American Fun Read online

  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.”

  “The Story of Pike and Tom,” a tale of brinksmanship and one-upmanship. (Courtesy of Special Collections, Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy.)

  The freedom with which Twain skewered politicians, much like the freedom with which he needled public sympathies and roared away his nights with other drunk reporters, was enabled on some level by the permissiveness of the West, and by the viral mistrust of authority and control, but it also sprang from his fascination with community—especially reckless, chaotic community. He liked watching society run its rocky course, and he bristled when oligarchs got in the way. Twain was nobody’s radical democrat. He despised Nevada juries—“composed of two desperadoes, two low beer-house politicians, three barkeepers, two ranchmen who could not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkeys!”—but he was thrilled by dance halls and theaters in uproar; delighted by Nevada’s “infinitely varied and copious” slang; amused, then scared, then ultimately enlarged by the widespread sensations caused by his hoaxes, for here was humanity at its most excitable.

  The noblest fun he witnessed along these lines—“the wildest mob Virginia had ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable”—was during his last month in Virginia City, when the citizens “rose as a man” and heaped their accumulated riches on the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a medical brigade serving both sides of the Civil War. Nevadans’ “flush-times” munificence met their wartime patriotism and gave way to an extraordinary prank that evinced the territory’s sterling character.

  Reuel Gridley, Clemens’s childhood classmate, was living in the nearby town of Austin. That March, when he lost Austin’s mayoral race, Gridley also lost a bet with his Republican opponent and had to haul a fifty-pound flour sack through the streets, followed by townsfolk and a marching band. When someone suggested he auction the sack “for the benefit of the Sanitary,” the crowd went wild. The first winner bought it for $250, then turned around and auctioned it off again. By the end of the day it had been bought and sold so often that it had earned a stunning $8,000. Virginia City caught wind of the gag and, not to be bested, called for the sack themselves. They were disgusted when they could raise only $5,000, and they thought they might get another chance the next morning when a parade of carriages blared its way down the high street, led by Gridley and his flour sack, “the latter splendid with bright paint and gilt lettering.” But the wagons kept going out the other side of town, leaving Virginians with their wounded pride. It was a warm spring day, and the glittering procession (Clemens included) merrily rolled on over the sagebrush mountains to the mining towns of Gold Hill, Silver City, and Dayton, announcing their arrival with “drums beating and colors flying” and greeting mobs of “men, women and children, Chinamen and Indians” who had been alerted in advance by telegram.

  Gridley’s traveling orgy of absurd largess rolled all the way to Carson City, and eventually on to San Francisco, where its reputation preceded it. The prank held on for three months straight, and the sack was last sold at “a monster Sanitary Fair” in St. Louis, where it was displayed alongside its final purchase price, valued in bricks of Nevada silver ($150,000!), and was baked into platters of costly cakes.

  WHAT J. D. BORTHWICK CALLED a “California education”—the “polish” argonauts got “from being violently shaken up with a crowd of men of different habits and ideas from their own”—conjures up lessons in plain moral sense. Borthwick’s phrasing is remarkably similar to that of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the eighteenth-century father of “moral sense” philosophy and Thomas Hobbes’s fiercest philosophical rival. Unlike bitter and cynical Hobbes, who believed people entered into society out of selfish motives, Shaftesbury thought people were naturally good citizens, who, when left to their own devices, achieved their aims through brisk give-and-take. In the throes of open public discourse—as in barrooms and around campfires, where civility turns coarse and often boisterous—folks are free to rail and joke, even on occasion, in his words, to “fight.” Such conflict is safe, by and large, when the majority are interested in the common good. In a society that is motivated by the generality’s good, even etiquette can afford to be feisty. In fact, as Shaftesbury argued, it has to be. “All Politeness,” he wrote, “is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Men’s Understandings. ’Tis a destroying of Civility, Good Breeding, and even Charity it-self, under pretence of maintaining it.”

  The argonauts Borthwick saw heading east from California showed the marks of many “collisions,” “amicable” or otherwise. Californians and Nevadans were connoisseurs of collision. It toughened their hides and steeled their wills. It was also a surefire source of pleasure. The excitement and adventure that had propelled them westward—that which drove Taylor, Doten, and Twain—had also thrown them into makeshift society where cursing, pranks, gambling, song, and the capacity to hold their fiery drink were counterweights to honor and bravery. While the growing eastern middle class was minding their manners and shuttering their taverns, these emigrants and westerners pursued a radical civility that had been on the run since Merry Mount: the social bonds and personal thrills of risky, rebellious fun.

  The American frontier was a woolly place, incomparable to Shaftesbury’s courtly world. With its Indian wars, claims disputes, lawless justice, deadly predators, extreme weather, runaway riches, and (most often) desperate poverty, it laid the workings of society bare—often to reveal that they were badly damaged. The stakes for not getting along were high—typically isolation, mutilation, or death—and yet nobody was rewarded for acting skittish. On the contrary, as it emerges in these Sierra Nevada stories the celebrated citizens were the boldest ones—the practical jokers, rousing musicians, willing combatants, and impious journalists. These folks didn’t shy away from fray; they exploited its pleasures and voiced its freedoms. In a land that demanded backbreaking participation in order simply to survive, they modeled rude and playful civility. They made a mockery of the stingy and scared and dared other citizens to join in. Their coarse behavior was delicious, infectious, and their elaborate pranks and hoaxes and parties formed spontaneous and volatile communities bound by excitement and hilarity. And when the papers and publishers spread their fame back east, this Wild West attitude riveted the nation. These creatures of slang and daring and pluck became paragons of American liberty, their fame growing into instantaneous legend.

  Such boldness in the face of adversity and restraint characterized the best early American fun. Boldness in the face of Puritans, the British, slave owners, and reformers. The principals were spark plugs like Thomas Morton and Samuel Adams, charismatic figures like old King Charles, tricksters and troublemakers like Alfred Doten and Mark Twain, but in all of these cases their willing associates—sometimes numbering into the thousands—lent their fun its civic force. The crowd rose up and gave its assent, happy to join in the rebellious dance, glad to show they got the joke, ready to make wild contributions of their own. The joy of these free and lawless crowds affirmed, in flashes, the experience of democracy. It allowed citizens that would otherwise have been pushed away to feel brief thrills of liberty and equality.

  ……………

  IN ALL OF THESE CASES there were environmental conditions—fundamentally American conditions—that made the fun possible, made it necessary. Untamed wilderness. Unchecked tyranny. A world of everything and nothing to lose that benefited only the hardest characters. Whether they were adventurers tussling for ideological freedom, colonists rallying for a political identity
, slaves asserting their pride and humanity, or emigrants risking life and limb to bust their fortunes out of rocks, the protagonists in these stories were attracted to conflict for all of its generative possibility. That they were advocates for group pleasure, not selfish domination, has helped to establish the coarse civility that continues to thrive in the national consciousness. The pleasure of tangling with opponents and rivals, of not backing down, of not giving up, all the while proving your style and wit, is a virtue that Sons of Liberty paraded and that Pinkster Boys reveled in. It was a survival tactic in the Wild West. Had Americans not risked such amicable collisions, but resorted only to violence or submission, they would have joined the low ranks of criminals and cowards who tried to keep the people apart.

  Instead they were authors of a national culture that remains our greatest social resource.

  5

  * * *

  Selling It Back to the People

  IN 1876, the American humorist Samuel S. Cox claimed that “Plenty, unless gorged to dyspepsia … is the very father of fun.” Samuel S. Cox was a man of his age—the so-called Gilded Age. In his era of conspicuous consumption and leisure, when American calendars were suddenly abloom with weekends, vacations, and holidays, “fun” became a catchall name for outlets that didn’t require backbreaking, mind-numbing labor—sports, spas, carnivals, circuses, vaudeville, parks, and so on. Fun-as-plenitude prevailed during the period, and it made some folks a lot of money.

  American fun, as defined by this book, rarely prevailed in the early republic. Fun, as the previous chapters show, was one of many notable forces in the struggle between authoritarian citizens, who tried to contain the people’s freedoms, and individualistic (or communitarian) citizens, who felt such freedoms were the life of democracy. Ambitious fun lovers like Thomas Morton and King Charles may have made some effort to prevail, but achieving market share wasn’t their priority—or a realistic possibility. Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty scored stunning victories, but a “culture of fun” wasn’t their objective; their sights were set on founding a republic. And “funmaking animals” like Zab Hayward and Alfred Doten were happy just whipping up a crowd; for all of their spontaneous influence, they lived from one wild party to the next.