillow, and congregants sitting in stiff
pews, he still regarded himself as an incorrigible sinner, headed straight
to hell. Every time a boy in town drowned, Sam chalked it up to an
angry deity who was coming for him next. Although he consoled him-
self by day, saying God would be patient, dark fears of retribution
sneaked up on him at night. “With the going down of the sun my faith
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failed, and the clammy fears gathered about my heart. It was then that I
repented. Those were awful nights, nights of despair, nights charged with
the bitterness of death.”
39
One thing, in retrospect, that weakened Mark Twain’s faith in the
church of his childhood was its unswerving endorsement of slavery. The
evidence of slavery’s misery stood scattered all around him— “the sad-
dest faces” Sam Clemens ever saw were those of a dozen shackled slaves
on Hannibal’s dock awaiting shipment farther south— but he heard no
condemnation from religious leaders.
40
Nearly half the families in Mar-
ion County held at least one person in bondage, almost invariably with a
clear conscience. “In my schoolboy days,” Twain said, “I had no aversion
to slavery . . . the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was
a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished
to settle his mind.”
41
Beyond preaching slavery, pastors practiced it un-
ashamedly. Twain remembered one Methodist minister who sold an en-
slaved child to a fellow minister, who then profi ted by later selling the
child downriver. As the steamboat departed with her offspring, the child’s
mother wept inconsolably at the dock.
42
As he got older and developed
into an avid student of history, Twain came to believe that the Church
had endorsed slavery for centuries and reformed its position only
after
congregants turned against it. Church complicity on slavery came to il-
lustrate for him how social institutions could collude in a “lie of silent
assertion . . . that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are
aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”
43
When it came to slavery, the forces of repression were especially vir-
ulent in northern Missouri, settled mostly by people from slave states.
Even though Missouri lay at the intersection of the free states of Illinois
and Iowa and the mixed Kansas Territory, it had a heavily enslaved pop-
ulation in counties strung along the Mississippi River. In fact, the prox-
imity of free Illinois right across the waterway only heightened the dread
in Hannibal that dastardly abolitionists would sneak across and spirit
slaves away. “In that day,” Twain wrote, “for a man to speak out openly
and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery was simply to proclaim
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A WILD A ND MISCHIEVOUS BOY
himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing
known to a Missourian, and could
not
be in his right mind.”
44
As much as he had warmed to the lowly Tom Blankenship, Sam
Clem ens gravitated to the company of the enslaved, and for someone at-
tracted to pariahs, the human chattel were the ultimate outcasts of soci-
ety. For many years, his brain stuffed with early stereotypes, he would
refer to Blacks in derogatory language— after all, he grew up in a town
that still had slave auctions and minstrel shows with racist imperson-
ations of Banjo and Bones— yet his boyish affection for Black people was
also unmistakable. By some instinct he reveled in their company. Of
having Black children as playmates, he contended that he preferred
“their society to that of the elect, I being a person of low- down tastes
from the start, notwithstanding my high birth.”
45
Sam spent two or three months of every summer at his uncle John
Quarles’s homestead, set on the crest of a beautiful hill, four miles out-
side of Florida. Populated by eight Quarles children and about a dozen
enslaved people, it represented an emotional haven for the boy and would
reappear as the Phelpses’ farm in
Huck Finn
. “It was a heavenly place for
a boy,” Mark Twain recalled, “that farm of my uncle John’s.”
46
The meals
served were hearty and irresistible— “the corn bread, the hot biscuits and
wheatbread, and the fried chicken”— never to be surpassed in northern
years.
47
Nor was it a small thing that, in contrast to his father’s severity,
John Quarles showed a winning geniality.
The plantation’s foremost appeal lay in the smokehouse and a cluster
of small log cabins that made up the “negro quarter,” a place redolent
with an atmosphere of magic, mystery, and folklore. Here the future nov-
elist found fi gures of inexhaustible fascination, including “Aunt” Han-
nah, “a bedridden white- headed slave woman whom we visited daily, and
looked upon with awe, for we believed she was upwards of a thousand
years old and had talked with Moses.”
48
It was thought “she had lost her
health in the desert, coming out of Egypt. The bald spot on her head was
caused by fright at seeing Pharaoh drowned.”
49
The language, folkways,
songs, and religion of the enslaved left lasting traces on Sam Clemens’s
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imagination. He absorbed their dialects into his bloodstream and they
became a part of him. Often the older Black children would chaperone
younger whites, but, stepping outside their roles, they could also act as
companions and co- conspirators. These unions, however pleasant, were
illusory in nature. “We were comrades, and yet not comrades”; Twain re-
membered, “color and condition interposed a subtle line which both par-
ties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible.”
50
The high point each summer came at night by the kitchen fi re, when
the enslaved Old Uncle Dan’l would deliver a ghost story called the
“Golden Arm” amid a fl ickering blaze. From Mark Twain’s luminous
memories of these performances, it grows clear that he encountered in
the elderly Black man his fi rst platform virtuoso, expert in tone and pac-
ing. “We would huddle close about the old man, & begin to shudder
with the fi rst familiar words; & under the spell of his impressive delivery
we always fell a prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape
in the twilight sprang at us with a shout.”
51
In his many years on the lec-
ture circuit, Mark Twain would constantly reprise the Golden Arm story
along with many tricks of delivery he had learned at the feet of his fi rst
mentor.
With his kindness, warmth, and intelligence, Uncle Dan’l would serve
as inspiration for many characters in Mark Twain’s fi ction. As he admit-
ted, “I . . . staged him in books under his own name and as ‘Jim,’ and
carted him all around— to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and
even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon— and he has endured it all
with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birth-
right.”
52
Due to prolonged exposure to slavery at the Quarleses’ farm,
Twain had a fondness for Black people that didn’t stem from polite toler-
ance or enforced familiarity. It was deep and personal, and he was never
afraid to say so, distinguishing him from many white people of his era.
“It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for [Uncle Dan’l’s] race
and my appreciation of certain of its fi ne qualities. This feeling and this
estimate have stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no
impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then.”
53
Sometimes it can be hard to reconcile Twain’s varied memories of
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A WILD A ND MISCHIEVOUS BOY
slavery in Hannibal, which he once termed “the mild domestic slavery,
not the brutal plantation article. Cruelties were very rare, and exceed-
ingly and wholesomely unpopular.”
54
Of course, “mild domestic slav-
ery,” if such ever existed, was still slavery. Yet it was Twain himself who
told the story of the lump of iron fl ung at a Black man that killed him
and how his own parents had been corrupted by this system into cruel
and unnatural behavior.
The situation that implicated the entire community in the crime of
chattel slavery was the problem of runaway slaves. No white person who
came into contact with a fugitive was spared responsibility. “To help steal
a horse or a cow was a low crime,” Mark Twain said, “but to help a hunted
slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his
troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to
the slave- catcher . . . was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a
moral smirch which nothing could wipe away.”
55
While Twain under-
stood why slave owners pursued runaways in such ferocious fashion, he
was always puzzled that “the loafers[,] the tag- rag & bobtail of the com-
munity” took up the hunt with equal zeal. “It shows that that strange
thing, the conscience . . . can be trained to approve any wild thing you
want
it to approve if you begin its education early & stick to it.”
56
Sam Clemens experienced direct exposure to at least one fugitive slave,
which became the genesis of
Huck Finn.
In the summer of 1847, Benson
Blankenship, the older brother of Tom, happened upon a runaway from
Missouri hiding in the swamp of an island on the Illinois side of the Mis-
sissippi River. Spurning the reward for returning runaways and defying
the law, Benson smuggled food to the man and helped to sustain and
safeguard him for several weeks. Then a band of woodcutters stumbled
upon the Black man and gave chase until he disappeared and drowned. A
few days later, Sam Clemens and his companions were present when the
mutilated corpse, like some ghostly apparition, suddenly rose straight
up from the water, scattering the boys in terror— a nightmarish moment
that burned the episode into the future author’s memory.
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CHAPTER THREE
Printer’s Devil
T
he fragile bark of John Marshall Clemens’s career always seemed
to struggle upstream against a heavy tide as his fi nances turned
perilous again in 1845– 46. To supplement his erratic, meager in-
come as justice of the peace, he had been forced into an unwanted side-
line, clerking at a local produce house. Mark Twain believed his father’s
fi nal ruin came at the hands of a villain named Ira Stout, who defaulted
on a loan of several thousand dollars guaranteed by his father. If the de-
tails remain murky, it seems clear that the straitened fi nances of the
Clem ens family forced them to relinquish their home and move across
the street, occupying second- story rooms above Grant’s Drug Store.
This must have been a crushing blow to family pride: in lieu of rent, Jane
Clemens, the erstwhile Kentucky belle, now had to cook for the family
of Orville Grant.
Ever admirable in his civic projects, John Marshall Clemens cooper-
ated on plans to build a railroad that would connect the Mississippi and
Missouri Rivers and also lobbied for the creation of a state Masonic col-
lege in Hannibal. No project, however, materialized in time to pluck him
from the depths of misfortune. His most promising prospect was a job as
clerk of the circuit court, a position to be chosen at the next election in
August 1847. Apart from its considerable prestige, the post would at last
ensure the Clemens clan a steady income, with Judge Clemens consid-
ered a front- runner in the race. During the winter of 1846– 47, he mounted
his horse and rode from house to house to drum up support for his
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candidacy. In late February 1847, riding back twelve miles from Palmyra,
the county seat north of Hannibal, he was drenched by sleet and rain,
and in his chilled, sodden state succumbed to pleurisy and then pneu-
monia.
As the forty- eight- year- old patriarch lay dying, surrounded by his
family, he uttered words that suggested he had learned little from his
short, unhappy stay on earth. “I believe if I had stayed in Tennessee,” he
insisted, “I might have been worth twenty thousand dollars today.”
1
He
returned to the obsession that had cruelly beckoned for so many years:
the Tennessee land, which he had insisted bulged with fabulous mineral
deposits. “I shall not live to see these acres turn to silver and gold,” he
had prophesied, “but my children will.”
2
“Cling to the land,” he now
urged them in a feeble voice. “Cling to the land, and wait. Let nothing
beguile it away from you.”
3
Instead of bequeathing a fortune to his chil-
dren, he left them with the bane of imaginary riches. “He went to his
grave in the full belief that he had done us a kindness,” said Mark Twain.
“It was a woeful mistake, but fortunately he never knew it.”
4
At the end,
he motioned to his daughter Pamela to approach, laced his arms around
her neck, and gave her his fi rst kiss in years. “Let me die” were his part-
ing words on March 24, 1847.
5
Sam Clemens saw only a rebuke in his
father’s farewell kiss to Pamela: “He did not say good- bye to his wife,
or to any but his daughter.”
6
If Mark Twain became the quintessential
American writer, it may have been because his father left such a poignant
example of failure in a land obsessed with money and success. Twain
would suffer the lifelong fi nancial anxiety of someone whose family for-
tunes had crashed in early life.
With his father’s death, the burden of family support now settled
squarely on Orion, who yearned for a career as an orator or politician,
but dutifully returned to his printing job in St. Louis. With more than a
tincture of bitterness, he blamed his father for hastening his own demise.
“He doctored himself from my earliest remembrance,” he later said.
“During the latter part of his life he bought Cook’s pills by the box, and
took some daily. He was very dexterous at throwing a pill to the root of
his tongue, washing it down with a sip of water.”
7
While it is impossible
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to verify Orion’s suspicions, Cook’s Pills were a blend of potent laxa-
tives that included mercury chloride, which can have toxic effects on
bodily organs. The pills were also used to treat syphilis. Sketchy evi-
dence suggests that an autopsy was performed on Judge Clemens with
Sam bending down to peer through a keyhole. At least one Mark Twain
biographer has suggested that the autopsy disclosed shocking news: that
Judge Clemens suffered from syphilis.
8
If so, the world knew nothing of
this shame, and the local paper lauded Judge Clemens for his “public
spirit” and “high sense of justice and moral rectitude.”
9
The whole troubled saga of John Marshall Clemens must have had a
nightmarish quality for Sam, only eleven at the time of his father’s death.
The business failures, the harrowing plunge in social status, the ghastly
fi scal strain, the early death perhaps brought on by bad habits, the key-
hole autopsy— it was horror heaped on horror for the young boy, made
especially galling by his father’s cold, aloof attitude toward him. And it
had all ended badly given that the judge’s death condemned “his heirs to
a long and discouraging struggle with the world for a livelihood.”
10
So
traumatic was his father’s death that Mark Twain marked the date, some-
times with tears, for the rest of his life.
11
The emotional toll was soon evident, for the night following his fa-
ther’s funeral and for several nights thereafter, Sam, cloaked in a sheet,
reverted to sleepwalking— a sight that unnerved his mother and sister—
as if all the nervous energy gathered by day exploded in his mind at
night. His cousin Tabitha Quarles recalled Sam as “a pale, sickly boy”
and said his sleepwalking proved an ongoing terror to his family, who
feared he would harm himself in his nocturnal wanderings. One night at
the Quarleses’ farm, his uncle discovered Sam “out in the stable in his
night gown. He was astride the old gray horse. He was yelling like a wild
Indian and thought he was running a race, while old Gray just pricked up
his ears and paid no more attention to Sam’s tricks than the rest of us.”
12
That John Marshall Clemens had been so emotionally absent from
his son’s life only made it more diffi cult for Sam to accept his death since
he no longer had a chance to repair relations and tortured himself with
memories of disrespect toward his father. Jane Clemens escorted him into
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the room where the coffi n rested, and as they stood on either side, she
attempted to soothe him. “It is all right, Sammy. What’s done is done,
and it does not matter to him any more.”
13
She used the occasion to broach
the subject of his uncertain future. “I had some serious requests to make
of him, and . . . I knew his word once given was never broken . . . He
turned his streaming eyes upon me and cried out, ‘Oh, mother, I will do
anything, anything you ask of me except to go to school; I can’t do that!’
That was the very request I was going to make. Well, we afterward had a
sober talk, and I concluded to let him go into a printing offi ce to learn
the trade, as I couldn’t have him running wild.”
14
Sam swore to his mother
that he would behave himself and never break her heart.
After Judge Clemens’s death, his family mostly survived on money
Orion sent from St. Louis and income Pamela brought in from teaching
piano and guitar. As it turned out, Sam wasn’t immediately freed from
homework and attended school part- time until John D. Dawson fl ed to
California in 1849. In the meantime, he performed assorted part- time
labor, including a stint as an apprentice printer at the
Hannibal Gazette
and an errand boy for the paper’s owner, as well as short- term, menial
assignments in a grocery, bookstore, and drugstore. Then he landed an
apprentice job around May 1848 with the
Missouri Courier,
a Democratic
paper headed by Joseph P. Ament, and by the next year he was sprung
from hated schooling forever. With his shortened education, it is amazing
how cultured, literate, and worldly Mark Twain would become as he con-
tinued to educate himself and far transcended his provincial upbringing.
An apprentice’s job then stood only a notch above indentured servi-
tude, entitling the occupant to no wages, only board in the owner’s resi-
dence and two suits of cheap clothes. Mark Twain scoffed that he never
saw the second suit and that the fi rst, composed of worn garments dis-
carded by the bigger Ament, made him feel “as if I had on a circus tent.
I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short enough.”
15
Sometimes he slept on a pallet on the print shop fl oor, sometimes at
Ament’s house, and he dismissed his boss four years later as a “diminu-
tive chunk of human meat.”
16
Even though he was already hypercritical
of people, others shared this derisory view of Ament, one editor railing
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at him as “the most fretful, peevish, cross- grained, ill- natured, sour-
tempered, scolding obscure little brat we have met with.”
17
At the time no clear line demarcated the printing and editorial sides
of a newspaper, which meant that Sam Clemens had now ventured,
willy- nilly, into the writing world. This bleak existence was lightened
by the uproarious company of apprentice Wales McCormick and jour-
neyman printer Pet McMurry, who depicted Sam as “a little sandy-
haired boy” who sat crooning ditties or smoked “a huge cigar or a
diminutive pipe” as he sat “mounted upon a little box” setting type.
18
For
all his self- deprecating jokes about his printing skills— “I had always
been such a slow compositor that I looked with envy upon the achieve-
ments of apprentices of two years’ standing”— he became quite agile at
his craft.
19
The offi ce factotum, he went around dunning subscribers and
delivering newspapers at dawn. “The carrier was then an object of inter-
est to all the dogs in town. If I had saved up all the bites I ever received,
I could keep M. Pasteur busy for a year.”
20
Sam stuck to his lazy, messy
habits, as one old pressman learned when he tried to sweep around him.
“He would rather die in the dust than uncross his legs.”
21
Despite the
fond feelings he had shown toward Blacks at the Quarleses’ farm, he now
resented being assigned to eat in the kitchen alongside an old enslaved
cook and her mulatto daughter.
While working as a printer’s devil, Twain betrayed his fi rst spark of
literary interest when he supposedly scooped up a scrap of paper lying in
the street. This fugitive sheet came from a biography of Joan of Arc,
and it blew open a window into another world. The passage in question
chronicled Joan’s imprisonment in a cage at Rouen and the two coarse
English soldiers who mocked her and absconded with her clothes. The
story spoke to Sam’s chivalric side, his need to save young maidens in
distress, especially those on the eve of womanhood, and he began to read
eagerly about Joan. He found more mental nourishment reading on his
own than in insipid school texts. For an author who would compose the
classic ode to small- town American boyhood, it is also revealing that his
fi rst literary crush was a historical tale set on another continent in distant
times. Sam was soon studying German, and within a few years, perhaps
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bewitched by Joan’s mystique, he would be teaching himself French and
fi lling notebooks with phrases.
Aside from reading, he also fl irted briefl y with the Cadets of Tem-
perance, a group dedicated to stamping out drinking, smoking, and
gambling— all pastimes dear to Mark Twain’s heart. Sam’s main attrac-
tion to the group was strictly sartorial: he liked the bright red merino
scarves they sported during church parades. “I was clothed like a confl a-
gration,” he recalled. “I have never enjoyed any dress so much as I en-
joyed that ‘regalia.’ ”
22
Like Tom Sawyer, the proud, self- confessed sinner
couldn’t keep up the charade very long and lasted only three or four
months in the group. Already wedded to his vices, Sam Clemens would
forever nurse a healthy contempt for moral crusaders who tried to im-
prove him.
In what proved a mixed blessing for Sam, Orion returned to Hanni-
bal in the summer of 1850 and purchased a weekly newspaper, the
West-
ern Union,
recruiting his brothers Sam and Henry as typesetters. Within
a year he would purchase a second paper and merge it with the fi rst, the
resulting hybrid called the
Hannibal Journal
. When Orion worked in
St. Louis as a journeyman printer, he had won a powerful patron in at-
torney Edward Bates, who advised him to study law and remembered
him fondly as “a good boy, anxious to learn, using all means in his power
to do so.”
23
Studious and eager to improve himself, Orion led an austere
life, poring over Benjamin Franklin’s life in his boardinghouse, but he
chafed at printing work as unsatisfying. While he dreamed of being a
public orator, “that had been forbidden by my father who had placed me
at the toil of printing and editing, because his own preference was in that
direction.”
24
Ten years older than Sam, Orion had been wounded more
by Judge Clemens’s severity, and the shadow of his father’s hardship fell
heavily across his life. Given the siblings’ age difference and Orion’s pro-
tracted stay in St. Louis, he arrived in Hannibal as something of an un-
known entity to Sam.
Thanks to the sale of some Tennessee land and borrowed money, Orion
was able to move the family from Grant’s Drug Store back to the Hill
Street frame house, where Jane took in boarders to bolster income. Like
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his deceased father, Orion was a confi rmed Whig who penned editorials
that protested talk of southern secession, even as he opposed the Free Soil
movement and endorsed the Fugitive Slave Law. “We are entirely conser-
vative,” he reassured his readers, “and while our contempt for the Aboli-
tionists of the North knows no bounds, we are loath to claim brotherhood
with the ‘Fire- eaters’ of the South.”
25
Newspapers were then expected to
be highly partisan and opinionated, a hyperbolic style that would play
to the strength of young Sam Clemens, who soon published “A Gallant
Fireman,” his fi rst known piece, in which he mocked the antics of a print-
er’s devil in his offi ce when a fi re broke out next door.
Like another famous apprentice printer, Ben Franklin, Sam squirmed
under the arbitrary rule of his older brother. After starting work around
January 1851, at fi fteen, Sam awaited the handsome weekly wage of $3.50
that Orion promised him, only to discover that his older brother “never
was able to pay me a single penny as long as I was with him.”
26
Again he
was reduced to involuntary servitude. Orion would admit that he only
furnished Sam with “poor, shabby clothes,” and Sam’s anger toward his
brother festered.
27
Perhaps in a case of sublimated rage, Sam taunted an
apprentice, Jim Wolfe, until the latter retaliated and punched him in the
nose.
Cruel pranks seemed to occupy a large portion of Sam Clemens’s life.
He was a wisecracking kid who never entirely shed that smart- alecky side
of his personality. But where the young Sam Clemens could appear heart-
less in mocking people, the later Mark Twain would display a profound
wit suffused with a much deeper humanity. The fi rst known photo of Sam
Clemens, taken in 1850 as he was turning fi fteen and graduated from ap-
prentice to printer, is striking for the turbulent gaze and the forceful in-
telligence of his expression. It is a mature look, as if this teenager were
already somewhat hardened by experience. Whether as a joke or a form
of bombastic self- promotion, he held the name “SAM,” set up in the type
of a “composing stick,” at his belt.
Much like his father before him, Orion proved a hopeless business-
man, who lowered the price of the
Journal
and its advertising rates until
profi ts vanished and the paper had to operate from the Clemens home.
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Not for the last time, his ambition far exceeded his reach, and he “began
to yearn for a chance to get away from the offi ce, and rest and breathe
fresh air.”
28
Both Orion and Sam were dreamers, but Sam had a tough,
hardheaded practicality that would enable him to succeed, whereas Orion
was an endearing oddball whose naivete would always serve as a whet-
stone that sharpened his younger brother’s cynicism. In his frustration,
Orion took out his bad humor on Sam. Basically fair and decent, Orion
recognized belatedly that he had been a harsh taskmaster. “I was tyran-
nical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as a good journey-
man. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I begrudged him the
time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and Henry a very
dirty one . . . Once we were kept late, and Sam complained with tears of
bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry’s dirty proofs.”
29
Ori-
on’s tyranny left its lasting scars on Sam Clemens, who seldom resisted
chances to exact revenge in later life.
Even though Sam entered printing with no literary ambitions, as a
compositor “acres of good and bad literature” passed beneath his gaze
daily and trained his eye to discriminate between the good stuff and the
bad.
30
Almost by accident he crossed over from printer to writer. Short
of money, Orion went to Tennessee to try to squeeze some money from
the Tennessee land, leaving Sam as the paper’s foreman. When Sam heard
that the lovelorn editor of a rival paper had tramped down to the river in
a botched effort to drown himself, he skewered him with the same irrev-
erence that he had deployed throughout childhood. A skillful cartoon-
ist, he drew the cautious editor creeping gingerly into the river and
testing the water’s depth. This was a natural step for Sam Clemens, who
would take his schoolboy japes and convert them into literature. He
would relish the combative image of the journalist as a gladiator battling
opposing papers and trading insults with them.
The editor in question reacted with fury to the satire, and his news-
paper upbraided Sam for not having “the decency of a gentleman nor the
honor of a blackguard.”
31
Orion wasn’t amused when he returned from
Tennessee. His impulse was always to pacify and conciliate whereas Sam’s
was to stir up and provoke. To placate the rival editor, Orion wrote of
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him as “a young man, recently come amongst us, with a design of occu-
pying a respectable position in society, by industry and by propriety and
straightforwardness of conduct.”
32
Orion was so busy apologizing that
he missed the cosmic signifi cance of what had occurred: the birth of one
of the premier literary talents in American history. For the fi rst time, the
future Mark Twain had served up a scathing portrait of human foibles.
As Orion ruefully admitted later, “I could have distanced all competitors
even then, if I had recognized Sam’s ability and let him go ahead, merely
keeping him from offending worthy persons.”
33
Sam would enjoy sporadic forays into print during his two years at
Orion’s paper. Perhaps still smarting from his father’s treatment, he
railed at one contribution against a husband guilty of “unmercifully
beating and maltreating his wife and children” and opined that he ought
“to be ducked, ridden on a rail, tarred and feathered, and politely re-
quested to bundle up his ‘duds’ and make himself scarce.”
34
The item
was written in the chivalric mode that Mark Twain would develop to the
brim with Joan of Arc. In another piece, he defended local culture from
East Coast snobs who thought the interior peopled by philistines. “Your
Eastern people seem to think this country is a barren, uncultivated re-
gion, with a population consisting of heathens.”
35
If he gloried in the
West’s rough, lawless culture, he also wanted to show easterners they
were dead wrong about it.
The paper sorely needed direction under the indecisive Orion, whom
Sam likened to a human weathervane. Orion, rather pathetically, agreed:
“I followed all the advice I received. If two or more persons confl icted
with each other, I adopted the views of the last.”
36
With this passive char-
acter, Orion lacked not only Sam’s brash talent but also his instinctive
sense of conviction. He couldn’t settle on fi xed prices for advertisements
or subscriptions, and accepted everything from cabbages to cordwood
as payment. Sam deplored the paper’s amateur appearance, “a wretch-
edly printed little sheet, being very vague and pale in spots, and in other
spots so caked with ink as to be hardly decipherable.”
37
By 1853 Orion realized that he had to cool off Sam’s simmering dis-
content and so briefl y gave him a slot in the paper called “Our Assistant’s
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Column”— a space Sam fi lled only three times. In one of his last efforts,
he wrote a paean to redheaded people like himself, arguing that not only
Thomas Jefferson but likely Jesus and Adam had been redheads. Then
came the inevitable break with Orion. Sam asked him for money to pur-
chase a used gun, and Orion fl ew into a rage at what he deemed an un-
reasonable request. Disgusted, Sam went to his mother, said Orion hated
him, and announced he was leaving home. Fearing the sinful world
beyond Hannibal, Jane Clemens made him swear on a Bible that he
wouldn’t “throw a card or drink a drop of liquor” while away. When he
agreed, she planted a kiss, saying, “Remember that, Sam, and write to
us.”
38
Though he abided by his pledge, he later refl ected, “The instant a
person pledges himself not to drink, he feels the galling of the slave-
chain he has put upon himself; & if he be wise . . . he will go instantly
and break that pledge.”
39
We can roughly date Sam’s departure from
Hannibal because on May 27, 1853, Orion ran a notice: “Wanted! An
Apprentice to the Printing Business. Apply Soon.”
40
As he contemplated future moves, Sam gave a clue as to a possible
destination in his valedictory “Assistant’s Column,” referring to crowds
“continually congregated around the new Crystal Palace in New York
City,” where “drunkenness and debauching are carried on to their full-
est extent.”
41
He narrowly missed a Hannibal lynching, when an accused
slave, “a demon in human shape,” according to Ament’s paper, was
hunted down by a mob and “
burned at the stake
.”
42
Given Sam Clem-
ens’s budding interest in Joan of Arc, one wonders what he would have
made of this modern example of medieval barbarity.
Sam left Hannibal bruised, not hopeful, later telling William Dean
Howells that there was “not much satisfaction in it, even as a recollec-
tion.”
43
For someone of his energy, Hannibal seemed a drowsy back-
water. “Half the people were alive and the other half were dead,” he later
wrote. “A stranger could not tell them apart.”
44
He must have felt that
Orion had kept him in a state of peonage, of penniless labor and a thread-
bare existence, even as he awakened to a sense of his own profi ciency as
a printer and wordsmith. Orion, having bungled his relationship with
Sam, understood in retrospect that Sam “went wandering in search of
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that comfort and that advancement and those rewards of industry which
he had failed to fi nd where I was— gloomy, taciturn, and selfi sh. I not
only missed his labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merri-
ment.”
45
Sam’s departure damaged the paper, and Orion had trouble get-
ting it out after he left. Jane Clemens fumed at Sam’s betrayal. Before the
year was over, Orion packed up and traveled north to Muscatine, Iowa,
where he bought a stake in a local paper, the
Muscatine Journal,
taking
Jane and Henry Clemens with him.
n
When Sam Clemens departed from Hannibal, he bore a world of pain, but
also a cargo of precious memories preserved intact in his mind, ready for
future retrieval. The abrupt break with his boyhood had this advantage:
there would be no overlay of later experience to mar the perfection of his
recollections. Sam boarded a boat to St. Louis, as his fi rst port of call, and
stayed with Pamela, who had married a well- to- do commission merchant,
William Moffett, and had a baby named Annie. Sam had a tendency to
make fun of Pamela’s piety and her “notorious Sunday school proclivi-
ties,” but she was a true and loyal sister, and he owed her a great deal.
46
At seventeen, Sam was fortunate to have a portable skill as a journey-
man typesetter, affording him unusual freedom for an adolescent, and he
soon obtained a job with the printing fi rm that had employed Orion. For
a Hannibal boy, St. Louis shimmered as a teeming metropolis of one
hundred thousand souls, with hospitals and libraries and fancy homes.
As Mark Twain would observe, whenever anyone in those days traveled
to St. Louis, “He talked St Louis, and nothing but SL and its wonders for
months and months afterward.”
47
As far as Jane Clemens knew, Sam was to stay put in that town with
Pamela. She didn’t reckon on his restless, roving spirit; even as a teen-
ager, he would embrace broad swaths of the country, as if soaking up all
of the American experience for future use. “All I do know or feel,” he
later wrote his mother, “is, that I am wild with impatience to move—
move— Move!”
48
In a similar mood, he said, “I love stir & excitement; &
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so the moment the spring birds begin to sing . . . I want to pack off some-
where where there’s something going on.”
49
Without telling Jane, the
headstrong Sam decided to decamp to New York City in a personal dec-
laration of independence. By breaking loose from his family, he was both
asserting his autonomy and satisfying his innate, nomadic craving for
adventure.
Traveling by rail to the city, he stopped in Syracuse, a hotbed of abo-
litionist fervor and a key stop in New York on the Underground Rail-
road. Two years earlier, a Hannibal man named John McReynolds had
discovered in Syracuse his runaway slave Jerry, who had fl ed there years
earlier, adopting the surname Henry. McReynolds sent slave- catchers to
recapture him and, invoking the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, enlisted local
law enforcement to cooperate. When Jerry was held in the town court-
house, outraged abolitionists besieged the building and had the captive
released in a notable victory for antislavery advocates. In Frederick
Doug lass’s view, “the rescue of Jerry did most to bring the fugitive slave
bill into contempt and to defeat its execution everywhere.”
50
Once in Syracuse, Sam Clemens immediately associated it with the
McReynolds case. Not surprisingly, the racism of his boyhood society
had not deserted him, and he exhibited all the nasty biases one might ex-
pect from a boy of his background. As he told his mother on August 24,
1853, “when I saw the Court House in Syracuse, it called to mind the
time when it was surrounded with chains and companies of soldiers, to
prevent the rescue of McReynolds’ nigger, by the infernal abolitionists. I
reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers
are considerably better than white people.”
51
Sam’s fi rst exposure to the
North brought to the surface proslavery sympathies as yet untouched by
residence outside Missouri. Hungry for copy after Sam’s departure, Orion
printed the letter in the
Hannibal
Journal,
informing readers, “The free
and easy impudence of the writer of the following letter will be appreci-
ated by those who recognize him. We should be pleased to have more of
his letters.”
52
Sam knew his mother would be furious that her footloose son at sev-
enteen had traveled such a distance on his own. In effect, he had run
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away from home. “MY DEAR MOTHER: you will doubtless be a little
surprised, and somewhat angry when you receive this, and fi nd me so far
from home”; he wrote, “but you must bear a little with me, for you know
I was always the best boy you had, and perhaps you remember the peo-
ple used to say to their children, ‘Now don’t do like Orion and Henry
Clemens but take Samuel for your guide.’ ”
53
This last, of course, ironi-
cally inverted the truth. Once in New York City, he found in record
time a room in a boardinghouse and a printing job at John A. Gray’s at
97 Cliff Street, where he worked alongside forty compositors. He was
enchanted by the vista from his fi fth- fl oor offi ce, where “from one win-
dow I have a pretty good view of the city, while another commands a view
of the shipping beyond the Battery; and the ‘forest of masts,’ with all
sorts of fl ags fl ying, is no mean sight.”
54
After work, he frequented the
free printers library at 3 Chambers Street, where he would settle in to
“spend my evenings most pleasantly.”
55
However entranced by city views, Sam Clemens was still blinkered
by small- town bias and revolted by the racial and ethnic mix in lower
Manhattan. Shaped by Hannibal, he spewed forth prejudice. His daily
stroll to work led him through the tough, immigrant neighborhood of
Five Points, and he gazed with sheer loathing at the diverse inhabitants.
“Niggers, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese, and some the Lord no doubt
originally intended to be white, but the dirt on whose faces leaves one
uncertain as to that fact, block up the little, narrow street; and to wade
through this mass of human vermin, would raise the ire of the most pa-
tient person that ever lived.”
56
Such ugliness formed part of a youthful
bravado that bespoke his own insecurity and provinciality. There was
still a giant, unresolved confl ict inside Sam between his warm feeling
toward Blacks he knew personally in Hannibal and his fear- ridden an-
tipathy toward Black strangers in the East.
Free of his father’s disposition and his brother’s despair, Sam Clemens
sampled the city’s murky charms. He had suffi cient curiosity to attend a
“model artist show” on Chatham Street, although prudery prevented him
from savoring glimpses of female fl esh provided by this early version of
striptease. Even sixteen years later, he said how “everybody growled about
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it,” denouncing it as “horrid” and “immoral.”
57
Nonetheless, the city
opened a wealth of new sights and sounds to his youthful curiosity, and
his opinion of the town was revised favorably. “I have taken a liking to the
abominable place,” he confi ded to Pamela in October, “and every time I
get ready to leave I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause.”
58
Showing remarkable confi dence in his own ability to earn a living,
Sam pushed on to Philadelphia and obtained temporary work as a printer
for the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
alerting Orion that, “unlike New York, I
like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it.”
59
In his spare time
he frequented art galleries and libraries, even though he still sounded
like a hayseed in the metropolis. A massive tide of German and Irish im-
migration had spawned the nativist Know- Nothing Party in the 1850s,
and Sam echoed their xenophobia, squawking to Orion that “there are
so many abominable foreigners here (and among printers, too) who hate
everything American.”
60
He again voiced a lengthy litany of complaints.
“I always thought the eastern people were patterns of uprightness; but I
never before saw so many whisky- swilling, God- despising heathens as I
fi nd in this part of the country. I believe I am the only person in the In-
quirer offi ce that does not drink.”
61
Nor did he shy away from further
swipes at abolitionists and independent Black people. “How do you like
‘free- soil?’ I would like amazingly to see a good, old- fashioned negro.”
62
Since Sam sent these letters with a view to having them reprinted by
Orion, he was evolving, gradually, into a newspaper correspondent.
Before heading west again, Sam toured Independence Hall and re-
corded his feelings of “awe and reverence” as he entered the room where
the Declaration of Independence was drafted.
63
He went on to Washing-
ton, D.C., where he marveled at the “fi ne specimens of architecture” and
visited the halls of Congress, sending back vivid sketches of William
Seward of New York and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. “Mr. Seward
is a slim, dark, bony individual, and looks like a respectable wind would
blow him out of the country . . . Mr. Benton sits silent and gloomy in the
midst of the din, like a lion imprisoned in a cage of monkeys, who, feel-
ing his superiority, disdains to notice their chattering.”
64
Pretty good
prose for an adolescent writer.
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PRINTER’S DEV IL
n
One spring morning in 1854, Orion, Jane, and Henry Clemens were
having breakfast when Sam suddenly materialized, brandishing a gun in
a menacing fashion. “You wouldn’t let me buy a gun,” he exclaimed, “so
I bought one myself, and I am going to use it, now, in self- defense.”
65
Jane Clemens was alarmed by this threat until her son dissolved in typi-
cal laughter at his prank.
Orion tried to tempt Sam with a job at the
Muscatine Journal.
He ac-
cepted the offer for a few months then ended up back at his former print-
ing job in St. Louis. It should be mentioned that Orion had undergone a
political conversion in reaction to the Kansas- Nebraska Act, which re-
pealed the Missouri Compromise and might open the western territories
to slavery. Liberated by the free state atmosphere of Iowa, Orion edito-
rialized in his paper that “the ‘inevitable hour’ for slavery has come . . .
Slavery has culminated, and from the present, now, its decay may be
dated.”
66
Not yet an unabashed abolitionist, Orion was referred to lo-
cally as a “black Republican.”
By his late teens, Sam Clemens had shown fl ashes of talent, intermixed
with rank bigotry. Twenty years later he left a withering portrait of his
youthful self as “a callow fool, a self- suffi cient ass, a mere human tumble-
bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung and imagining that he is re-
modeling the world & is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance,
intolerance, egotism, self- assertion, opaque perception, dense & pitiful
chuckle- headedness— & an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That
is what I was at 19– 20.”
67
With hindsight he attributed these unattractive
features to his southern upbringing.
Whatever his grievances with Orion, Sam happily sought his protec-
tion in moments of need. After leaving his printing post in St. Louis,
he went to work with Orion again, this time in Keokuk, Iowa. In De-
cember 1854, Orion had married Mary Stotts— always referred to as
“Mollie”— who bore him a daughter named Jennie. Mollie seems to have
induced her husband to unload his half interest in the
Muscatine Journal
and move to Keokuk, her hometown, and he set up shop in June 1855.
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Situated a bare fi fty miles from Hannibal, Keokuk was a tiny town of
650 residents, with muddy streets and wooden plank sidewalks. From its
third- fl oor offi ce on Main Street, Orion’s business, styled the Ben Frank-
lin Book and Job Offi ce, performed pretty banal work, printing busi-
ness cards and forms— not something to set Sam’s heart on fi re. Sam was
wooed with a promise of decent wages and a junior partnership, only to
have it turn into a throwback to the bad times he had suffered with Orion
in Hannibal.
Nor did the low- caliber work provide any offsetting satisfactions.
With Henry Clemens and Dick Higham serving as his assistants, Sam
worked on the Keokuk City Directory and other mundane projects, and
blamed Orion for undermining his efforts. “They take Henry and Dick
away from me too . . . they throw all my plans into disorder by taking
my hands away from their work,” he protested to his family. “I can’t
work blindly— without system.”
68
By now an experienced typesetter, he
had seen many professional print shops only to stumble back into the
dreary tumult of working for the inept Orion.
Still, there were modest milestones to celebrate. As he sat up smoking
in bed at night, Sam Clemens read voraciously and became acquainted
with Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. On January 17, 1856— the
150th anniversary of Ben Franklin’s birth— he stood up at Ivins House
and debuted as a speaker at a printers’ banquet, revealing a latent talent
that must have surprised audience and speaker alike. “Blushing and slowly
getting upon his feet, stammering in the start,” one listener recollected,
“he fi nally rallied his powers, and when he sat down, his speech was pro-
nounced by all present a remarkable production of pathos and wit, with
the latter, however, predominating, convulsing his hearers with round
after round of applause.”
69
Most signifi cantly, Sam Clemens would soon
publish three travel letters in a Keokuk paper under the pen name
“Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass” and for the fi rst time would be paid for
his prose. The reading, the speaking, the writing— the faint outlines of a
promising literary career were beginning to emerge.
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n
CHAPTER FOUR
“Darling Existence”
T
hroughout his life, Sam Clemens would be attracted both to
moneymaking ventures that promised to yield colossal fortunes
and to nostrums that would rescue humankind from disease
and suffering. Before he left Keokuk in October 1856 and went off to
work for a Cincinnati printer, he happened upon a book, recently pub-
lished, that held forth the possibility of accomplishing both miracles in
one fell swoop. Written by William L. Herndon, it was titled
Explora-
tion of the Valley of the Amazon, Made Under Direction of the Navy
Department,
and it described a glorious four- thousand- mile trek that,
Mark Twain recalled, passed “through the heart of an enchanted land, a
land wastefully rich in tropical wonders, a romantic land where all the
birds and fl owers and animals were of the museum varieties, and where
the alligator and the crocodile and the monkey seemed as much at home
as if they were in the Zoo.”
1
The exotic beauty of this place, however, was not the book’s chief
draw so much as Herndon’s discussion of how Incas in the Andes chewed
coca leaves, rendering them “silent and patient” as they performed pro-
digious feats of labor in silver mines.
2
Sam came to believe that the coca
plant held extraordinary powers that he could harness. Pretty soon, he
had concocted a plan to sail to the Amazon’s headwaters in a quest to
monopolize the coca trade and ascend into the ranks of the global rich.
He felt “a longing to open up a trade in coca with the world. During
months I dreamed that dream, and tried to conjure ways to get to Pará
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[a Brazilian state] and spring that splendid enterprise upon an unsus-
pecting planet.”
3
The moment previewed much of Twain’s future busi-
ness career, with its grandiose schemes that often obscured practical
pitfalls, treading a fi ne line between inspiration and pure folly.
The would- be coca mogul recruited two allies, a Keokuk physician
named Martin and a youthful businessman named Ward. In August 1856,
Sam told his brother Henry, in strictest confi dence, that he and Ward
would start for Brazil in six weeks. Sam had deliberately misled Orion,
telling him Ward would venture alone to Brazil while he waited patiently
in New York or New Orleans to receive a favorable report from him. “But
that don’t suit me,” Sam confi ded to Henry. “My confi dence in human
nature does not extend quite that far. I won’t depend upon Ward’s judg-
ment, or anybody’s else— I want to see with my own eyes, and form my
own opinion. But you know what Orion is. When he gets a notion into
his head, and more especially if it is an erroneous one, the Devil can’t get
it out again . . . Ma knows my determination but
even
she
counsels me to
keep it from Orion.” Orion had been talking “grandly about furnishing
me with fi fty or a hundred dollars in six weeks,” but Sam, knowing his
brother’s changeable nature, did not trust a word of it.
4
After a winter spent in Cincinnati and with only thirty dollars in his
pocket, the cocksure Sam Clemens hopped a steamer to New Orleans on
April 15, 1857, in an “ancient tub” christened the
Paul Jones.
5
By this time,
Martin and Ward had jettisoned the project. Always careless with de-
tails, Sam was shocked to discover a critical fl aw in his thinking. In New
Orleans, he “inquired about ships leaving for Pará and discovered there
weren’t any and learned that there probably wouldn’t be any during that
century.”
6
Indeed, it turned out no ship had
ever
traveled from New Or-
leans to Pará. Looking back, Mark Twain blamed his own impulsive na-
ture, plunging headlong into new projects, bedazzled by their supposed
worth. “I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for
doing things and refl ecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no
value to me.”
7
As it happened, fate had more interesting things awaiting the twenty-
one- year- old Sam Clemens than cornering the coca market. Onboard
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“DARLING EX ISTENCE”
the
Paul Jones,
he became acquainted with its young pilot, Horace Bixby,
who was so adept at his craft that he was licensed to work both the Mis-
sissippi and Missouri Rivers. Sam claimed he and Bixby hit it off and
“pretty soon I was doing a lot of steering for him in his daylight
watches.”
8
Bixby would remember his fi rst impression of Sam as “a big,
shaggy- haired youth with a slow, drawling speech that was provoking to
anyone that happened to be in a hurry.”
9
When his Amazonian adven-
ture proved a boondoggle, Sam begged Bixby to teach him the piloting
trade on the lower Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans. Here
lay the supreme ambition of any Hannibal boy— to be a riverboat pilot,
with a salary equal to that of the U.S. vice president or a Supreme Court
justice. Bixby agreed on the condition that Sam would pay him a hefty
fi ve hundred dollars, with one hundred laid out in advance, a sum Sam
borrowed from his brother- in- law, William Moffett. This decision of
Sam’s disturbed Jane Clemens, who knew the disreputable types work-
ing the river and feared the worst for her son. “I gave him up then, for I
always thought steamboating was a wicked business and was sure he
would meet bad associates.”
10
Jane extracted a fresh pledge that he would
abstain from intoxicating liquors.
A blunt man who spat out rapid- fi re instructions, the thirty- one-
year- old Bixby immediately told Sam, “My boy, you must get a little
memorandum- book, and every time I tell you a thing put it down right
away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire
river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.”
11
For all his affec-
tion for Sam, he brooked no frivolity. “When I say I’ll learn a man the
river, I mean it,” he warned Sam. “And you can depend on it, I’ll learn
him or kill him.”
12
Although Sam entered the job full of youthful bravado, it was a for-
midable undertaking: he had to master river sites and landmarks, both
their nocturnal and daytime appearances, over twelve or thirteen hun-
dred miles of broad, muddy river. He had to memorize innumerable
shores, bends, reefs, snags, and sandbars, and study subtle shifts in the
water’s surface. “There is a light line of ripples, which no amateur can
understand; a harmless- looking line of ripples, quiet and easy,” which
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alerted the pilot to “the death of his ship if she gets there.”
13
Nights were
especially treacherous. As Bixby observed, “There were no signal- lights
along the shore in those days . . . and on a dark, misty night . . . a pilot’s
judgment had to be founded on
absolute certainty
.”
14
Nobody had ever challenged Sam like this before. Overwhelmed with
river details, he was awakened from his youthful slumber and thrust into
a world of adult responsibility. The rigorous training gave structure and
discipline to his vagabond character. An impossibly tough but under-
standing taskmaster, Bixby was impressed that Sam rose to the chal-
lenge. “Sam was always good- natured, and he had a natural taste for the
river. He had a fi ne memory and never forgot anything I told him.”
15
On
another occasion, Bixby said of Sam, “In all my time I never knew a man
who took to the labor of piloting with so little effort. He was born for it,
just as some men are born to make poetry and some to paint pictures . . .
Clemens kept on improving, and he went from one boat to another, get-
ting better all the time.”
16
This was the fi rst time that Sam had ever really
stuck
to something. As river life weaned him from a lackadaisical adoles-
cence, he was immeasurably proud of his progress, later boasting to
Orion that “the young pilots who used to tell me, patronisingly, [
sic
] that
I could never learn the river, cannot keep from showing a little of their
chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to ‘blow my horn,’
for I derive a
living
pleasure from these things.”
17
Such was the exalted status of a riverboat pilot that the Clemens clan
basked in the glory of Sam becoming a cub pilot. Orion had sold his
printing business in Keokuk and gone off to Tennessee with Mollie to
study law and, if possible, unload some of the vaunted Tennessee land.
Jane Clemens had moved in with Pamela and William Moffett in
St. Louis, and Sam stayed with them whenever his boat docked there.
Sam’s niece Annie remembered the thrill they all felt about Sam’s good
fortune. “It seemed to me as if everyone was running up and down stairs
and sitting on the steps to talk over the news. Piloting in those days was
a dramatic and well- paid profession, and in a river town it was a great
honor to have a pilot in the family.”
18
Annie later told how Sam would
thump the piano and sing by the hour. “He wore sideburns and had
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“DARLING EX ISTENCE”
chestnut hair, though some call it red. It was very curly. My grandmother
said that as a boy he would soak his hair in a tub of water and plaster it
down to try and make it straight.”
19
Mark Twain always felt indebted to Pamela for her exceptional hospi-
tality, for the “thousand affectionate kindnesses & services” she showed
in his St. Louis days.
20
When the twenty-four- year- old Pamela married
William, a man ten years her senior, he had scorned it as a match between
an “old maid” and a “mouldy [
sic
] old bachelor” who was well- off.
21
A
photo of Pamela shows a prim, matronly- looking woman with rimless
glasses. Even when she became a semi- invalid late in life, Twain could
never detect a blemish in her character, considered her incapable of de-
ceit, and credited her with “a most kindly & gentle disposition.”
22
A
strict Presbyterian, she chided Sam for poaching on sacred topics and
ridiculing the respectable things in life. Sam, an incorrigible tease, tried
to tread gingerly with her, but often ended up upsetting her instead. On
one occasion, in 1886, he wrote a revealing letter of apology. “I love you,
& I am sorry for every time I have ever hurt you; but God Almighty
knows I should keep on hurting you just the same if I were around; for I
am built so, being merely in the image of God, but not otherwise resem-
bling him enough to be mistaken for him by anybody but a very near-
sighted person.”
23
One clearly needed a rather thick skin to survive as
Mark Twain’s sister.
On the river Sam could escape family complications and fully emerge
from Orion’s shadow. With his restless soul, he found the mighty, rush-
ing river his natural element and would long insist that his four years on
the water were his life’s most enjoyable. He began to perfect his deadpan
storytelling style, letting punch lines explode in the listener’s mind, not
on the speaker’s face, and his companions were often convulsed with
laughter. “Piloting on the Mississippi River was not work to me; it was
play— delightful play, vigorous play, adventurous play— and I loved it,”
he said.
24
The river never relinquished a drop of its romance. He spoke so
nostalgically about it that his housekeeper later declared that “he loved
the Mississippi almost as much as he loved a person, and he was always
talking about it— what a wonderful river it was.”
25
Those Mississippi
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years became the rapturous interlude of his life, distilling all the freedom
of youth. “Oh! that was the darling existence,” he pronounced forty years
later. “There has been nothing comparable to it in my life since.”
26
This idyllic period left little time to spare for literary endeavors. “I
cannot correspond with a newspaper,” he explained to Orion and Mol-
lie, “because when one is learning the river, he is not allowed to do or
think of anything else.”
27
He did manage, nonetheless, to publish some
pieces in the St. Louis
Missouri Republican
and the New Orleans
Daily
Crescent
. Commenting on the Lincoln- Douglas Senate race in Illinois,
he leaned toward conservative positions, noting that Know- Nothings,
ex- Whigs, and Democrats concurred that Stephen Douglas “ought to be”
the winner.
28
He found time to read John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and was
already taken with “the Arch- Fiend’s terrible energy!”
29
After reading
The Age of Reason
by Thomas Paine, still a taboo volume, he began to
toy with more unorthodox views on religion. “Disgusted by hypocrisy
and bigotry,” he later said of Paine, “he made war upon religion, fully
believing that he was doing a good work.”
30
Luckily for Twain, he be-
friended a pilot named George Ealer who “would read Shakespeare to
me; not just casually but by the hour, when it was his watch, and I was
steering.”
31
Around this time, Sam Clemens also encountered the icono-
clastic view of Delia Salter Bacon, expressed in her book
The Philosophy
of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded,
that Francis Bacon and others had
written the plays attributed to the actor William Shakespeare. He also
ducked behind a barrel to read
The Fortunes of Nigel
by Sir Walter Scott—
a writer he came to detest cordially.
First as a printer, then as a pilot, Sam Clemens had chosen two profes-
sions that promised to broaden his vision. With a true writer’s instincts,
he had already begun cramming a notebook with jottings that gave a
glimpse into his busy mind. He had started tutoring himself in French,
transcribing long lists of words and phrases. In a preview of his varied
interests, he wrote out classifi cations of human appearance made by
phrenologists, who believed that bodily constitutions conformed to psy-
chological types. Describing the hot- blooded “sanguine” temperament,
he penned a self- portrait of his own mercurial personality. “It is very
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“DARLING EX ISTENCE”
sensitive and is fi rst deeply hurt at a slight, the next emotion is violent
rage, and in a few moments the cause and the result are both forgotten
for the time being. It often forgives, but never entirely forgets an injury.”
32
n
Sam wasn’t the only Clemens brother plying the Mississippi River: in
1858 he had wangled his brother Henry, almost twenty, a job as a “mud
clerk”— a subordinate purser— on his sidewheeler, the
Pennsylvania
.
However testy he could be toward Orion and Pamela, Sam lavished a
selfl ess love on Henry. Three years younger than Sam, the witty Henry
enjoyed reading, had a retentive memory, and exhibited a well- stocked
mind. Docile, obedient, he was the adorable blue- eyed boy, the clear
family favorite. Even though Henry sometimes tattled to their mother
about Sam’s misdeeds, when it came to Henry, Sam’s usual cynicism
seemed suspended. Henry was his confi dant, his best comrade, and he
later said that, except for his wife, Livy, he was never in such “entire
sympathy” with a human being.
33
“He was the best boy in the whole re-
gion,” Mark Twain recalled. “He never did harm to anybody, he never
offended anybody. He was exasperatingly good. He had an overfl owing
abundance of goodness.”
34
A model boy, but lovable. Orion noted the
tight bond between his two younger brothers, describing Henry as
“quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on Sam for protection.”
35
Sam’s protective impulse toward Henry was palpable. In
Life on the
Mississippi,
Twain tells how, on a trip aboard the
Pennsylvania,
the bru-
tal pilot William Brown unfairly accused Henry of lying, grabbed a
huge chunk of coal, and was ready to smash it over Henry’s head when
Sam rushed between them. According to Sam’s account, he “hit Brown a
good honest blow which stretched him out. I had committed the crime
of crimes— I had lifted my hand against a pilot on duty . . . I stuck to him
and pounded him with my fi sts a considerable time . . . but in the end he
struggled free and jumped up and sprang to the wheel.”
36
A contempora-
neous letter Sam sent to Mollie Clemens gives a slightly different version
of what happened on June 3. “Henry started out of the pilothouse—
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Brown jumped up and collared him— turned him half way around and
struck him in the face!
— and him nearly six feet high— struck my little
brother. I was wild from that moment.”
37
Sam, though ordered off the
boat, had made a point about the need for people to respect his younger
brother. He would now take a different boat, hoping to rejoin the
Penn-
sylvania
when Brown left.
One night in New Orleans, before the
Pennsylvania
departed, the
two brothers sat on a levee and discussed a topic never broached before—
steamboat disasters. With brotherly solicitude, Sam advised Henry: “In
case of accident, whatever you do, don’t lose your head— the passengers
will do that. Rush for the hurricane deck and to the life- boat . . . When
the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. Don’t get in
yourself. The river is only a mile wide. You can swim ashore easily
enough.”
38
While the chief pilot bore the main responsibility for safe-
guarding passengers, the brothers agreed that subordinates should “at
least stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw
in the way.”
39
Sam would soon wonder about the repercussions of this
conversation as the
Pennsylvania,
with Henry aboard, began its journey
upriver, while Sam followed in the
Alfred T. Lacey
two days later. Fifty
years afterward, Twain reported that around the time of the voyage he
had an eerie dream in St. Louis of amazing vividness: he saw Henry’s
corpse stretched out in a metal casket propped on two chairs, dressed in
his clothing. A bouquet of white roses rested on his chest, with a lone
crimson fl ower planted in the middle.
At dawn on June 13, 1858, the
Pennsylvania
blew up and burned near
Helena, Arkansas. Three or four of its eight boilers exploded with such
fi erce intensity that the front part of the boat whirled into the sky, only
to collapse back onto the stricken craft and set it afl ame. The inferno
claimed scores of lives, including that of pilot William Brown. Among
those severely injured was Henry Clemens. Sam heard of the calamity
when the
Alfred T. Lacey
reached Greenville, Mississippi, and someone
hollered from the dock: “The
Pennsylvania
is blown up just below Mem-
phis, at Ship Island! One hundred and fi fty lives lost!”
40
That evening a
shaken Sam Clemens learned from a Memphis paper that Henry was
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“DARLING EX ISTENCE”
wounded but still alive. As he pieced together the story, he learned that
Henry and a Mr. Wood had been blown into the water by the tremen-
dous blast and had “struck out for shore, which was only a few hundred
yards away; but Henry presently said he believed he was not hurt, . . .
and therefore would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded.
So they parted, and Henry returned.”
41
Later on, Mark Twain tortured
himself with the thought that Henry, by heading back to the disaster,
had heeded his counsel and paid a terrible price.
But a letter that Sam wrote to Mollie Clemens fi ve days afterward
suggests that Henry could not possibly have returned to the burning
craft. “Henry was asleep— was blown up— then fell back on the hot boil-
ers, and I suppose that rubbish fell on him, for he is injured internally.
He got into the water and swam to shore, and got into the fl atboat with
the other survivors. He had nothing on but his wet shirt, and he lay there
burning up with a southern sun and freezing in the wind till the Kate
Frisbee came along. His wounds were not dressed till he got to Mem-
phis, 15 hours after the explosion. He was senseless and motionless for
12 hours after that.”
42
There is no mention here of Henry heroically re-
turning to the boat. Was this the accurate version, or did Sam Clemens
alter the story to conceal his complicity in Henry’s fate? Or did he later
feel the need to fi nd some redeeming feature and impose a heroic narra-
tive on Henry?
By June 15, Sam reached the Cotton Exchange in Memphis, which had
been turned into a makeshift hospital for the thirty- two scalded victims
laid out on pallets on the fl oor. One observer recorded Twain’s dramatic
response to seeing his stricken brother, saying that as he “approached the
bedside of the wounded man, his feelings so much overcame him, at the
scalded and emaciated form before him, that he sunk [
sic
] to the fl oor
overpowered.”
43
Twain himself later wrote, “The sight I saw when I en-
tered the large hall was new and strange to me. Two long rows of pros-
trate forms— more than forty, in all— and every face and head a shapeless
wad of loose raw cotton. It was a grewsome [
sic
] spectacle. I watched
there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it was . . . I
saw many poor fellows removed to the ‘death- room,’ and saw them no
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more afterward.”
44
With his lungs burned by steam, his body singed by
fl ames, Henry had been brought to Memphis “in a senseless and almost
lifeless condition.”
45
Even though his face was not disfi gured, the sight of
his charred body unnerved his older brother. In the coming days, Henry
would be only fi tfully conscious and coherent, leaving Sam alone with
his terrible thoughts.
Sam was impressed by the ministrations of Dr. Thomas Peyton—
“What a magnifi cent man he was!”—who tended Henry with such devo-
tion that, by the sixth night after the accident, it looked as if he might
recover.
46
“I believe he is out of danger and will get well,” he assured Sam
before leaving for the evening.
47
Since he wanted Henry to sleep undis-
turbed and feared moaning patients might awaken him, Dr. Peyton en-
trusted Sam with a mission: if Henry woke up, he should have the doctor
on duty give him an eighth of a grain of morphine. The scenario Dr. Pey-
ton envisioned did occur, and Henry was roused from sleep by groans.
When Sam approached the young medical student on duty, the latter grew
fl ustered. “I have no way of measuring,” he protested. “I don’t know how
much an eighth of a grain would be.” As Henry’s agitation worsened,
Sam was beside himself. “If you have studied drugs,” he told the medical
student, “you ought to be able to judge an eighth of a grain of mor-
phine.”
48
Prodded by Sam, the young man measured a small amount of
morphine onto the tip of a knife and administered it to Henry. Although
Henry fell asleep, he was dead by morning, and Sam always suspected
that an excessive morphine dose had hastened his brother’s tragic demise.
Even before Henry died, an overwrought Sam poured out his grief to
Mollie Clemens. “Long before this reaches you, my poor Henry,— my
darling, my pride, my glory, my
all,
will have fi nished his blameless ca-
reer, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness,” he
wrote, sounding more like a father or lover than a brother. “The horrors
of three days have swept over me— they have blasted my youth and left
me an old man before my time. Mollie, there are grey hairs in my head
to- night. For forty- eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned
and bruised, but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope
went out and left me in the gloom of despair.” With aching sadness, he
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prayed to God to spare Henry and “to pour out the fulness of his just
wrath upon my wicked head, but have mercy, mercy, mercy upon that
unoffending boy.”
49
Religious feeling still lay buried somewhere deep in-
side Sam Clemens, but such savage hurts as this would shake his faith.
In the immediate aftermath of his brother’s death, Sam, exhausted
from his harrowing vigil, slept for hours. Then he rose and went to view
Henry’s remains. Touched by his youthful beauty, some Memphis ladies
had chipped in for a metal casket for Henry instead of the standard
wooden model. Sam was startled to enter the room and see Henry just as
he had pictured him in the dream, minus one detail: there were no white
fl owers on his chest. Then an elderly lady appeared with a large white
bouquet, containing a red rose at its center, to complete the scene. The
entire Clemens clan trooped back to Hannibal for the funeral at the First
Presbyterian Church, and Henry was laid to rest beside Judge Clemens
in the Old Baptist Cemetery. The stoical Jane Clemens had now suffered
staggering losses: her husband and four of her seven children. In 1847 a
Hannibal paper estimated that only half the children in town lived into
adulthood, so her sad plight was not entirely atypical.
Of course, the story of Henry’s death— his allegedly heroic but
doomed behavior in returning to a burning ship, the uncanny dream and
its realization— relies on Mark Twain’s later and ever- fallible memory,
yet it formed part of family lore. As Pamela’s daughter Annie recalled,
people in Memphis “had sent a young man up to St. Louis with Uncle
Sam, who was so overcome with grief that they were afraid he would go
insane. He was shadowed for years by the feeling that he was in a mea-
sure responsible for Henry’s death.” Twain expunged the dream story
from
Life on the Mississippi
for fear of upsetting his mother, but Annie
later testifi ed that he needn’t have worried. Sam had already told of the
dream “before they started on the fatal trip,” so that Jane Clemens knew
of the dream “and often talked about it. He had told them about it before
he went away but the family were not impressed; indeed they were amused
that he took it so seriously.”
50
Mark Twain was never reconciled to his beloved brother’s loss. As
late as 1879 he even visited a medium and sought to communicate with
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Henry. His reaction to the death revealed much about Sam Clemens at
twenty- two: his melodramatic emotions, his capacity for guilt bordering
on self- fl agellation, his tendency to brood endlessly on past errors.
Compounding his diffi culty was that instead of his pure, loving feelings
for Henry, he was left grappling with his ongoing psychodrama with
Orion. The pangs of guilt never deserted him. In 1876 Twain published a
story, “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Con-
necticut,” in which a hideous dwarf, representing the narrator’s con-
science, torments him with sadistic glee and accuses him of betraying his
younger brother’s trust. “He always lovingly trusted in you with a fi del-
ity that your manifold treacheries were not able to shake. He followed
you about like a dog, content to suffer wrong and abuse if he might only
be with you.” The narrator, he says, had pushed his brother into an ice-
covered brook, then roared with laughter as the boy struggled in freez-
ing water. “Man, you will never forget the gentle, reproachful look he
gave you as he struggled shivering out, if you live a thousand years!”
51
For Mark Twain, when it came to hellish torments of conscience, there
existed no statute of limitations. In later years, he told a friend that his
entire life was “one long apology,” with him down on his knees pleading
for forgiveness.
52
n
Right before the steamboat debacle, Sam Clemens, a “heedless and giddy
lad,” enjoyed a romantic adventure that would exert a mysterious grip
on his imagination until his death.
53
In May 1858, while awaiting depar-
ture of a steamboat in New Orleans, he wandered over one night to an-
other boat, the
John J. Roe,
one of whose offi cers he knew, William
Youngblood. The ship had a piano and a big deck for dancing, and there
Sam met fourteen- year- old Laura Wright of Warsaw, Missouri (not to be
confused with Laura Hawkins of Hannibal), who had come downriver
on the ship with her uncle Youngblood. The daughter of a rich Missouri
judge, she was entrancing to Sam, who found her irresistible. In his
frankly romantic retelling, he evoked the “enchanted vision” of “that
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comely child, that charming child . . . that unspoiled little maid, that
fresh fl ower of the woods and the prairies.” He limned an idealized girl
“in the unfaded bloom of her youth, with her plaited tails dangling from
her young head and her white summer frock puffi ng about in the wind.”
54
Twenty years later, in a more circumspect mood, he described Laura, by
then a teacher, to one of her pupils: “She was a very little girl, with a very
large spirit, a long memory, a wise head, a great appetite for books, a
good mental digestion, with grave ways, & inclined to introspection— an
unusual girl.”
55
Sam Clemens— and then Mark Twain— found a special charm in
beautiful young girls who trembled on the brink of womanhood, and
Laura’s appeal was instantaneous. “I was not four inches from the girl’s
elbow during our waking hours for the next three days.”
56
At the end of
this delirious encounter, they parted with a prophecy—“We shall meet
again 30 years from now”— and Laura gave Sam a small gold ring as a
gift.
57
Mark Twain would commemorate their parting date— May 6,
1858— as sacred for the rest of his days.
With his penchant for rewriting history, Mark Twain made it sound
as if he had never met Laura again after this intoxicating meeting. Yet his
correspondence makes clear that he swapped letters with Laura for a
while and visited her at least once at her home in Warsaw. As they cor-
responded, some misunderstanding arose that led to hurt feelings, and
both were too proud to hazard the fi rst move toward a rapprochement.
We know all this because in February 1861, Sam consulted a fortune
teller in New Orleans named Madame Caprell, who read horoscopes.
She got many things wrong, Sam believed, but described the contre-
temps with Laura with astonishing accuracy, claiming Mrs. Wright had
sabotaged the relationship.
Afterward Sam wrote in detail to Orion and Mollie about the session:
“But that about that girl’s [mother] being ‘cranky,’ and playing the devil
with me,
was
about the neatest thing she performed— for although I have
never spoken of the matter, I happen to know that she spoke truth. The
young lady has been beaten by the old one, though, through the roman-
tic agency of intercepted letters, and the girl still thinks
I
was in fault—
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and always will, I reckon, for I don’t see how she’ll ever fi nd out the
contrary . . . But drat the woman, she
did
tell the truth, and I won’t deny
it. But she said
I
would speak to Miss Laura fi rst— and I’ll stake my last
shirt on it, she missed it there.”
58
Sam had listened to Madame Caprell in
silence for half an hour, transfi xed by the “very startling things” and
“wonderful guesses” she had made.
59
Three years later, he inquired of his
mother and sister, “What has become of that girl of mine that got mar-
ried? I mean Laura Wright”— now Laura Dake.
60
Not long after, he had
a dream of meeting Laura when she was out driving in a carriage and
they “said good bye and shook hands.”
61
Still monitoring her doings in
1867, he wrote that one of the “old sweethearts I have been dreaming of
so long has got fi ve children now.”
62
The image of Laura Wright would never fade from Mark Twain’s
highly susceptible imagination, tantalizing him with an imperishable
ideal of love. She would become the model for his future fascination
with young girls who hovered on the borderline between girlhood and
womanhood—chaste, pure, perfect— virginal girls on the eve of puberty.
The whole relationship was as insubstantial as a dream, yet Mark Twain,
an arch romantic, hung weighty memories on this slender wisp of real-
ity. Laura would appear as a character in
The Gilded Age
and would
reappear as his “dream- sweetheart” in the 1898 piece “My Platonic
Sweetheart.” As with his wife, Mark Twain romanticized and spiritual-
ized his pursuit of a considerably younger female. In his rosy memories,
Laura Wright would stay eternally young, never facing the tougher test
of real human relationships, fraught with diffi culties. Instead, she was
allowed to fl oat high above any conceivable reality in a gauzy sphere of
untouched, ethereal perfection.
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n
CHAPTER FIVE
“A Ragged and Dirty Bunch”
O
n April 9, 1859, after an impressively short two- year span of
learning navigation, Samuel Clemens, at twenty- three, received
his license as a steamboat pilot for journeys between St. Louis
and New Orleans, a credential that catapulted him upward in the river
world and for which his tutor, Captain Horace Bixby, was justly proud.
“There never was a better boy,” he declared. “He was bound to be great,
whatever his course in life. I believe that he would have owned a line of
steamboats had he kept to the river.”
1
After the disapproving attitudes of
Judge Clemens and Orion, Sam needed an older male fi gure who be-
lieved in him implicitly, and he had found that man in Horace Bixby.
After his fi rst run on the
Alfred T. Lacey,
Sam was assigned a pilot job
on the
City of Memphis,
the largest boat operating on the river. Then, in
October, he assumed the helm of the
A. B. Chambers,
winning general
admiration. “He was not a great pilot, but he was a brave fellow,” said
fi rst mate Grant Marsh. “He didn’t know what fear was . . . When the
steamboat went aground north of Cairo . . . Twain braved ice fl oes to
lead a party scavenging for fuel.”
2
With his new fi nancial security and a fair measure of status, Sam
Clem ens grew cocky, sprouting muttonchop whiskers and trading in his
old garments for fancy new ones, including patent leather shoes, striped
shirts, and white duck pants. Enjoying the role of big shot, he made a
point of fl ashing large bills. In a bit of braggadocio, he told Orion about
paying his pilot dues at the Western Boatmen’s Benevolent Association,
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where he liked “to let the d– d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred dollar
bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions, whose faces
I do
not
exhibit! You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a
‘stern joy’ in it.”
3
Even though Sam Clemens published little during his four- year stint
on the river, he squandered nothing from a literary standpoint. He har-
vested the anecdotal riches of serving on more than a dozen boats and
was so content that he foresaw a peaceful, never- ending life afl oat. “Time
drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed— and hoped—
that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the
wheel when my mission was ended.”
4
Then the sudden outbreak of the Civil War shut traffi c on the Missis-
sippi and started the slow demise of the steamboat world Sam had cher-
ished. The river that had witnessed so many joyous scenes was now
stripped of color and brimmed with menacing black gunboats. Painfully
ambivalent about the war, Sam Clemens refl ected the manifold cross-
currents roiling Missouri. “It was hard for us to get our bearings,” he ad-
mitted.
5
In general, he opposed secession, but that didn’t mean he
opposed slavery. In the 1860 presidential race, he had favored John Bell
and the Constitutional Union Party, which was dedicated to preserving
the Union and was neutral on slavery, and he would fl ip- fl op on whether
to side with the North or the South. When South Carolina seceded in
December 1860, he and a copilot fell into a heated argument. “My pilot-
mate was a New Yorker. He was strong for the Union; so was I . . . A
month later the secession atmosphere had considerably thickened on the
Lower Mississippi, and I became a rebel; so did he.”
6
Sam Clemens happened to be in New Orleans on January 26, 1861,
when Louisiana left the Union, and he later recorded this impression in
his notebook: “Great rejoicing. Flags, Dixie, soldiers.”
7
The next day he
sent a note to a friend, his oldest surviving letter written to somebody
outside his family. In a wild, anarchic style, sprinkled with humor, he
showed an early skill at comic prose, but also an ability to shroud— and
evade— grave subjects in a blizzard of jokes. There is scarcely a serious
word about secession, just joshing about a pup named “Secession” and a
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“A R AGGED A ND DIRTY BUNCH”
hodgepodge of gossip about girls and trivia.
8
Sam sidestepped entirely
the historic signifi cance of the moment.
While steaming south on the Mississippi aboard the
Alonzo Child,
he
fi rst heard tidings at Vicksburg of the fi ring on Fort Sumter. His crew,
captained by secessionist John De Haven, rejoiced, leaving no doubt of
their Confederate leanings: “We hoisted stars & bars & played Dixie,”
Twain wrote.
9
A few days later, when the boat steamed into New Or-
leans, the Confederate fl ag fl uttered from its jack staff, with Sam serving
as one of its pilots. All romance was suddenly drained from the job, super-
seded by peril. As his niece Annie Moffett recalled of her uncle, “He was
obsessed with the fear that he might be arrested by government agents
and forced to act as a pilot on a government gunboat while a man stood
by with a pistol ready to shoot him if he showed the least sign of a false
move.”
10
In traveling the river, Sam had passed by a string of secessionist
states, disproportionately exposing him to the southern viewpoint.
At this stage of his life he was largely apolitical but abruptly found
himself in a situation where he no longer enjoyed the luxury of strad-
dling both sides. One pilot reckoned that of 128 pilots on the lower Mis-
sissippi, only fi ve favored the Union, and they were threatened with
being blackballed from future work if they served the North. The fol-
lowing year, when Jane Clemens tried to collect a $200 debt that Will
Bowen owed to Sam, Bowen grumbled that “no secesh [i.e., secessionist]
ever should have $1.00 of his money . . . I said Mr. B, Sam is no secesh.”
Jane reminded him that when they were on the
Alonzo Child
together
“they quarreled and Sam let go the wheel to whip Will for talking secesh
and made Will hush.”
11
Sam found himself on the last boat to slip through the Union block-
ade at Memphis, shutting the lower Mississippi to commercial traffi c.
The ship was shelled by batteries at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, shat-
tering glass and shredding smokestacks on the voyage’s last night. As
Bixby observed of Sam, “He had tasted a bit of the diffi culties of war;
blockades were to be run, and hazard was to take the place of another
charm the river had . . . His boat’s smokestacks had bullet- holes in
them— and the Civil War had only begun.”
12
Sam Clemens swallowed
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hard, refl ecting on the grim choices he faced. “I’m not very anxious to
get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side,” he said. “I’ll go
home and refl ect on the matter.”
13
As a Confederate pilot, he would be
exposed to ceaseless danger, but as a Union pilot, he would also face the
double jeopardy of being suspected of southern sympathies. Describing
her uncle’s profound quandary, Annie Moffett observed that while he
showed reverence for the Union and the American fl ag, “he was a South-
erner, his friends were all Southern, his sympathies were with the
South.”
14
His river experiences had only deepened his ties to the South as
he worked with predominantly southern pilots and plied the
lower
stretch
of the Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans.
With Jane Clemens favoring secession and Orion strong for the Union,
Annie noted Sam’s “divided loyalty and the emotional strain he was
under.”
15
She said that when he came to St. Louis he was “almost afraid
of leaving the house” and began to hide with a neighbor.
16
Barring nosy
intruders, Jane Clemens issued “strict orders that if anyone called and
asked for Mr. Clemens she was to be called.”
17
Sam returned to Hannibal
only to discover that federal troops occupied a town only recently be-
decked with Confederate fl ags. At the wharf, he and two other pilots
were swiftly approached by a Union lieutenant, taken under arrest, and
brought to St. Louis. According to pilot Absalom C. Grimes, Union gen-
eral John B. Gray attempted to coax them into serving as pilots on Union
troop ships. When Gray got sidetracked by female visitors, the three pi-
lots skedaddled out a side door and escaped to safety.
In terribly fractured Missouri, with families fi ercely split over the
war, the state contributed soldiers to both northern and southern armies.
Mark Twain later evoked the violent, internecine dissension that en-
gulfed Missouri, a border state riven “between Unionist and Confeder-
ate occupations, sudden maraudings and bush- whackings and raids.”
18
The pro- southern governor, Claiborne Jackson, tried futilely to push
through a bill of secession and fl outed Washington’s call for troops, tell-
ing Lincoln, “Not one man will Missouri furnish to carry on any such
unholy crusade against her Southern sisters,” and he interpreted the entry
of Union troops as an “invasion.”
19
Around the time Sam malingered in
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St. Louis, Captain Nathaniel Lyon and pro- Union troops swooped down
on Camp Jackson, an encampment of pro- southern state militia estab-
lished by the governor, who were poised to seize a huge cache of weap-
ons at the federal arsenal. When Lyon publicly marched his captives
through the streets, it provoked two days of riots, but the bloody encoun-
ter left the federal government in full control of the city.
To counter this foray, Governor Jackson passed a bill that transformed
the old militia into the Missouri State Guard. It was not aligned with the
Confederacy but was clearly designed to resist any federal incursion. It
was headed by General Sterling Price and commanded in northeast Mis-
souri by Thomas A. Harris, who had operated the Hannibal telegraph.
One day a stranger under the assumed name of Smith arrived at the Mof-
fett residence in St. Louis with a specifi c mission. “He had come,” re-
called Annie, “with the wild project of forming a company to join General
Price. Uncle Sam, tired of his life of inaction and the role of semi- prisoner,
joyously agreed to the plan.”
20
Debarred from his river job and cooped
up with his family, Sam may have seen no plausible alternative. Nothing
in his behavior typed him as a rabid, fi re- eating Confederate, although
he was probably more enthusiastic than he later let on. It was likely Sam
who printed a letter in the
Hannibal Messenger
that reported: “The boys
are responding bravely to the call of the Governor” and were ready “to
strike when the proper time comes.”
21
With Union forces patrolling Hannibal, Sam and other young men
met secretly one night and formed a militia in response to Governor
Jackson’s call for fi fty thousand troops to beat back Yankee invaders.
For two memorable weeks, Sam would serve as a second lieutenant in a
Missouri State outfi t known as the Marion Rangers (also called the Ralls
County Rangers) composed of his Hannibal compatriots. Talkative on
almost every conceivable topic, Mark Twain withheld a full account of
his experience until December 1885 when he knew he had dodged this
touchy subject long enough and penned a semifi ctional article for the
Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine
called “The Private History of a
Campaign That Failed.”
22
Technically a member of a volunteer company,
he had never served in the Confederacy, but he would admit numerous
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times to having been a “rebel” in the Missouri State Guard, whose Con-
federate tenor was transparent. Later on, the Missouri State Guard was
absorbed into the Confederate army.
In “The Private History,” Twain minimized his weeks with the pro-
Confederate militia by playing it mostly for laughs, sometimes reducing
his service to a rollicking jaunt by harmless, overaged boys who knew
nothing of combat. For years he would employ clowning to mask the
gravity of the situation and lampoon himself as a laughable coward. He
followed this strategy in private correspondence too, writing after the war
to Confederate general M. Jeff Thompson: “I was a soldier in the rebel
army in Missouri for two weeks once, we never won any victories to speak
of. We never could get the enemy to stand still when we wanted to fi ght,
& we were generally on the move when the enemy wanted to fi ght.”
23
In
another letter, he explained facetiously that he was “incapacitated by fa-
tigue” through persistent retreating.
24
“The Private History” starts as a boyish lark, with Twain contending
that he was “grateful to have a change, new scenes, new occupations, a
new interest. In my thoughts that was as far as I went.”
25
In slapstick
style, he describes the contingent of bumbling young men setting out
from Hannibal on a dark night and heading toward Ralls County, ten
miles away, where they swore allegiance to Missouri, their heads stuffed
with noble legends of southern chivalry. According to one participant,
the group had no “tents, arms or commissary stores,” while Jane Clem-
ens remembered a “ragged and dirty bunch.”
26
The young men poach
peaches and melons and curl up in corncribs at night. Twain seasons his
story with funny bits about stubborn horses and mules. In later notes, he
portrayed his youthful self thus: “Sam took mosquito blisters for a mor-
tal disease. Used to sit on his horse in prairie on picket duty & cry &
curse & go to sleep in the hot sun.”
27
He suffered a troublesome saddle
boil and sprained his ankle tumbling from a hayloft. In “The Private
History,” the playful romp is punctuated now and then by somber
thoughts. When Union soldiers approach, the Marion Rangers crouch in
a ravine on a rainy night and the author refl ects: “The drenching we were
getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still was the refl ection
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that the halter might end us before we were a day older. A death of this
shameful sort had not occurred to us as being among the possibilities of
war. It took the romance all out of the campaign.”
28
After more episodes
of “horse- play and school- boy hilarity,” a Union soldier, dimly visible in
the night, though not in uniform, appears in the forest.
29
Twain fi res at
the man and is horrifi ed to see him sprawled dead in a puddle of blood.
“The thought shot through me that I was a murderer; that I had killed a
man— a man who had never done me any harm.”
30
It turned out that Sam was one of six people who fi red simultane-
ously on the unarmed man, so the burden of guilt was equally shared.
From its earlier, jocular tone, the reminiscence darkens into a searing
indictment of war’s cruelty. Sam can’t banish thoughts of the death be-
cause “the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing.
And it seemed an epitome of war— the killing of strangers against whom
you feel no personal animosity . . . My campaign was spoiled . . . I re-
solved to retire from this avocation of sham soldiership while I could
have some remnant of my self- respect.”
31
However eloquent and heartfelt, the elegiac antiwar message con-
cerned war in general, avoiding the critical question of what
this
war was
all about: the preservation of the Union and, ultimately, slavery’s extinc-
tion. In the end, “The Private History” is unsatisfying because it is de-
void of any political or ideological content. Instead of rectifying Twain’s
twenty- four- year omission of what he did during the war, it left many
critical questions dangling in the air— the sure sign of an unresolved con-
fl ict. The piece was Twain at his best and at his worst: one part sage, one
part buffoon. It is also impossible to credit the story of the shot soldier.
One of Sam’s fellow soldiers, Absalom Grimes, said nobody was killed,
only a horse, and that Mark Twain invented the human killing— a con-
clusion echoed by most Twain biographers.
32
Twain ends “The Private
History” with a witticism: “I knew more about retreating than the man
that invented retreating.”
33
Twain’s misadventure with the Marion Rangers ends when the de-
tachment receives word of a Union regiment bearing down on them.
“So about half of our fi fteen, including myself, mounted and left on the
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instant”; Twain wrote, “the others yielded to persuasion and staid— staid
through the war.”
34
To add spice to his tale, Twain claimed that the Union
colonel in hot pursuit was Ulysses S. Grant, but the latter’s thrust into
Missouri against General Thomas Harris came somewhat later. Making
light of his wartime experience, Mark Twain insisted that the company
crumbled because they “ran out of Worcestershire sauce.”
35
Its early dis-
solution enabled him to claim he had not deserted, but he was never
quite sure of that. As he told a friend sixty years later, he was “troubled
in my conscience a little, for I had enlisted, and was not clear as to my
lawful right to disenlist.”
36
His brief war tenure later left Mark Twain
with an agonizing dilemma. He knew northerners would look suspi-
ciously on his service on the Confederate side, while southerners would
be no less contemptuous of his overly hasty desertion. Clearly Sam
Clem ens held glaringly ambivalent feelings about the war. He believed
enough in secession to join a militia but opted out with a convenient speed
that suggests something less than stern devotion to the southern cause. It
is telling that Twain should have left such a welter of confusion about one
of his life’s most consequential decisions.
n
Luckily for Sam, Orion never wavered in his fealty to the Union or its
war aims. While Sam mocked his brother’s mutable views on politics, he
conceded, with some overstatement, his consistency on one all- important
issue: “Born and reared among slaves and slave- holders, he was yet an
abolitionist from his boyhood to his death.”
37
If Orion was a fi gure of
fun, he was also high- minded. Of his absentminded brother, Sam said
that he had “a grave mien and big earnest eyes” with “a precocious intel-
lect, and a voracious appetite for books and study.”
38
His switch from
Whig to Republican had won plaudits from his St. Louis mentor, Judge
Edward Bates. Bates had been a losing presidential contender against
Lincoln, who then rewarded him with a cabinet appointment as attorney
general. A former slaveholder who freed his slaves, Bates was an almost
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biblical- looking fi gure, with a full white beard, who helped to solidify
Lincoln’s support among moderate Republicans.
In January 1861, Orion traveled to St. Louis to solicit a government
post from Bates and dragooned Sam into this lobbying campaign, asking
him to send Bates a letter “recommending me for a clerkship . . . It will
be a great advantage to me to get some such offi ce, as I can then support
myself and family, which will be a huge gratifi cation, and probably be
able to pay some debts, which will also be gratifying.”
39
Once in offi ce in
March, Bates duly urged Secretary of State William Seward to name
Orion as secretary of a territory. While Bates didn’t submit a breathless
endorsement of Orion and conceded he possessed only middling talents,
he praised him as “honest & manly” and noted that he had braved “op-
position amounting almost to persecution” for espousing Republican
views in slaveholding territory.
40
The good news for Orion came through
on March 27 when he was appointed secretary of the newly formed Ne-
vada Territory— second in power only to the governor— with a yearly
salary of $1,800. Sam, who envied his brother’s newfound “distinction”
and “fi nancial splendor,” was to accompany him.
41
Sam would thus be
sprung, ironically, from the Civil War by Orion’s solid Republican cre-
dentials and high- level contact in the Lincoln administration.
Stuck in political limbo after defecting from the Marion Rangers, Sam
must have viewed Orion’s appointment as a godsend and happily seized
the chance to escape the moral quandary presented by the national con-
fl ict. Attorney General Bates had taken a tough, pitiless stand against
secessionist partisans in Missouri, arguing that arrest alone was too le-
nient for them. “They should be
summarily shot by thousands,
” he de-
cided.
42
Sam Clemens would sneak out of Missouri under the auspices of
an attorney general who might well have had him executed. Orion,
bogged down in debt, needed to borrow money to make the Nevada
trip, and Sam, still fl ush with cash from the river, struck a deal with
him: if Orion excused his recent Confederate escapade, he would pay
their joint passage overland. There also existed an expectation that Sam
would serve as the private secretary to the new territorial secretary. He
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imagined that the war would last only three months and he would then
resume his lovely idyll on the Mississippi. The detour, however, would
prove more than temporary and would free Sam Clemens to redefi ne his
personality far from the stifl ing constraints of Missouri and its slavery,
starting his slow, halting, and never- quite- complete transformation into
a northerner.
On July 18, Sam and his brother left St. Louis and set off on a mara-
thon trip westward to the Nevada Territory. The conscientious Orion,
noted Sam, toted along “six pounds of Unabridged Dictionary.”
43
Al-
though he didn’t know it, Sam Clemens had made an irrevocable break
from his past life in Missouri. Three days later, Union troops suffered a
catastrophic rout at Bull Run, underscoring that the war would be no
short- lived affair. As his steamboat, the
Sioux City,
traversed the Mis-
souri River to St. Joseph, on the western edge of the state, Sam was gid-
dily excited at the prospect of “the long strange journey” ahead and of
the “curious new world” he would inhabit.
44
When the brothers arrived
in St. Joseph, they booked passage on the overland stagecoach to Carson
City, Nevada Territory, meaning they would ride behind large teams of
horses and mules for eighteen days and nights. In his unforgettable, fi c-
tionalized chronicle of the trip,
Roughing It,
Mark Twain resurrected
“the wild sense of freedom” as he headed west, wedged into a stagecoach
alongside stacks of mail packed in with the passengers, a jolting, hell- for-
leather ride “through sagebrush, over sand and alkali plains, wolves and
Indians, starvation and smallpox— everything to make the journey in-
teresting.”
45
As he describes his departure for Carson City, one feels all the foot-
loose, carefree excitement of young Sam Clemens lighting out for the
territory, shedding the burdens of his past and experiencing pristine
feelings of joy. “It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape
was brilliant with sunshine. There was a freshness and breeziness, too,
and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and re-
sponsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the
close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away.”
46
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“A R AGGED A ND DIRTY BUNCH”
He smoked his pipe with exquisite pleasure aboard a “great swinging and
swaying” stagecoach, “drawn by six handsome horses.”
47
Travel would
always be a sovereign remedy for his troubles. Not surprisingly, he im-
mortalized the Pony Express rider, who “was usually a little bit of a
man, brim full of spirit and endurance . . . he must be always ready to
leap into the saddle and be off like the wind!”
48
Racing across country that was brand- new to him, Sam didn’t distin-
guish himself by his tolerance for the new sights and sounds and he re-
served special bile for Native Americans. In the wild country west of
Salt Lake City, he wrote, “We came across the wretchedest type of man-
kind I have ever seen, . . . I refer to the Goshoot [
sic
] Indians. From what
we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior
to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of
savages on our continent.”
49
He described their poverty- stricken exis-
tence in virulently racist terms, an encounter, he asserted, that cured him
of the “mellow moonshine of romance” about Indians.
50
Resorting to
the most scurrilous language, he called the Goshoots “treacherous, fi lthy
and repulsive.”
51
Mark Twain showed no early enlightenment in his view
of Native Americans nor any awareness of how white settlement had
shaped their often lowly situation. With Blacks, he would be capable of
considerable growth, but it would take much more time and experience
for him to graduate to a higher level of awareness with Native communi-
ties.
As reported in
Roughing It,
Sam’s fi rst encounter with the Mormons
in Salt Lake City brought forth equally unsparing reactions. He picked
up a copy of the Mormon Bible and subjected it to a scathing critique—
funny if unfair— that derided the tome as so sleepy and pretentious it
constituted “chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book,
the act was a miracle— keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.”
52
He drew laughs from a burlesque monologue in which he had the polyga-
mist Brigham Young bemoan the bother of having to sleep with seventy-
two wives. “It appeared to me that the whole seventy- two women snored
at once. The roar was deafening . . . Take my word for it, ten or eleven
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wives is all you need— never go over it.”
53
Mark Twain allowed that the
Mormon code of morals was “unobjectionable,” even as he grumbled that
it was swiped from the New Testament without proper credit.
54
On August 14, 1861, the overland stagecoach pulled into Carson City,
the capital of the Nevada Territory, having survived endless stretches of
desert splashed with sagebrush. A little the worse for wear, Sam stepped
from the stagecoach “tired, discouraged, white with alkali dust” and not
knowing a soul except Orion.
55
The sight that fi rst greeted his eyes must
have made him wonder whether the lengthy trip was worth the grueling
effort. It was a strange town with a desert fl oor below and snowcapped
peaks above. Boasting a population of a few thousand people, it featured
a main street composed of small white frame stores and sidewalks that
were loose wooden planks that wobbled underfoot. Instead of wall paper,
many houses were lined inside with fl our sacks sewn together.
Appearances could be deceptive. Two years earlier, the discovery of
the Comstock Lode had sparked a silver rush to the area on a scale un-
seen since the California gold rush a decade earlier, a frenzy that spawned
many fortunes, including that of George Hearst, the father of William
Randolph Hearst. No less fortuitous for a future novelist, this area rich
in minerals was even richer in colorful fi gures who would populate his
imagination. Two months later Sam wrote ecstatically to his mother:
“Nevada Territory is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal,
iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, slate, plaster of Paris (gypsum),
thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians,
gam
blers, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, sharpers, cuyotes . . . preachers,
poets and jackass rabbits.” Fate had a way of depositing Sam Clemens
amid the boisterous scenes he would most relish. “It is the dustiest coun-
try on the face of the earth,” he concluded, “— but I rather like dust.”
56
A
proud mother, Jane Clemens saw to it that Sam’s letter was published in
the Keokuk
Gate City.
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CHAPTER SIX
“The Most Lovable Scamp”
S
am Clemens had gloried in his bad boy image, the rebel angel
proud of his apostasy, the scourge of middlebrow morality, and in
Nevada he found himself right in his element. He had a head full
of curly auburn hair and penetrating eyes and soon added a mustache to
his image. According to his fi rst biographer, “He wore a rusty slouch
hat, fl annel shirt, [and] coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of
the heavy cow- skin boots.”
1
He had typically preferred the outsider role,
operating beyond the pale of respectability, and now, a frontier denizen,
he was surrounded by like- minded rogues. He would recall, with undis-
guised nostalgia, the notorious characters of those early days, an honor
roll of “desperadoes, who made life a joy and the ‘Slaughter- house’ a
precious possession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfi eld, Six- fi ngered
Jake, Jack Williams and the rest of the crimson discipleship . . . Those
were the days!”
2
Years later, when he saw the Wild West show of Buffalo
Bill Cody, he wrote him in an onrush of happy memories that “it brought
vividly back the breezy, wild life of the great plains & the Rocky Moun-
tains & stirred me like a war song. Down to its smallest details the show
is genuine— cowboys, vaqueros, Indians, stage- coach, costumes & all.”
3
In
Roughing It,
Mark Twain portrayed a rough- and- tumble world
where violence often ruled, decent citizens hobnobbed freely with crim-
inals, and murder was commonplace. “After a murder, all that Rocky
Mountain etiquette required of a spectator was, that he should help the
gentleman bury his game— otherwise his churlishness would surely be
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remembered against him the fi rst time he killed a man himself and
needed a neighborly turn in interring him.”
4
It was a place where a saloon-
keeper or a blacksmith might be a notorious fugitive from justice, escap-
ing his past with impunity. Sam never pretended that this world of
outlaws represented a higher form of civilization, but he enjoyed social-
izing with disreputable characters. Gregarious and easygoing, he latched
on to every conceivable type of personality— why he would corral so
much of American life into his fi ction. Unlike most writers, Sam Clem-
ens had nothing solitary or contemplative in his nature. With transplants
from many states and countries, Nevada had created a polyglot slang
that would enrich his writing. As if by osmosis, he picked up scraps of
dialect from everywhere, fusing them into a new idiom and making him-
self a master of vernacular speech. The new territory’s lack of social bar-
riers offered a welcoming environment for any newcomer.
With his omnivorous curiosity about people, Sam sought out depraved
characters for closer inspection. In
Roughing It,
he would tell how he
was intrigued by colorful legends about Jack Slade, a stagecoach agent in
the Rocky Mountains, reputed to be a homicidal maniac. He wrote that
Slade liked to postpone murderous vengeance against enemies “just as a
school- boy saves up a cake, and made the pleasure go as far as it would
by gloating over the anticipation.”
5
Since rumor had it that Slade had
killed twenty- six people, Twain allegedly sought him out on the ninth
day of his journey west, but found a quiet, affable man, not a monster.
When the coffee was running out, Slade offered to refi ll Sam’s cup in-
stead of his own, but Sam “politely declined. I was afraid he had not
killed anybody that morning, and might be needing diversion.”
6
It was
all humorous invention: when Sam breakfasted with Slade during his
stagecoach journey, he didn’t yet know of his ghoulish reputation. Three
years later, after another satisfying round of shooting sprees, Slade was
hung by vigilantes in Montana.
7
The brothers’ fi rst quarters in Carson City could not have been hum-
bler. A landlady named Bridget O’Flannigan provided Orion with an
offi ce and bedroom on the ground fl oor, while Sam slept in a second-
story bed— one of “fourteen white pine cot- bedsteads that stood in two
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“THE MOST LOVABLE SCA MP”
long ranks in the one sole room of which the second story consisted.”
8
Sam told of uproarious times there, including the night when a strong
wind knocked over a shelf with glass bottles full of tarantulas, triggering
a panic in the room. Sam clerked for Orion for a couple of months but
was condemned to inaction. “I had nothing to do and no salary. I was
private secretary to his majesty the Secretary and there was not yet writ-
ing enough for the two of us.”
9
Perhaps inevitably this young man who’d had fantasies of cornering
the global coca trade was soon infected with a bad case of silver mania.
Americans equated money with success, and Sam Clemens was never
immune from this belief, his Nevada time reinforcing a get- rich- quick
mentality instilled early by the Tennessee land saga. As he told Orion, “I
shall never look upon Ma’s face again, or Pamela’s, or get married . . .
until I am a rich man,” and he was convinced he would land a fortune “as
surely as Fate itself.”
10
In Carson City, people babbled about their silver
strikes, “prospecting parties” fl ocked to the hills daily, and novice min-
ers emerged as instant millionaires. As Twain later refl ected, “I would
have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest . . .
I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest.”
11
As with steamboating, Sam dove headlong into this new world, ex-
pecting to “fi nd masses of silver lying all about the ground.”
12
For his
fi rst prospecting foray that September 1861, he traveled to Aurora, in
mining- rich Esmeralda County, one hundred miles southeast of Carson
City, and bought “feet”— mining shares— in a number of rocky ledges.
After a brief stay, he returned to Carson City to clerk for Orion during
the fi rst legislative session. Then, in December, he and three companions
loaded up a wagon with eighteen hundred pounds of supplies— picks,
shovels, drills, and powder, along with fourteen packs of playing cards,
two dogs, a cribbage board, and a copy of Charles Dickens’s
Dombey
and Son
— and rode 175 miles northeast, sometimes in pelting rain or
snow, to the Humboldt Range. They often had to push the wagon be-
cause Sam’s fi nicky horse Bunker balked at further movement. The horse
was so “infernally lazy,” Sam assured his mother, that he could have been
“a blood relation of our family.”
13
The road was thickly littered with the
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detritus of aborted mining ventures: “skeletons and carcasses of dead
beasts of burden . . . and charred remains of wagons” as well as “chains,
and bolts and screws.”
14
In the evening, the four men gathered around a
campfi re in the desert stillness and found cheer in pipe smoking, song
singing, and yarn spinning. Always a bard of nomadic life, Mark Twain
would celebrate this open- air existence as “the very summit and culmi-
nation of earthly luxury.”
15
Arriving at Unionville, a settlement of stone and adobe houses, Sam
and his companions threw up a log cabin that teetered beside a crevice.
An amateur miner, Sam scoured the grounds for loose stones and re-
turned excitedly with what turned out to be fool’s gold. He discovered
that serious mining— sinking shafts, drilling tunnels with iron drills and
heavy sledgehammers— was backbreaking labor. “One week of this sat-
isfi ed me,” he said. “I resigned.”
16
As he groused to his family, “Why, I
have had my whiskers and moustaches so full of alkali dust that you’d
have thought I worked in a starch factory and boarded in a fl our barrel.”
17
Nonetheless, he grew convinced that his mining investments would yield
major results, even though his overactive mind sometimes cooled down.
“Don’t you know that I have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar
that belonged to me?” he lamented to his mother and sister. “Don’t you
know that it’s all talk and no cider so far? . . . By George, if I
just
had a
thousand dollars
I’d
be all right!”
18
Like many newcomers, Sam speculated in mining shares in Humboldt
and Esmeralda Counties. Lacking suffi cient capital, he tapped Orion for
money, and they became partners in the Clemens Gold and Silver Min-
ing Company. In a signifi cant inversion of their former power relation-
ship, Orion would provide the capital while Sam handled the business
affairs, convinced— no doubt now through experience— that his older
brother lacked “business talent enough to carry on a peanut stand.” The
result, he told his family, was that “if mines are to be bought or sold, or
tunnels run or shafts sunk, parties have to come to me— and me only.
I’m the ‘fi rm,’ you know.”
19
Not only did Sam reserve to himself all busi-
ness decisions, but he left Orion in the dark about any setbacks. He ad-
vised their partner Billy Clagett that Orion lacked the stomach to ride
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“THE MOST LOVABLE SCA MP”
out failures and that he should always discuss things with his brother “in
such a way that Orion cannot understand them.” “I don’t care a d— n for
failures and disappointments, but they nearly kill him, you know.”
20
Orion, of course, resented any money Sam squandered, reviving their
old fraternal sparring.
The main locus of Sam’s speculations centered in Aurora. When Sam
and his associates went to test various claims in which they had invested,
they had to brave wintry gusts in a cabin whose chinks let in icy air from
the mountain slopes. Sam was so defl ated by the mining results that he
ordered Orion not to buy any more “ground, anywhere. The pick and
the shovel are the only claims I have any confi dence in now. My back is
sore and my hands blistered with handling them to- day.” Then, sound-
ing more like
David
Copperfi eld
’s Mr. Micawber, he added, “something
must come, you know.”
21
Like many Nevada prospectors, Sam Clemens
was rich on paper, if broke in the real world. As he phrased it, he and his
partners owned “not less than thirty thousand ‘feet’ apiece in the ‘richest
mines on earth,’ ” but “were in debt to the butcher” and “our credit was
not good at the grocer’s.”
22
Blinded by greed, Sam convinced himself that it was only a matter of
time before he and Orion grew wealthy. Riches “
will
come,” he assured
his brother, “there is no
shadow
of a doubt.”
23
As always, he was head-
strong. “I have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral certainty,” he
said, stating fl atly that the Monitor Ledge they owned would “contain
our fortune. The ledge is 6 feet wide, and one needs no glass to see gold
& silver in it.”
24
This cocksure certainty about prospective riches would
be his undoing. When their mining ventures faltered, Sam adopted a testy
tone toward his older brother, one he would maintain for decades. “You
have
promised
me that you would leave all mining matters, and every-
thing involved in an outlay of money, in my hands,” he scolded Orion.
“Now it may be a matter of no consequence at all to
you,
to keep your
word with me, but I assure you
I
look upon it in a very different light . . .
Now Orion, I have given you a piece of my mind— you have it in full,
and you deserved it.”
25
Sam left no doubt who was boss— he was now the
decisive, hard- charging brother— and he would henceforth lord it over
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Orion, perhaps exacting revenge for his older brother’s harsh treatment
of him in their printing offi ce days. Sam warned him that “when you
stand between me and my fortune . . . you stand between me and
home,
friends, and all that I care for.”
26
At the nadir of his Nevada sojourn, Sam was reduced to working for
a short period as a common laborer in a quartz mill, where he had to
shovel silver tailings. It was gruesome, exhausting work in which the
quartz was crushed, fi ltered, and rinsed in an effort to extract embedded
shards of silver. Although Sam claimed that he had taken the job to learn
the refi ning business for future use as a mining mogul, he lasted only a
week in this fi lthy trade and regarded it as the most detestable work he
had ever performed.
Despite his business frustrations, Sam loved the brash freedom of the
West, its hedonistic permission to carouse and socialize, and one com-
panion remembered how “he used to smoke pipes, and quaff lager and
dress rather slouchily.”
27
Surrounded by ruffi ans galore, he had an ideal
setting to exercise his comic gifts. He had many boon companions, even
if some back home worried about the wicked prankster from Hannibal.
Pamela piously entreated him to “let the Spirit of God, which has been
knocking at the door of your heart for years, now come in, and make
you a new man in Christ Jesus.”
28
Everyone in the family but Sam had
embraced religion, and he seemed in no particular rush to remedy the
omission.
Quite the bon vivant, effervescent and exuberant, Sam amused peo-
ple at balls by dancing alone and crooning to himself, shutting his eyes
in comic ecstasy, the court jester. “By the second set,” friend Cal Higbie
recalled, “all the ladies were falling over themselves to get him for a part-
ner, and most of the crowd, too full of mirth to dance, were standing or
sitting around dying with laughter.”
29
Sam admitted to his sister- in- law,
Mollie, that he might be sleeping with chambermaids. “I don’t mind
sleeping with female servants as long as I am a bachelor— by
no
means—
but
after
I marry, that sort of thing will be ‘played out.’ ” He also indi-
cated that he intended to marry well or not at all and would postpone
marriage “until I can afford to have servants enough to leave my wife in
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“THE MOST LOVABLE SCA MP”
the position for which I designed her, viz.— as a
companion
. I don’t want
to sleep with a three- fold Being who is cook, chambermaid and washer-
woman all in one.”
30
The letter foreshadows the woman he would even-
tually marry: rich, genteel, and refi ned, and he may already have had a
sixth sense that only marriage could cure his roaming nature and satisfy
his social ambitions.
One underappreciated aspect of Mark Twain’s career would be his
sensitivity to nature and the magnifi cent word pictures he painted of it.
Not long after arriving in Carson City, he and a friend, John Kinney,
hiked to Lake Bigler— later known by its Indian name, Lake Tahoe—
where they had staked out a timber claim, and they were smitten by
their fi rst glimpse of the water. “We plodded on, two or three hours lon-
ger, and at last the lake burst upon us— a noble sheet of blue water lifted
six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in
by a rim of snow- clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thou-
sand feet higher still!”
31
Clemens and Kinney fell under the spell of this
untamed wilderness beauty, a version of the prelapsarian river paradise
Tom and Huck would inhabit. Sealed off from the world, Sam and his
companion spent days on a boat, drifting freely with the breeze, buoyed
by lake water so crystalline “that the boat seemed fl oating in the air!”
Mark Twain later gave the lake this hilarious endorsement: “Three months
of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his
pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean
the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.”
32
Unfor-
tunately, before leaving the lake, Sam accidentally set fi re to the forest
while attempting to cook dinner over a campfi re, and he and Kinney
went away looking “like
lava
men, covered as we were with ashes, and
begrimed with smoke.”
33
Much of their timber claim went up in fl ames.
The comic vitality that surged through Sam’s letters home signals that
he was fl exing his powers as a writer— you can see him reveling in comic
riffs— and Jane Clemens rushed them into print in the Keokuk
Gate City
.
Though convinced he would be a rich capitalist by summer, he no longer
expected to resume his piloting life because his pride was too injured
by mining failures to return home. Hence, he searched for a new job of
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sturdy independence. “I have been a slave several times in my life,” he
told Pamela, “but I’ll never be one again. I always intend to be so situ-
ated (
unless
I marry) that I can ‘pull up stakes’ and clear out whenever I
feel like it.”
34
He had begun sending satirical sketches to the
Territorial
Enterprise
in Virginia City under the well- chosen name “Josh.” He wrote
for personal amusement and a desperate need for cash. With no clear liter-
ary calling, he “stumbled” into the writing profession, he said, “as a man
falls over a precipice that he is not looking for.”
35
To his everlasting amaze-
ment, he received a letter that summer from the affable Joseph T. Good-
man, owner of the
Territorial Enterprise,
and William H. Barstow, its
managing editor, offering him a job as a local editor for a weekly salary of
$25. Not only did the sum seem princely— “a sinful and lavish waste of
money”— but he needed work posthaste. “I do not doubt that if, at the
time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the original
Hebrew, I would have accepted.”
36
Aside from the Josh letters, the editors
had two other pressing reasons for hiring Sam Clemens: the local editor,
William Wright, who wrote under the pen name “Dan De Quille,” was
taking temporary leave for an eastern trip, and the editors may also have
thought Sam would help win public printing contracts from Orion.
Before starting work on the
Territorial Enterprise,
Sam ventured one
last attempt at mining in a leaky Aurora cabin. As he wrote with black
humor, “Yesterday it rained— the fi rst shower for fi ve months . . . We went
outside to keep from getting wet.”
37
He and his partner Daniel Twing
subsisted on hardtack and beans, and rooted around in garbage dumps to
supplement their diet. During this bleak interval, they let empty food
tins and champagne bottles pile up outside their cabin to foster the illu-
sion of prosperity within.
When he began working for the paper in September, Sam Clemens
operated on a much larger stage, for the
Enterprise
was the territory’s
foremost daily paper. The combined population of Virginia City and
nearby Gold Hill had mushroomed from nothing before the mining craze
to become Nevada’s most populous city. Mark Twain left graphic de-
scriptions of this town that sat astride the Comstock Lode. Sitting on
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“THE MOST LOVABLE SCA MP”
the steep slope of Mount Davidson, the Virginia City hillside was honey-
combed with shafts and tunnels. “Taken as a whole, the underground
city had some thirty miles of streets and a population of fi ve or six thou-
sand.”
38
Whenever miners touched off explosives, stores and houses shook
from the impact. Working in an offi ce where all the editors and printers
seemed to pack revolvers, Sam knew when they were blasting quartz
below. “Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a blast
down in the bowels of the earth under the offi ce.”
39
The future author of
The Gilded Age
found himself at the white- hot
center of silver euphoria. People traded worthless shares at blue- sky prices,
and everybody believed his fortune was nigh. This was money madness
in its purest form. Twain said “there was a glad, almost fi erce, intensity in
every eye, that told of the money- getting schemes that were seething in
every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart.”
40
It was ex-
actly the sort of free- wheeling, rip- roaring atmosphere that appealed to
Sam Clemens’s swaggering personality and subversive instincts. “There
were military companies, fi re companies, brass bands, banks, hotels,
theatres, ‘hurdy- gurdy houses,’ wide- open gambling palaces, political
pow- wows, civic processions, street fi ghts, murders, inquests, riots, a
whisky mill every fi fteen steps.”
41
In short, the perfect place for an aspir-
ing writer to study human nature in its rawest form.
For the fi rst time, Sam joined a community of writers with a rough
western bravado, and he couldn’t have found a more convivial crew, es-
pecially in thirty-three- year- old Dan De Quille and the twenty-four-
year- old compositor Steve Gillis. There was as much drinking, swearing,
and juvenile horseplay as he could possibly have desired. De Quille, who
roomed with Sam at times, left interesting impressions of him, noting
his “bushy brows,” “curly pate,” and half- shut eyes that sized up the
world with a shrewd, appraising gaze.
42
He remembered Sam’s chronic
insomnia and nighttime prowling. Most of all, he recalled how Sam be-
came a captive of his anger, the way things simmered inside him and re-
fused to settle down. He “was nervously overstrung and always in
danger of a neurotic upset or explosion . . . Things that wouldn’t disquiet
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the average man would grate on him and set him wild, while just an or-
dinary annoyance hit with the force of an overpowering shock.”
43
Sam’s fi rst article appeared on October 1, 1862. Never having written
on deadline and educating himself on the job, he panicked about fi lling
his fi rst two columns until he was blessed by a lucky occurrence: “a des-
perado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more. I never was
so glad over any mere trifl e before in my life.”
44
Then a wagon train pulled
into town, having survived hostile Native American territory, and Sam
served up the story with lavishly macabre exaggeration: “I put this
wagon through an Indian fi ght that to this day has no parallel in history.
My two columns were fi lled. When I read them over in the morning I
felt that I had found my occupation at last.”
45
Mark Twain made light of
the episode, but it helped to launch a career marked by embellishment
and hyperbole that would frequently get him into scrapes, even as it de-
lighted readers. Published in a spirit of entertainment as well as straight
reportage, the
Territorial Enterprise
was an ideal home for someone with
Sam’s outsize powers of invention and casual relationship with facts.
From his teenage years, Sam was skilled in taunts and teasing, and
this side of his personality meshed perfectly with the new job, which
included trading barbs and engaging in mock feuds with rival journal-
ists. Reporters in Virginia City were literary gladiators who amused
readers by making blood sport of these vendettas. It was vaudeville in
print, with reporters as clowns of the show. As he began to cover the
Nevada legislature, he clashed, at least on paper, with Clement T. Rice of
the
Virginia City
Daily
Union.
He coined a name for Rice, “The Unreli-
able,” which he made stick by constant repetition, and Rice retaliated by
branding Sam “The Reliable.” It was mostly good- natured ribbing, with
Sam advising the Unreliable in print on how to behave in church and
other such matters, but the two men remained good friends. In time, this
combative style of play would take a darker turn, albeit not with Rice.
Sam’s fertile imagination was on full display that October when he
published a report about the discovery of “The Petrifi ed Man” in a des-
ert cave near the Humboldt River. Dressed up in scientifi c jargon, the
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story described how a prehistoric man, dead three hundred years, was
found petrifi ed in rock, his body welded to limestone sediment. The tale
was a hoax— “an unmitigated lie, made from whole cloth,” Sam admitted—
but it gained widespread credence and was reprinted by gullible Califor-
nia and Nevada papers, making it the author’s fi rst interstate story.
46
The
outrageous farce was designed to ridicule Judge G. T. Sewall, who sup-
posedly held an inquest of the Petrifi ed Man. “The practical joke was a
legal tender in Virginia [City],” noted a Twain biographer. Twain had
turned his old Hannibal talent for mischief into a marketable skill.
47
The
following year, Sam followed up with two equally preposterous hoaxes:
“A Bloody Massacre Near Carson” and “The Great Landslide Case.” Of
these titillating, ghoulish stories, Twain explained that “the public needed
matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil
Enter-
prise
offi ce was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation and general
destruction in those days.”
48
It was the start of Mark Twain’s persona as
a man who spun wild yarns and minted tall tales.
Not everything the
Territorial Enterprise
did was risible, and the
editorials composed by Joseph T. Goodman were widely read and infl u-
ential. That November, he sent Sam back to Carson City to cover the
Territorial Legislature. Sam resided with Orion, who had now been
joined by his wife, Mollie, and their daughter, Jennie. In his new incar-
nation, Sam cut a foppish fi gure and was vain about his infl uence. As a
journalist, he had a passport to people in power. “I was there every day
in the legislature to distribute compliment and censure with evenly bal-
anced justice and spread the same over half a page of the
Enterprise
every
morning; consequently I was an infl uence.”
49
After his Sunday letters
from Carson City appeared, they tended to draw howls of derision from
delegates the next day. Aided by information from Orion, Sam received
an invaluable education in legislative back- scratching and maneuvers,
their inner workings greased by bribery. It was telling that Sam’s cover-
age also called attention to himself, making him a local celebrity. If he
won plaudits, he also made many enemies. “I suppose he was the most
lovable scamp and nuisance who ever blighted Nevada,” said William M.
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Stewart, later known as the “silver senator” from Nevada, who alleged
that Sam went around “stirring up trouble” and “did not care whether
the things he wrote were true or not, just so he could write something.”
50
Undoubtedly Sam qualifi ed as a troublemaker, albeit one endowed with
a rapier wit.
It was likely in early February 1863 that he published his fi rst article
under the byline “Mark Twain.” Pen names were then in vogue among
fellow journalists and particularly commonplace among the chief hu-
morists of the day. Dan De Quille had left Nevada on December 27 for a
prolonged leave, and Sam, in taking a pseudonym, may have been seek-
ing continuity as his replacement. Sam liked that “Mark Twain” was
short and melodious— a perfect spondee. On the surface, the origin of
the moniker seems fairly simple: On the Mississippi River, the leadsman
would sound the water’s depth by lowering a weighted rope, and if he
cried “mark twain,” it meant two fathoms or twelve feet, considered a
safe depth; hence, a pleasing sound. Twain maintained that he swiped
the name from an old steamboat captain, Isaiah Sellers, who employed
it in reporting on Mississippi River doings for the New Orleans
Pica-
yune
. Although Sam had mocked his encyclopedic, pedantic comments,
incurring Sellers’s wrath, he claimed to have taken Sellers’s pen name
upon the captain’s death. He regretted having made sport of an esteemed
pilot, who “did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day
forth.”
51
Over the years, Twain grew testy whenever the pen name’s derivation
was questioned. “I have published this vital fact 3,600 times now. But no
matter, it is good practice; it is about the only fact that I can tell the same
way every time.”
52
Twain scholars have pointed out glaring inconsisten-
cies in Twain’s story, including that Sellers didn’t die until 1864 and that
his newspaper columns never bore the Mark Twain byline. One Twain
authority has suggested that he appropriated the name from a comic
sketch titled “The North Star” in a January 1861 issue of
Vanity Fair
.
53
Still others have suggested that the true source of the pen name was a
barroom practice of chalking up two marks— “mark twain”— for two
drinks whenever Sam Clemens ran up a tab at a local saloon.
54
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“THE MOST LOVABLE SCA MP”
Whatever the truth, the nom de plume would come to wrap Sam
Clem ens like a tight cloak. Often he signed letters to intimate friends
“Mark” and they addressed him as such. He always instructed dinner
hosts to introduce him as Mark Twain and “not Clemens, for my private
name embarrasses me when used in public.”
55
He would even become the
fi rst author to claim his pen name as a trademark, suing pirated editions
on that basis. Given the invective that he dished out to Nevada rivals, it
was probably not a bad idea to shield himself with a made- up name. For
twenty- seven- year- old Sam Clemens it was the ultimate act of reinven-
tion, the start of an attempt to mythologize his life. Many commentators
have noted the name’s ingenuity, for it not only attached the author to the
Mississippi River but refl ected the striking dualities in his nature. As he
later told Helen Keller, the name fi t because he was “sometimes light and
on the surface, and sometimes— ” She completed the sentence: “Deep.”
56
After adopting his pen name, Mark Twain started to cultivate larger
literary connections. In May 1863, he clambered aboard a stagecoach
with none other than Clement T. Rice, the Unreliable himself, and crossed
the Sierra Nevada en route to San Francisco. They stayed at the two best
hotels in town, dining sumptuously and drowning themselves in cham-
pagne and claret. With the blessing of his Nevada employers, Twain met
with the editor of the San Francisco
Morning Call
and walked away with
a contract to send him letters from Virginia City, giving Twain a chance
to write for a more literate audience than Nevada miners. He admitted
that in covering mining stories, he planned to shake down companies
for shares in exchange for touting their businesses, telling his mother
and sister, “if I don’t know how to levy black- mail on the mining
companies,— who
does,
I should like to know.”
57
Such extortion was, alas,
all too common among reporters covering the Comstock Lode. Twain’s
time in San Francisco showed that his early literary successes had by no
means quieted his lust for money. “I take an absorbing delight in the
stock market,” he informed his family. “I love to watch the prices go up.
My time will come after a while.”
58
When he departed San Francisco, he
lamented that “it seems like going back to prison to go back to the snows
& the deserts of Washoe, after living in this Paradise.”
59
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n
A controversial young man on the make, Twain attracted growing atten-
tion, albeit not always wanted or desirable. In October he scripted an-
other hoax for the
Territorial Enterprise
titled “A Bloody Massacre Near
Carson.” It purported to tell how an investor cheated in a stock swindle
had slaughtered his wife and children. This grisly tale was meant as a
satire on fi nancial shenanigans, but many Nevada and California papers
that reprinted the story missed the point entirely. In the ensuing hubbub,
said Dan De Quille, “Some papers demanded the immediate discharge
of the author” by the
Enterprise
editors. Although Joseph T. Goodman
stood by him, Twain was “so distressed that he could not sleep,”
De Quille recalled. “He tossed, tumbled and groaned aloud.”
60
The
young Twain gloried in the shock value of his writing, even if he was not
always braced for the outrage it would generate.
With fortuitous timing, the young Artemus Ward, America’s most-
beloved humorist and a favorite of President Lincoln, visited Virginia
City that December. Born Charles Farrar Browne, Ward gave Mark
Twain a sense of the shape a humorist’s career could take, uniting the
roles of clown, entertainer, sage, and moralist. When Ward lectured at
Maguire’s Opera House, Twain reviewed him in the
Territorial Enter-
prise
and gave him his highest encomium by stating that any spectator
who listened to Ward “without laughing either inwardly or outwardly
must have done murder, or at least meditated it, at some time during his
life.”
61
His later descriptions of Ward’s speaking style preview the poker-
face style he himself would adopt. He lauded Ward’s “inimitable way of
pausing and hesitating, of gliding in a moment from seriousness to
humor without appearing to be conscious of so doing . . . There was
more in his pauses than his words.”
62
Ward was only a year older than
Twain, yet his profi ts that season totaled $30,000 to $40,000— a stagger-
ing sum that must surely have captivated Twain’s imagination.
Around midnight on Christmas Eve, Ward, with fl aming red hair, an
aquiline nose, and a handlebar mustache, showed up at the
Territorial
Enterprise
offi ce and proposed to treat the editorial staff to an oyster
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“THE MOST LOVABLE SCA MP”
supper. According to Joseph T. Goodman, during this uproariously
funny dinner, Twain upstaged Ward, winning undisputed claim to the
“King of Comedy” title. “It was on that occasion that Mark Twain fully
demonstrated his right to rank above the world’s acknowledged fore-
most humorist.”
63
As dawn streaked the sky, Ward announced, “I feel
like walking on the skies, but as I can’t I’ll walk on the roofs.”
64
Ward,
Twain, and De Quille then scrambled to the top of a building and raced
across rooftops until the local police drew weapons, suspecting they were
burglars. This famous literary odyssey ended with Twain sitting on a bar-
rel in a local saloon and downing drinks with Ward.
A kindly, generous soul, Ward encouraged Twain to write for the New
York
Sunday Mercury
and eased his path by sending a fl attering letter
about him to its editors. When the publication accepted two Twain
sketches in mid- January 1864, it signaled a critical foothold for him on
the Eastern Seaboard. Twain told his mother that while he couldn’t
“write regularly for the Mercury,” he was mindful that it had “a more
extended circulation than is afforded by a local daily paper.”
65
Clearly
Ward’s visit served as a tonic to Twain’s spirits and a spur to his ambition
to think in national terms. In 1867 Ward would die of tuberculosis, just
shy of his thirty- third birthday, leaving open a prime spot for Twain as
America’s premier humorist.
When he fi rst arrived in Nevada, Twain had been decidedly junior to
his older brother, but now as a rising personage in the territory, he was
eclipsing Orion. “Everybody knows me,” Twain boasted to his mother
in August 1863, “& I fare like a prince wherever I go . . . And I am proud
to say I am the most conceited ass in the territory.”
66
He bragged of his
power as a “wire- puller” in the legislature. “I passed every bill I worked
for, & on a bet, I killed a bill by a three- fourths vote in the House after it
had passed the Council unanimously. Oh, I tell you a reporter in the
Legislature can swing more votes than any member of the body.”
67
Since
voters approved Nevada statehood in a plebiscite that September, with
the fi rst state elections scheduled for January 1864, Sam meant to get his
older brother “some fat offi ce” in the new government.
68
This was hardly a foregone conclusion, the sojourn in Nevada having
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had differing effects on the brothers. Sam had soaked up experience and
shown a worldly pizzazz, while Orion grew more dreamy and impracti-
cal. Mark Twain always viewed his brother as a well- meaning but hope-
less bungler who dithered his way through life. The problem wasn’t that
Orion was stupid, for he was highly intelligent. Rather, he lacked com-
mon sense and could be headstrong with authority fi gures, while at
other times he was so eager to please folks that he refused to stand his
ground. Additionally, Orion suffered from some psychological ailment
that clouded his mental faculties and often rendered him inert and de-
pressed. As Twain wrote of a character based on his brother, he “read
everything and digested nothing; he was a mine of misinformation and
mental confusions.”
69
Sam still chafed when Orion tried to usurp their
father’s place and keenly resented a letter from his brother chastising
him for dissipated living. Sam seethed to his family that Orion would
“learn after a while, perhaps, that I am not an infant, that I know the
value of a good name as well as he does, and stop writing such childish
nonsense to me.”
70
A photo of Orion shows a tall, handsome man with dark hair, a full
beard, and shaggy eyebrows, but the telling feature is the eyes— large,
staring eyes that betray fear or alarm and a hint of sadness. One can see
nervous instability in the expression, a lifetime of disappointments, the
variable moods. “You could break his heart with a word of disapproval;
you could make him as happy as an angel with a word of approval,”
Twain noted.
71
Where the younger brother had an irrepressible force that
lifted him from troubles, Orion seemed mired in dejection. “He moved
through a cloud of gloom and depression all his days,” Twain said.
72
For
all of Orion’s infuriating fl aws, Mark Twain thought him “a sterling
man,” who was “beloved, all his life, in whatsoever community he lived.”
73
As territorial secretary, Orion worked directly under Governor
James W. Nye, a former president of the Metropolitan Board of Police of
New York City, who was, said one of Sam’s friends, a “fat, vulgar, pro-
fane fellow whose colloquialisms were tainted with obscenity.”
74
Orion
had a demanding job, having to handle the fi nances and serve as acting
governor during Nye’s frequent absences. Without a capitol, Orion
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“THE MOST LOVABLE SCA MP”
rented the second fl oor of a local hotel and divided it into chambers for
the new legislature. He also had to arbitrate complex boundary disputes
with California. Orion even had to design the territory’s offi cial seal: a
miner hoisting a pick and waving an American fl ag. Although he didn’t
know it at the time, the job of territorial secretary would mark the pin-
nacle of Orion’s career, even as he and Mollie grandly assumed the good
times would persist. When they built and furnished an expensive house
in Carson City, Twain blamed Mollie’s social pretensions— “there was
no other house in that sagebrush capital that could approach this prop-
erty for style and cost.”
75
When President Lincoln declared Nevada a state on October 31, 1864,
Orion aspired to be secretary of state. For this to happen, he needed to
attend the Republican Party convention where nominations would be
decided. In a typically quixotic move, Orion decided that “his presence
there would be an unfair and improper infl uence,” Twain recalled with
exasperation, “and that if he was to be nominated the compliment must
come to him as a free and unspotted gift.”
76
A recent convert to tee-
totalism, Orion refused to frequent a saloon where critical politicking
took place. “The paper next morning contained the list of chosen nomi-
nees,” Twain remembered. “He had not received a vote. His rich income
ceased when the State government came into power. He was without an
occupation . . . He put up his sign as attorney at law, but he got no cli-
ents.”
77
Compounding Orion’s problems was that he and Mollie had lost
their eight- year- old daughter, Jennie, to cerebrospinal meningitis in Feb-
ruary 1864. Twain challenged the undertaker’s excessive charges, launch-
ing a lifetime habit of disputing bills loudly and at length. By 1866 Orion
and Mollie had left Nevada and returned impoverished to Iowa. They
would never see their daughter’s grave again, although they would, as a
memorial, keep her empty chair in houses they subsequently occupied.
To worsen matters for Orion’s delicate self- esteem, just as his life com-
menced a long, depressing slide, his kid brother was about to stage a
comet- like ascent in the American literary fi rmament.
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n
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Heaven on the Half Shell”
M
ark Twain would leave Nevada amid a blaze of controversy,
and the cause can be traced to the very issues of race and the
Civil War that he had sought to leave far behind. Although
the Nevada Territory was dominated by the Union Party, there was still
pervasive anti- Black sentiment and Orion was again denounced for his
“Black Republican” politics.
1
With plenty of southern transplants in Vir-
ginia City, abolitionism was less popular locally than unionism. In
March 1864, when Joseph T. Goodman decamped on a trip to the Sand-
wich Islands (as the Hawaiian Islands were then known), he asked Twain
and Dan De Quille to take over the
Territorial Enterprise
in his absence.
Still ducking the Civil War, Twain had already stipulated when he was
hired “that I should never be expected to write editorials about politics
or eastern news. I take no sort of interest in those matters.”
2
In his early days in Nevada, Sam Clemens still betrayed clear sympa-
thy for the southern cause. When a mule named Paint- Brush, which he
had ridden with the Marion Rangers, fell into Union hands, he exclaimed
to his sister- in- law, “ ‘Paint- Brush’ in the hands of the enemy! God for-
give me! this is the fi rst time I have felt melancholy since I left the United
States.”
3
In February 1862, when northern general Samuel Curtis scored
a major victory in Missouri by vigorously routing General Sterling Price
and his mostly Missouri militia from the state into Arkansas, Sam, hop-
ping mad, wrote to his friend Billy Clagett about Curtis’s victory: “He
has thrashed our Missourians like everything. But by the Lord, they
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didn’t do it on the Sacred Soil, my boy. They had to chase ’em clear down
into Arkansas before they could whip them. There’s a consolation in
that
.”
4
Shortly afterward, when he feuded with Judge G. T. Sewall, Sam
commented sarcastically to Clagett, “I don’t see why he should dislike
me
. He is a yankee,— and I naturaly [
sic
] love a yankee.”
5
To Orion, Sam
complained, “There
are
good men in the North, but they are
d— d
scarce.”
6
Nevada governor James W. Nye had already disparaged Sam as
“a damned Secessionist.”
7
Yet despite the racial slurs that still infested his notebook, Sam Clem-
ens’s time in the Nevada Territory had given him a chance for a slow
disengagement from a southern identity. There may have been oppor-
tunism involved— he was writing in Unionist territory for a pro- Union
paper— but a deeper evolution was at work. The Far West allowed him a
convenient break from his Missouri upbringing, a chance to reimagine
himself as a born- again Yankee. The most- dramatic rupture came in
early July 1863 amid pivotal Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicks-
burg. As a violent electrical storm pounded Mount Davidson, black
clouds blocked out everything but the American fl ag atop the mountain,
which was illuminated by the setting sun. As Mark Twain wrote in the
Territorial Enterprise,
“
It was the fl ag!
. . . a mysterious messenger of
good tidings . . . It was the nation’s emblem transfi gured by the depart-
ing rays of the sun . . . The superstition grew apace that this was a mystic
courier come with great news from the war . . . Vicksburg fallen, and the
Union armies victorious at Gettysburg.” He concluded that “every man
that had any respect for himself would have got drunk.”
8
Twain showed
no twinge of discomfort in expressing outright joy over the Union tri-
umphs.
Twain’s carefree Nevada life began to fall apart after he wrote an ar-
ticle about money raised for the United States Sanitary Commission,
launched in 1861 to raise funds for medical care for sick and wounded
Union soldiers. Pamela acted as a leader of the St. Louis branch, and the
cause was also dear to Orion Clemens, who served as president of the
Sanitary Commission of Ormsby County, while Mollie labored as its
secretary. Western supporters had devised a fundraising gimmick of
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“HEAV EN ON THE H ALF SHELL”
auctioning off a fi fty- pound sack of fl our— it would be greeted in towns
with bands and festive crowds— and cities competed proudly to top the
highest bid. On May 17, 1864, Twain published an article suggesting that
Carson City hadn’t outbid nearby Dayton because of rumors that “the
money raised at the Sanitary Fancy Dress Ball recently held in Carson . . .
had been diverted from its legitimate course, and was to be sent to aid a
Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East; and it was feared the pro-
ceeds of the sack might be similarly disposed of.”
9
It was as tasteless and
incendiary a jape as Mark Twain ever penned. A catalyst for controversy,
he was still, at heart, an immature, smart- alecky young journalist, will-
ing to wring cheap laughs from a harmful wisecrack, and he now paid
dearly for this crisis of his own devising.
The term “miscegenation” had entered the political lexicon the previ-
ous year when Democratic Copperheads attempted to discredit Lincoln
and the Republican Party by claiming they favored miscegenation— that
is, racial mixing. Twain’s introduction of this nasty innuendo offended
the genteel ladies of Carson City, including Mollie Clemens, who over-
saw the Sanitary Fancy Dress Ball, but it also typed him as a closet se-
cessionist. The response to his article was ferocious, with the ladies
dashing off a letter to
Enterprise
editors denouncing the “
tissue of false-
hoods,
made for
malicious
purposes,” and insisting that all money raised
thus far would go for the care of distressed Union soldiers.
10
Twain even
faced duel challenges from outraged husbands of the ladies in question.
The author stood abashed. He tried to stammer out an explanation to
Mollie, stating that when he wrote the piece he wasn’t sober and that
Dan De Quille had warned him “it would wound the feelings of the la-
dies of Carson.”
11
He claimed, unconvincingly, that he had decided to
shelve the piece, that he and Dan had then sauntered off to the theater,
and that the next thing he knew the foreman had gone and printed the
article in the
Enterprise
. Even as he confi ded that “the Sanitary expedi-
tion has been very disastrous to me,” he resisted a printed retraction be-
cause he feared “the humiliation of publishing myself as a liar.”
12
With the crowd’s angry roar still throbbing in his ears, Twain did issue
a belated, if half-hearted, apology, saying, “We resemble the majority of
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our species in the respect that we are very apt to get entirely in the wrong,
even when there is no seeming necessity for it; but to offset this vice, we
claim one of the virtues of our species, which is that we are ready to re-
pair such wrongs when we discover them.”
13
Twain had already been
hurt by his reputation as a literary brawler, with an opposing paper not-
ing that “Sammy Clemens, or as he styles himself, Mark Twain,” was fond
of directing satirical fi re at others but found it very tough to handle it
when they reciprocated. “Merciless himself in perpetrating jokes on oth-
ers, he winces like a cur with a fl ea in his ear when others retort.”
14
Twain infl amed the controversy further when he accused the
Virginia
City Daily
Union
of reneging on its donations for the fl our sack, leading
its publisher, James L. Laird, to denounce the
Enterprise
in turn. The
exchanges between Twain and Laird became increasingly heated and
brutal. Before it was over, Twain had blasted the rival publisher as a
“ putrid . . . groveling, vulgar liar,” an “ass,” and a “craven carcass.”
15
For
his part, Laird tore into Twain as “an unmitigated liar,
a
poltroon, and a
puppy,
” charging him with “disregard for truth, decency and courtesy.”
16
In high dudgeon, Twain issued duel challenges to Laird, who declined.
“The more he did not want to fi ght,” Twain later joked, “the bloodthirst-
ier I became.” In the end, Laird and his second offered an apology on the
dueling ground and settled the confl ict peacefully. Nevertheless, an 1861
Nevada law called for prison sentences for anyone involved in a duel, and
rumor hinted that the governor might set an example and arrest the par-
ticipants. When this news reached Twain, it forced him to fl ee to Cali-
fornia, or so he said. Perhaps he mostly wished to escape ridicule and his
sudden notoriety, his swashbuckling, outlaw style having fi nally caught
up with him. Joseph T. Goodman urged him to resign his newspaper
post and leave Nevada at once, which he did.
On May 29, 1864, Twain departed from Virginia City and headed by
stagecoach to San Francisco, where, he told Orion, he expected to stay a
month. A few days earlier, he had written to his brother in a defi ant
mood, still growling about the Sanitary Commission spouses who threat-
ened duels. “However, if there is any chance of the husbands of those
women challenging
me,
I don’t want a straw put in the way of it. I’ll wait
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“HEAV EN ON THE H ALF SHELL”
for them a month, if necessary, & fi ght them with
any
weapon they
choose.”
17
The day before he left, when another irate husband pursued
him, Twain remained unrepentant. Later he alleged that he left Nevada
because he had grown restless, needed a change of scenery, and yearned
to travel. As so often with Twain, his memories obfuscate events as
much as clarify them. Whatever the true cause of his departure, he left a
territory that, for all his atrocious judgment toward the end, had trans-
formed him from callow youth into a seasoned newspaperman and af-
forded him “the most vigorous enjoyment of life I had ever experienced.”
18
One Nevada paper thumbed its nose at his departure, saying, “Mark
Twain’s beard is full of dirt, and his face is black before the people of
Washoe.”
19
When he had visited San Francisco the previous year with Clement T.
Rice, he had returned to Nevada with reluctance. It was perhaps fore-
ordained that he would now stay longer than a month, and this interlude
would indeed stretch into a two- year period. Notwithstanding their
limited cash, Twain and Steve Gillis checked into the swank Occidental
Hotel, a hostelry that Twain crowned as “heaven on the half shell.”
20
Of
his time with Twain, Gillis observed: “Mark was the laziest man I ever
knew in my life, physically. Mentally, he was the hardest worker I ever
knew.”
21
Indeed, Mark Twain had a brain that always buzzed with
words, a whirring beehive of thoughts, jokes, and ideas.
Urgently needing money, Twain took a job as a local reporter for the
San Francisco
Morning Call,
which boasted the largest circulation in the
city. (He would also fi le weekly articles with the San Francisco
Golden
Era,
a local literary journal.) The
Morning Call
editor George Barnes
recalled how a “slim, awkward, hawk- eyed, tousle- haired Twain”
slouched into his offi ce one day. Beneath Twain’s bravado, Barnes sensed
a sad and lonely soul who had diffi culty making friends. “The refugee
from Nevada justice told a hard- luck story about being out of money
and out of work in a strange city.”
22
As a Nevada reporter, Twain had
written in an ebullient style about whatever struck his fancy, whereas
working for the
Morning Call
meant tamping down his creative fl air and
becoming a humdrum scribe. As he recalled in 1906, the daily schedule
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was “fearful drudgery, soulless drudgery, and almost destitute of inter-
est” that started early in the police court and ended late in the theaters.
23
The indolent Twain nursed multiple grudges against the paper, where
he always felt rushed and hated the late hours. In the morning he at-
tended police court, then spent afternoons making political rounds. At
night he wrote theater reviews, visiting six houses. “We remained in each
of those places for fi ve minutes, got the merest passing glimpse of play
and opera, and with that for a text we ‘wrote up’ those plays and operas,
as the phrase goes, torturing our souls every night.”
24
However arduous
the routine, it sparked an interest in theater and supplied handy tips for
public speaking. Of actor Fred Franks he wrote how he possessed “the
fi rst virtue of a comedian, which is to do humorous things with grave
decorum and without seeming to know that they are funny.”
25
Already
busy as a master of ceremonies, Twain exhibited a certain thespian fl air
when he delivered a tribute to Major Edward C. Perry at Maguire’s
Opera House. Perry had raised a Union gunboat from the harbor bot-
tom, and Twain praised him by reading aloud from a seven- foot- long
parchment as the “entire audience was dissolved in tears of laughter,”
said a reporter.
26
With a dawning sense of social justice at the
Morning Call,
Twain ex-
posed the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants, especially by police
abuse. One day he fi led a strongly worded piece about “some hoodlums
chasing and stoning a Chinaman who was heavily laden with the weekly
wash of his Christian customers” as a policeman stood by, watching
amusedly.
27
Twain was shocked when the article failed to appear the next
day in what he considered an odious concession to Irish readers. He later
mocked the paper’s mission: “To lick the boots of the Irish & throw bold
brave mud at the Chinamen.”
28
Mark Twain was beginning to shed some
of the bigoted provincialism of his youth. In
Roughing It,
he recorded
blistering passages about how “the worst class of white men” made the
Chinese suffer “fi nes for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their rob-
beries, and death for their murders.”
29
Not only did the white working
class persecute Chinese immigrants, but “the policemen and politicians,
likewise, for these are the dust- licking pimps and slaves of the scum,
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“HEAV EN ON THE H ALF SHELL”
there as well as elsewhere in America.”
30
Twain saw the Chinese immi-
grants as a peaceable, hardworking people, “a harmless race when white
men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs.”
31
Always alert to offi cial misdeeds, he wrote venomous articles for the
Territorial Enterprise
about Martin Burke, San Francisco’s crooked po-
lice chief. Twain’s discomfort with authority fi gures, fi rst evinced as a
Hannibal boy, now started to generalize into a larger critique of public
fi gures. He was especially outraged by police laxity and corruption.
One day he found a policeman snoozing on the job and turned it into a
memorable incident. Grabbing an oversize cabbage leaf from a nearby
vendor, he began to wave it lazily over the sleeping cop until a sizable
crowd had gathered to laugh and watch the incident. News of Twain’s
stunt— street theater with a punchy political message— soon raced around
the city.
While he felt trapped and demeaned by his
Morning Call
job, he knew
he “couldn’t get another berth if I resigned . . . Therefore I swallowed my
humiliation and stayed where I was.”
32
Instead of taking his usual pride
in his writing, “I took the pen and spread this muck out in words and
phrases, and made it cover as much acreage as I could.”
33
After his fl ush
times in Nevada, the paper felt like a terribly poor fi t for the easygoing
Twain and he knew it, and by October he was fi red. George Barnes
broke the news in gentle, fatherly fashion, and while Twain understood
the decision— “I neglected my duties and became about worthless as a
reporter for a brisk newspaper”— the fi ring still stung him to the quick.
34
It was, he later claimed, the only time in his life that he was discharged,
and the rejection bothered him for years.
Losing his job meant that Twain felt the insecurity of a freelance writ-
er’s life, devoid of any permanent paycheck, a brush with poverty that
had a harrowing effect on him. “I became very adept at ‘slinking.’ I slunk
from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that
looked familiar, I slunk to meals . . . I felt meaner, and lowlier and more
despicable than the worms.”
35
Whatever the hyperbole here, Twain was
haunted by this early period of poverty, which reinforced his preoccupa-
tion with money, a leitmotif of his life. A
Morning Call
reporter pub-
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lished an item about “a melancholy- looking Arab, known as Marque
Twain,” who moved like a Bedouin from tent to tent. “His hat is an old
one, and comes too far down over his eyes, and his clothes don’t fi t as if
they were made for him.”
36
However low his spirits, Mark Twain managed to experience some
rollicking times in San Francisco, writing to Jane and Pamela that after
the Nevada snowbanks, “this superb climate agrees with me.”
37
With
prodding from his mother he joined the San Francisco Olympic Club,
which featured a large gymnasium and classes in gymnastics, boxing, and
fencing. One member testifi ed that Twain’s main exercise was “confi ned
to studying up jokes to play on his fellow members.”
38
Twain and Steve Gillis were rowdy tenants who were usually lag-
gards in paying rent and had to switch lodgings fi ve times in four months.
One disgruntled landlady said the two men smuggled beer into their
room, and she also didn’t care for the revolvers and bowie knives they
kept lying around, or the women who waltzed in and out of their lair.
39
To make things worse, they had a vile habit of tossing empty beer bottles
onto the tin roofs of Chinese residences below. Though he generated lots
of noise himself, Twain was a light sleeper and driven mad by any sounds
in the vicinity. According to his authorized biographer, he was awak-
ened one morning by a howling dog and decided to get even with the
creature. Steve Gillis awoke to fi nd “his room- mate standing in the door
that opened out into a back garden, holding a big revolver, his hand shak-
ing with cold and excitement.”
40
Twain still had the option of resuming life as a Mississippi pilot, but
he knew he would have to master anew the intricacies of a river that con-
stantly reshaped itself. He had also become so accustomed to a bohe-
mian life of odd hours— he could never fi t into a conventional mold— that
he didn’t imagine he could return to the stern discipline of a river pilot.
As he told Will Bowen, “I generally get up at eleven o’clock, because I
am naturally lazy, as you well know . . . I am too lazy for 14- day trips—
too fond of running all night & sleeping all day— too fond of sloshing
around, talking with people.” Nor did he think marriage would reform
his wayward behavior. “Marry be d— d. I am too old to marry. I am
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“HEAV EN ON THE H ALF SHELL”
nearly 31. I have got gray hairs in my head. Women appear to like me,
but d— n them, they don’t
love
me.”
41
Women were fascinated by him—
he was, after all, a charming rogue, a lovable scamp— but they may also
have been wary of his mercurial personality and footloose existence.
As a writer, Twain craved respectability and gained a modicum of lit-
erary cachet writing for the
Golden Era,
a literary journal housed in the
same building as the
Morning Call
. Now he started writing for an even
classier publication, the
Californian,
which began publication in May
1864. Owned by Charles Henry Webb and employing a sophisticated
format, it attracted the most- talented writers from the city’s thriving lit-
erary community. Its chief ornament, main contributor, and sometime
editor was Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce also appeared there. In late
September, Twain reported home that he had dropped the
Golden
Era
— “It wasn’t high- toned enough”— and contracted to write weekly
articles for the
Californian,
which “circulates among the highest class of
the community, & is the best weekly literary paper in the United
States.”
42
Of special importance to Twain was that the publication “has
an exalted reputation in the east.”
43
One can see how Twain’s social striv-
ing commingled with his literary ambitions as he sought to cultivate read-
ers among people of better standing. His two- year association with the
periodical would help elevate him to national prominence.
If a year younger than Twain, Bret Harte was already a literary star
in San Francisco and held a cushy sinecure as secretary to the superin-
tendent of the U.S. Mint, occupying an offi ce one fl oor below the
Morn-
ing Call
. Harte’s story was not unlike Twain’s: In his teens he traveled
west to California with his mother and stepfather and taught school in
mining camps, where he learned to capture local manners and dialect.
He then went to San Francisco, rising from typesetter to author at the
Golden Era
. Three weeks before sealing his deal with the
Californian,
Twain heaped printed compliments on Harte, who had just been named
editor. “Some of the most exquisite productions which have appeared in
its pages emanated from his pen and are worthy to take rank among even
Dickens’ best sketches.”
44
The praise is noteworthy since Twain, in time,
would emerge as a vitriolic critic of Bret Harte’s work. In these early
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