subsequent letters, written in January and March 1862 and also addressed to Clemens’s mother, seem to have been intended for publication; they also appeared in the Gate City. In them Clemens assigns Jane Clemens the role of a worshiping disciple of Fenimore Cooper and admirer of the romantic Noble Savage and portrays himself as a disenchanted old-timer. Later, when he used these same materials in Roughing It, he played both roles: he had arrived in the West, he explains, as an innocent tenderfoot, full of book learning, but now years later he was writing as a hardened veteran. While the 1872 book version is deservedly better known, these previous letters are a valuable indication of Clemens’s development as a writer: he was beginning to assign himself more interesting roles.
The second of these early Nevada letters describes a trip Clemens and three others made to Unionville, Humboldt County, where silver was being discovered and mined. In this letter Clemens mixes information and anecdote just as he was to do in his travel books. In a March letter, he responds to an imagined plea from his mother to “tell me all about the lordly sons of the forest.” Clemens’s response reveals a scornful attitude toward American Indians that would not mellow for decades, unlike his racist views of African Americans, which dissipated in later years. The description of a representative Indian, whose name is given as Hoop-dedoodle-do, is thoroughly repulsive. In 1897, Mark Twain wrote that in his youth, “Any young person would have been proud of a ‘strain’ of Indian blood”; Cooper’s great popularity was responsible.30 But on the basis of his experience in Nevada, Clemens’s advice is, “Now, if you are acquainted with any romantic young ladies or gentlemen who dote on these loves of Indians, send them out here before the disease strikes in.”
These long descriptive letters home indicate how thoroughly Clemens was beginning to enjoy playing the skeptic. Chiefly, however, he wanted to get rich quick, and the means was obviously silver. In a letter written to Orion on May II and 12, 1862, he reported that he owned a one-eighth interest in a ledge, and “I know it to contain our fortune” in gold and silver. The same letter refers to Sam’s contributions to the local newspaper; he assumed that Orion was seeing his letters in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. By June he was thinking seriously of his work as a writer, for he instructs Orion, “Put all of my Josh’s letters in my scrap book. I may have use for them some day.” (The “Josh” letters written for the Enterprise have not survived.) But in the same letter he reports, “I have quit writing for the [Keokuk] ‘Gate’ [City]. I haven’t got time to write.” Perhaps it was at this juncture that he was obliged to take on a job that was nothing but manual labor. Ten years later he wrote, “I shoveled quartz in a silver mill at ten dollars a week, for one entire week, & then resigned, with the consent & even the gratitude of the entire mill company.”31 A month later he told Orion to write to the Sacramento Union or to members of its staff to announce that “I’ll write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a week—my board must be paid. Tell them I have corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent, and other papers—and the Enterprise. California is full of people who have interests here, and its d—d seldom they hear from this country.” The explanation for his job hunting is that he was in debt: “The fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too.”
What happened next is not quite clear, though it turned out to have great consequences. According to his autobiography, Clemens now became so desperate that he “stood on the verge of the ministry or the penitentiary.” Fortunately, he recounted, he found occasion to submit to the Enterprise for publication a clever burlesque of a speech by the chief justice of Nevada just when his services became necessary: the city editor of the Enterprise, Dan De Quille (William E. Wright) was planning a trip home to Iowa. Sam’s piece was considered witty, and he was hired.32 A more probable scenario is that Sam was taken on because of the “Josh” series and because employing Sam might mean that the Enterprise printing house would get patronage from Sam’s brother, the territorial secretary. In any event, within a short time Clemens was a full-time writer for the Enterprise, and the Enterprise did obtain the printing contract.33 Clemens soon adopted the pen name “Mark Twain” for his humorous writings, but probably used his real name for serious news stories. Seemingly he identified in important ways with the adopted name, for now he signed a letter to his mother and sister “Mark.” According to one letter he sent to them, “I take great pains to let the public know that ‘Mark Twain’ hails from there [i.e., Missouri].” For his newspaper work, “They pay me,” he wrote home, “six dollars a day, and I make 50 per cent profit by doing only three dollars’ worth of work.”
The development of Samuel Clemens as a writer cannot be fully documented, since a large portion of what he wrote for publication in Nevada was lost. It has been estimated that he published fifteen hundred to three thousand local items, but there is no file of the Enterprise, and one can consult only such sources as the slim collection of clippings in a surviving Clemens notebook and the pieces reprinted in other newspapers. These provide a total of fewer than fifty items, although many of them are notable pieces. The earliest extant pieces signed “Mark Twain” are three letters from Carson City dated January 31 and February 3 and 6, 1863. Written while he was on a week’s vacation, they are notable chiefly for their tone: good-natured, confidential, nonchalant. For instance, discussing a wedding he had attended, Mark Twain writes that it was “mighty pleasant, and jolly, and sociable, and I wish to thunder I was married myself. I took a large slab of the bridal cake home with me to dream on, and dreamt that I was still a single man, and likely to remain so, if I live and nothing happens—which has given me a greater confidence in dreams than I ever felt before.” The name “Mark Twain” was to be identified with the voice heard here: unpretentious, self-assured, good-natured, accessible.
Another development was taking place within Samuel Clemens. He had gone west after having identified himself, if only briefly, with the Confederate cause. At the same time that he was creating “Mark Twain,” Clemens was gradually becoming a Union man, though in Nevada he was largely able to avoid the issue of slavery. He was to confront that issue only after the Civil War.
For the Enterprise, Mark Twain wrote local items, unsigned editorials, and reports from San Francisco, Carson City, and the territorial legislature and constitutional convention. (For the convention, he and another reporter provided full and in part verbatim accounts. These are of no literary value, and it is impossible to distinguish Clemens’s writing from that of his coworker.)34 Even routine items frequently have a humorous touch. He suggests in “The Spanish Mine,” for instance, that “stout-legged persons with an affinity to darkness” might enjoy an hour-long visit to the mine on which he was reporting. Such unsigned items as the following appeared soon after Clemens joined the Enterprise staff. “A beautiful and ably conducted free fight came off in C street yesterday, but as nobody was killed or mortally wounded in manner sufficiently fatal to cause death, no particular interest attaches to the matter, and we shall not publicize the details. We pine for murder—these fist fights are of no consequence to anybody.” In this piece—written before the earliest appearance of Clemens’s nom de plume—one hears for the first time the voice that was to become famous. Excitement made life tolerable in the dull towns of the West, and Clemens was to celebrate his boyish appreciation of it. As diverting as frontier violence was, if necessary one could always resort to theatrics.
In Nevada, Mark Twain was a successful journalist. Some of his stories were picked up by other papers, especially in California, even though few of the surviving ones give an indication of his later abilities. In the boom-or-bust atmosphere of Nevada, he became especially identified with hoaxes; among other things, these were preparations for Huck Finn’s admired imaginative deceptions. One of the earliest hoaxes dates from October 15, 1862. It reports the startling discovery of a “petrified man,” found “in a sitting posture” with “the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supporting the chin, the fore-finger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart. This strange freak of nature” was examined by a local judge, “Justice Sewell or Sowell, of Humboldt
