it. They include “How to Cure a Cold,” published September 20, and “The Lick House Ball,” published September 27, both in 1863. The former would be one of the earliest to find a place, in revised form, in Sketches, New and Old (1875). It also appeared in 1867 in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, Mark Twain’s first book. It tells of the author’s efforts to get rid of that most common of ailments by adopting various cures offered by well-meaning people: cold showers, drinking a quart of salt water (which caused him, he reports, to throw up everything, including, he believes, his “immortal soul”); then a mixture of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and drugs; then gin, then gin and molasses, and gin and onions; then travel; next a mustard plaster, and eventually steam baths. He survives, with difficulty.
During his Nevada years, Mark Twain created his first fully developed character equipped to flout gentility. When a rival reporter, actually a friend named Clement T. Rice, criticized Mark Twain’s reports of a session of the Nevada legislature, he replied that Rice’s accounts were a “festering mass of misstatements the author of whom should be properly termed the ‘Unreliable.’”41 Thereafter, “the Unreliable” was to make frequent appearances in Mark Twain’s writings of the period, both as the butt of his humor and as Clemens’s alter ego—his coarser side. The Unreliable borrows, without permission, Mark Twain’s most elegant clothes, his boots, his hat, his “white kid gloves,” and his “heavy gold repeater.” Mark Twain finds him in this garb attending an evening party, where he devours huge quantities of food and drink, including a roast pig, and sings a drunken song. Mark Twain offers to duel with him, “boot-jacks at a hundred yards.” The Unreliable swindles a San Francisco hotel when the two visit it. He is constantly obnoxious and boorish. When Mark Twain plans to send back to Nevada “something glowing and poetical” on the San Francisco weather, the Unreliable tells him, “Say it’s bully, you tallow-brained idiot! that’s enough; anybody can understand that; don’t write any of those infernal, sick platitudes about sweet flowers, and joyous butterflies, and worms and things, for people to read before breakfast. You make a fool of yourself that way; everybody gets disgusted with you; stuff! be a man or a mouse.” The Unreliable is—as Mark Twain frequently chose to be—the sworn enemy of bombast and sentimentality.
In one letter Mark Twain renders an account of the Unreliable’s drunken remarks on his visit to San Jose, “Sarrozay.” Rice retaliated when Clemens was ill with a cold and had arranged for Rice to attend to Enterprise chores. Over Mark Twain’s name, Rice published an apology to all those whom he had ridiculed, especially “the Unreliable,” and promised to go “in sackcloth and ashes for the next forty days.” The next day, Clemens recovered enough to publish a retraction of “his” apology and a denunciation of Rice as “a reptile” and “jackass-rabbit.”42 Later Mark Twain created a similar fictional character of much fuller dimensions, the outspoken “Mr. Brown.” The still-developing author was seeking a means of expressing himself frankly but without sullying himself.
Few of the surviving pieces from the Enterprise could justifiably be called sketches. One of these, “Ye Sentimental Law Student,” quotes a letter, identified as probably by the Unreliable, effusively expressing the devotion of the writer, “the party of the second part,” to “Mary, the peerless party of the first part.” “The view from the lonely and segregated mountain peak of this portion of what is called and known as Creation,” he avers, “with all and singular the hereditaments and appurtenances thereunto appertaining and belonging, is expressively grand and inspiring.” For Mary’s benefit he extends his comically legalistic description. Another piece, published in May 1864, provides a learned essay on Washoe in response to an innocent inquiry from a Missourian. He replies, for instance, that it may rain for four to seven days in a row, after which “you may loan out your umbrella for twelve months, with the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.”
On July 26, 1863, Clemens lost everything he owned, including mining stocks, when the Virginia City hotel where he lived burned down. He may have felt this was a signal that he should leave Nevada. But he continued to identify himself with the place, though he was unwell for a time. He took advantage of the hot mineral springs at Steamboat Springs, then went to San Francisco, but only for a month.
One of the most famous, even notorious, of Mark Twain’s writings of his western years is “A Bloody Massacre near Carson” (October 1863). His purpose, he explained later, was to compose a “reformatory satire” on the “dividend-cooking system” of misleading investors, but he admitted that nobody ever saw the point of the satire.43 This hoax reported that one Hopkins, who lived in the old log house between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s at the edge of a forest, had been driven to despair by the loss of his savings through financial manipulations in San Francisco. He died after having ridden into town, his throat cut ear to ear, with his wife’s bloody scalp in his hand. The husband was discovered to have brutally murdered six of his children. The report included many gruesome details. But Hopkins was, in fact, a bachelor; there was no forest for many miles—and Dutch Nick’s and Empire City were one and the same. If the reader did not know this geography, he might have detected the hoax nonetheless: Hopkins’s riding four to five miles with his throat cut ear to ear ought to have alerted the wary. But the nearby Gold Hill Daily News picked up the story as fact, as did other papers. When Mark Twain wrote in the next issue of the Enterprise, “I take it all back,” he was widely attacked. California newspapers such as the Sacramento Daily Union demanded that he be discharged. Eventually the putative “massacre” became part of the local lore, frequently alluded to in newspapers.
In the spring of 1864, Mark Twain’s often obnoxious ways finally crossed the line and brought about his departure from Nevada. He had been feuding fiercely, in print, with the publisher of the Virginia City Union when, by chance, a piece he had written—but then held back on advice from Dan De Quille—nevertheless appeared in the Enterprise. The story had to do with local efforts to raise money for the Sanitary Fund, a Civil War organization resembling the later Red Cross. It had been stated, Mark Twain wrote, that funds raised for the organization had been misdirected to “a Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East.” He then asserted that the charge was “a hoax, but not all a hoax, for an effort is being made to divert these funds from their proper course.”44 The Union responded by referring to the writer as having “no gentlemanly sense of professional propriety” and being “a vulgar liar.”45 Clemens demanded “a public retraction” or “satisfaction” from James Laird, the editor of the Union, “the satisfaction due to a gentleman,” although privately he apologized to the women of the Sanitary Fund. “Satisfaction” meant that Clemens was challenging Laird to a duel. As he explained in 1899, “Dueling was in that day a custom there—a temporary one. The weapons were always Colt’s navy revolvers, distance 15 paces; fire, & advance; six shots allowed.” Although the duel did not take place, it was illegal to “send a challenge, carry a challenge, or receive one.”46 To escape the law, Clemens wrote his brother, “Steve & I are going to the States.” On May 29, accompanied by his friends Steve Gillis, a printer and journalist, and Joe Goodman, Clemens went to California. Partly through his love of mischief, partly as the result of others’ malice, partly through mischance, Sam Clemens had become persona non grata in the territory.
The Gold Hill Daily News bid good riddance: “Shifting the locale of his tales of fiction from the Forest of Dutch Nick’s to Carson City; the dramatis personae thereof from the Hopkins family to the Ladies of the Sanitary Fair; and the plot thereof from murder to miscegenation—he slopped. The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man, though sheathed with the brass and triple cheek of Mark Twain.” But the Virginia City Old Piute was kinder: “We shall miss Mark…. To know him was to love him…. God bless you, Mark!”47
The original and authentic Mark Twain sprang from this Nevada stint. There Samuel Clemens found that he could become a writer by dramatizing a portion of himself and then assuming this identity when he wrote. Who was “Mark Twain”? He was,
