[begin page 1]
CHAPTER 1
My brother had just been appointed
Secretary of Nevada TerritoryⒺ—an office of such majesty that it concentrated in
itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and
Acting Governor in the Governor’s absence. A
salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year and the title of “Mr. Secretary,” gave to
the great position an air of wild and
imposing grandeur. I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and
his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey
he was going
to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel!
I never had been away from home
Ⓔ, and that word “travel” had a seductive
[begin page 2] charm for
me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains
and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far
West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have
all kinds of adventures, and
maybe
Ⓐ get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us
all about it, and be a hero. And he would see
the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work
was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of
shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. And by and by he would
become very rich, and return home by sea, and be
able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean, and “the
Isthmus
Ⓐ” as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face.
What I suffered in contemplating his
happiness, pen cannot describe. And so, when
he offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of
private secretary under him
Ⓔ, it appeared to me that
the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was rolled together as a
scroll
Ⓔ! I had nothing more to desire. My contentment was complete.
At the end of an hour
or two I was ready for the journey. Not much packing up was necessary, because we
were going in the overland stage
Ⓔ from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and passengers were only allowed a small quantity
of baggage apiece.
There was no Pacific railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve years ago—not a
single rail of it.
I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months—I had
no thought of staying longer than that. I meant to see all I could that was new and
strange, and then hurry home to business. I little
thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six
or seven uncommonly long yearsⒺ!
I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next
day, we took
shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a steamboat bound up the Missouri riverⒶ.
We were six days going from St. Louis to “St. JoeⒶ”—a trip that was so dull, and sleepy, and eventless that it has left no more impression
on my memory than if its
duration had been six minutes instead of that many days. No record is left in my mind,
now, concerning it, but a confused jumble of
savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other;
and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then
retired from and [begin page 3] climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars
which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our crutches and sparred
overⒺ. In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. JoeⒶ by land, for she was walking most of the timeⒺ, anyhow—climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all
day long. The captain said she was a
“bully” boat, and all she wanted was more
“shear”Ⓐ
Ⓔ and a bigger
wheel. I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the deep sagacity not to say
so.
Explanatory Notes CHAPTER 1
Ⓔ
My brother had just
been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory] Orion Clemens (1825–97) learned of his
appointment as secretary of Nevada
Territory by President Lincoln on 27 March 1861, obtained his commission on 20 April,
and received his final instructions on 2 July.
The position had been secured for him by Edward Bates (1793–1869), Lincoln’s newly
appointed attorney general, who wrote to Secretary of State William Seward on 12 March
1861:
I have just received a letter from Orion Clemens of Mo begging
me to help him to an office suitable to his degree & qualifications—& he indicates
the post of Secretary of a
Territory—any Territory except Utah—
Mr C was bred a printer—I
knew him in his apprenticeship—a good boy, anxious to learn, using all means in his
power to do so. He edited a newspaper in a
country town of Mo, with fair success. Studied law, & practiced for several years, in N.E. Mo. His success as a lawyer was not great, chiefly, I am told, because his politics
did not suit his
locality—He was a Whig, but joined the Republicans, & that, while it was honest & manly,
subjected him to an opposition amounting almost to persecution.
I consider him an honest man of fair
mediocrity of talents & learning—more indeed of both, than I have seen in several
Territorial secretaries.
Without being very urgent with you, I commend Mr Clemens to you, as a worthy & competent
man, who will be
grateful for a favor. (Bates to Seward, 12 Mar 61,
Letters of
Application
)
In 1860 Orion had campaigned vigorously on behalf of Lincoln and the
Republican Party (MEC, 10; Miller,
1–2; Mack 1961b, 69).
Ⓔ I envied my brother
. . . I never had been away from home] To create a fictional persona for the narrator,
Clemens departed in
several ways from the facts.
In reality, he had left home in June 1853 at the age of seventeen.
After working for four years as a journeyman typesetter in various midwestern and
eastern cities, he began his training in April 1857
as a cub pilot on the Mississippi. As a licensed pilot he earned as much as $250 a
month. For a period in 1860–61 he
even provided financial support for Orion, who was ten years his senior and had been
married since 1854. Still, Clemens had left the
river by May 1861 (see the note at 2.18–20), and may well have felt some envy toward
his brother (
L1
, 1–3, 44–46, 58–59, 69–71, 102, 103–4, 112;
AD, 29 Mar 1906,
CU-MARK, in
MTA
, 2:290–91).
Ⓔ he offered me
. . . the sublime position of private secretary under him] Orion’s official instructions
stipulated that
“as a general thing, the Secretary can,
in person, perform
all the duties
pertaining to his office” (
Miller, 2).
He
therefore had no authority to offer his brother a secretarial position. But that did
not deter Clemens, who had saved
[begin page 575] enough money from his pilot’s wages to pay for both stage fares to Carson City (see
the note at 4.2–3)
and provide approximately $800 more for expenses. During the Sixty-day session of
the first Territorial Legislature, from 1
October through 29 November 1861, Orion did hire his brother as a clerk, at $8 a day,
for a total of $480 (
Miller, 1–3;
AD, 29 Mar 1906,
CU-MARK, in
MTA
,
2:291).
Ⓔ the heavens and the
earth passed away, and the firmament was rolled together as a scroll] Revelation 6:14
and 21:1: “And the heaven departed
as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out
of their places. . . . And I
saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed
away; and there was no more sea.”
Ⓔ At the end of an hour or
two I was ready . . . because we were going in the overland stage] Clemens did not
in fact decide to go with
Orion until early July 1861.
For several weeks after Orion was told of his appointment on 27 March,
Clemens continued to work as a pilot, completing his final run in New Orleans on 8
May and returning to St. Louis as a passenger on 21
May, by which date the Civil War had virtually halted commercial river traffic. From
mid-June until early July he belonged to a small
band of Confederate volunteers, an episode he later fictionalized in “The Private
History of a Campaign That Failed”
(
SLC 1885). On 4 July he met in St. Louis with Orion, who had left behind his wife and
daughter in Keokuk, Iowa; on 18 July the brothers embarked from St. Louis on the
Sioux City, bound up the
Missouri River for the overland stagecoach at St. Joseph (
L1
,
121–22;
MEC, 10–11).
Ⓔ I only proposed to stay
in Nevada three months . . . seven uncommonly long years] In August 1866 Clemens recalled
that when he left for
Nevada he expected “to be gone 3 months . . . thinking the war would be closed & the
river open again by
that time” (
L1
, 357). But the War lasted until April 1865,
and he remained in the West until December 1866, returning to St. Louis in March 1867,
after an absence of nearly six years (
L2
, 1, 18 n. 1).
Ⓔ
sand-bars which we
roosted on . . . and then got out our crutches and sparred over] To spar a vessel
over a sand-bar, long stout
poles were lashed to either side of it,
by means of
which the bow was lifted as on crutches. The wheels were then put in forward motion
and the boat driven ahead for a short distance,
perhaps no more than a few feet. . . . This operation was repeated as often as necessary
to enable the boat
partly to hobble over, partly to dig its way through the bar into the deeper water
of the pool beyond. (Hunter, 254–55)
Ⓔ she was walking most of the
time] This passage resembles a description in Albert D. Richardson’s
Beyond the Mississippi, a
book Clemens probably read while working on
Roughing It (SLC to Bliss, 29 Oct 70,
[begin page 576]
Daley).
Richardson had taken a steamboat in 1857 at
Jefferson City, Missouri, to connect with the overland stage at Kansas City. “Navigating
the Missouri, at low water,” he
wrote, “is like putting a steamer upon dry land, and sending a boy ahead with a sprinkling
pot. Our boat rubbed and scraped
upon sand-bars, and they stopped us abruptly a dozen times a day” (
Richardson,
21–22, 25, 33).
Ⓔ “shear”] More
commonly “sheer,” the curvature from bow to stern of a ship’s deck as shown in side
elevation.
