Published in the Enterprise, the story was picked up by twelve credulous newspapers in Nevada and California. Only the San Francisco publication, headed “A Washoe Joke” (Washoe was a native American name given to Nevada), was appropriately captioned by someone who recognized that the petrified man was winking and thumbing his nose.
At the Enterprise, Mark Twain was associated with other stimulating young writers, such as the twenty-four-year-old editor, Joseph Goodman, and Dan De Quille, with whom he roomed. (De Quille had already written up his own effective hoax about a personal portable air-conditioning system.) The new journalist soon discovered that his work was not arduous. Reporters from other journals were ready to swap “regulars,” reports from continuing sources of news such as the courts and the registry of bullion. If news was short, it could promptly be invented. For a time Clemens lost his ambition, drank a good deal, and gained a reputation for flippancy, bohemianism, and irreverence. He was proud enough of his direct language to defend it in print: “If I choose to use the language of the vulgar, the low-flung and the sinful, and such as will shock the ears of the highly civilized, I don’t want him [a compositor] to appoint himself an editorial critic and proceed to tone me down and save me from the consequences of my conduct; that is, unless I pay him for it, which I won’t.”35
The Enterprise phase enabled the writer to discover himself—or, more accurately, allowed Sam Clemens to create “Mark Twain.” He learned here about the close connection between the comic and the forbidden—the permissible and those aspects of life not to be mentioned in polite society. He intuited, too, that humor is gratifying because it relaxes a repressive atmosphere. Obviously the raw, blustering frontier environment encouraged his explorations. He was, however, never quite able to determine precisely how far he could go without being offensive, although he sensed that he could amusingly violate inhibiting strictures by satirizing the fastidiousness of the genteel and their attitudes toward romantic love, childhood, grand opera, admiration for the “sublime” in nature, even benevolent humanitarianism. He could offend the pretentiousness of the proper by referring to the unmentionable: sows, nose-picking, vomit, spit, warts, singed cats, body odor. (He was never to outgrow the conviction that bad smells are funny.) A mild specimen of this brand of humor is in a “Letter from Mark Twain” published in August 1863 in which he provides an account of his adventures after taking a tonic called “Wake-up Jake.” It affected him for forty-eight hours. “And during all that time, I could not have enjoyed a viler taste in my mouth if I had swallowed a slaughter-house.” He almost died, he says, of vomiting and another form of elimination.
This sketch is one of the few in which Mark Twain is a buffoon. More often he asserts in exaggerated form his own superiority. The roles he assigns himself are, in one critic’s words, those of the “Social Lion, the Nabob, the Entertainer, and the Ladies’ Man.”36 He had determined that his assignment was to be insulting and humiliating to others. It would be some time before he learned how much funnier he could be if he himself were humiliated, especially by becoming, in James Cox’s phrase, the fool of his own illusions.37
San Francisco was a long 150 miles west from Washoe, through the daunting Sierra Nevada range. The trip took thirty hours. But California was the source of supplies for Nevada, and all the bullion was shipped to San Francisco in bars, with three stages a day in each direction. Clemens visited San Francisco several times during his years in Nevada, and at least three times in 1863. His first trip, which lasted two months, occasioned this parting shot from the May 3 Enterprise: “As he assigned no adequate reason for this sudden step, we thought him the pitiable victim of self-conceit and the stock mania…. Yes, the poor fellow actually thought he possessed some breeding—that Virginia [City] was too narrow a field for his grace and accomplishments, and in this delusion he has gone to display his ugly person and disgusting manners and wildcat on Montgomery street.”38 In a letter published in September 1863, he describes the trip “Over the Mountains” and in it introduces perhaps the first of his antigenteel narrators. Much of the letter is devoted to Mark Twain’s account of the stagecoach driver’s conversation. For instance: “I see a poor cuss tumble off along here one night—he was monstrous drowsy, and went to sleep when I’d took my eye off of him for a moment—and he fetched up again a boulder, and in a second there wasn’t anything left of him but a promiscuous pile of hash!” The use of such an accomplished yarn-spinning figure became an important part of Mark Twain’s literary repertoire.
His narrators, usually veterans of long service in their occupations (including miners, ship captains, and stage drivers), are utterly lacking in self-consciousness. As the man behind the writer became more interested in moving upward in the social scale, he found that when he wished to avoid presenting Mark Twain as too “low” and vulgar a personage, he could introduce a vernacular narrator such as the coach driver to tell his tale. He especially enjoyed relying on characters who were both colorfully profane and profoundly innocent.
Another letter on his adventures in California went to New York, where it was published in the Sunday Mercury for February 21, 1864. Artemus Ward, whom Clemens had met when the experienced writer visited Virginia City in late 1863, had suggested that he write occasionally for that Eastern paper. In “Those Blasted Children,” Mark Twain describes his suffering at the Lick House in San Francisco, where noisy “young savages” pestered him. “It is a living wonder to me that I haven’t scalped some of those children before now,” he comments unsentimentally. “I expect I would have done it, but then I hardly felt well enough acquainted with them.” The recommended remedies for illnesses in children indicate his studied ignorance: for worms, “Administer a catfish three times a week. Keep the room very quiet; the fish won’t bite if there is the least noise.”
While visiting San Francisco, Clemens obtained a commission to write a series of letters from Nevada to the Daily Morning Call. In the summer of 1863, ten letters as well as half a dozen dispatches from Mark Twain in Nevada appeared in that paper. The Call announced that these letters “set forth in his easy, readable style the condition of matters and things in Silverland.”39 Showing journalistic competence and good humor, these pieces helped spread his reputation and prepared the way for a later position on the San Francisco newspaper. In order to emphasize wittily the vast difference between the mild San Francisco climate and that of torrid Virginia City, he reported that “last week the weather was passably cool, but it has moderated a good deal since then. The thermometer stands at a thousand, in the shade, today. It will probably go to a million before night.” In another letter he writes that Mr. G. T. Sewall was among those bruised recently in a travel accident; he reminds his readers that Sewall is the man who allegedly held the inquest on the death of the petrified man. An amusing piece published in July 1863 explains that crime is much more common in Nevada than in California. “Nothing that can be stolen is neglected. Watches that would never go in California, generally go fast enough before they have been in the Territory twenty-four hours.”40
One passage, “A Rich Decision,” published in the Call in August 1863, is particularly notable because it tells a story that Mark Twain was to return to twice. It appears in “The Facts in the Great Landslide Case” in the Buffalo Express for April 12, 1870, and (in only slightly revised form) in chapter 34 of Roughing It. The 1863 version informs the reader at the beginning that “some of the boys in Carson” were playing a hoax on old Mr. Bunker, an attorney, who was employed to bring suit for the recovery of Dick Sides’s ranch after Tom Rust’s ranch slid down the mountain and covered it. In the later versions, the hoax is played on the unwary reader as well, and the story, three times as long, is elaborated and dramatized.
In addition, Mark Twain wrote a few sketches from Nevada for the San Francisco Golden Era, a weekly founded to encourage the development of literature in the area. The eminent landscape painter Albert Bierstadt had designed the masthead, and numbered among the local writers were Joaquin Miller, Charles W. Stoddard, and Bret Harte, whose “M’liss” had proven to be the first memorable tale of the California frontier. Mark Twain had the good judgment to learn from his fellows. The editors of the Enterprise
