LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by ROY MORRIS JR

Author:ROY MORRIS, JR.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

However it was characterized, Mark Twain’s abrupt departure from Virginia City signaled the end of an era. For the better part of three years, he had been an enthusiastic participant in the gold rush culture of Nevada Territory. At one time or another, either directly or indirectly, he had been a politician, a silver miner, a stock trader, a mill worker, and a newspaper reporter—virtually every role, with the exception of gunfighter or storekeeper, that the wide-open territory offered to a man. (He had spent so much time in bars that he could qualify as an honorary bartender.) Now, with the trusty Gillis at his side, he would try on the role of San Francisco boulevardier, dipping into the rarefied waters of West Coast bohemia, which his brief exposure a few months earlier to Artemus Ward, Adah Isaacs Menken, Ada Clare, and other seasoned culture warriors had encouraged him to sample.

Characteristically, Twain made a joke out of his trip to San Francisco. He and Gillis shared the stage (so he claimed) with a happily inebriated passenger who had been struck on the foot by a hundred-pound silver brick that was being loaded onto the stagecoach. Calling piteously for brandy, the injured party resisted all suggestions that he have a doctor look at his foot at the stage company’s expense. “He declined,” wrote Twain, “and said that if he only had a little brandy to take along with him, to soothe his paroxysms of pain when they came on, he would be grateful and content.” When Twain asked him how he could be so calm in the face of his suffering, the man responded with a smile, “Got a cork leg, you know,” and proceeded to get “drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his timely ingenuity.”

After the chalky deserts of Nevada, windy San Francisco was a literal breath of fresh air. In a celebratory dispatch to the Enterprise after checking into his favorite hotel, Twain crowed: “To a Christian who has toiled months and months in Washoe, whose hair bristles from a bed of sand, and whose soul is caked with the cement of alkali dust; whose nostrils know of no perfume but the rank odor of the sagebrush—and whose eyes no landscape but the barren mountains and desolate plains; where the wind blows, and the sun blisters, and the broken spirit of the contrite heart finds joy and peace only in Lindburger cheese and lager beer—unto such a Christian, verily the Occidental Hotel is Heaven on the half shell. He may even secretly consider it to be heaven on the entire shell, but his religion teaches a sound Washoe Christian that it would be sacrilege to say it.”

The city itself was equally celestial. It had, observed Twain, the most unvarying climate in the world. “The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round,” he wrote. “It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other.” (There is no hard

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