Authors: John Beckman
In January 1863, as his stock was rising, Clemens traded “Josh” for the better brand “Mark Twain” and never looked back. He dined out for months on his
Union
rival,
Clement Rice, a fellow statehouse reporter and traveling companion whom he worked up into a freeloading boor, the “
Unreliable.” In a series of increasingly improbable dispatches, Twain and the Unreliable crashed candy-pulls, dance parties, senators’ conventions, and a wedding where the Unreliable kept requesting “the pea-nut song” and following the bride and groom “like an evil spirit.” Along the way “Mark Twain” grew unassailable, skewering politicians, sending up rivals, and paying his tabs with self-mocking puff pieces for hotels as far away as San Francisco. Almost overnight, at least by the time he met Doten in Como, “Mark Twain” had become the tallest lightning rod for Washoe’s firebolt sense of humor.
The capacity to tell a joke in the West, or at least to take one, was worth more than a service revolver.
Jokes divided the men from the fools. One April 1 in San Francisco, Doten and friends made a day’s entertainment of taking in the gags: sealed envelopes, turned down on sidewalks, were addressed to “
April Fool & Co.”; large crowds flocked to see a beached whale facetiously reported in the papers. “All sorts of fools traps were set and all sorts of people fell into them.” Among the many pranks Dan De Quille remembered from the Comstock, most were at the expense of gormless outsiders, like the recent arrivals who watched with horror as “
that most incorrigible of jokers,
Bill Terry” placed a restaurant order for “baked horned toad, two broiled lizards on toast, with tarantula sauce—stewed rattlesnake and poached scorpions on the side!” He was served straightaway by conspirators in the kitchen while the onlookers “nearly twisted their necks out of joint” trying to glimpse what he was eating. Some jokes took in great masses of marks, like the California
miners who poured in from all around to see
William Wilson’s legendary “
12 pound nugget”—which turned out to be a healthy baby boy. “Each of the miners loved being had,”
William Bennett wrote of the prank. “As each squad came out of the cabin, every man solemnly asserted that the Wilson nugget was the ‘boss,’ the finest ever seen.…
Men came for two or three days and asked to be shown the nugget, some arriving from camps eight or ten miles distant.”
One famous prank, recounted in
Roughing It
and still commemorated in Nevada, pitted a whole town against the U.S. government. The incident that started it was rather improbable: an ostensible landslide in the mountains around Carson had dropped the entirety of
Tom Rust’s ranch smack on top of
Richard D. Sides’s ranch, “exactly cover[ing] up every single vestige of his property.” Apparently Rust liked the new arrangement and decided he would stay. When Sides went to fresh-off-the-coach territorial attorney general
Benjamin B. Bunker, accusing Rust of “trespassing,” the indignant official took up the case. He pulled together a court, complete with winking lawyers and in-the-know witnesses, and put the intruding rancher on trial. The conspiring locals were up in arms, insisting the fallen ranchland still belonged to Rust. After days of burlesque testimony, and Bunker’s shrill closing statements notwithstanding, the court came back with the maddening verdict that Sides “had been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of God!” It took the attorney general a couple of months, but eventually the joke managed “to boor itself, like another Hoosac Tunnel, through the solid adamant of his understanding.”
Miners took pride in telling fact from humbug, lucky strikes from “salted” mines, and they made open examples of interlopers and idiots. Writers for the
Enterprise
played to this prejudice and whipped the public into a froth. As one historian puts it, two of the paper’s functions were “
to provoke cascades of inextinguishable merriment” and “to give the gardaloo or raspberry to the great and saintly just for the pure, uninhibited hell of it.”
At a time when eastern culture, as the historian and critic
Ann Douglas has shown, was being aggressively “feminized” all throughout the United States under the widespread influence of middle-class Christian journalism, western culture, with the help of the papers, was flaunting its unwashed
im
propriety. The
Enterprise
may have been the worst offender, but many of Virginia City’s papers (they counted at least twelve by 1864) sent their rounders into the ring, fabricating news, talking trash in print, vilifying aspiring political candidates, and generally lowering the public tone. Hoaxes, pranks, irreverence, and slang
appealed to the tastes of a mostly male
demos
who survived by grit and drank their nights away at the countless poker tables.
But in October 1863, Twain’s “Empire City Massacre” hoax succeeded in turning even this case-hardened readership’s iron stomach. In previous months, as the
Civil War raged throughout the States and Nevadans traded blows over their constitutional convention,
a rash of murders, gunfights, and hangings were keeping things interesting for Virginia City. Desensitized (or inspired) by this bellicose atmosphere, Twain dreamed up an outrageous story meant to shame the San Francisco
Bulletin
for publishing misleading investment information. Like any worthwhile hoax, however, its only real virtue was riling up readers.
The story was gruesome.
Philip Hopkins, a father of six who lived in the “
great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” slaughtered his family with an axe. He also slashed the throat of a witness, who galloped four miles to Carson City with Hopkins’s wife’s “reeking scalp” as evidence—then died. The destitute Hopkins, the story concluded, had been impoverished by “the newspapers of San Francisco.” The details were ludicrous, but even the canniest readers missed Twain’s tip-offs that the whole thing was a fraud: Nevada had no pines, Dutch Nick’s was a tavern in Empire City, Philip Hopkins was a well-known bachelor, and no Paul Revere slashed ear to ear could weather such a nightmare ride. The next morning, over breakfast, Sam and Dan watched with interest while a hapless reader absorbed the news: “
Presently his eyes spread wide open, just as his jaws swung asunder to take in a potato approaching it on a fork; the potato halted, the face lit up redly, and the whole man was on fire with excitement.”
The sensation, the excitement, seized the territory, where the
Daily News
reprinted the story that afternoon. Only the
Evening Bulletin
, given time to cool off, called it “
as baseless as the fabric of a dream.” Twain issued a one-line response: “I take it all back.” The
News
called it “a lie,” to which Twain belittled their use of “small caps.” But the fun, of course, was far from over, and “fun,” needless to say, was the bone of contention. Among the many complaints was the
Bulletin
’s opinion that “the man who could pen such a story … and sen[d] a pang of terror into the hearts of many persons, as a joke, in fun, can have but a very
indefinite idea of the elements of a joke.” Twain replied that the writer was an “oyster-brained idiot” and that he himself felt not one “pang of remorse,” as if to suggest that he in fact had a very
definite
idea “of the elements of a joke.” Indeed, a gag that kept readers wringing their hands as late as January over their “shock[ed]… moral sense” had struck the bull’s-eye of Nevada’s social irony: citizens of the murderous, decadent Washoe Territory needed a bulletproof “moral sense” if they were to have any such thing at all.
DAN DE QUILLE
’
S
History of the Big Bonanza,
written years later in Clemens’s Hartford mansion, pays keen attention to the “
fun,” “frolic,” and “deviltry” that educated the average miner. One 1860 mining excursion, when Dan and his companions follow a sketchy rumor of “gold as large as peas,” shows how reckless fun helped even quick-to-murder rogues sharpen their so-called moral sense.
Deep in the
El Dorado canyon, when the men have to cross the Carson River, one miner, Tom, hires another one, Pike, to lug him on his back. Midway through the ford, sunk to his knees in mud, with Tom clinging to his hip “as closely as a young Indian,” Pike starts to panic, shouting “Snake! snake!” and begging Tom to dismount. “A snake is biting me all to pieces.” Tom, thinking Pike is pulling a prank, reaches around and socks him in the mouth. Their fisticuffs culminate in Tom’s awkward attempt to murder Pike with his waterlogged revolver. Only when Pike explains that Tom’s needle-sharp spurs were “causing him to think he [is] being bitten on all sides by water-snakes” can the men laugh it off, shake hands, and move on.
A few days later, when they have arrived in El Dorado and been thoroughly disabused of any hope of pea-sized gold, Tom is the last to rise for breakfast. Pike watches with relish as Tom pulls on his boot and lets go with a horrendous scream. “Pull off my boot, quick, somebody! There is a scorpion in it!” Pike rushes to Tom, who rolls on the ground, but insists the boot can’t be removed. Tom’s foot is too swollen: the boot needs to be cut. “ ‘Cut it off then!’ roar[s] Tom, ‘cut it off, I can’t die this way!’ ” The boot is cut, the foot removed, and a prickly pear is found clinging
to the heel of Tom’s stocking. When the laughter subsides, everyone is surprised by Tom’s calm reaction—everyone but Pike, in whose violent imagination Tom is lying low to kill him.
When they are alone in the ravines later that day, prospecting for measly specks of gold, Dan updates Tom on how frightened Pike has gotten, noting that “men are killed in this country for more trifling things.” Tom’s response reveals a coarse sense of civility: “I don’t want to kill any man, but I do want to play even on Pike. It was mean on him to put that thing into my boot after we had shook hands down at the river.” The terms were clear: a handshake was as good as a contract in the land of grizzlies and rattlesnakes, and even a joke has its time and place. Tom knows Pike is “a great coward,” and his intention is to “scare the life out of him before this trip is over.”
Reports in the region of eleven armed
Paiutes “going eastward at a dog-trot” start bands of miners packing for Carson. Craven Pike wants to pack out, too, but Tom and Dan and the rest of the connivers argue they are safer staying put for the night, on the ruse that they have heard the Indians are lying in wait for prospectors between there and the river. The thought that they are cut off terrifies Pike, who turns jumpy and paranoid but tries to save face by boasting they would have some “fun a fightin’ Injuns ’fore mornin’.” (Little did he know.) Tom baits his fear by lighting a campfire and hollering a song about a yokel “from Pike.” Pike himself hallucinates the rustling of predators and “lay awake a long time listening for Indians.” When he finally passes out after midnight, the others sneak away into the hills, having been planning the prank all day. On cue they ambush him through the clattering shale rock, “leaping and making as much noise as though old Winnemucca and half the Piute tribe were coming down the mountain.” They shout and curse and return imaginary fire, and a half-dead Hank staggers into camp, demanding of the panicked Pike, “Carry me off!” Pike hauls Hank about “two rods” before chucking him into some “thorny bushes” and disappearing into the night.
The next day, after fearing Pike has been drowned in the river and swearing off such “deviltry” for good, the men find him on Chinatown’s main street, regaling a crowd with his tale of valor. Unable to resist one
last prank, Tom’s men deny every word of it and lead Pike to believe it was all a dream.
In the devilish hands of fun-loving miners, even the diggings’ deadliest threats—vipers, murderers, hostile Indians—could be fashioned into marvelous playthings. The western prankster, like Brother Rabbit, did not shrink from the high-stakes game. His taste was for gunpowder, riches, and power, and his practical jokes followed suit. He also used the tricks of his trade to jostle society for its biggest laughs. Poltroons like Pike and buffoons like Attorney General “Bunscombe” went against the grain of free-spirited communities that survived by sociability, courage, and wits. Whereas vigilantes made examples of desperadoes by hanging them from the highest trees, pranksters called out hotheads and fools who threatened to drag society down, and in doing so they buoyed society up.
WHEN ARTEMUS WARD
(Charles Farrar Browne), the celebrity lecturer and humorist, hit Virginia City in time for the 1863 Christmas bacchanalia, he, Sam, and Dan—Ward called them the “
Three Saints”—indulged in a notorious two-week binge that found them glorified in print, entertaining packed houses, and taking a midnight tour of the rooftops that was rudely halted by Virginia City police. Ward, who was famous for crazy spellings and
hedonism, soberly concluded that the town was “
very wild” but “that a mining city must go through with a certain amount of unadulterated cussedness before it can settle down and behave itself in a conservative and seemly manner.” These “Saints” were connoisseurs of unadulterated cussedness; they left seemly manners to the cattle train of latecomers.
By January 4 Clemens had already tapped his famous friend’s connections and published a bona fide Washoe missive in the New York
Sunday Mercury
. Twain’s first eastern publication, offering “
‘opinions and reflections’ upon recent political movements,” calls to mind Doten’s baiting letters to
Plymouth Rock
. It aims to shock the uppity eastern states with its
mockery of religion, government, and babies, but it also fires a political skyrocket, as if celebrating a New Year’s Eve of territorial
independence. “Satisfied” that Nevadans will shoot down the state constitution, on the grounds that it calls for the taxation of mines, Twain puts all the nominated officials up for sale. As advertised, some are more useful back east than out west: “One Governor, entirely new. Attended Sunday-school in his youth, and still remembers it. Never drinks. In other respects, however, his habits are good.” Some, like the “second-hand” treasurer, are good to nobody but themselves: “Took excellent care of the funds—has them yet.”