Orphans Preferred by Christopher Corbett

Author:Christopher Corbett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767919630
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2004-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

En route to Nevada, Sam and Orion Clemens stopped, as many a traveler had before them, to have a look at the Mormons. (Mark Twain would make some use of this material later.) Orion paid an official call on Brigham Young. When the brothers finally reached Carson City, they were so filthy and rough-looking from three weeks on the overland stage that the reception planned to welcome Orion as the new secretary for former New York City police commissioner James Nye, the territorial governor, was canceled.

Twain's first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, recalled the disastrous arrival of the Clemens brothers in the Washoe. “The committee saw two wayworn individuals climb down from the stage, unkempt, unshorn—clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same they had put on at St. Jo—dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten with longs days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust. It is not likely there were two more unprepossessing officials on the Pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived Territorial secretary and his brother. Somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the half-formed plan of a banquet faded out and was not heard of again. Soap and water and fresh garments worked a transformation; but that first impression had been fatal to festivities of welcome.”

The Clemens brothers quickly settled into this new life in Nevada as part of the extended patronage family of Nye's camp followers who had come west with promises of a bright future in the new territory. In a letter home to his mother, Sam Clemens reported: “The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperados, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, coyotes (pronounced Ki-yo-ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.”

Despite Twain's enthusiastic memoirs of overland stage travel, his anecdotes recall that the food offered to these travelers along the line, like the fare that disgusted Burton and was eaten by the riders of the Pony Express, was vile. (“Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle,” Twain recalled.) He remembered a particularly unappetizing breakfast in Nebraska:

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