American Fun Read online

  Sometime after midnight (who was keeping time?) two ruffians arrived from Spanish Gulch, one of them identified as “Cut-nosed-Bill.” Doten notes that they “were not invited but were no less welcome and entered into the spirit of jollification with us.” The singing and drinking doubled in volume—“the fun grew ‘fast and furious’ ”—and before long “all felt filled with the ‘milk of human kindness.’ ” Doten’s only regret during this “most glorious frolic,” which broke up after the blush of dawn, was the “two or three disgraceful little quarrels between Locke and cut-nosed Bill and others.” But all was saved. The majority had “interfered,” “prevented a fight,” and the spirit of jollification prevailed.

  Doten grew so loyal to California fun that he started to evangelize in his hometown paper, the possibly unamused Plymouth Rock. Writing under the nom de guerre “Ben Bolt,” he had titillated his readers for years with the usual gold rush sensations: rattlers, grizzlies, vigilantes, gamblers, and the five-year explosion of San Francisco from the “little Spanish village of ‘Yerba Buena’ ” to a booming cosmopolis. But his missives celebrating the Fourth of July, the Golden State’s vaunted new holiday, provoked New England with a decidedly libertine vision of democracy. “As usual in California,” he wrote in 1854—a year when activists breathed fire for prohibition throughout the northeastern states—the Fourth “was celebrated by a most unusual amount of powder burning, cracker-popping, horse racing, whiskey-drinking, patriotism, and (where the case seemed to demand it), a small ‘tussle’ or two.” The diggings woke early when Juan Fernandez—“a native of Hindostan”—fired off a log fashioned into a bomb and initiated an all-day binge of shooting, dancing, hunting, and drinking. Things turned rather lurid after dark, when the men (“We had no ladies to grace the occasion”) let themselves go in an all-out “stag dance” reminiscent of Borthwick’s miners’ ball. After a pause for a few cigars and songs, “all sorts of steps were taken, from polkas and waltzes, down to the ‘fore and after,’ ” as well as giving another tip-off as to their interracial company, the “ ‘Juba.’ ” Doten knew his account would raise eyebrows—and hackles. Evidently that was his aim:

  Let no “old fogy,” when he reads this, turn up his immaculate nose with a grim smile, at what he may term “follies.” Just let him be situated precisely as we are situated here, and then see how he would act. If he has any warm blood at all about his heart, he might easily do worse than we did.

  On July 4, 1855, such antics hit a boil, as “Bolt” dutifully reported to the Rock. Doten and his friend George rose before sunrise and roused the town of Fort John by firing their rifles “as fast as [they] could load.” The miners dragged out with their “guns and pistols,” held a communal reveille, breakfasted together, “marched down town with drum and fife,” and went about gathering a band of “some 40—quite a force” to disport themselves throughout the day. Still feeling ornery after dinner, they marched six miles in single file with someone named “jackass at the head.” Their destination was Fiddletown, where they hurled three huzzas at the various “public houses,” made incendiary devices from the blacksmith’s four anvils, dined and drank in its various pubs, and warmed the floor of the Spanish Dance Hall.

  The locals quickly rose to the challenge, forming a band called the “Fiddletown Doughheads” and marching “in opposition” down the middle of the street—their “five fiddles” trying “in vain” to drown out Doten’s band: “Our fifer, with protruding eyes and distending cheeks, blew his shrillest blast, while our ambitious drummer put in his prettiest licks. The fiddlers were nowhere; they lost their tune completely, not being able to hear their own fiddles. The ‘Doughheads’ gave us three cheers which we returned with earnest.” They marched three rings around the dance hall and exited town, again in formation, “to the tune of Yankee Doodle.” Back in Fort John, they “fired a volley in front of Vance’s, took a drink and dispersed quietly to [their] beds.” Faithfully reporting these events to the Rock, he added a poke at the temperance movement:

  Whether any of the citizens of Fort John imbibed anything stronger than ginger-pop or soda water, we’ll not mention in this connection, but if there was “anything stronger,” “cocktails” or “sherry cobblers,” for instance, taken a “corrective of the stomach,” let us excuse it on the ground that the “Maine Liquor Law” has not yet extended its protecting arm over the benighted citizens of this barbarous region.… Perhaps the day may come when “Maine Liquor Riots” may become known in these parts, when sharp-nosed policemen will invade the log cabins and little tents of the miners, keen on the scent to discover some concealed bottle of whiskey.

  The month before, Maine’s suppression of drinking through electoral politics had indeed led to an actual, violent riot. But the Siege of Fiddletown, for all its fun and loud restraint, resembled nothing nearly so much as the Sons of Liberty’s Stamp Act parade, right down to the three improvised cheers in front of every pub. Which is to say, it was radically civil.

  By 1855, at the age of twenty-five, Doten had earned his California diploma.

  MINERS HAD BEEN SCRAPING bits of gold from Nevada (then called the Washoe Territory) as early as 1850, but in 1859 it dawned on someone why the mud in these mines was blue. The greatest silver strike in U.S. history turned this sagebrush desert, hitherto inhabited mostly by Mormons, into a hub of cutthroat commerce. In a matter of two years, Virginia City, once a tent camp on the Comstock Lode, teemed with all the luxuries of a Wild West metropolis: fire companies, hotels, banks, brothels, gambling halls, and opium dens. The town constantly shook from underground explosions, trickled with steam from its natural hot springs, and whizzed with volleys between its rival newspapers, the Union and the Enterprise.

  Alfred Doten quit mining in 1855, by which point the California gold fields had been gouged, picked, sluiced, and sifted of their very last nuggets, slurry, and dust. He took a crack at farming and ranching for a while, but he caught the gold bug again in 1862. He trekked his way across the Sierras, pausing here and there, as was still his wont, for trysts, benders, jollification, and the odd dispatch to the Rock. When he got to “far famed” Virginia City on July 1, it looked to him like a step back in time—to “San Francisco in ’49.” For the first time in fourteen years of journaling, Doten was flummoxed:

  No use for my pencil to try & describe this place—can’t do it—big, bustling, noisy city—all process of creation—streets full of wagons, horses, omnibuses, crowd—sidewalk crowded with rushing crowd—500 houses being built … great circus performing here … lots of gambling saloons open to the public—crowded—Monte, faro, chuckerluck, rouge et noir &c—bands of music in orchestra … in the saloons also were dancing girls—hurdy gurdys, organs &c in the streets—lots of money flying around in this city & no mistake—

  One thing is certain: it was a town mad for fun.

  Three days later, on Doten’s favorite holiday, the blacksmiths exploded the customary anvils, and the clubs and fire departments held parades, but there were also “considerable drunks & some fights—several men got shot in rows & two were killed.” Such random violence was common in Nevada, part of the ambience, and Doten jotted it down with less ceremony than he did Martin the Wizard’s “fancy tricks”—“ ‘the vanishing coin,’ swallowing my jack-knife, ‘The one-armed fiddler’ &c.”—or the opening of a mill, two weeks later, for which three taverns spotted kegs of lager and a boisterous crowd trailed Doten’s bandwagon, singing “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia.” A minor riot broke out that night, leavened by gunfire and broken windows, but nobody was killed (thanks to a malfunctioning revolver), and the parties raged on for the rest of the summer. In August, he “got on a big spree, the wildest [he] ever saw, but still no fighting or anything disagreeable.” Nevada was proving to be Doten’s kind of place.

  He set himself up in the town of Como, where he continued posting updates to the Rock and the odd correspondence to the Virginia Daily Union. That winter he kept warm with endless drinking, gam
bling, fiddling, and some “skylarking” that sent his friend Murphy’s arm slicing through a window. And early the following March, in the midst of his cotillions-and-billiards regime, he crossed paths with a rising local celebrity: “Evening stage brought a noted correspondent of the Territorial Enterprise who writes under the ‘nomme de plume’ of ‘Mark Twain’—his name is Samuel Clements [sic].” The journalists disported over the next couple of days. The minutes of this summit are unrecorded, but it is certain the conversation between these young troublemakers wasn’t fit for public consumption.

  AT THE TIME “Mark Twain” was barely a month old. Samuel Clemens had arrived in the Washoe in 1861. His brother Orion had come to be Governor Nye’s factotum, and aimless Sam had tagged along. His résumé by then listed every last thing from printer’s devil to riverboat pilot to, most recently, Confederate militia deserter; in Nevada his career was no better focused. He cast about for a year or so, picking up odd clerical jobs, failing miserably as a prospector and a placer miner, but succeeding, during a spell of unrepentant loafing, at setting several forested mountains ablaze along the banks of Lake Tahoe. He admired this “sublime” and “beautiful” sight from the safety of a rowboat: “Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake!”

  Clemens’s follies during this fallow period—the best of them later embellished in Roughing It—have made deep contributions to the popular belief that even the worst of the Wild West was fun. Whether it is Sam getting bucked off an unbroken “Mexican plug” (“Oh, don’t he buck, though!”), Sam having breakfast with the murderous “Slade” (“Here was romance, and I sitting face to face with it!”), Sam waking in a cabin filled with tarantulas (“It was dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a thing could be seen”), or Sam losing his rights to a million-dollar claim, Sam Clemens, neophyte argonaut, sports all the bluster and slack-jawed innocence that made America’s western adventure look like a lark. Like most U.S. citizens he was out of his depth, but he was dead set on giving every ride a whirl. Blind to danger, wired for novelty, always up for an endorphin rush, Sam was his own best picaro, a character he mined for all its comic gold.

  In the summer of 1862, right around the time Doten hit Nevada, Clemens was flat busted in the mountain town of Aurora. A proven flop at mining, he had been sending squibs to the Territorial Enterprise and signing them simply, aptly, “Josh.” Writing with an ear for the region’s tall tales and its special taste for the rude and absurd, he joshed his readers with exaggerated mining claims, burlesques of the territory’s blowhard chief justice, and a spoof of an Independence Day oration. Joseph Goodman, the Enterprise’s armed-to-the-teeth editor, who had made his own career provoking the locals, thought the young firebrand was what the paper needed—for he was also suddenly understaffed: his prized editor and staff writer, the facetious Dan De Quille (William Wright), needed to visit his family in Iowa. When Clemens received the offer of $25 a week (the price of a steak in flush Virginia City), he was so elated, and so impoverished, that he closed the 130-mile distance on foot and arrived at the Enterprise reeking of sweat, bristling with straw from his makeshift beds, and bearded halfway down his chest. He cleaned himself up right there in the offices and went about getting a Nevada education: regarding the do’s and do’s of lying. Goodman advised him: “Unassailable certainty,” especially when the truth is far from certain, “is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation.”

  This was all the permission Clemens needed. Still writing as “Josh,” a name that was steadily gaining prestige, he exaggerated dull agricultural statistics, dressed up skirmishes with handsome death tolls, and settled into the idea that he “could take [his] pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and the interests of the paper demanded it.” In October Josh sloughed off fact altogether and enjoyed the liberty of an all-out hoax—a practice he may have picked up from the humorist Artemus Ward, who had frightened readers of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer with his 1858 story of an escaped grave-robbing hyena. Clemens’s hoax of a “petrified man” tickled witty locals and wowed the credulous world. It reported the discovery of a century-old cadaver “sitting” in a cave with a curiously “pensive” bearing. Its success owed a lot to its riddling details:

  the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported 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.

  Close reading shows the Thinker to be thumbing his nose. Even “Judge Sewell or Sowell,” the Humboldt coroner lampooned in the piece for holding “an inquest on the body,” had to laugh at his own expense. But a medical journal, the Lancet, in far-off London, where they lacked the refinement of Washoe wit, cited the ridiculous marvel as fact.

  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 impropriety. 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.