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Title: Mark Twain Newspaper Correspondent Author: Mark Twain * A Project Gutenberg Australia eBook * eBook No.: 0900821h.html Language: English Date first posted: October 2009 Date most recently updated: April 24, 2011 Project Gutenberg Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg Australia License which may be viewed online at http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html
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INDIAN TROUBLES ON THE OVERLAND ROUTE
COMMITTEE ON INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS
GRAND BULL DRIVER'S CONVENTION
CHAMPAGNE WITH THE BOARD OF BROKERS
ADVICE TO THE UNRELIABLE ON CHURCH-GOING
THE MENKEN—WRITTEN ESPECIALLY FOR GENTLEMEN
THE FAIR A SUCCESS AND A VALUABLE LESSON
REVIEW OF "INGOMAR THE BARBARIAN"
REPORTED IN PHONOGPAPHIC SHORT-HAND BY MARK TWAIN
OUR CARSON DISPATCH—SECOND SESSION
COMPOSITOR UP THERE WHO IS TOO ROTTEN PARTICULAR
I HAD NEVER TALKED TO A CROWD BEFORE
CALIFORNIA STATE TELEGRAPH COMPANY
THE CARSON UNDERTAKER—CONTINUED
FRIGHTFUL ACCIDENT TO DAN DE QUILLE
MARK TWAIN TAKES A LESSON IN THE MANLY ART
"MARK TWAIN" IN THE METROPOLIS
A MODEL ARTIST STRIKES AN ATTITUDE
WHAT HAPPENED TO A FEW VIRGINIANS
BOB ROACH'S PLAN FOR CIRCUMVENTING A DEMOCRAT
MORE FASHIONS—EXIT "WATERFALL."
GRAND FETE-DAY AT THE CLIFF HOUSE
"CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR."
THE BLACK HOLE OF SAN FRANCISCO
GORGEOUS NEW ROMANCE, By Fitz Smythe!
WHAT HAVE THE POLICE BEEN DOING?
BEARDING THE FENIAN IN HIS LAIR
I TRY TO OUT "SASS" THE LANDLORD—AND FAIL
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON
COLONEL ELY PARKER, CHIEF OF THE SIX NATIONS
THE POLITICAL STINK-POTS OPENED
THE MAN WHO STOPPED AT GADSBY'S
KINGLY CONTEMPT FOR LONG SETTLED FORMS AND CUSTOMS
"ANDREW JOHNSON'S FAREWELL ADDRESS."
THE SAN FRANCISCO DAILY MORNING CALL
ANOTHER CHAPTER IN THE MARKS FAMILY HISTORY
PETTY POLICE COURT TRANSACTIONS
CHARGE AGAINST A POLICE OFFICER
MISSIONARIES WANTED FOR SAN FRANCISCO
BURGLARY—THE BURGLAR CAUGHT IN THE ACT
INSPECTION OF THE FORTIFICATIONS
INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE FOR STOCKTON
MORE STAGE ROBBERS AND THEIR CONFEDERATES CAPTURED
DEMOCRATIC MEETING AT HAYES' PARK
ANOTHER OBSCENE PICTURE KNAVE CAPTURED
AN ACCUMULATION OF COPPERHEADS
"WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR"
SCHOOL DIRECTOR POPE AND THE CALL
ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE A PAWNBROKER
INEXPLICABLE NEWS FROM SAN JOSE
CAMANCHE ITEMS—SANITARY CONTRIBUTIONS
ARREST OF ANOTHER OF THE ROBBING GANG
ENTHUSIASTIC HARD-MONEY DEMONSTRATION
STRONG AS SAMPSON AND MEEK AS MOSES
THE COSMOPOLITAN HOTEL BESIEGED
DEMOCRATIC RATIFICATION MEETING
RACE FOR THE OCCIDENTAL HOTEL PREMIUM
ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF A DETECTIVE OFFICER
SAD ACCIDENT—DEATH OF JEROME RICE
THE LATE SUICIDE—CORONER'S INQUEST
STRIKE OF THE STEAMER EMPLOYEES
DEDICATION OF BUSH STREET SCHOOL
FAREWELL ADDRESS OF DR. BELLOWS
THE AJAX VOYAGE CONTINUED—THE OLD NOR'WEST SWELL
OUR ARRIVAL ELABORATED A LITTLE MORE
THE EQUESTRIAN EXCURSION CONCLUDED
LEGISLATURE CONTINUED—THE SOLONS AT WORK
BURNING OF THE CLIPPER SHIP HORNET AT SEA
STILL IN KONA—CONCERNING MATTERS AND THINGS
GREAT BRITAIN'S QUEER MONUMENT TO CAPTAIN COOK
THE TALE OF THE "BIRD OF A NEW SPECIE"
MY ANCIENT FRIENDS, THE POLICE
HANNIBAL—BY A NATIVE HISTORIAN
RETURN OF THE SUTRO TUNNEL FROM EUROPE
"ONE'S AFRAID AND 'T'OTHER DAR'N'T."
I SAW A MAN HANGED THE OTHER DAY
SUSPICIOUS PROPERTY IN HIS POSSESSION
A DARING ATTEMPT AT A SOLUTION OF IT
THE RECEPTION AT THE PRESIDENT'S
GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN
GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN
A REMINISCENCE OF THE BACK SETTLEMENTS
AN ENGLISH CRITIC ON MARK TWAIN
JUST BARELY ESCAPED BEING QUITE VALUABLE
GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN
ANSWER TO AN INQUIRY FROM THE COMING MAN
INDIGNITY PUT UPON THE REMAINS
Territorial Enterprise, October 1, 1862
LOCAL COLUMN
A GALE.—About 7 o'clock Tuesday evening (Sept. 30th) a sudden blast of wind picked up a shooting gallery, two lodging houses and a drug store from their tall wooden stilts and set them down again some ten or twelve feet back of their original location, with such a degree of roughness as to jostle their insides into a sort of chaos. There were many guests in the lodging houses at the time of the accident, but it is pleasant to reflect that they seized their carpet sacks and vacated the premises with an alacrity suited to the occasion. No one hurt.
THE INDIAN TROUBLES ON THE OVERLAND ROUTE.—Twelve or fifteen emigrant wagons arrived here on Monday evening, and all but five moved on towards California yesterday. One of the five wagons which will remain in the city is in charge of a man from Story county, Iowa, who started across the plains on the 5th of May last, in company with a large train composed principally of emigrants from his own section. From him we learn the following particulars: When in the vicinity of Raft river, this side of Fort Hall, the train was attacked, in broad daylight by a large body of Snake Indians. The emigrants, taken entirely by surprise—for they had apprehended no trouble—made but a feeble resistance, and retreated, with a loss of six men and one woman of their party. The Indians also captured the teams belonging to thirteen wagons, together with a large number of loose cattle and horses. The names of those killed in the affray are as follows: Charles Bulwinkle, from New York; William Moats, Geo. Adams and Elizabeth Adams, and three others whose names our informant had forgotten. The survivors were overtaken on the afternoon by a train numbering 111 wagons, which brought them through to Humboldt. They occasionally discovered the dead bodies of emigrants by the roadside; at one time twelve corpses were found, at another four, and at another two—all minus their scalps. They also saw the wrecks of many wagons destroyed by the Indians. Shortly after the sufferers by the fight recorded above had joined the large train, it was also fired into in the night by a party of Snake Indians, but the latter, finding themselves pretty warmly received, drew off without taking a scalp. About a week before these events transpired, a party of emigrants numbering 40 persons was attacked near City Rocks by the same tribe of uncivilized pirates. Five young ladies were carried off, and, it is thought, women and children in all to the number of fifteen. All the men were killed except one, who made his escape and arrived at Humboldt about the 20th of September. This train was called the "Methodist Train," which was not altogether inappropriate, since the whole party knelt down and began to pray as soon as the attack was commenced. Every train which has passed over that portion of the route in the vicinity of City Rocks since the 1st of August has had trouble with the Indians. When our informant left Humboldt several wagons had just arrived whose sides and covers had been transformed into magnified nutmeg-graters by Indian bullets. The Snakes corralled the train, when a fight ensued, which lasted forty-eight hours. The whites cut their way out, finally, and escaped. We could not learn the number of killed and wounded at this battle.
[MORE INDIAN TROUBLES.—] Mr. L. F. Yates, who arrived in this city a few days since from Pike's Peak, has given us the following particulars of a fight his train had on the 8th of last August, about one and a-half miles this side of the junction of the Lander's Cut-off and Fort Bridger roads. Their train consisted of 15 wagons and 40 men, with a number of women and children. The train was attacked while passing along a ravine by a party of Indians being concealed in among a thick growth of poplar bushes. When the attack commenced, most of the front wagons were some 80 rods in advance. They formed in corral, and intrenched behind their wagons, refused the slightest aid to those who were struggling with the savages in the rear. The party thus left to fight their way through the ambushed Indians numbered but nine men, and there were but four guns with which to maintain the battle. Five of the nine were killed and one wounded. The names of the killed are as follows: Parmelee, James Steele, James A. Hart, Rufus C. Mitchell, from Central City, Colorado Territory, and McMahan, residence unknown; the name of the man wounded is Frank Lyman. He was shot through the lungs—recovered. The thirty-one men who were hidden snugly behind their wagons, with a single honorable exception, refused to render the slightest assistance to those who were fighting for their lives and the lives of their families so near them. Although they had 27 guns they refused to lend a single gun, when at one time four men went to ask assistance. The cowards all clung to their arms, and lay trembling behind their wagons. A man named Perry, or Berry, was the only one who had sufficient courage to attempt to render his struggling friends any assistance. He was shot in the face before reaching the rear wagons, and was carried back to the corral. The fight lasted nearly two hours, and some seven or eight Indians were killed, as at various times they charged out of the bushes on their ponies. Several Indian horses were killed, and at length the few left alive fought through to where their thirty heroic friends (?) were corraled, leaving the killed and two wagons in possession of the Indians. Thirty bigger cowards and meaner men than those above mentioned never crossed the plains; we are certain that every man of them left the States for fear of being drafted into the army.
Territorial Enterprise, October 4, 1862
A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner—which lifetime, by the way, came to a close about a century ago, in the opinion of a savan who has examined the defunct. The body was in a sitting posture, and leaning against a huge mass of croppings; the attitude was pensive, 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. This strange freak of nature created a profound sensation in the vicinity, and our informant states that by request, Justice Sewell or Sowell, of Humboldt City, at once proceeded to the spot and held an inquest on the body. The verdict of the jury was that "deceased came to his death from protracted exposure," etc. The people of the neighborhood volunteered to bury the poor unfortunate, and were even anxious to do so; but it was discovered, when they attempted to remove him, that the water which had dripped upon him for ages from the crag above, had coursed down his back and deposited a limestone sediment under him which had glued him to the bed rock upon which he sat, as with a cement of adamant, and Judge S. refused to allow the charitable citizens to blast him from his position. The opinion expressed by his Honor that such a course would be little less than sacrilege, was eminently just and proper. Everybody goes to see the stone man, as many as three hundred having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.
Territorial Enterprise, late October, 1862
This comprises one hundred feet of the great Comstock lead, and is situated in the midst of the Ophir claims. We visited it yesterday, in company with Mr. Kingman, Assistant Superintendent, and our impression is that stout-legged people with an affinity to darkness, may spend an hour or so there very comfortably. A confused sense of being buried alive, and a vague consciousness of stony dampness, and huge timbers, and tortuous caverns, and bottomless holes with endless ropes hanging down into them, and narrow ladders climbing in a short twilight through the colossal lattice work and suddenly perishing in midnight, and workmen poking about in the gloom with twinkling candles—is all, or nearly all that remains to us of our experience in the Spanish mine. Yet, for the information of those who may wish to go down and see how things are conducted in the realms beyond the jurisdiction of daylight, we are willing to tell a portion of what we know about it. Entering the Spanish tunnel in A street, you grope along by candle light for two hundred and fifty feet—but you need not count your steps—keep on going until you come to a horse. This horse works a whim used for hoisting ore from the infernal regions below, and from long service in the dark, his coat has turned to a beautiful black color. You are now upon the confines of the ledge, and from this point several drifts branch out to different portions of the mine. Without stopping to admire these gloomy grottoes you descend a ladder and halt upon a landing where you are fenced in with an open-work labyrinth of timbers some eighteen inches square, extending in front of you and behind you, and far away above you and below you, until they are lost in darkness. These timbers are framed in squares or "stations," five feet each way, one above another, and so neatly put together that there is not room for the insertion of a knife-blade where they intersect. You are apt to wonder where the forest around you came from, and how they managed to get it into that hole, and what sums of money it must have cost, and so forth and so on, and you wind up with a confused notion that the man who designed it all had a shining talent for saw mills on a large scale. He could build the frame-work beautifully at any rate. Whereupon, you desist from further speculation, and waltz down a very narrow winding staircase, and the further you squirm down it the dizzier you get and the more those open timber squares seem to whiz by you, until you feel as if you are falling through a well-ventilated shot-tower with the windows all open.
Finally, after you have gone down ninety-four feet, you touch bottom again and find yourself in the midst of the saw mill yet, with the regular accomplishments of workmen, and windlasses, and glimmering candles and cetera, as usual. Now you can stoop and dodge about under the "stations," and get your clothes dirty, and drip hot candle grease all over your hands, and find out how they take those timbers and commence at the top of the mine, and build them together like mighty window sashes all the way down to the bottom of it; and if, after coming down that tipsy staircase, you can by any possibility make out to understand it, then you can render the information useful above ground by building the third story of your house to suit you first, and continuing its erection wrong end foremost until you wind up with the cellar. You will also find out that at this depth the lead is forty-six feet wide, with its sides walled and weather boarded as compactly and substantially as those of a jail. And here and there in little recesses, the walls of the lead are laid bare, showing the blue silver lines traced upon the white quartz, after the fashion of variegated marble—this, in places, you know, while others, where the ore is richer, the blue predominates and the white is scarcely perceptible. From these various recesses a swarm of workmen are constantly conveying wheel-barrow loads of quartz to the windlasses, of all shades of value, from that worth $75 to that worth $3,000 per ton—and if you should chance to be in better luck than we were, you may happen to stumble on a small specimen worth a dollar and a half a pound. Such things have occurred in the Spanish mine before now. However, as we were saying, you are now one hundred and seventy feet under the ground, and you can move about and see how the ore is quarried and moved from one place to another, and how systematically the great mine is arranged and worked altogether, and how unsystematically the Mexicans used to carry on business down there—and you may get into a bucket, if you please, and extend your visit to the confines of purgatory—so to speak—if you feel anxious to do so; but as this would afford you nothing more than a glance at the bottom of a drain shaft, you could better employ your time and talents in climbing that cork screw and seeking daylight again. And before leaving the mouth of the tunnel, you would do well to visit the office of Mr. Beckwith, the superintendent, where you can see a small cabinet of specimens from the mine which has been pronounced by scientific travelers to be one of the richest collections of the kind in the world. We shall have occasion to speak of the steam hoisting apparatus now in process of erection by the Spanish Company at an early day.
Territorial Enterprise, November 1-10, 1862
LOCAL COLUMN
THE PETRIFIED MAN.—Mr. Herr Weisnicht has just arrived in Virginia City from the Humboldt mines and regions beyond. He brings with him the head and one foot of the petrified man, lately found in the mountains near Gravelly Ford. A skillful assayer has analyzed a small portion of dirt found under the nail of the great toe and pronounces the man to have been a native of the Kingdom of New Jersey. As a trace of "speculation" is still discernible in the left eye, it is thought the man was on his way to what is now the Washoe mining region for the purpose of locating the Comstock. The remains brought in are to be seen in a neat glass case in the third story of the Library Building, where they have been temporarily placed by Mr. Weisnicht for the inspection of the curious, and where they may be examined by any one who will take the trouble to visit them.
Territorial Enterprise, December 1862
December 5, 1862
EDITOR ENTERPRISE: If your readers are not aware of the fact, I take pleasure in informing them that the [Nevada] Supreme Court will meet in Carson City on the 13th of the present month; and in connection with this intelligence I present the following item, giving it in the language in which I received it for fear of mistakes—for its terms are darkly, mysteriously legal, and I have not the most distant conception of what they mean, or what they are intended to have reference to—thus: "Wm. Alford vs. Nathaniel Dewing et als.—Ordered filed, denying rehearing." There it is, and I wash my hands of the matter. I don't know Alford, and I don't know Dewing, and I don't know Et Als—and I never heard of either, or any of these gentlemen until this very day, when the Clerk of the Supreme Court brought me this written nightmare, which has been distressing me up to the present moment. If it is a charge, I do not make it; if it is an insinuation, I do not endorse it; if its expression less exterior conceals a slur, I do not father it. I simply publish the document as I received it, and take no responsibility upon myself for the consequences. I do not wish these gentlemen any harm; I would not willingly and knowingly do them the slightest possible wrong—yet, if they ought to be filed—mind, I say if they ought to be filed—if it is entirely right and proper that they should be filed—if, in the opinion of the people of this commonwealth, it is deemed necessary to file them—then, I say, let them be filed and be d——[here the manuscript was illegible.—ED.] Now you have the document and the facts in the case; and if there be a fault in the matter it is the Clerk's, and I know what that Chinaman did it for. [If you have forgotten the circumstance, I said in a letter that he had been cast for a Chinaman in the recent tableaux here.]
The Roads and Highways bill was considered in Committee of the Whole in the House yesterday. A clause in it provides for a tax of $4 on each voter, or a day's work on the roads in lieu thereof. Storey was relieved from the payment of this tax, which was entirely proper, since there is not a free road in the whole county.
These grave and reverend legislators relax a little occasionally, and indulge in chaste and refined jollity to a small extent. Col. Williams is engineering a certain toll road franchise through the House, and the other night he was laying before the Committee on Internal Improvements some facts in the case, pending which he had occasion to illustrate his theme with pencil and paper, and the result was a map, which, in view of its grandeur of conception, elegance of design and masterly execution, I feel justified in styling miraculous. Mr. Lovejoy, Chairman of the Committee, captured it, incorporated it into his report, and presented it before the House yesterday, thus:
REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS
Map of Col. Williams' road "from a certain point to another place," as drawn by himself, and which was conclusive evidence to your Committee:
Your committee would ask that it be referred to Col. Howard of the Storey county delegation.
[Signed] LOVEJOY, Chairman
ACKLEY, Sec y.
It was so referred by the Speaker.
Col. Howard will report to-day. I have procured a copy of the forthcoming document, and transmit it herewith.
Your committee, consisting of a solitary but very competent individual, to whom was referred Col. Williams' road from a certain point to another place, would beg most respectfully to report:
Your committee has had under consideration said map.
The word map is derived from the Spanish word "mapa," or the Portuguese word "mappa." Says the learned lexicographer Webster, "in geography a map is a representation of the surface of the earth, or any part of it, drawn on paper or other material, exhibiting the lines of latitude and longitude, and the positions of countries, kingdoms, states, mountains, rivers, etc."
Your committee, with due respect to the projector of the road in question, would designate what is styled in the report a map, an unnatural and diabolical scrawl, devoid of form, regularity or meaning. Your committee has in times past witnessed the wild irregularity of the footprints of birds of prey upon a moist sea shore. Your committee was struck with the strong resemblance of the map under discussion to some one of said footprints.
Your committee, during his juvenile days, has watched a frantic and indiscreet fly emerge from a pot or vase containing molasses; your committee has seen said fly alight upon a scrap of virgin paper, and leave thereon a wild medley of wretched and discordant tracks; your committee was struck with the wonderful resemblance of said fly-tracks to the map now before your committee.
Yet your committee believes that the map in question has some merit as an abstract hieroglyphic.
Your committee, therefore, recommends, the Council concurring, that the aforesaid map be photographed, and that one copy thereof, framed in sage brush, be hung over the Speaker's chair, and that another copy be donated to the Council, to be suspended over the chair of the President of that body, as a memento of the artistic skill and graphic genius of one of our most distinguished members—a guide to all future Pi-Utes. All of which is respectfully submitted.
HOWARD, Chairman and Sole Committee
A resolution passed the House yesterday, authorizing the Secretary of the Territory to purchase and preserve files of the various papers published in the Territory.
Territorial Enterprise, December 1862
LETTER FROM CARSON CITY
December 12, 1862
EDITORS ENTERPRISE: Ormsby heads the world on the turnip question. The vegetable upon which I base this boast, was grown in the turnip garden of Mr. S. D. Fairchild, back here towards King's Canyon—in the suburbs—say about eight squares from the plaza. Mr. Fairchild left it at the 'branch of the ENTERPRISE office in Carson, a day or two since. The monster was accurately surveyed, with the following result: circumference, forty inches; weight, a fraction over eighteen pounds.
Col. Williams, of the House, who says I mutilate his eloquence, addressed a note to me this morning, to the effect that I had given his constituents wrong impressions concerning him, and nothing but blood would satisfy him. I sent him that turnip on a hand barrow, requesting him to extract from it a sufficient quantity of blood to restore his equilibrium—which I regarded as a very excellent joke. Col. Williams ate it (raw) during the usual prayer by the chaplain. To sum up: eighteen pounds of raw turnip is sufficient for an ordinary lunch—Col. Williams had his feet on his desk at the time—he beamed—wherefore, I think his satisfaction was complete.
Carson also boasts the only pork-packing establishment in Nevada Territory. Mr. George T. Davis is the proprietor thereof, and he has already killed and packed two hundred and fifty fine hogs this winter. This will be cheering news to the young lady who told me the other evening that she "loved pork."
The pleasantest affair of the season, perhaps, although not the most gorgeous, was the "candy-pull" at the White House, a few nights ago. The candy had not finished cooking at nine o'clock, so they concluded to dance awhile. They always dance here when they have time. I have noticed it frequently. I think it is a way they have. They got a couple of able-bodied fiddlers and went at it. They opened with the dance called the plain quadrille, which is very simple and easy, and is performed in this wise: All you have to do is to stand up in the middle of the floor, being careful to get your lady on your right hand side, and yourself on the left hand side of your lady. Then you are all right you know. When you hear a blast of music like unto the rush of many waters, you lay your hand on your stomach and bow to the lady of your choice then you turn around and bow to the fiddlers. The first order is, "First couple fore and aft"—or words to that effect. This is very easy. You have only to march straight across the house—keeping out of the way of the advancing couple, who very seldom know where they are going to—and when you get over, if you find your partner there, swing her; if you don't, hunt her up—for it is very handy to have a partner in these plain quadrilles. The next order is, "Ladies change." This is an exceedingly difficult figure, and requires great presence of mind; because, on account of shaking hands with the lobby members so much, and from the force of human nature also, you are morally certain to offer your right, when the chances are that your left hand is wanted. This has a tendency to mix things. At this point order and regularity cease the dancers get excited—the musicians become insane—turmoil and confusion ensue—chaos comes again! Put your trust in Providence and stick to your partner. Several of these engaging and beautiful plain quadrilles were danced during the evening, and we might have enjoyed several more, but the rostrum broke down and spilt the musicians. I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases—the dances are precisely the same. You have only to spin around with frightful velocity and steer clear of the furniture. This has a charming and bewildering effect. You catch glimpses of a confused and whirling multitude of people, and above them a row of distracted fiddlers extending entirely around the room. The waltz and the polka are very exhilarating—to use a mild term—amazingly exhilarating.
Nothing occurred to mar the joyousness of the occasion. The party was very select except myself and Col. Williams; the candy was not burned; the Governor sat down on a hot stove and got up again with great presence of mind; the dancing was roomy and hilarious, and fun went to waste. Henceforward my principles are fixed. I am a stern and unwavering advocate of "candy-pulls."
There was a slight conflagration in Mr. Helm's office yesterday morning—at least I was told so by my friend, the reporter for the Virginia Union, who is not very reliable. He also stated that no damage was done; but I don't put much confidence in what he says.
The ladies have not smiled much on this Legislature, so far. Thirty-two of our loveliest visited the halls night before last, though, which is an encouraging symptom. I cannot conscientiously say they smiled, however, for the Revenue bill was before the House. This cheerful subject is calculated to produce inward jollity, but the same is not apt to blossom into smiles on the surface. The ladies were well pleased with the night session, though—they enjoyed it exceedingly—in many respects it was much superior to a funeral. The Revenue bill was finished up last night, and in the name and at the request of the members, I invite all the ladies in town to call again, at any time, either day or night session. That Revenue bill was one of those nonsensical general public concerns that we are not used to; but the fun will be resumed right away, now that we are back on our regular toll roads again.
I went down to Empire City yesterday to see the Eagle Fire Company try their new engine (by the way, you have, so far, neglected to mention either the machine or the company in your paper). They first threw an inch and a quarter stream over Dutch Nick's hotel, and then a three-quarter inch stream over the liberty pole. This brought cheers from the multitude (there were many ladies there from neighboring cities). The boys grew excited and ambitious. Several ladies passed by, wearing the new fashioned light-house bonnets. The Eagles, in their madness, attempted to throw a half-inch stream over those bonnets. They puffed their cheeks and strained every nerve; there was a moment of painful suspense, as the pearly column went towering toward the clouds—then a long, loud, reverberating shout, as it bent gracefully and went over, without touching a feather! But the engine broke.
If McCluskey, of the Delta Saloon, could send me a reporter's cobbler—an unusually long one—I think it would relieve my cold.
Territorial Enterprise, December 13-19, 1862
Ah, well—it is touching to see these knotty and rugged old pioneers—who have beheld Nevada in her infancy, and toiled through her virgin sands unmolested by toll-keepers; and prospected her unsmiling hills, and knocked at the doors of her sealed treasure vaults; and camped with her horned-toads, and tarantulas and lizards, under her inhospitable sage brush; and smoked the same pipe; and imbibed lightning out of the same bottle; and eaten their regular bacon and beans from the same pot; and lain down to their rest under the same blanket—happy, and lousy and contented—yea, happier and lousier and more contented than they are this day, or may be in the days that are to come; it is touching, I say, to see these weather-beaten and blasted old patriarchs banding together like a decaying tribe, for the sake of the privations they have undergone, and the dangers they have met—to rehearse the deeds of the hoary past, and rescue its traditions from oblivion! The Pah-Ute Association will become a high and honorable order in the land—its certificate of membership a patent of nobility. I extend unto the fraternity the right hand of a poor but honest half-breed, and say God speed your sacred enterprise.
Territorial Enterprise, December 1862
[extracts from original]
A BIG THING IN WASHOE CITY OR THE GRAND BULL DRIVER'S CONVENTION
Carson, Midnight December 23d.
Eds., Enterprise:
On the last night of the session, Hon. Thomas Hannah announced that a Grand Bull Drivers' Convention would assemble in Washoe City, on the 22d, to receive Hon. Jim Sturtevant and the other members of the Washoe delegation. I journeyed to the place yesterday to see that the ovation was properly conducted. I traveled per stage. The Unreliable of the Union went also—for the purpose of distorting the facts. The weather was delightful. It snowed the entire day. The wind blew such a hurricane that the coach drifted sideways from one toll road to another, and sometimes utterly refused to mind her helm. It is a fearful thing to be at sea in a stagecoach. We were anxious to get to Washoe by four o'clock, but luck was against us: we were delayed by stress of weather; we were hindered by the bad condition of the various toll roads; we finally broke the after spring of the wagon, and had to lay up for repairs. Therefore we only reached Washoe at dusk. Messrs. Lovejoy, Howard, Winters, Sturtevant, and Speaker Mills had left Carson ahead of us, and we found them in the city. They had not beaten us much, however, as I could perceive by their upright walk and untangled conversation. At 6 P.M., the Carson City Brass Band, followed by the Committee of Arrangements, and the Chairman of the Convention, and the delegation, and the invited guests, and the citizens generally, and the hurricane, marched up one of the most principal streets, and filed in imposing procession into Foulke's Hall. The delegation, and the guests, and the band, were provided with comfortable seats near the Chairman's desk, and the constituency occupied the body-pews. The delegation and the guests stood up and formed a semicircle, and Mr. Gregory introduced them one at a time to the constituency. Mr. Gregory did this with much grace and dignity, albeit he affected to stammer and gasp, and hesitate, and look colicky, and miscall the names, and miscall them again by way of correcting himself, and grab desperately at invisible things in the air—all with a charming pretense of being scared.
The Hon. John K. Lovejoy arose in his place and blew his horn. He made honorable mention of the Legislature and the Committee on Internal Improvements. He told how the fountains of their great deep were broken up, and they rained forty days and forty nights, and brought on a flood of toll roads over the whole land. He explained to them that the more toll roads there were, the more competition there would be, and the roads would be good, and tolls moderate in consequence.
Mr. Speaker Mills responded to the numerous calls for him, and spoke so well in praise of the Washoe delegation that I was constrained to believe that there really was some merit in the deceased.
Hon. Theodore Winters next addressed the people. He said he went to the Legislature with but one solitary object in view—the securing to this Territory of an incorporation law. How he had succeeded, the people themselves could tell...
The Chairman, Mr. Gaston, introduced Colonel Howard, and that gentleman addressed the people in his peculiarly grave and dignified manner. The constituency gave way to successive cataracts of laughter, which was singularly out of keeping with the stern seriousness of the speaker's bearing. He spoke about ten minutes, and then took his seat, in spite of the express wish of the audience that he should go on.
Hon. Jim Sturtevant next addressed the citizens, extemporaneously. He made use of the very thunder which I meant to launch at the populace. Owing to this unfortunate circumstance, I was forced to keep up an intelligent silence during the session of the convention...
After this the assemblage broke up and adjourned to take something to drink. At nine o'clock the band again summoned the public to Foulke's Hall, and I proceeded to that place. I found the Unreliable there, and George Hepperly. I had requested Mr. Hepperly, as a personal favor, to treat the Unreliable with distinguished consideration and I am proud and happy to acknowledge he had done so. He had him in charge of two constables.
The Hall had been cleared of the greater part of its benches, and the ball was ready to commence. The citizens had assembled in force, and the sexes were pretty equally represented in the proportion of one lady to several gentlemen. The night was so infernally inclement—so to speak—that it was impossible for ladies who lived at any considerable distance to attend. However, those that were there appeared in every quadrille, and with exemplary industry. I did not observe any wallflowers—the climate of Washoe appears to be unsuited to that kind of vegetation.
In accordance with the customs of the country, they indulged in the plain quadrille at this ball. And notwithstanding the vicissitudes which I have seen that wonderful national dance pass through, I solemnly affirm that they sprung some more new figures on me last night. However, the ball was a very pleasant affair. We could muster four sets and still have a vast surplusage of gentlemen—but the strictest economy had to be observed in order to make the ladies hold out.
The supper and the champagne were excellent and abundant, and I offer no word of blame against anybody for eating and drinking pretty freely. If I were to blame anybody, I would commence with the Unreliable—for he drank until he lost all sense of etiquette. I actually found myself in bed with him with my boots on. However, as I said before, I cannot blame the cuss; it was a convivial occasion, and his little shortcomings ought to be overlooked. When I went to bed this morning, Mr. Lovejoy, arrayed in fiery red night clothes, was dancing the war dance of his tribe (he is President of the Paiute Association) around a spittoon and Colonel Howard, dressed in a similar manner, was trying to convince him that he was a humbug. A suspicion crossed my mind that they were partially intoxicated, but I could not be sure about it on account of everything appearing to turn around so. I left Washoe City this morning at nine o'clock, fully persuaded that I would like to go back there again when the next convention meets.
Territorial Enterprise, December 28, 1862
Old Dan is gone, that good old soul, we ne'er shall see him more—for some time. He left for Carson yesterday, to be duly stamped and shipped to America, by way of the United States Overland Mail. As the stage was on the point of weighing anchor, the senior editor dashed wildly into Wasserman's and captured a national flag, which he cast about Dan's person to the tune of three rousing cheers from the bystanders. So, with the gorgeous drapery floating behind him, our kind and genial hero passed from our sight; and if fervent prayers from us, who seldom pray, can avail, his journey will be as safe and happy as though ministering angels watched over him. Dan has gone to the States for his health, and his family. He worked himself down in creating big strikes in the mines and keeping all the mills in this district going, whether their owners were willing or not. These herculean labors gradually undermined his health, but he went bravely on, and we are proud to say that as far as these things were concerned, he never gave up—the miners never did, and never could have conquered him. He fell under a scarcity of pack-trains and hay wagons. These had been the bulwark of the local column; his confidence in them was like unto that which men have in four aces; murders, robberies, fires, distinguished arrivals, were creatures of chance, which might or might not occur at any moment; but the pack-trains and the hay-wagons were certain, predestined, immutable! When these failed last week, he said "Et tu Brute," and gave us his pen. His constitution suddenly warped, split and went under, and Daniel succumbed. We have a saving hope, though, that his trip across the Plains, through eighteen hundred miles of cheerful hay stacks, will so restore our loved and lost to his ancient health and energy, that when he returns next fall he will be able to run our five hundred mills as easily as he used to keep five-score moving. Dan is gone, but he departed in a blaze of glory, the like of which hath hardly been seen upon this earth since the blameless Elijah went up in his fiery chariot.
Territorial Enterprise, December 30-31, 1862
LOCAL COLUMN
OUR STOCK REMARKS.—Owing to the fact that our stock reporter attended a wedding last evening, our report of transactions in that branch of robbery and speculation is not quite as complete and satisfactory as usual this morning. About eleven o'clock last night the aforesaid remarker pulled himself upstairs by the banisters, and stumbling over the stove, deposited the following notes on our table, with the remark: "S(hic)am, just 'laberate this, w(hic)ill, yer?" We said we would, but we couldn't. If any of our readers think they can, we shall be pleased to see the translation. Here are the notes: "Stocks brisk, and Ophir has taken this woman for your wedded wife. Some few transactions have occurred in rings and lace veils, and at figures tall, graceful and charming. There was some inquiry late in the day for parties who would take them for better or for worse but there were few offers. There seems to be some depression in this stock. We mentioned yesterday that our Father which art in heaven. Quotations of lost reference, and now I lay me down to sleep," &c., &c., &c.
BOARD OF EDUCATION.—In accordance with a law passed at the late session of the legislature, a Board of Education is to be organized in each of the several counties. The Storey county Board will be composed of seven members, apportioned as follows: Four from Virginia, two from Gold Hill, and one from Flowery. The Chairman of the Board will be County School Superintendent. These officers will have power to issue bonds sufficient to defray the expenses of the schools, from the 1st of January until the 1st of November; to establish schools of all grades, engage and examine teachers, etc. The election for the Board of Education will be held next Monday, at the Court House, in Virginia; at the Postoffice, in Gold Hill, and at the house of I. W. Knox, in Flowery, the polls to be open from 8 o'clock in the morning until 6 in the evening. The Board will meet and organize on the Monday following their election.
BLOWN DOWN.—At sunset yesterday, the wind commenced blowing after a fashion to which a typhoon is mere nonsense, and in a short time the face of heaven was obscured by vast clouds of dust all spangled over with lumber, and shingles, and dogs and things. There was no particular harm in that, but the breeze soon began to work damage of a serious nature. Thomas Moore's new frame house on the east side of C street, above the Court House, was blown down, and the fire-wall front of a one story brick building higher up the street was also thrown to the ground. The latter house was occupied as a store by Mr. Heldman, and owned by Mr. Felton. The storm was very severe for a while, and we shall not be surprised to hear of further destruction having been caused by it. The damage resulting to Mr. Heldman's grocery store, amounts to $2,200.
AT HOME.—Judge Brumfield's nightmare—the Storey county delegation—have straggled in, one at a time, until they are all at home once more. Messrs. Mills, Mitchell, Meagher and Minneer returned several days ago, and we had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Davenport, also, yesterday. We do not know how long the latter gentleman has been here, but we offer him the unlimited freedom of the city, any how. Justice to a good representative is justice, you know, whether it be tardy or otherwise.
THE SCHOOL.—Mr. Mellvile's school will open again next Monday, and in the meantime the new furniture is being put up in the school house. The Virginia Cadets (a company composed of Mr. Mellvile's larger pupils,) will appear in public on New Year's Day, the weather permitting, armed and equipped as the law directs. The boys were pretty proficient in their military exercises when we saw them last, and they have probably not deteriorated since then.
SAD ACCIDENT.—We learn from Messrs. Hatch &. Bro., who do a heavy business in the way of supplying this market with vegetables, that the rigorous weather accompanying the late storm was so severe on the mountains as to cause a loss of life in several instances. Two sacks of sweet potatoes were frozen to death on the summit, this side of Strawberry. The verdict rendered by the coroner's jury was strictly in accordance with the facts.
THRILLING ROMANCE.—On our first page, to-day, will be found the opening chapters of a thrilling tale, entitled "An Act to amend and supplemental to an Act to provide for Assessing and Collecting County and Territorial Revenue." This admirable story was written especially for the columns of this paper by several distinguished authors. We have secured a few more productions of the same kind, at great expense, and we design publishing them in their regular order. Our readers will agree with us that it will redound considerably to their advantage to read and preserve these documents.
FIRE, ALMOST.—The roof of the New York Restaurant took fire from the stovepipe, yesterday morning, and but for the timely discovery of the fact, a serious conflagration would have ensued, as the restaurant is situated in a nest of frame houses, which would have burned like tinder. As it was, nothing but a few shingles were damaged.
PRIVATE PARTY.—The members of Engine Co. No. 2, with a number of invited guests, are to have a little social dance at La Plata Hall, this evening. They have made every arrangement for having a pleasant time of it, and we hope they may succeed to the very fullest extent of their wishes.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1, 1863
Are we to be scared to death every time we venture into the street? May we be allowed to go quietly about our business, or are we to be assailed at every corner by fearful apparitions? As we were plodding home at the ghostly hour last night, thinking about the haunted house humbug, we were suddenly riveted to the pavement in a paroxysm of terror by that blue and yellow phantom who watches over the destinies of the shooting gallery, this side of the International. Seen in daylight, placidly reclining against his board in the doorway, with his blue coat, and his yellow pants, and his high boots, and his fancy hat, just lifted from his head, he is rather an engaging youth, than otherwise; but at dead of night, when he pops out his pallid face at you by candle light, and stares vacantly upon you with his uplifted hat and the eternal civility of his changeless brow, and the ghostliness of his general appearance heightened by that grave-stone inscription over his stomach, "to-day shooting for chickens here," you are apt to think of spectres starting up from behind tomb-stones, and you weaken accordingly—the cold chills creep over you—your hair stands on end—you reverse your front, and with all possible alacrity, you change your base.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1, 1863
Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. To-day, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.
Territorial Enterprise, January 4, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
[first lines not recovered]
... benevolent enterprise, and to be present and see such a phenomenon, would be well worth the price of the ticket—six dollars, supper included. Wherefore, we advise every citizen of Storey to go to the ball—early—and stand ready to enjoy the joke. The fun to be acquired in this way, for a trifling sum of money, cannot be computed by any system of mathematics known to the present generation. And the more the merrier. We all know that a thousand people can enjoy that failure more extensively than a smaller number. Mr. Unger has tendered the use of the large dining hall of the What Cheer House (nearly opposite the La Plata Hall) with all the necessary table ware, and the waiters employed in the hotel, free of charge. This generosity—this liberality in a noble cause—calls for a second from somebody. Get your contributions ready—money, wines, cakes, and knicknacks and substantials of all kinds—and when the ladies call for them, deliver your offerings with a grace and dignity graduated by the market value of the same, the condition of your pecuniary affairs, and the sympathy you feel for maimed and suffering humanity. The ladies may be looked for to-morrow.
ELECTION.—To-morrow morning, at eight o'clock, the polls will be opened at the Court House, on C street, for the election of the four members of the County Board of Education to which Virginia is entitled. Gold Hill is entitled to two members, and Flowery to one. In the former place, the polls will be at the Post Office, and in the latter at the house of Mr. I. W. Knox. The Board will meet and organize on the Monday following their election. They will have power to issue bonds for a sum sufficient to defray the expenses of the respective schools of the county, from the beginning of the present month until the first of November. They will also have power to establish schools of all grades, engage and examine teachers, etc. The Chairman of the Board will be County School Superintendent. Let those who feel interested in school matters go and deposit their opinions in the ballot-box to-morrow.
PUBLIC SCHOOL.—The juveniles are hereby notified to put away their sleds and doll-babies and go into the traces again, at Mr. Mellvile's school-house, corner of E and Washington streets, to-morrow morning, at 10 o'clock. The pupils used to learn fast under the old regime of puritanical straight-back benches. We shall expect the new chairs and desks to impart a telegraphic celerity to their improvement henceforward.
NEW YEARS EXTENSION.—Yesterday was New Years Day for the ladies. We kept open house, and were called upon by seventy-two ladies—all young and handsome. This stunning popularity is pleasant to reflect upon, but we are afraid some people will think it prevented us from scouting for local matters with our usual avidity. This is a mistake; if anything had happened within the county limits yesterday, those ladies would have mentioned it.
SUPREME COURT.—Gen. Williams finished his long and able argument in the Chollar and Potosi case, at a late hour last night. This was the closing speech. It is said that the Supreme Court cannot reasonably be expected to render a decision in this important case before the end of the present month.
BALL IN CARSON.—Just as we are going to press, we learn that Mrs. Williamson is to give a ball at the White House in Carson City, next Thursday evening. We have no particulars, but we suppose that one of those pleasant, sociable affairs, which are Mrs. Williamson's specialty, is in contemplation.
MASS.—Rev. Father Manogue notifies the Roman Catholics of Carson City that Mass will be celebrated there this forenoon at 11 o'clock. We presume that this service will take place at Miss Clapp's school house, as it has been used by that denomination for some time past as a chapel.
FIREMEN'S MEETING.—The Virginia Engine Company will hold a meeting at the engine house, A street, on Tuesday evening, January 6th, for the purpose of electing officers to serve during the present year.
RECORDER'S COURT.—Business in this institution is still feeble. Only one case yesterday—a scion of the noble house of Howard—Christian name, John Doe, d. d., fined ten dollars and costs—paid the same and was discharged.
Territorial Enterprise, January 6, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
FREE FIGHT.—A beautiful and ably conducted free fight came off in C street yesterday afternoon, but as nobody was killed or mortally wounded in a manner sufficiently fatal to cause death, no particular interest attaches to the matter, and we shall not publish the details. We pine for murder—these fist fights are of no consequence to anybody.
Humboldt stocks are plenty in the market, at figures which we have no doubt are low for the claims. The want of buyers is probably attributable to the indefinite knowledge of these claims. There are unquestionably many valuable ledges in the district offered at exceedingly low prices.
The old friends and acquaintances of Jno. D. Kinney (who came to Nevada Territory with Chief Justice Turner, and who returned to the States last March,) will be gratified to learn that that sterling patriot is now a captain in the Seventh Ohio Cavalry.
Milstead, who murdered a man named Varney, some time ago, near Ragtown, in Humboldt county, will be hung in Dayton next Friday.
James Leconey, W. H. Barstow, Jas. Phelan and John A. Collins were elected members of the Board of Education at Virginia.
Territorial Enterprise, January 8, 1863
[written after having his hat stolen]
We have been suffering from the seven years' itch for many months. It is probably the most aggravating disease in the world. It is contagious. That man has commenced a career of suffering which is frightful to contemplate; there is no cure for the distemper—it must run its course; there is no respite for its victim, and but little alleviation of its torments to be hoped for; the unfortunate's only resource is to bathe in sulphur and molasses and let his finger nails grow. Further advice is unnecessary—instinct will prompt him to scratch.
Territorial Enterprise, January 10, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
THE SANITARY BALL—The Sanitary Ball at La Plata Hall on Thursday night [January 8, 1863] was a very marked success, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, the correctness of our theory, that ladies never fail in undertakings of this kind. If there had been about two dozen more people there, the house would have been crowded—as it was, there was room enough on the floor for the dancers, without trespassing on their neighbors' corns. Several of those long, trailing dresses, even, were under fire in the thickest of the fight for six hours, and came out as free from rips and rents as they were when they went in. Not all of them, though. We recollect a circumstance in point. We had just finished executing one of those inscrutable figures of the plain quadrille; we were feeling unusually comfortable, because we had gone through the performance as well as anybody could have done it, except that we had wandered a little toward the last; in fact we had wandered out of our own and into somebody else's set—but that was a matter of small consequence, as the new locality was as good as the old one, and we were used to that sort of thing anyhow. We were feeling comfortable, and we had assumed an attitude—we have a sort of talent for posturing—a pensive attitude, copied from the Colossus of Rhodes—when the ladies were ordered to the centre. Two of them got there, and the other two moved off gallantly, but they failed to make the connection. They suddenly broached to under full headway, and there was a sound of parting canvas. Their dresses were anchored under our boots, you know. It was unfortunate, but it could not be helped. Those two beautiful pink dresses let go amidships, and remained in a ripped and damaged condition to the end of the ball. We did not apologize, because our presence of mind happened to be absent at the very moment that we had the greatest need of it. But we beg permission to do so now.
An excellent supper was served in the large dining-room of the new What Cheer House on B street. We missed it there, somewhat. We were not accompanied by a lady, and consequently we were not eligible to a seat at the first table. We found out all about that at the Gold Hill ball, and we had intended to be all prepared for this one. We engaged a good many young ladies last Tuesday to go with us, thinking that out of the lot we should certainly be able to secure one, at the appointed time, but they all seemed to have got a little angry about something—nobody knows what, for the ways of women are past finding out. They told us we had better go and invite a thousand girls to go to the ball. A thousand. Why, it was absurd. We had no use for a thousand girls. A thou—but those girls were as crazy as loons. In every instance, after they had uttered that pointless suggestion, they marched magnificently out of their parlors—and if you will believe us, not one of them ever recollected to come back again. Why, it was the most unaccountable experience we ever heard of. We never enjoyed so much solitude in so many different places, in one evening before. But patience has its limits; we finally got tired of that arrangement—and at the risk of offending some of those girls, we stalked off to the Sanitary Ball alone without a virgin, out of that whole litter. We may have done wrong—we probably did do wrong to disappoint those fellows in that kind of style—but how could we help it? We couldn't stand the temperature of those parlors more than an hour at a time: it was cold enough to freeze out the heaviest stock-holder on the Gould & Curry's books.
However, as we remarked before, everybody spoke highly of the supper, and we believe they meant what they said. We are unable to say anything in the matter from personal knowledge, except that the tables were arranged with excellent taste, and more than abundantly supplied, and everything looked very beautiful, and very inviting, also; but then we had absorbed so much cold weather in those parlors, and had had so much trouble with those girls, that we had no appetite left. We only eat a boiled ham and some pies, and went back to the ball room. There were some very handsome cakes on the tables, manufactured by Mr. Slade, and decorated with patriotic mottoes, done in fancy icing. All those who were happy that evening, agree that the supper was superb.
After supper the dancing was jolly. They kept it up till four in the morning, and the guests enjoyed themselves excessively. All the dances were performed, and the bill of fare wound up with a new style of plain quadrille called a medley, which involved the whole list. It involved us also. But we got out again—and we staid out, with great sagacity. But speaking of plain quadrilles reminds us of another new one—the Virginia reel. We found it a very easy matter to dance it, as long as we had thirty or forty lookers-on to prompt us. The dancers were formed in two long ranks, facing each other, and the battle opens with some light skirmishing between the pickets, which is gradually resolved into a general engagement along the whole line: after that, you have nothing to do but stand by and grab every lady that drifts within reach of you, and swing her. It is very entertaining, and elaborately scientific also; but we observed that with a partner who had danced it before, we were able to perform it rather better than the balance of the guests.
Altogether, the Sanitary Ball was a remarkably pleasant party, and we are glad that such was the case—for it is a very uncomfortable task to be obliged to say harsh things about entertainments of this kind. At the present writing we cannot say what the net proceeds of the ball will amount to, but they will doubtless reach quite a respectable figure—say $400.
DUE NOTICE—Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil; and we therefore hold the man who suffers that turkey to run at large just back of our office as culpable as our self, if some day that fowl is no longer perceptible to human vision. The Czar of Russia never cast his eye on the minarets of Byzantium half as longingly as we gaze on that old gobbler. Turkey stuffed with oysters is our weakness—our mouth waters at the recollection of sundry repasts of that character—and this bird aforementioned appears to us to have an astonishing capacity for oyster-stuffing. Wonder if those fresh oysters at Almack's are all gone? We grow ravenous—pangs of hunger gnaw our vitals—if to-morrow's setting sun gleams on the living form of that turkey, we yield our reputation for strategy.
THE NEW COURT HOUSE.—Messrs. Unger & Denninger's new brick house, on B street, has been leased by the County Commissioners for court rooms and offices. The first floor, we believe, is to be used for a United States District Court room, and the second story will be partitioned into offices and a Probate Court room. It would probably have been better to have reversed this order of things, on account of the superior light and the freedom from dust and noise afforded by the upper story; yet it is possible that these advantages may be as necessary in one case as the other—we do not care about dictating much in the matter so long as no one will be likely to pay us for it. But nevertheless, since the first story is to be used for the District Court, we wish to suggest that that box, that partition, be removed, and the whole of it set apart for that purpose. It would then be a large, handsome and well-lighted hall, whereas, in its present shape, it is not very greatly superior to the present court room on C street. A gentleman informed us yesterday that he thought the intention was to remove the partition, but he could not be positive about it.
THE MUSIC.—Millington & McCluskey's band furnished the music for the Sanitary Ball on Thursday night, and also for the Odd Fellows' Ball the other evening in Gold Hill, and the excellence of the article was only equalled by the industry and perseverance of the performers. We consider that the man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip, may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.
Territorial Enterprise, January 11-21, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
HIGH PRICE OF PORK.—In our record of probate proceedings to-day, will be found the case of John Hill vs. John Doe Wentworth. As a matter of principle, it may be well enough to stand by your rights until the lake of fire and brimstone is no longer in a state of liquification, but whether it be good policy to do so at all times is a question which admits of argument. This case is an instance in point. The property involved is about twenty or thirty dollars' worth of pork in a crude state—we mean, two living hogs, probably worth but little more than ten dollars each; yet this suit to determine their ownership has already cost the parties to it some six or seven hundred dollars, and the defeated but plucky plaintiff has given notice that he will apply for a new trial! The new trial will double the bill of expenses, in all human probability.
We learn from gentlemen who were present at the trial to-day, that there were about thirty witnesses on the stand, and one of them a woman. The hog dispute afforded those concerned and the lookers-on a good deal of fun, but it was very costly. Those two distinguished pigs ought to be taken care of and exhibited at the first agricultural fair of Nevada Territory. At any rate, we shall officially spread the proceedings of this trial upon the records of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Society, as evidence of the high value placed upon the hog in Nevada Territory.
Territorial Enterprise, January 22-28, 1863
The following, which will do to sweeten some bachelor's coffee with, was picked up in front of the International:
"DARLING: I have not had time to write you to-day—I have worked hard entertaining company. Do come and see your little pet. I yearn for the silvery cadence of your voice—I thirst for the bubbling stream of your affection.
"YOUR MADELINE."
We feel for that girl. The water privilege which she pines for so lovingly has probably dried up and departed, else her sweet note would not have been floating around the streets without a claimant. We feel for her deeply—and if it will afford her any relief, if it will conduce to her comfort, if it will satisfy her yearning even in the smallest degree, we will cheerfully call around and "bubble" awhile for her ourself, if she will send us her address.
Territorial Enterprise, mid-February, 1863
We slide down into the Spanish mine yesterday, to look after the rich strike which was made there lately.
[This in the time before elevators, when, as in the salt mines in Austria, one slides down a polished wooden bannister on a waxed leather apron to reduce the heat. It is a great ride down but a long hike back up. Ed.]
We found things going on at about their usual gait, and the general appearance of the mine in no respect differing from what it was before the recent flood. A few inches of water still remain in the lower gallery, but it interferes with nobody, and can be easily bailed out whenever it may be deemed necessary. Every department of the Spanish mine is now in first class working order, owing to the able management of the general Superintendent, Mr. J. P. Corrigan: the slight damage done by the inundation having been thoroughly repaired. In the matter of bracing and timbering the mine, an improvement upon the old plan has lately been added, which makes a large saving in the bill of expenses. This improvement consists in building the stations wider and higher, and filling up a wall of them here and there with refuse rock. Expenses are not only lightened thus, but such walls never rot, are never in danger of caving, need never be removed, and are altogether the strongest supports that a mine can have. Intelligent people can understand, now, that about a hundred dollars a day may be saved in this way, without even taking into consideration the costly job of re-timbering every two or three years, which is rendered unnecessary by it—and by way of driving the proposition into heads like the Unreliable's, which is filled with oysters instead of brains, we will say that by building these walls, you are saved the time and labor of lowering heavy timbers 300 feet into the earth and hoisting up refuse rock the same distance; for you can leave the one in the woods, and pile the other into boxed-up stations as fast as you dig it out. However, it is time to speak of the rich strike, now. This charming spot is two hundred and forty feet below the surface of the earth. It extends across the entire width of the ledge—from twenty-five to thirty feet—and has been excavated some twenty feet on the length of the lead, and to the depth of twenty-one feet. How much deeper it reaches, no man knoweth. The face of the walls is of a dark blue color, sparkling with pyrites, or sulphurets, or something, and beautifully marbled with little crooked streaks of lightning as white as loaf sugar. This mass of richness pays from eight to twelve hundred dollars a ton just as it is taken from the ledge, without "sorting." Twenty thousand dollars' worth of it was hoisted out of the mine last Saturday; about two hundred and fifty tons have been taken out altogether. The hoisting apparatus is about perfect: when put to its best speed, it can bail out somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty tons of rock in daylight. The rich ore we have been talking about is sacked up as soon as it reaches the surface of the Territory, and shipped off to the Company's mill (the Silver State) at Empire City. The Silver State is a forty-stamp arrangement, with a thundering chimney to it, which any one has noticed who has traveled from here to Carson. Mr. Dorsey is the superintendent, and Mr. Janin assayer.
Territorial Enterprise, February 5, 1863
LETTER FROM CARSON
CARSON, Tuesday Night.
EDS. ENTERPRISE: I received the following atrocious document the morning I arrived here. It is from that abandoned profligate, the Unreliable, and I think it speaks for itself:
CARSON CITY, Thursday Morning
TO THE UNRELIABLE—SIR: Observing the driver of the Virginia stage hunting after you this morning, in order to collect his fare, I infer you are in town.
In the paper which you represent, I noticed an article which I took to be an effusion of your muddled brain, stating that I had "cabbaged" a number of valuable articles from you the night I took you out of the streets in Washoe City and permitted you to occupy my bed.
I take this opportunity to inform you that I will compensate you at the rate of $20 per head for every one of those valuables that I received from you, providing you will relieve me of their presence. This offer can either be accepted or rejected on your part: but, providing you don't see proper to accept it, you had better procure enough lumber to make a box 4 x 8, and have it made as early as possible. Judge Dixson will arrange the preliminaries, if you don't accede. An early reply is expected by
Not satisfied with wounding my feelings by making the most extraordinary references and allusions in the above note, he even sent me a challenge to fight, in the same envelope with it, hoping to work upon my fears and drive me from the country by intimidation. But I was not to be frightened; I shall remain in the Territory. I guessed his object at once, and determined to accept his challenge, choose weapons and things, and scare him, instead of being scared myself. I wrote a stern reply to him, and offered him mortal combat with bootjacks at a hundred yards. The effect was more agreeable than I could have hoped for. His hair turned black in a single night, from excess of fear; then he went into a fit of melancholy, and while it lasted he did nothing but sigh, and sob, and snuffle, and slobber, and blow his nose on his coat-tail, and say "he wished he was in the quiet tomb"; finally, he said he would commit suicide—he would say farewell to the cold, cold world, with its cares and troubles, and go and sleep with his fathers, in perdition. Then rose up this young man, and threw his demijohn out of the window, and took a glass of pure water, and drained it to the very, very dregs. And then he fell on the floor in spasms. Dr. Tjader was called in, and as soon as he found that the cuss was poisoned, he rushed down to the Magnolia Saloon and got the antidote, and poured it down him. As he was drawing his last breath, he scented the brandy and lingered yet a while upon the earth, to take a drink with the boys. But for this, he would have been no more and possibly a good deal less—in another moment. So he survived; but he has been in a mighty precarious condition ever since. I have been up to see how he was getting along two or three times a day. He is very low; he lies there in silence, and hour after hour he appears to be absorbed in tracing out the figures in the wall paper. He is not changed in the least, though; his face looks just as natural as anything could be there is no more expression in it than a turnip. But he is a very sick man; I was up there a while ago, and I could see that his friends had begun to entertain hopes that he would not get over it. As soon as I saw that, all my enmity vanished; I even felt like doing the poor Unreliable a kindness, and showing him, too, how my feelings towards him had changed. So I went and bought him a beautiful coffin, and carried it up and set it down on his bed, and told him to climb in when his time was up. Well, sir, you never saw a man so affected by a little act of kindness as he was by that. He let off a sort of war-whoop, and went to kicking things around like a crazy man, and he foamed at the mouth, and went out of one fit and into another faster than I could take them down in my note-book. I have got thirteen down, though, and I know he must have had two or three before I could find my pencil. I actually believe he would have had a thousand, if that old fool who nurses him hadn't thrown the coffin out of the window, and threatened to serve me in the same way if I didn't leave. I left, of course, under the circumstances, and I learn that although the patient was getting better a moment before this circumstance, he got a good deal worse immediately afterward. They say he lies in a sort of a stupor now, and if they cannot rally him, he is gone in, as it were. They may take their own course now, though, and use their own judgment. I shall not go near them again, although I think I could rally him with another coffin.
I did not return to Virginia yesterday, on account of the wedding. The parties were Hon. James H. Sturtevant, one of the first Pi-Utes of Nevada, and Miss Emma Curry, daughter of Hon. A. Curry, who also claims that his is a Pi-Ute family of high antiquity. Curry conducted the wedding arrangements himself, and invited none but Pi-Utes. This interfered with me a good deal. However, as I had heard it reported that a marriage was threatened, I felt it my duty to go down there and find out the facts in the case. They said I might stay, as it was me; the permission was unnecessary, though—I calculated to do that anyhow. I promised not to say anything about the wedding, and I regard that promise as sacred—my word is as good as my bond. At three o'clock in the afternoon, all the Pi-Utes went up stairs to the old Hall of Representatives in Curry's house, preceded by the bride and groom, and the brides maids and groomsmen (Miss Jo. Perkins and Miss Nettie Curry, and Hon. John H. Mills and Wm. M. Gillespie) and followed by myself and the fiddlers. The fiddles were tuned up, three quadrille sets were formed on the floor. Father Bennett advanced and touched off the high contracting parties with the hymeneal torch ( married them, you know), and at the word of command from Curry, the fiddle-bows were set in motion, and the plain quadrilles turned loose. Thereupon, some of the most responsible dancing ensued that you ever saw in your life. The dance that Tam O'Shanter witnessed was slow in comparison to it. They kept it up for six hours, and then they carried out the exhausted musicians on a shutter, and went down to supper. I know they had a fine supper, and plenty of it, but I do not know much else. They drank so much champagne around me that I got confused, and lost the hang of things, as it were. Mills, and Musser, and Sturtevant, and Curry, got to making speeches, and I got to looking at the bride and bridesmaids—they looked uncommonly handsome—and finally I fell into a sort of trance. When I recovered from it the brave musicians were all right again, and the dance was ready to commence. They went to slinging plain quadrilles around as lively as ever, and never rested again until nearly midnight, when the dancers all broke down and the party broke up. It was all mighty pleasant, and jolly, and sociable, and I wish to thunder I was married myself. I took a large slab of the bridal cake home with me to dream on, and dreamt that I was still a single man, and likely to remain so, if I live and nothing happens—which has given me a greater confidence in dreams than I ever felt before. I cordially wish the newly married couple all kinds of happiness and posterity, though.
Richardson's case was continued to the next term of the District Court last Thursday, and the prisoner admitted to bail in the sum of $10,000—$7,000 on the charge of murder (the killing of Con Mason), and $3,000 on the charge of highway robbery.
Three new mining companies filed their certificates of incorporation in the County Clerk's and Territorial Secretary's offices last Saturday. Their ledges are located in the new Brown & Murphy District, in Lyon county. The names, etc., of the new companies are as follows: Jennie V. Thompson G. & S. M. Company, capital stock $220,000, in 2,200 shares of $100 each; Byron G. & S. M. Company, same number of shares, etc.; Lion G. & S. Company, capital stock $230,000, in 2,300 shares of $100 each. The following gentlemen are Trustees of all three companies: C. L. Newton, J. D. Thompson, J. Ball, G. C. Haswell and Wm. Millikin. The principal offices of the companies are in Carson City.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, February 8, 1863
CARSON, Thursday Morning
EDS. ENTERPRISE: The community were taken by surprise last night, by the marriage of Dr. J. H. Wayman and Mrs. M. A. Ormsby. Strategy did it. John K. Trumbo lured the people to a party at his house, and corraled them, and in the meantime Acting Governor Clemens proceeded to the bride's dwelling and consolidated the happy couple under the name and style of Mr. and Mrs. Wayman, with a life charter, perpetual succession, unlimited marital privileges, principal place of business at ho—blast those gold and silver mining incorporations! I have compiled a long list of them from the Territorial Secretary's books this morning, and their infernal technicalities keep slipping from my pen when I ought to be writing graceful poetical things. After the marriage, the high contracting parties and the witnesses there assembled, adjourned to Mr. Trumbo's house. The ways of the Unreliable are past finding out. His instincts always prompt him to go where he is not wanted, particularly if anything of an unusual nature is on foot. Therefore, he was present and saw those wedding ceremonies through the parlor windows. He climbed up behind Dr. Wayman's coach and rode up to Trumbo's—this shows that his faculties were not affected by his recent illness. When the bride and groom entered the parlor he went in with them, bowing and scraping and smiling in his imbecile way, and attempting to pass himself off for the principal groomsman. I never saw such an awkward, ungainly lout in my life. He had on a pair of Jack Wilde's pantaloons, and a swallow-tail coat belonging to Lytle ("Schermerhorn's Boy"), and they fitted him as neatly as an elephant's hide would fit a poodle dog. I would be ashamed to appear in any parlor in such a costume. It never enters his head to be ashamed of anything, though. It would have killed me with mortification to parade around there as he did, and have people stepping on my coat tail every moment. As soon as the guests found out who he was they kept out of his way as well as they could, but there were so many gentlemen and ladies present that he was never at a loss for somebody to pester with his disgusting familiarity. He worried them from the parlor to the sitting-room, and from thence to the dancing-hall, and then proceeded upstairs to see if he could find any more people to stampede. He found Fred. Turner, and stayed with him until he was informed that he could have nothing more to eat or drink in that part of the house. He went back to the dancing-hall then, but he carried away a codfish under one arm, and Mr. Curry's plug hat full of sour-krout under the other. He posted himself right where he could be most in the way, and fell to eating as comfortably as if he were boarding with Trumbo by the week. They bothered him some, though, because every time the order came to "all promenade," the dancers would sweep past him and knock his cod fish out of his hands and spill his sour-krout. He was the most loathsome sight I ever saw; he turned everybody's stomach but his own. It makes no difference to him, either, what he eats when hungry. I believe he would have eaten a corpse last night, if he had one. Finally, Curry came and took his hat away from him and tore one of his coat tails off and threatened to thresh him with it, and that checked his appetite for a moment. Instead of sneaking out of the house, then, as anybody would have done who had any self respect, he shoved his codfish into the pocket of his solitary coat tail (leaving at least eight inches of it sticking out), and crowded himself into a double quadrille. He had it all to himself pretty soon; because the order "gentlemen to the right" came, and he passed from one lady to another around the room, and wilted each and every one of them with the horrible fragrance of his breath. Even Trumbo, himself, fainted. Then the Unreliable, with a placid expression of satisfaction upon his countenance, marched forth and swept the parlors like a pestilence. When the guests had been persecuted as long as they could stand it, though, they got him to drink some kerosene oil, which neutralized the sour-krout and cod fish, and restored his breath to about its usual state, or even improved it, perhaps, for it generally smells like a hospital.
The Unreliable interfered with Col. Musser when he was singing the pea-nut song; he bothered William Patterson, Esq., when that baritone was singing, "Ever of thee I'm fondly dreaming"; he interrupted Epstein when he was playing on the piano; he followed the bride and bridegroom from place to place, like an evil spirit, and he managed to keep himself and his coat-tail eternally in the way. I did hope that he would stay away from the supper-table, but I hoped against an impossibility. He was the first one there, and had choice of seats also, because he told Mr. Trumbo he was a groomsman; and not only that, but he made him believe, also, that Dr. Wayman was his uncle. Then he sailed into the ice cream and champagne, and cakes and things, at his usual starvation gait, and he would infallibly have created a famine, if Trumbo had not been particularly well fortified with provisions. There is one circumstance connected with the Unreliable's career last night which it pains me to mention, but I feel that it is my duty to do it. I shall cut the melancholy fact as short as possible, however: seventeen silver spoons, a New Testament and a gridiron were missed after supper. They were found upon the Unreliable's person when he was in the act of going out at the back door.
Singing and dancing commenced at seven o'clock in the evening, and were kept up with unabated fury until half-past one in the morning, when the jolly company put on each other's hats and bonnets and wandered home, mighty well satisfied with Trumbo's "corn shucking," as he called it.
Well, you were particularly bitter about the "extra session" yesterday morning, and with very small cause, too, it seems to me. You rush in desperately and call out all the fire engines in the universe, and lo! there is nothing but a chunk of harmless fox-fire to squirt at after all. You slash away right and left at the lawyers, just as if they were not human like other people, subject to the same accidents of fortune and circumstances, moved by the same springs of action, and honest or dishonest according to the nature which God Almighty endowed them with. Stuff! You talk like a wooden man. A man's profession has but little to do with his moral character. If we had as many preachers as lawyers, you would find it mixed as to which occupation could muster the most rascals. Then you pitch into the legislators, and say that, "with two or three exceptions, they are men who failed to complete their programmes of rascality," etc. Humbug! They never commenced any such programme. I reported their proceedings—I was behind the scenes, and I know. I talk sweepingly, perhaps—so do you, in that wild sentence. There might have been two or three first-class rascals in the Legislature—I have that number in my eye at the present moment—but the balance were fully as honest as you, and considerably more so than me. I could prove this by simply reminding you of their names. Run over the list, and see if there are not some very respectable names on it. I have acknowledged that there were several scoundrels in the Legislature, but such a number, in as large a body as the last Assembly, could carry no measure, you know, and the men I am thinking of couldn't even influence one. The Lord originally intended them to do transportation duty in a jackass train, I think. And then, how you talk about the pecuniary wants of our legislators: "Their hungry wallets yearn for a second assault on the greenbacks and franchises of the Territory." That is humbug, also. Take the House, for instance. I can name you fifteen members of that body whose pecuniary condition is very comfortable—who stand in no more pressing need of Territorial greenbacks than you do of another leg. And I can name you half a dozen others who are not suffering for food and raiment, and whom Providence will be able to take care of, I think, without bringing an extra session of the Nevada Legislature to pass. You talk like a wooden man, I tell you. Why there are not enough "Territorial Greenbacks" in the Secretary's office and the Territorial Treasury put together to start a wholesale pea-nut stand with; and why should thirty-nine legislators want to neglect their business to go to Carson and gobble up and divide such a pittance? Bosh.
Somebody made a blunder; somebody did a piece of rascality. It was not the legislators, yet only they can set the matter right—and if they want to go back to the capital and do it, it is rather a credit to them than a dishonor. I cannot see anything very criminal in this conduct of theirs. You are too brash, you know—that is what is the matter with you. You say you heard a report that the Acting Governor had decided to call an extra session. Well, what if you did? Don't you suppose that, being here, at the seat of government, I would naturally know a good deal more about it than anybody's reports? Reports lie—I do not. Why didn't you ask me for information? I always have an abundance of the article on hand. I will give you some now: the Acting Governor has not decided to call an extra session; he is not seriously thinking of such a thing at present; he is not expecting to think of it next week; he is not in favor of the measure, and does not wish to move in the matter unless a majority of the counties expressly desire it. Now, you have said a great many things in your article which you ought not to have said; you have done injustice to all the parties whom you have mentioned; you have hollered "wolf!" when there was nothing present but the mildest sort of a lamb; and the properest course for you to pursue will be to screw down your throttle-valve and dry up.
I have a strong inclination to continue this subject a while longer, but I promised to go down in town and get drunk with Curry and Trumbo, and Tom Bedford and Gillespie, before I leave for Virginia. My promises are sacred. I have also to receive a petition from citizens of Carson, with several thousand names on it, requesting me to extend my visit here a few years longer. It affords me great pleasure to state that several hundred sheets of this petition are covered with the autographs of intelligent and beautiful ladies.
Territorial Enterprise, February 19, 1863
EDS. ENTERPRISE—I found the following letter, or Valentine, or whatever it is, lying on the summit, where it had been dropped unintentionally, I think. It was written on a sheet of legal cap, and each line was duly commenced within the red mark which traversed the sheet from top to bottom. Solon appeared to have had some trouble getting his effusion started to suit him. He had begun it, "Know all men by these presents," and scratched it out again; he had substituted, "Now at this day comes the plaintiff, by his attorney," and scratched that out also; he had tried other sentences of like character, and gone on obliterating them, until, through much sorrow and tribulation, he achieved the dedication which stands at the head of his letter, and to his entire satisfaction, I do cheerfully hope. But what a villain a man must be to blend together the beautiful language of love and the infernal phraseology of the law in one and the same sentence! I know but one of God's creatures who would be guilty of such depravity as this: I refer to the Unreliable. I believe the Unreliable to be the very lawyer's-cub who sat upon the solitary peak, all soaked in beer and sentiment, and concocted the insipid literary hash I am talking about. The handwriting closely resembles his semi-Chinese tarantula tracks.
SUGAR LOAF PEAK, February 14, 1863.
To the loveliness to whom these presents shall come, greeting:—This is a lovely day, my own Mary; its unencumbered sunshine reminds me of your happy face, and in the imagination the same doth now appear before me. Such sights and scenes as this ever remind me, the party of the second part, of you, my Mary, the peerless party of the first part. The view from the lonely and segregated mountain peak, of this portion of what is called and known as Creation, with all and singular the hereditaments and appurtenances thereunto appertaining and belonging, is inexpressively grand and inspiring; and I gaze, and gaze, while my soul is filled with holy delight, and my heart expands to receive thy spirit-presence, as aforesaid. Above me is the glory of the sun; around him float the messenger clouds, ready alike to bless the earth with gentle rain, or visit it with lightning, and thunder, and destruction; far below the said sun and the messenger clouds aforesaid, lying prone upon the earth in the verge of the distant horizon, like the burnished shield of a giant, mine eyes behold a lake, which is described and set forth in maps as the Sink of Carson; nearer, in the great plain, I see the Desert, spread abroad like the mantle of a Colossus, glowing by turns, with the warm light of the sun, hereinbefore mentioned, or darkly shaded by the messenger clouds aforesaid; flowing at right angles with said Desert, and adjacent thereto, I see the silver and sinuous thread of the river, commonly called Carson, which winds its tortuous course through the softly tinted valley, and disappears amid the gorges of the bleak and snowy mountains—a simile of man!—leaving the pleasant valley of Peace and Virtue to wander among the dark defiles of Sin, beyond the jurisdiction of the kindly beaming sun aforesaid! And about said sun, and the said clouds, and around the said mountains, and over the plain and the river aforesaid, there floats a purple glory—a yellow mist—as airy and beautiful as the bridal veil of a princess, about to be wedded according to the rites and ceremonies pertaining to, and established by, the laws or edicts of the kingdom or principality wherein she doth reside, and whereof she hath been and doth continue to be, a lawful sovereign or subject. Ah! my Mary, it is sublime! it is lovely! I have declared and made known, and by these presents do declare and make known unto you, that the view from Sugar Loaf Peak, as hereinbefore described and set forth, is the loveliest picture with which the hand of the Creator has adorned the earth, according to the best of my knowledge and belief, so help me God.
Given under my hand, and in the spirit-presence of the bright being whose love has restored the light of hope to a soul once groping in the darkness of despair, on the day and year first above written.
(Signed) SOLON LYCURGUS.
Law Student, and Notary Public in and for the said County of Storey, and Territory of Nevada.
To Miss Mary Links, Virginia (and may the laws have her in their holy keeping).
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, February 19, 1863
[some text of this article has not been recovered]
LOCAL COLUMN
[LA PLATA ORE COMPANY.—]... The company was organized under a deed of trust, and has been steadily at work, with scarce any intermission, since the 1st of May, 1861—under the general superintendence of the President, Col. W. H. Howard. The claim is believed to comprise some of the finest ledges in the Virginia and Gold Hill range, and from present appearances it looks as if the company were about to commence realizing the reward of their long and well-bestowed labor, as in addition to the ledges already noticed, the top of a fine ledge has already been uncovered on the west side of the claim, where the chimney ranging with the Butler's Peak and Mount Davidson ledges crops out.
THE CHINA TRIAL.—We were there, yesterday, not because we were obliged to go, but just because we wanted to. The more we see of this aggravated trial, the more profound does our admiration for it become. It has more phases than the moon has in a chapter of the almanac. It commenced as an assassination; the assassinated man neglected to die, and they turned it into assault and battery; after this the victim did die, whereupon his murderers were arrested and tried yesterday for perjury; they convicted one Chinaman, but when they found out it was the wrong one, they let him go—and why they should have been so almighty particular is beyond our comprehension; then, in the afternoon, the officers went down and arrested Chinatown again for the same old offense, and put it in jail—but what shape the charge will take this time, no man can foresee: the chances are that it will be about a stand-off between arson and robbing the mail. Capt. White hopes to get the murderers of the Chinaman hung one of these days, and so do we, for that matter, but we do not expect anything of the kind. You see, these Chinamen are all alike, and they cannot identify each other. They mean well enough, and they really show a disinterested anxiety to get some of their friends and relatives hung, but the same misfortune overtakes them every time: they make mistakes and get the wrong man, with unvarying accuracy. With a zeal in behalf of justice which cannot be too highly praised, the whole Chinese population have accused each other of this murder, each in his regular turn, but fate is against them. They cannot tell each other apart. There is only one way to manage this thing with strict equity: hang the gentle Chinamen promiscuously, until justice is satisfied.
THE CONCERT.—We shall always guard against insinuating that the citizens of Virginia are not filled with a fondness for music, after what we saw at Mr. Griswold's Concert last night. The house was filled, from dome to cellar (we speak figuratively, since there was neither dome nor cellar to the house,) with people who entirely appreciated the performance, and testified pleasure by frequent and hearty applause. The Concert was a notable credit to the talent of Virginia, and we think we speak the public desire when we ask for another like it. Mr. James Gilmore, a very youthful looking poet, recited a martial poem whereof himself was the author. It was received with great applause. We only heard five of the songs set...
Territorial Enterprise, February 17-22, 1863
We propose to speak of some silver bars which we have been looking at, and to talk science a little, also, in this article, if we find that what we learned in the latter line yesterday has not escaped our memory. The bars we allude to were at the banking house of Paxton Thornburgh, and were five in number; they were the concentrated result of portions of two eight-day runs of the Hoosier State Mill, on Potosi rock. The first of the bricks bore the following inscription, which is poetry stripped of flowers and flummery, and reduced to plain common sense: "No. 857; Potosi Gold and Silver Mining Company; Theall & Co., assayers; 688.48 ounces, gold, 020 fine, silver, 962 fine; gold $572.13, silver $1,229.47." Bars No. 836 and No. 858 bore about the same inscription, save that their values differed, of course, the one being worth $1,800, and the other a fraction under $1,300. The two largest bars were still in the workshop, and had not yet been assayed; one of them weighed nearly a hundred pounds and 1 was worth about $3,000, and the other, which contained over 900 ounces, was worth in the neighborhood of $2,000. The weight of the whole five bars may be set down in round numbers at 300 pounds, and their value, at say, $10,000. Those are about the correct figures. We are very well pleased with the Hoosier State mill and the Potosi mine—we think of buying them. From the contemplation of this result of two weeks' mill and mining labor, we walked through the assaying rooms, in the rear of the banking house, with Mr. Theall, and examined the scientific operations there, with a critical eye. We absorbed much obtuse learning, and we propose to give to the ignorant the benefit of it. After the amalgam has been retorted at the mill, it is brought here and broken up and put into a crucible (along with a little borax,) of the capacity of an ordinary plug hat; this vessel is composed of some kind of pottery which stands heat like a salamander; the crucible is placed in a brick furnace; in the midst of a charcoal fire as hot as the one which the three Scriptural Hebrew children were assayed in; when the mass becomes melted, it is well stirred, in order to get the metals thoroughly mixed, after which it is poured into an iron brick mould; such of the base metals as were not burned up, remain in the crucible in the form of a "sing." The next operation is the assaying of the brick. A small chip is cut from each end of it and weighed; each of these is enveloped in lead and placed in a little shallow cup made of bone ashes, called a cupel, and put in a small stone-ware oven, enclosed in a sort of parlor stove furnace, where it is cooked like a lost sinner; the lead becomes oxydized and is entirely absorbed by the pores of the cupel—any other base metals that may still linger in the precious stew, meet the same fate, or go up the chimney. The gold and silver come from the cupel in the shape of a little button, and in a state of perfect purity; this is weighed once more, and what it has lost by the cooking process, determines the amount of base metal that was in it, and shows exactly what proportion of it the bar contains—the lost weight was base metal you understand, and was burned up or absorbed by the cupel. The scales used in this service are of such extremely delicate construction that they have to be shut up in a glass case, since a breath of air is sufficient to throw them off their balance—so sensitive are they, indeed, that they are even affected by the particles of dust which find their way through the joinings of the case and settle on them. They will figure the weight of a piece of metal down to the thousandth part of a grain, with stunning accuracy. You might weigh a musquito here, and then pull one of his legs off, and weigh him again, and the scales would detect the difference. The smallest weight used—the one which represents the thousandth part of a grain—is composed of aluminum, which is the metallic base of common clay, and is the lightest metal known to science. It looks like an imperceptible atom clipped from the invisible corner of a piece of paper whittled down to an impossible degree of sharpness—as it were—and they handle it with pincers like a hair pin. But with an excuse for this interesting digression, we will return to the silver button again. After the weighing, melting and re-weighing of it has shown the amount of base metal contained in the brick, the next thing to be done is to separate the silver and gold in it, in order to find out the exact proportions of these in the bar. The button is placed in a mattrass filled with nitric acid, (an elongated glass bottle or tube, shaped something like a bell clapper) which is half buried in a box of hot sand—they called it a sand bath—on top of the little cupel furnace, where all the silver is boiled out of said button and held in solution, (when in this condition it is chemically termed "nitrate of silver.") This process leaves a small pinch of gold dust in the bottom of the mattrass which is perfectly pure; its weight will show the proportion of pure gold in the bar, of course. The silver in solution is then precipitated with muriatic acid (or something of that kind—we are not able to swear that this was the drug mentioned to us, although we feel very certain that it was,) and restored to metal again. Its weight, by the musquito scales, will show the proportion of silver contained in the brick, you know. Now just here, our memory is altogether at fault. We cannot recollect what in the world it is they do with the "dry cups." We asked a good many questions about them—asking questions is our regular business—but we have forgotten the answers. It is all owing to lager beer. We are inclined to think, though, that after the silver has been precipitated, they cook it a while in those little chalky-looking "dry cups," in order to turn it from fine silver dust to a solid button again for the sake of convenient handling—but we cannot begin to recollect anything about it. We said they made a separate assay of the chips cut from each end of a bar; now if these chips do not agree—if they make different statements as to the proportions of the various metals contained in the bar, it is pretty good proof that the mixing was not thorough, and the brick has to be melted over again; this occurrence is rare, however. This is all the science we know. What we do not know is reserved for private conversation, and will be liberally inflicted upon any body who will come here to the office and submit to it. After the bar has been assayed, it is stamped as described in the beginning of this dissertation, and then it is ready for the mint. Science is a very pleasant subject to dilate upon, and we consider that we are as able to dilate upon it as any man that walks—but if we have been guilty of carelessness in any part of this article, so that our method of assaying as set forth herein may chance to differ from Mr. Theall's, we would advise that gentleman to stick to his own plan nevertheless, and not go to following ours—his is as good as any known to science. If we have struck anything new in our method, however, we shall be happy to hear of it, so that we can take steps to secure to ourself the benefits accruing therefrom.
Territorial Enterprise, February 25, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
THE UNRELIABLE.—This poor miserable outcast crowded himself into the Firemen's Ball, night before last, and glared upon the happy scene with his evil eye for a few minutes. He had his coat buttoned up to his chin, which is the way he always does when he has no shirt on. As soon as the managers found out he was there, they put him out, of course. They had better have allowed him to stay, though, for he walked straight across the street, with all his vicious soul aroused, and climbed in at the back window of the supper room and gobbled up the last crumb of the repast provided for the guests, before he was discovered. This accounts for the scarcity of provisions at the Firemen's supper that night. Then he went home and wrote a particular description of our ball costume, with his usual meanness, as if such information could be of any consequence to the public. He never vouchsafed a single compliment to our dress, either, after all the care and taste we had bestowed upon it. We despise that man.
"MANY CITIZENS."—In another column of this paper will be found a card signed by "Many Citizens of Carson," stating that the County Commissioners of Ormsby county have removed the Sheriff from office and appointed some one else in his stead. They also ask whether the Commissioners really possess the power to remove the Sheriff, or the Governor of the Territory, or the President of the United States, at pleasure. This is all well enough, except that in the face of our well known ability in the treatment of ponderous questions of unwritten law, these citizens have addressed their inquiries to the chief editor of this paper—a man who knows no more about legal questions than he does about religion—and so saturated with self-conceit is he, that he has even attempted, in his feeble way, to answer the propositions set forth in that note. We ignore his reply entirely, and notwithstanding the disrespect which has been shown us, we shall sink private pique for the good of our fellow men, and proceed to set their minds at rest on this question of power. We declare that the County Commissioners do possess the power to remove the officers mentioned in that note, at pleasure. The Organic Act says so in so many words. We invite special attention to the fist clause of section 2 of that document, where this language is used, if we recollect rightly: "The executive power and authority in and over said Territory of Nevada shall be vested in a Governor and other officers, who shall hold their offices for four years, and until their successors shall be appointed and qualified, unless sooner removed by the County Commissioners." That is explicit enough, we take it. "Other officers" means any or all other officers, of course, else such dignitaries as it was intended to refer to would have been specifically mentioned; consequently, the President of the United States, and the Governor and Sheriff being "officers," come within the provisions of the law, and may be shoved out of the way by the Commissioners as quietly as they would abate a nuisance. We might enlarge upon this subject until Solomon himself couldn't under stand it—but we have settled the question, and we despise to go on scattering pearls before swine who have not asked us for them. In thus proving by the Organic Act, and beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the County Commissioners are invested with power to remove the Sheriff or the Governor or the President, whenever they see fit to do so, we have been actuated solely by a love of the godlike principles of right and justice, and a desire to show the public what an unmitigated ass the chief editor of this paper is. Having succeeded to our entire satisfaction, we transfer our pen to matters of local interest, although we could prove, if we wanted to, that the County Commissioners not only possess the power to depose the officers above referred to but to hang them also, if they feel like it. When people want a legal opinion in detail, they must address their communications to us, individually, and not to irresponsible smatterers, like the chief editor.
THE FIREMEN'S BALL.—About seventy couples assembled at Topliffe's Theatre night before last, upon the occasion of the annual ball of Virginia Engine Company No. 1. The hall was ablaze, from one end to the other, with flags, mirrors, pictures, etc.; and when the crowd of dancers had got into violent motion, and thoroughly fuddled with plain quadrilles, the looking-glasses multiplied them into a distracted and countless throng. Verily, the effect was charming to the last degree. The decoration of the theatre occupied several days, and was done under the management of a committee composed of Messrs. Brokaw, Robinson, Champney, Claresy, Garvey and Sands, and they certainly acquitted themselves with marked ability. The floor was covered with heavy canvass, and we rather liked the arrangement—but the wind got under it and made it fill and sag like a circus tent, insomuch that it impeded the Varsovienne practice, and caused the ladies to complain occasionally. Benham's "People's Band" made excellent music; however, they always do that. We have not one particle of fault to find with the ball; the managers kept perfect order and decorum, and did everything in their power to make it pass pleasantly to all the guests. They succeeded. But of all the failures we have been called upon to chronicle, the supper was the grandest. It was bitterly denounced by nearly everybody who sat down to it—officers, firemen, men, women and children. Now, the supposition is, that somebody will come out in a card and deny this, and attribute base motives to us: but we are not to be caught asleep, or even napping, this time—we have got all our proofs at hand, and shall explode at anybody who tries to show that we cannot tell the truth without being actuated by unworthy motives. Chief Engineer Peasley and officer Birdsall said that the supper contract was for a table supplied with everything the market could afford, and in such profusion that the last who came might fare as well as the first (the contractor to receive a stipulated sum for each supper furnished)—and they also say that no part or portion of that contract was entirely fulfilled. The entertainment broke up about four o'clock in the morning, and the guests returned to their homes well satisfied with the ball itself, but not with the supper.
SMALL POX.—From Carson we learn, officially, that Dr. Munckton has been sent down to Pine Nut Springs to look after some cases of small pox, reported as existing among the Washoe Indians there. It is said that three men and a mahala are afflicted with it; the doctor intends vaccinating their attendants and warning the other Indians to keep away. Capt. Jo says one of the Indians caught the disease from a shirt given him by a white man. We do not believe any man would do such a thing as that maliciously, but at the same time, any man is censurable who is so careless as to leave infected clothing lying about where these poor devils can get hold of it. The commonest prudence ought to suggest the destruction of such dangerous articles.
SCHOOL-HOUSE.—An addition is being built to the public school house, and will be completed and put in order for occupation as soon as possible. Mr. Mellvile's school has increased to such an extent that the old premises were found insufficient to accommodate all the pupils. As soon as the new building is completed, the school will be divided into three departments—advanced, intermediate and infant—and one of these will occupy it.
TRIAL TO-DAY.—Sam Ingalls, who attempted the life of Pease the other day with a bowie knife, will be up before Judge Atwill to-day on a charge of drawing a deadly weapon. A case of this kind should never be allowed to pass without a severe rebuke, and if the evidence finds the prisoner guilty, he will probably catch it to-day; if it does not, why, no one wants him rebuked, of course.
DISTRICT COURT.—The testimony for both sides in the case of the Burning Moscow vs. Madison Company was completed yesterday, and the lawyers will begin to throw hot shot at each other this morning—which is our military way of saying that the arguments of counsel herein will be commenced to-day. A great deal of interest is manifested in this suit, and the lobbies will be crowded during its trial.
SUICIDE.—We learn by a note received last night per Langton's Express, that a German named John Meyer, a wood dealer in Downieville, committed suicide there on the night of the 19th inst., by blowing his brains out with a pistol. The cause is supposed to have been insanity.
TELEGRAPHIC.—A message for S. S. Harman remains uncalled for at the Telegraph office.
Territorial Enterprise, February 26, 1863
[last portion of mock obituary of the "Unreliable"; first portion of original text not recovered]
He became a newspaper reporter, and crushed Truth to earth and kept her there; he bought and sold his own notes, and never paid his board; he pretended great friendship for Gillespie, in order to get to sleep with him; then he took advantage of his bed fellow and robbed him of his glass eye and his false teeth; of course he sold the articles, and Gillespie was obliged to issue more county scrip than the law allowed, in order to get them back again; the Unreliable broke into my trunk at Washoe City, and took jewelry and fine clothes and things, worth thousands and thousands of dollars; he was present, without invitation, at every party and ball and wedding which transpired in Carson during thirteen years. But the last act of his life was the crowning meanness of it: I refer to the abuse of me in the Virginia Union of last Saturday, and also to a list of Langton's stage passengers sent to the same paper by him, wherein my name appears between those of "Sam Chung" and "Sam Lee." This is his treatment of me, his benefactor. That malicious joke was his dying atrocity. During thirteen years he played himself for a white man: he fitly closed his vile career by trying to play me for a Chinaman. He is dead and buried now, though: let him rest, let him rot. Let his vices be forgotten, but let his virtues be remembered: it will not infringe much upon any man's time.
MARK TWAIN.
P. S.—By private letters from Carson, since the above was in type, I am pained to learn that the Unreliable, true to his unnatural instincts, came to life again in the midst of his funeral sermon, and remains so to this moment. He was always unreliable in life—he could not even be depended upon in death. The shrouded corpse shoved the coffin lid to one side, rose to a sitting posture, cocked his eye at the minister and smilingly said, "O let up, Dominie, this is played out, you know—loan me two bits!" The frightened congregation rushed from the house, and the Unreliable followed them, with his coffin on his shoulder. He sold it for two dollars and a half, and got drunk at a "bit house" on the proceeds. He is still drunk.
Territorial Enterprise, between February 17-26, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
APOLOGETIC.—We are always happy to apologize to a man when we do him an injury. We have wounded William Smiley's feelings, and we will heal them up again or bust. We said in yesterday's police record that Bill (excuse the familiarity, William,) was drunk. We lied. It is our opinion that Sam Wetherill did, too, for he gave us the statement. We have gleaned the facts in the case, though, from William himself, and at his request we hasten to apologize. His offense was mildness itself. He only had a pitched battle with another man, and resisted an officer. That was all. Come up, William, and take a drink.
Territorial Enterprise, March 4, 1863
John Van Buren Perry, recently re-elected City Marshal of Virginia City, was born a long time ago, in County Kerry, Ireland, of poor but honest parents, who were descendants, beyond question, of a house of high antiquity. The founder of it was distinguished for his eloquence; he was the property of one Baalam, and received honorable mention in the Bible.
John Van Buren Perry removed to the United States in 1792—after having achieved a high gastronomical reputation by creating the first famine in his native land—and established himself at Kinderhook, New Jersey, as a teacher of vocal and instrumental music. His eldest son, Martin Van Buren, was educated there, and was afterwards elected President of the United States; his grandson, of the same name, is now a prominent New York politician, and is known in the East as 'Prince John;' he keeps up a constant and affectionate correspondence with his worthy grandfather, who sells him feet in some of his richest wildcat claims from time to time.
While residing at Kinderhook, Jack Perry was appointed Commodore of the United States Navy, and he forthwith proceeded to Lake Erie and fought the mighty marine conflict, which blazes upon the pages of history as "Perry's Victory." In consequence of this exploit, he narrowly escaped the Presidency.
Several years ago Commodore Perry was appointed Commissioner Extraordinary to the Imperial Court of Japan, with unlimited power to treat. It is hardly worthwhile to mention that he never exercised that power; he never treated anybody in that country, although he patiently submitted to a vast amount of that sort of thing when the opportunity was afforded him at the expense of the Japanese officials. He returned from his mission full of honors and foreign whisky, and was welcomed home again by the plaudits of a grateful nation.
After the war was ended, Mr. Perry removed to Providence, Rhode Island, where he produced a complete revolution in medical science by inventing the celebrated "Pain Killer" which bears his name. He manufactured this liniment by the ship-load, and spread it far and wide over the suffering world; not a bottle left his establishment without his beneficent portrait upon the label, whereby, in time, his features became as well known unto burned and mutilated children as Jack the Giant Killer's.
When pain had ceased throughout the universe Mr. Perry fell to writing for a livelihood, and for years and years he poured out his soul in pleasing and effeminate poetry.
His very first effort, commencing:
"How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour," etc.-
gained him a splendid literary reputation, and from that time forward no Sunday-school library was complete without a full edition of his plaintive and sentimental "Perry-Gorics." After great research and profound study of his subject, he produced that wonderful gem which is known in every land as "The Young Mother's Apostrophe to Her Infant," beginning:
"Fie! fie! oo itty bitty pooty sing!
To poke oo footsy-tootsys into momma's eye!"
This inspired poem had a tremendous run, and carried Perry's fame into every nursery in the civilized world. But he was not destined to wear his laurels undisturbed: England, with monstrous perfidy, at once claimed the "Apostrophe" for her favorite son, Martin Farquhar Tupper, and sent up a howl of vindictive abuse from her polluted press against our beloved Perry. With one accord, the American people rose up in his defense, and a devastating war was only averted by a public denial of the paternity of the poem by the great Proverbial over his own signature. This noble act of Mr. Tupper gained him a high place in the affection of this people, and his sweet platitudes have been read here with an ever augmented spirit of tolerance since that day.
The conduct of England toward Mr. Perry told upon his constitution to such an extent that at one time it was feared the gentle bard would fade and flicker out altogether; wherefore, the solicitude of influential officials was aroused in his behalf, and through their generosity he was provided with an asylum in Sing Sing prison, a quiet retreat in the state of New York. Here he wrote his last great poem, beginning:
"Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so—
Your little hands were never made
To tear out each other's eyes with—"
and then proceeded to learn the shoemaker's trade in his new home, under the distinguished masters employed by the commonwealth.
Ever since Mr. Perry arrived at man's estate his prodigious feet have been a subject of complaint and annoyance to those communities which have known the honor of his presence. In 1835, during a great leather famine, many people were obliged to wear wooden shoes, and Mr. Perry, for the sake of economy, transferred his boot-making patronage from the tan-yard which had before enjoyed his custom, to an undertaker's establishment—that is to say, he wore coffins. At that time he was a member of Congress from New Jersey, and occupied a seat in front of the Speaker's throne. He had the uncouth habit of propping his feet upon his desk during prayer by the chaplain, and thus completely hiding that officer from every eye save that of Omnipotence alone. So long as the Hon. Mr. Perry wore orthodox leather boots the clergyman submitted to this infliction and prayed behind them in singular solitude, under mild protest; but when he arose one morning to offer up his regular petition, and beheld the cheerful apparition of Jack Perry's coffins confronting him, "The jolly old bum went under the table like a sick porpus" (as Mr. P. feelingly remarks), "and never shot off his mouth in that shanty again."
Mr. Perry's first appearance on the Pacific Coast was upon the boards of the San Francisco theaters in the character of "Old Pete" in Dion Boucicault's "Octoroon." So excellent was his delineation of that celebrated character that "Perry's Pete" was for a long time regarded as the climax of histrionic perfection.
Since John Van Buren Perry has resided in Nevada Territory, he has employed his talents in acting as City Marshal of Virginia, and in abusing me because I am an orphan and a long way from home, and can therefore be persecuted with impunity. He was re-elected day before yesterday, and his first official act was an attempt to get me drunk on champagne furnished to the Board of Aldermen by other successful candidates, so that he might achieve the honor and glory of getting me in the station-house for once in his life. Although he failed in his object, he followed me down C street and handcuffed me in front of Tom Peasley's, but officers Birdsall and Larkin and Brokaw rebelled against this unwarranted assumption of authority, and released me—whereupon I was about to punish Jack Perry severely, when he offered me six bits to hand him down to posterity through the medium of this Biography, and I closed the contract. But after all, I never expect to get the money.
Territorial Enterprise, March 7, 1863
CHAMPAGNE WITH THE BOARD OF BROKERS
By a sort of instinct we happened in at Almack's just at the moment that the corks were about to pop, and discovering that we had intruded we were retreating when Daggett, the soulless, insisted upon our getting with the Board of Brokers, and we very naturally did so. The President had already been toasted, the Vice-President had likewise been complimented in the same manner. Mr. Mitchell had delivered an address through his unsolicited mouth-piece, Mr. Daggett, whom he likened unto Baalam's ass—and very aptly too—and the press had been toasted, and he had attempted to respond and got overcome by something—feelings perhaps—when that ever lasting, omnipresent, irrepressible, "Unreliable" crowded himself into the festive apartment, where he shed a gloom upon the Board of Brokers, and emptied their glasses while they made speeches. The imperturbable impudence of that iceberg surpasses anything we ever saw. By a concerted movement the young man was partially put down at length, however, and the Board launched out into speech-making again, but finally somebody put up five feet of "Texas," which changed hands at eight dollars a foot, and from that they branched off into a wholesale bartering of "wildcat"—for their natures were aroused by the first smell of blood of course—and we adjourned to make this report. The Board will begin its regular meetings Monday next.
Territorial Enterprise, between March 1-12, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
CALICO SKIRMISH.—Five Spanish women, of unquestionable character, were arraigned before Judge Atwill yesterday, some as principals and some as accessories to a feminine fight of a bloodthirsty description in A street. It was proved that one of them drew a navy revolver and a bowie-knife and attempted to use them upon another of the party, but being prevented, she fired three shots through the floor, for the purpose of easing her mind, no doubt. She was bound over to keep the peace, and the whole party dismissed.
Territorial Enterprise, between Feb. 24—March 31, 1863
[portion of letter from Carson City]
I arrived in this noisy and bustling town of Carson at noon to-day, per Langton's express. We made pretty good time from Virginia, and might have made much better, but for Horace Smith, Esq., who rode on the box seat and kept the stage so much by the head she wouldn't steer. I went to church, of course,—I always go to church when I—when I go to church—as it were. I got there just in time to hear the closing hymn, and also to hear the Rev. Mr. White give out a long metre doxology, which the choir tried to sing to a short-metre tune. But there wasn't music enough to go around: consequently, the effect was rather singular, than otherwise. They sang the most interesting parts of each line, though, and charged the balance to "profit and loss;" this rendered the general intent and meaning of the doxology considerably mixed, as far as the congregation were concerned, but inasmuch as it was not addressed to them, anyhow, I thought it made no particular difference.
By an easy and pleasant transition, I went from church to jail. It was only just down stairs—for they save men eternally in the second story of the new court house, and damn them for life in the first. Sheriff Gasherie has a handsome double office fronting on the street, and its walls are gorgeously decorated with iron convict-jewelry. In the rear are two rows of cells, built of bomb-proof masonry and furnished with strong iron doors and resistless locks and bolts. There was but one prisoner—Swayze, the murderer of Derickson—and he was writing; I do not know what his subject was, but he appeared to be handling it in a way which gave him great satisfaction...
Territorial Enterprise, March—April, 1863
A grand examination of candidates for positions as teachers in our public schools was had yesterday in one of the rooms of the Public School in this city. Some twenty-eight candidates were present—twenty-three of whom were ladies and five gentlemen. We do the candidates but simple justice when we say that we have never seen more intelligent faces in a crowd of the size. The following gentlemen constituted the Board of Examiners: Dr. Geiger, Mr. J. W. Whicher and John A. Collins. We observed that Messrs. Feusier, Adkison and Robinson of the Board of Trustees were also present yesterday. Printed questions are given to each of the candidates, the answers to which are written out and handed in with the signature of the applicant appended. These are all examined in private by the Board, and those who have best acquitted themselves are selected as teachers. In all, we believe, about twelve teachers are to be chosen. Upon each of the following subjects a great number of questions are to be answered: General questions, methods of teaching, object teaching; spelling, reading, writing, defining, arithmetic, grammar, geography, natural philosophy, history of the United States, physiology and hygiene, chemistry, algebra, geometry, natural history, astronomy—in all, eighteen subjects, with about as many questions upon each. Yesterday they had got as far as the ninth subject, grammar, at the time of our visit, and we presume have got but little further. To-day the examination will be resumed. If there is anything that terrifies us it is an examination. We don't even like an examination in a Police Court. In vain we looked from face to face yesterday through the whole list of candidates for signs of fright or trepidation. All appeared perfectly at ease, though quite in earnest. We took a look at some of the questions and were made very miserable by barely glancing them over. We became much afraid that some member of the Board would suddenly turn upon us and require us on pain of death or a long imprisonment, to answer some of the questions. Under the head of "Object Teaching," we found some ten questions—some of them, like a wheel within a wheel, containing ten questions in one. We barely glanced at the list, reading here and there a question, when we felt great beads of perspiration starting out upon our brow—our massive intellect oozing out. Happening to read a question like this, "Name four of the faculties of children that are earliest developed," we at once became anxious to get out of the room. We expected each moment that one of the Board would seize us by the collar and ask, "Why is it?" or something of the kind, and we wanted to leave—thought we would feel better in the open air. When the answers of all the candidates are opened and read we will try to be on hand; we are anxious for information on those "four faculties." We think the above a good deal like the conundrum about the young man who "went to the Sandwich Islands; learned the language of the Kanakas, came home, got married, got drunk, went crazy, was sent to Stockton—Why is it?" Then under the same head we noticed ten questions about mining for silver ores and ten more about the reduction of silver ores. Why these twenty-three "school marms" are expected to be posted on amalgamating processes, is more than we can guess. As this is a mining country, we presume it is necessary for a lady to give satisfactory answers to such questions as the following, before being entrusted with the education of our little Washoeites: "What is your opinion of the one-ledge theory? Have you seen the Ophir horse? Have you conscientious scruples as to black dyke? Are you committed to the sage-brush process? Give your opinion on vein matter, and state your reasons for thinking so; and tell wherein you differ with those who do not agree with you."
Territorial Enterprise, April 3, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
A DISTINGUISHED VISITOR.—Madame Clara Kopka arrived in Virginia a few days since, and is still sojourning in the city. To many of our citizens the name will be unfamiliar, yet such is by no means the case in the hospitals and upon the battle-fields of the East, where she has devoted nearly twelve months to arduous labor in tending the sick and wounded soldiers. In this service she has endured all the hardships and privations of camp life, without hope or desire of reward, and to the serious detriment of her health. She comes among us partly to satisfy a taste for travel, and partly to gather renewed vigor by a change of climate. She asked Mayor Arick for a homestead, supposing, in the simplicity of her heart, that the barren but beautiful landscape which surrounds Virginia was free to any who thought they could make use of it. Unfortunately, this is not the case; but the Silver Terrace Company could give Madame the homestead she covets without inconveniencing themselves in the least, and we have an idea that they will consider it a pleasure to do so. Madame Kopka brings with her a bundle of letters from military officers, from brigade and subordinate surgeons in the army, from Secretary Stanton, and letters of recommendation to General Halleck, all of which speak of her in the highest terms of praise. We cannot spare room for these letters, but we publish two newspaper extracts which will answer every purpose, perhaps. The first is from a long article, written by an army surgeon, in the N. Y. Home Journal of September 13th, and the other from the N. Y Tribune of July 5th...
THE LOIS ANN.—This claim is situated in a ravine which runs up in a northwesterly direction out of American Flat, and is on the Ophir Grade, about two miles and a half from Gold Hill. The ledge did not crop out, but was uncovered by a small slide in the hillside, and found by Mr. Lightford, the present Superintendent, and located some four or five weeks ago. A well timbered incline has since been sunk upon it to the depth of twenty-five feet, and work in it is still going on day and night, although a stream of water from the vein materially interferes with the operations of the men. In the bottom of the incline the ledge is about ten feet wide, has a casing of blue clay, and is well defined; a great quantity of quartz has been taken from it, which looks exactly like third or fourth-class Ophir, but it won't pay to crush yet awhile, although choice specimens of it have assayed as high as ninety-two dollars to the ton. We visited the mine in company with Mr. H. C. Brown and Mr. Lightford, the Superintendent, and we share their opinion, that there is big pay rock in it somewhere, and it is only necessary to sink a reasonable depth to find it. Such promising indications as have been found in this claim are not often discovered so near the surface. Three north extensions have been located on the Lois Ann, and shafts sunk, and the lead struck on the first and third, the character and appearance of the rock in both instances proving identical with that of the original—coarse crystalized quartz, of a porous nature, and of a dark blue color like Comstock rock. There are fourteen hundred feet in the discovery claim, and the property is owned principally by mill men of Gold Hill. One of the best indications about the Lois Ann is at present much the most troublesome—we refer to the stream of water which pours from the ledge; work in the incline will have to be suspended on account of it and a tunnel commenced from the ravine—this will be about a hundred and fifty feet long, and will tap the lead at a depth of seventy-five feet. A mill-site has been taken up in the vicinity with the intention of turning the water to useful account in case the ledge proves as excellent as it is expected it will. Another good-looking ledge lies back of the Lois Ann, and parallel with it, which belongs to the same company. There is a claim of a thousand feet in the vicinity of these leads which is called the Zanesville, and the rock from it pays in gold from the very surface; every pound of it is saved, and mill men who have tested it say it will yield about a hundred dollars to the ton; there is only a mere trace of silver in it. The ledge is only about two feet wide, in the bottom of a shaft twelve feet deep, but is increasing in width slowly; possibly the Zanesville may peter out and go to thunder, but there is no prospect of such a result at present. It is rich, but as it is only a gold ledge, and is so small, we have less confidence in it than in the Lois Ann.
ISLAND MILL.—The Island Mill, built on Carson river by Mr. Hite, of Gold Hill, is about completed now, and the machinery was set in motion yesterday to see if there was anything wrong about it. The result was satisfactory, and the Island Mill will go to work formally and forever next Tuesday.
GOULD & CURRY.—They struck it marvelously rich in a new shaft in the Gould & Curry mine last Saturday night. We saw half a ton of native silver at the mouth of the tunnel, on Tuesday, with a particle of quartz in it here and there, which could be readily distinguished without the aid of a glass. That particular half ton will yield some where in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars. We have long waited patiently for the Gould & Curry to flicker out, but we cannot discover much encouragement about this last flicker. However, it is of no consequence—it was a mere matter of curiosity anyhow; we only wanted to see if she would, you know.
THE MINSTRELS.—We were present at La Plata Hall about two minutes last night, and heard Sam. Pride's banjo make a very excellent speech in English to the audience. The house was crowded to suffocation.
Territorial Enterprise, April 12, 1863
[partial excerpt]
ADVICE TO THE UNRELIABLE ON CHURCH-GOING
In the first place, I must impress upon you that when you are dressing for church, as a general thing, you mix your perfumes too much; your fragrance is sometimes oppressive; you saturate yourself with cologne and bergamot, until you make a sort of Hamlet's Ghost of yourself, and no man can decide, with the first whiff, whether you bring with you air from Heaven or from hell. Now, rectify this matter as soon as possible; last Sunday you smelled like a secretary to a consolidated drug store and barber shop. And you came and sat in the same pew with me; now don't do that again.
In the next place when you design coming to church, don't lie in bed until half past ten o'clock and then come in looking all swelled and torpid, like a doughnut. Do reflect upon it, and show some respect for your personal appearance hereafter.
There is another matter, also, which I wish to remonstrate with you about. Generally, when the contribution box of the missionary department is passing around, you begin to look anxious, and fumble in your vest pockets, as if you felt a mighty desire to put all your worldly wealth into it—yet when it reaches your pew, you are sure to be absorbed in your prayer-book, or gazing pensively out of the window at far-off mountains, or buried in meditation, with your sinful head supported by the back of the pew before you. And after the box is gone again, you usually start suddenly and gaze after it with a yearning look, mingled with an expression of bitter disappointment (fumbling your cash again meantime), as if you felt you had missed the one grand opportunity for which you had been longing all your life. Now, to do this when you have money in your pockets is mean. But I have seen you do a meaner thing. I refer to your conduct last Sunday, when the contribution box arrived at our pew—and the angry blood rises to my cheek when I remember with what gravity and sweet serenity of countenance you put in fifty cents and took out two dollars and a half...
Territorial Enterprise, between April 16-18, 1863
For a day or two a rumor has been floating around, that five Indians had been smothered to death in a tunnel back of Gold Hill, but no one seemed to regard it in any other light than as a sensation hoax gotten up for the edification of strangers sojourning within our gates. However, we asked a Gold Hill man about it yesterday, and he said there was no shadow of a jest in it—that it was a dark and terrible reality. He gave us the following story as being the version generally accepted in Gold Hill:—That town was electrified on Sunday morning with the intelligence that a noted desperado had just murdered two Virginia policemen, and had fled in the general direction of Gold Hill. Shortly afterward, some one arrived with the exciting news that a man had been seen to run and hide in a tunnel a mile or a mile and a half west of Gold Hill. Of course it was Campbell—who else would do such a thing, on that particular morning, of all others? So a party of citizens repaired to this spot, but each felt a natural delicacy about approaching an armed and desperate man in the dark, and especially in such confined quarters; wherefore they stopped up the mouth of the tunnel, calculating to hold on to their prisoner until some one could be found whose duty would oblige him to undertake the disagreeable task of bringing forth the captive. The next day a strong posse went up, rolled away the stones from the mouth of the sepulchre, went in and found five dead Indians!—three men, one squaw and one child, who had gone in there to sleep, perhaps, and been smothered by the foul atmosphere after the tunnel had been closed up. We still hope the story may prove a fabrication, notwithstanding the positive assurances we have received that it is entirely true. The intention of the citizens was good, but the result was most unfortunate. To shut up a murderer in a tunnel was well enough, but to leave him there all night was calculated to impair his chances for a fair trial—the principle was good, but the application was unnecessarily "hefty." We have given the above story for truth—we shall continue to regard it as such until it is disproven.
Territorial Enterprise, April 19—30, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
ELECTRICAL MILL MACHINERY.—Mr. Wm. L. Card, of Silver City, has invented a sort of infernal machine, which is to turn quartz mills by electricity. It consists of wheels and things, and—however, we could not describe it without getting tangled. Mr. Card assures us that he can apply his invention to all the mills in Silver City, and work the whole lot with one powerful Grove battery. We believe—and if we had galvanic sense enough to explain the arrangement properly, others would also. A patent has already been applied for.
Territorial Enterprise, May 19-21, 1863
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
EDS. ENTERPRISE: The Unreliable, since he has been here, has conducted himself in such a reckless and unprincipled manner that he has brought the whole Territory into disrepute and made its name a reproach, and its visiting citizens objects of suspicion. He has been a perfect nightmare to the officers of the Occidental Hotel. They give him an excellent room, but if, in prowling about the house, he finds another that suits him better, he "locates" it ( that is his slang way of expressing it). Judging by his appearance what manner of man he was, the hotel clerk at first gave him a room immediately under the shingles—but it was found impossible to keep him there. He said he could not stand it, because spinning round and round, up that spiral staircase, caused his beer to ferment, and made him foam at the mouth like a soda fountain; wherefore, he descended at the dead of night and "jumped" a room on the second floor (the very language he used in boasting of the exploit). He said they served an injunction on him there, "and," says he, "if Bill Stewart had been down here, Mark, I'd have sued to quiet title, and I'd have held that ground, don't you know it?" And he sighed; and after ruminating a moment, he added, in a tone of withering contempt: "But these lawyers won't touch a case unless a man has some rights; humph! they haven't any more strategy into 'em than a clam. But Bill Stewart—thunder! Now, you just take that Ophir suit that's coming off in Virginia, for instance—why, God bless you, Bill Stewart'll worry the witnesses, and bullyrag the Judge, and buy up the jury and pay for 'em; and he'll prove things that never existed—hell! What won't he prove! That's the idea—what won't he prove, you know? Why, Mark, I'll tell you what he done when—"
The Unreliable was interrupted here by a messenger from the hotel office, who handed him several sheets of legal cap, very neatly folded. He took them and motioned the young man to retire. "Now," said he, confidentially, "do you know what that is, Sweetness?" I said I thought it was a wash bill, or a hotel bill, or some thing of that kind. His countenance beamed with admiration: "You've struck it, by the Lord; yes, sir, that's just what it is—it's another of them d—d assessments; they levied one on me last week, and I meant to go and see a lawyer about it, but"—The Unreliable simmered down into a profound reverie, and I waited in silence to see what species of villainy his fertile brain would bring forth. At last he started up exultingly, with a devilish light in his eye: "I've got them in the door, Mark! They've been trying all they knew how to freeze me out, but they can't win. This hotel ain't incorporated under the laws of the Territory, and they can't collect—they are only a lot of blasted tenants in common! O, certainly" (with bitter scorn ), "they'll get rich playing me for a Chinaman, you know." I forbear to describe how he reveled in the prospect of swindling the Occidental out of his hotel bill—it is too much humiliation even to think of it.
This young man insisted upon taking me to a concert last night, and I refused to go at first, because I am naturally suspicious of him, but he assured me that the Bella Union Melodeon was such a chaste and high-toned establishment that he would not hesitate to take any lady there who would go with him. This remark banished my fears, of course, and we proceeded to the house of amusement. We were the first arrivals there. He purchased two pit-tickets for twenty- five cents apiece; I demurred at this kind of hospitality, and reminded him that orchestra seats were only fifty cents, and private boxes two dollars and a half. He bent on me a look of compassion, and muttered to himself that some people have no more sense than a boiled carrot—that some people's intellects were as dark as the inside of a cow. He walked into the pit, and then climbed over into the orchestra seats as coolly as if he had chartered the theatre. I followed, of course. Then he said, "Now, Mark, keep your eye skinned on that doorkeeper, and do as I do." I did as he did, and I am ashamed to say that he climbed a stanchion and took possession of a private box. In due course several gentlemen performers came on the stage, and with them half a dozen lovely and blooming damsels, with the largest ankles you ever saw. In fact, they were dressed like so many parasols—as it were. Their songs, and jokes, and conundrums were received with rapturous applause. The Unreliable said these things were all copyrighted; it is probably true—I never heard them anywhere else. He was well pleased with the performance, and every time one of the ladies sang, he testified his approbation by knocking some of her teeth out with a bouquet. The Bella Union, I am told, is supported entirely by Washoe patronage. There are forty-two single gentlemen here from Washoe, and twenty-six married ones; they were all at the concert last night except two—both unmarried. But if the Unreliable had not told me it was a moral, high-toned establishment, I would not have observed it.
Hon. Wm. H. Davenport, of Virginia, and Miss Mollie Spangler, of Cincinnati, Ohio, were married here on the 10th instant, at the residence of Colonel John A. Collins. Among the invited guests were Judge Noyes and lady, Messrs. Beecher and Franz, of Virginia, and Mr. Mark Twain; among the uninvited I noticed only the Unreliable. It will probably never be known what became of the spoons. The bridal party left yesterday for Sacramento, and may be expected in Virginia shortly. Old fat, jolly B. C. Howard, a Lyon county Commissioner, is here, at the Russ House, where he will linger a while and then depart for his old home in Vermont, to return again in the Fall. Col. Raymond, of the Zephyr-Flat mill, is in the city, also, and taking up a good deal of room in Montgomery street and the Bank Exchange; he has invested in some fast horses, and I shall probably take them over to Washoe shortly. There are multitudes of people from the Territory here at the three principal hotels—consequently provisions are scarce. If you will send a few more citizens down we can carry this election, and fill all these city offices with Carson and Virginia men.
There is not much doing in stocks just now, especially in the Boards. But I suspect it is the case here as it is in Virginia, that the Boards do precious little of the business. Many private sales of Union ( Gold Hill) and Yellow Jacket have transpired here during the past week at much higher prices than you quote those stocks at. Three hundred feet of Golden Gate changed hands at $100 per foot, and fifty feet at $110; but a telegram from Virginia yesterday, announcing that they had "struck it"—and moderately rich—in the San Francisco, raised both stocks several figures, as also the Golden Eagle (first south extension of the Golden Gate), which had been offered the day before at $30 a foot. Two hundred feet of Oriental were sold at private sale to-day at $7 a foot. Now, you hear no talk in Virginia but the extraordinary dullness of the San Francisco market. Humbug! It may be dull in the Boards, but it is lively enough on the street. If you doubt it, say so, and I will move around a little and furnish you with all the statistics you want.
I meant to say something glowing and poetical about the weather, but the Unreliable has come in and driven away refined emotion from my breast. He says: "Say it's bully, you tallow brained idiot! that's enough; anybody can understand that; don't write any of those infernal, sick platitudes about sweet flowers, and joyous butterflies, and worms and things, for people to read before breakfast. You make a fool of yourself that way; everybody gets disgusted with you; stuff! be a man or a mouse, can't you?"
I must go out now with this conceited ass—there is no other way to get rid of him.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, June 21-24, 1863
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
SAN FRANCISCO, June 19.
EDS. ENTERPRISE:—I have just received, per Wells-Fargo, the following sweet scented little note, written in a microscopic hand in the center of a delicate sheet of paper—like a wedding invitation or a funeral notice—and I feel it my duty to answer it:
VIRGINIA, June 16.
"MR. MARK TWAIN:—Do tell us something about the fashions. I am dying to know what the ladies of San Francisco are wearing. Do, now, tell us all you know about it, won't you? Pray excuse brevity, for I am in such a hurry. BETTIE.
"P. S.—Please burn this as soon as you have read it."
"Do tell us"—and she is in "such a hurry." Well, I never knew a girl in my life who could write three consecutive sentences without italicising a word. They can't do it, you know. Now, if I had a wife, and she—however, I don't think I shall have one this week, and it is hardly worthwhile to borrow trouble.
Bettie, my love, you do me proud. In thus requesting me to fix up the fashions for you in an intelligent manner, you pay a compliment to my critical and observant eye and my varied and extensive information, which a mind less perfectly balanced than mine could scarcely contemplate without excess of vanity. Will I tell you something about the fashions? I will, Bettie—you better bet you bet, Betsey, my darling. I learned those expressions from the Unreliable; like all the phrases which fall from his lips, they are frightfully vulgar—but then they sound rather musical than otherwise.
A happy circumstance has put it in my power to furnish you the fashions from headquarters—as it were, Bettie: I refer to the assemblage of fashion, elegance and loveliness called together in the parlor of the Lick House last night—[a party given by the proprietors on the occasion of my paying up that little balance due on my board bill.] I will give a brief and lucid description of the dresses worn by several of the ladies of my acquaintance who were present. Mrs. B. was arrayed in a superb speckled foulard, with the stripes running fore and aft, and with collets and camails to match; also, a rotonde of Chantilly lace, embroidered with blue and yellow dogs, and birds and things, done in cruel, and edged with a Solferino fringe four inches deep—lovely. Mrs. B. is tall, and graceful and beautiful, and the general effect of her costume was to render her appearance extremely lively.
Miss J. W. wore a charming robe polonais of scarlet ruche a la vieille, with yellow fluted flounces of rich bombazine, fourteen inches wide; low neck and short sleeves; also a Figaro veste of bleached domestic—selvedge edge turned down with a back-stitch, and trimmed with festoons of blue chicoree taffetas—gay?—I reckon not. Her head-dress was the sweetest thing you ever saw: a bunch of stately ostrich plumes—red and white—springing like fountains above each ear, with a crown between, consisting of a single fleur de soliel, fresh from the garden—Ah, me! Miss W. looked enchantingly pretty; however, there was nothing unusual about that—I have seen her look so, even in a milder costume.
Mrs. J. B. W. wore a heavy rat-colored brocade silk, studded with large silver stars, and trimmed with organdy; balloon sleeves of nankeen pique, gathered at the wrist, cut bias and hollowed out some at the elbow; also, a bournous of black Honiton lace, scolloped, and embroidered in violent colors with a battle piece representing the taking of Holland by the Dutch; low neck and high-heeled shoes; gloves; palm leaf fan; hoops; her head-dress consisted of a simple maroon colored Sontag, with festoons of blue illusion depending from it; upon her bosom reposed a gorgeous bouquet of real sage brush, imported from Washoe. Mrs. W. looked regally handsome. If every article of dress worn by her on this occasion had been multiplied seven times, I do not believe it would have improved her appearance any.
Miss C. wore an elegant Cheveux de la Reine (with ruffles and furbelows trimmed with bands of guipre round the bottom), and a mohair Garibaldi shirt; her unique head-dress was crowned with a graceful pomme de terre (Limerick French), and she had her hair done up in papers—greenbacks. The effect was very rich, partly owing to the market value of the material, and partly to the general loveliness of the lady herself.
Miss A. H. wore a splendid Lucia de Lammermoor, trimmed with green baize: also, a cream-colored mantilla shaped pardessus, with a deep gore in the neck, and embellished with a wide greque of taffetas ribbon, and otherwise garnished with ruches, and radishes and things. Her coiffure was a simple wreath of sardines on a string. She was lovely to a fault.
Now, what do you think of that effort, Bettie (I wish I knew your other name) for an unsanctified newspaper reporter, devoid of a milliner's education? Doesn't it strike you that there are more brains and fewer oysters in my head than a casual acquaintance with me would lead one to suppose? Ah, well—what I don't know, Bet, is hardly worth the finding out, I can tell you. I could have described the dresses of all the ladies in that party, but I was afraid to meddle with those of strangers, because I might unwittingly get something wrong, and give offense. You see strangers never exercise any charity in matters of this kind—they always get mad at the least inaccuracies of description concerning their apparel, and make themselves disagreeable. But if you will just rig yourself up according to the models I have furnished you, Bets, you'll do, you know—you can weather the circus.
You will naturally wish to be informed as to the most fashionable style of male attire, and I may as well give you an idea of my own personal appearance at the party. I wore one of Mr. Lawlor's shirts, and Mr. Ridgway's vest, and Dr. Wayman's coat, and Mr. Camp's hat, and Mr. Paxton's boots, and Jerry Long's white kids, and Judge Gilchrist's cravat, and the Unreliable's brass seal-ring, and Mr. Tollroad McDonald's pantaloons—and if you have an idea that they are anyways short in the legs, do you just climb into them once, sweetness. The balance of my outfit I gathered up indiscriminately from various individuals whose names I have forgotten and have now no means of ascertaining, as I thoughtlessly erased the marks from the different garments this morning. But I looked salubrious, B., if ever a man did.
Territorial Enterprise, August 2, 1863
WHEREAS, Thomas Fitch, editor of the Union, having taken umbrage at an article headed "The Virginia Union—not the Federal," written by Joseph T. Goodman, our chief editor, and published in these columns; and whereas said Fitch having challenged said Goodman to mortal combat, naming John Church as his "friend;" and whereas the said Goodman having accepted said challenge, and chosen Thos. Peasley to appoint the means of death—
Therefore, on Friday afternoon it was agreed between the two seconds that the battle should transpire at nine o'clock yesterday morning (which would have been late in the day for most duelists, but it was fearfully early for newspaper men to have to get up)—place, the foot of the canon below the Gould & Curry mill; weapons, navy six-shooters; distance, fifteen paces; conditions, the first fire to be delivered at the word, the others to follow at the pleasure of the targets, as long as a chamber in their pistols remained loaded. To say that we felt a little proud to think that in our official capacity we were about to rise above the recording of ordinary street broils and the monotonous transactions of the Police Court to delineate the ghastly details of a real duel, would be to use the mildest of language. Much as we deplored the state of things which was about to invest us with a new dignity, we could not help taking much comfort in the reflection that it was out of our power, and also antagonistic to the principles of our class, to prevent the state of things above mentioned. All conscientious scruples—all generous feelings must give way to our inexorable duty—which is to keep the public mind in a healthy state of excitement, and experience has taught us that blood alone can do this. At midnight, in company with young Wilson, we took a room at the International, to the end that through the vigilance of the watchman we might not be suffered to sleep until past nine o'clock. The policy was good—our strategy was faultless. At six o'clock in the morning we were on the street, feeling as uncomfortable in the gray dawn as many another early bird that founded its faith upon the inevitable worm and beheld too late that that worm had failed to come to time, for the friends of the proposed deceased were interfering to stop the duel, and the officers of the law were seconding their efforts. But the two desperadoes finally gave these meddlers the slip, and drove off with their seconds to the dark and bloody ground. Whereupon young Wilson and ourself at once mounted a couple of Olin's fast horses and followed in their wake at the rate of a mile a minute.
Since then we enjoy more real comfort in standing up than sitting down, being neither iron-clad nor even half-soled. But we lost our bloody item at last—for Marshal Perry arrived early with a detachment of constables, and also Deputy Sheriff Blodgett came with a lot of blasted Sheriffs, and the battle ground lying and being in Storey county, these miserable, meddling whelps arrested the whole party and marched them back to town. And at the very moment that we were suffering for a duel. The whole force went off down there and left the city at the mercy of thieves and incendiaries. Now, that is about all the strategy those fellows know. We have only to add that Goodman and Fitch were obliged to give bonds in the sum of $5,000 each to keep the peace, and if anything were lacking to make this robbery of the reporters complete, that last circumstance furnished the necessary material. In interfering with our legitimate business, Mr. Perry and Mr. Blodgett probably think they are almighty smart, but we calculate to get even with them.
Territorial Enterprise, August 4, 1863
[portion of original]
We are to blame for giving "the Unreliable" an opportunity to misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great extent at the result. We simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass rabbit of the Sierras. We have done.
Territorial Enterprise, Aug. 19, 1863
[from Steamboat Springs, Nevada Territory; dated August 18, 1863]
EDS. ENTERPRISE: Never mind the date—I haven't known what day of the month it was since the fourth of July. In reality, I am not well enough to write, but am angry now, and like our old Methodist parson at home in Missouri, who started in to produce rain by a season of fervent prayer, "I'll do it or bust." I notice in this morning's ENTERPRISE a lame, impotent abortion of a biography of Marshal Perry, and I cannot understand what you mean by it. You either want to impose upon the public with an incorrect account of that monster's career (compiled from items furnished by himself, I'll warrant), or else you wish to bring into disrepute my own biography of him, which is the only correct and impartial one ever published. Which is it? If you really desired that the people should know the man they were expected to vote for, why did you not republish that history? By referring to it you will see that your own has not a word of truth in it. Jack Perry has made you believe he was born in New York, when in reality he was born in New Jersey; he has told you he was a pressman—on the contrary, he is by occupation a shoemaker,—by nature a poet, and by instinct a great moral humbug. If I chose, I could enumerate a dozen more instances to prove that, in his own vulgar phraseology, Jack Perry has successfully played you for a Chinaman. I suppose if he had told you the size of his boots was No. 5, you wouldn't have known enough to refrain from publishing the absurdity. Now the next time you want any facts about Jack Perry, perhaps you had better refer to the standard biography compiled by myself, or else let me hash them up for you. You have rushed into these biographies like a crazy man, and I suppose you have found out by this time that you are no more fitted for that sort of thing than I am for a circus rider (which painfully reminds me that my last horseback trip at Lake Bigler, on that razor-bladed beast of Tom Nye's, has lengthened my legs and shortened my body some). If I could devote more time to composition and less to coughing, I would write all those candidates' biographies over again, just to show you how little you know about it.
I must have led a gay life at Lake Bigler, for it seems a month since I flew up there on the Pioneer coach, alongside of Hank Monk, the king of stage drivers. But I couldn't cure my cold. I was too careless. I went to the lake (Lake Bigler I must beg leave to call it still, notwithstanding, if I recollect rightly, it is known among sentimental people as either Tahoe Lake or Yahoo Lake—however, one of the last will do as well as the other, since there is neither sense nor music in either of them), with a voice like a bull frog, and by indulging industriously in reckless imprudence, I succeeded in toning it down to an impalpable whisper in the course of seven days. I left there in the Pioneer coach at half-past one on Monday morning, in company with Mayor Arick, Mr. Boruck and young Wilson (a nice party for a Christian to travel with, I admit), and arrived in Carson at five o'clock—three hours and a half out. As nearly as I can estimate it, we came down the grade at the rate of a hundred miles an hour; and if you do not know how frightfully deep those mountain gorges look, let me recommend that you go, also, and skim along their edges at the dead of night.
I left Carson at two o'clock with Dyer—Dyer, the polite Dyer, the accommodating—Dyer, of the Carson and Steamboat stage line, and reached the Steamboat Springs Hotel at dusk, where all others who are weary and hungry are invited to come, and be handsomely provided for by Messrs. Holmes & Stowe. At Washoe we ate a supper of unimpeachable squareness at the Washoe Exchange, where I found Hon. J. K. Lovejoy, Dr. Bowman, and Captain Rawlings—there may have been other old acquaintances present, but the champagne that Lovejoy drank confused my vision so much that I cannot recollect whether there were or not. I learned here that the people who own ranches along Steamboat creek are very indignant at Judge Mott for granting an injunction to the Pleasant Valley Mill Company, whereby they are prohibited from using the water in the stream upon their lands. They say the mill company purchased the old Smith ranch and that portion of the creek which passes through it, and now they assume the right to deprive ranchmen owning property two or three miles above their lines from irrigating their lands with water which the mill company never before pretended to claim.
They further state that the mill men gave bonds in the trivial sum of $1,000, whereas the damage already done the crops by the withdrawal of the water amounts to more than $20,000. Again, the idea is that the mill men need the water to wet a new ditch which they have been digging, and after that is accomplished they will pay the amount of the bond and withdraw the injunction. More over—so the story runs—Judge Mott promised a decision in the case three weeks ago, and has not kept his word. The citizens of Galena, in mass meeting assembled, have drawn up a petition praying that the Judge will redress their grievances to-day, with out further delay. If the prayer is unheeded, they will turn the water on their ranches to-morrow in defiance of the order of the court. I believe I have recounted all these facts just as I got them; but if I haven't, I can't help it, because I have lost my note-book again. I think I could lose a thousand note-books a week if I had them. And, moreover, if you can ferret out the justice of the above proceedings, you are a better lawyer than I am—and here comes Orrick Johnson's Virginia stage again, and I shall have to fling in my benediction before I sing the doxology, as usual. Somehow or other, I can never get through with what I have to say.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, Aug. 25, 1863
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
August 23, 1863.
THE SPRINGS.
EDS. ENTERPRISE: I have overstepped my furlough a full week—but then this is a pleasant place to pass one's time. These springs are ten miles from Virginia, six or seven from Washoe City and twenty from Carson. They are natural—the devil boils the water, and the white steam puffs up out of creviccs in the earth, along the summits of a series of low mounds extending in an irregular semi-circle for more than a mile. The water is impregnated with a dozen different minerals, each one of which smells viler than its fellow, and the sides of the springs are embellished with very pretty parti-colored incrustations deposited by the water. From one spring the boiling water is ejected a foot or more by the infernal force at work below, and in the vicinity of all of them one can hear a constant rumbling and surging, somewhat resembling the noises peculiar to a steamboat in motion—hence the name.
THE HOTEL.
The Steamboat Springs Hotel is very pleasantly situated on a grassy flat, a stone's throw from the hospital and the bath houses. It is capable of accommodating a great many guests. The rooms are large, "hard-finished" and handsomely furnished; there is an abundant supply of pure water, which can be carried to every part of the house, in case of fire, by means of hose; the table is furnished with fresh vegetables and meats from the numerous fine ranches in the valley, and lastly, Mr. Stowe is a pleasant and accommodating landlord, and is ably seconded by Messrs. Haines, Ellsworth and Bingham. These gentlemen will never allow you to get ill-humored for want of polite attention—as I gratefully remember, now, when I recall the stormy hours of Friday, when that accursed "Wake-up Jake" was in me. But I haven't got to that, yet. God bless us! it is a world of trouble, and we are born to sorrow and tribulation—yet, am I chiefest among sinners, that I should be prematurely damned with "Wake-up Jake," while others not of the elect go free? I am trying to go on with my letter, but this thing bothers me; verily, from having "Wake-up Jake" on the stomach for three days, I have finally got it on the brain. I am grateful for the change. But I digress.
Dr. Ellis, the proprietor of the Springs, has erected a large, tastefully designed, and comfortable and well ventilated hospital, close to the bath-houses, and it is constantly filled with patients afflicted with all manner of diseases. It would be a very profitable institution, but a great many who come to it half dead, and leave it again restored to robust health, forget to pay for the benefits they have received. Others, when they arrive, confess at once that they are penniless, yet few men could look upon the sunken cheeks of these, and upon their attenuated forms and their pleading, faded eyes, and refuse them the shelter and assistance we all may need some day. Without expectation of reward, Dr. Ellis gives back life, hope and health to many a despairing, poverty stricken devil; and when I think of this, it seems so strange that he could have had the meanness to give me that "Wake up-Jake." However, I am wandering away from the subject again. All diseases (except confirmed consumption,) are treated successfully here. A multitude of invalids have attended these baths during the past three years, yet only an insignificant number of deaths have occurred among them. I want to impress one thing upon you: it is a mistaken notion that these Springs were created solely for the salvation of persons suffering venereal diseases. True, the fame of the baths rests chiefly upon the miracles performed upon such patients, and upon others afflicted with rheumatism, erysipelas, etc., but then all ordinary ailments can be quickly and pleasantly cured here without a resort to deadly physic. More than two-thirds of the people who come here are afflicted with venereal diseases—fellows who know that if "Steamboat" fails with them they may as well go to trading feet with the undertaker for a box—yet all here agree that these baths are none the less potent where other diseases are concerned. I know lots of poor, feeble wretches in Virginia who could get a new lease of life by soaking their shadows in Steamboat Springs for a week or two. However, I must pass on to
My friend Jim Miller has charge of these. Within a few days the new bath-house will be finished, and then twelve persons may bathe at once, or if they be sociable and choose to go on the double-bed principle, four times as many can enjoy the luxury at the same time. Persons afflicted with loathsome diseases use bath-rooms which are never entered by the other patients. You get up here about six o'clock in the morning and walk over to the bath-house; you undress in an ante room and take a cold shower-bath—or let it alone, if you choose; then you step into a sort of little dark closet floored with a wooden grating, up through which come puffs and volumes of the hottest steam you ever performed to, (because the awkwardest of us feel a hankering to waltz a little under such circumstances, you know), and then if you are alone, you resolve to have company thenceforward, since to swap comments upon your sensations with a friend, must render the dire heatless binding upon the human constitution. I had company always, and it was the pleasantest thing in the world to see a thin-skinned invalid cavorting around in the vapory obscurity, marveling at the rivers of sweat that coursed down his body, cursing the villainous smell of the steam and its bitter, salty taste—groping around meanwhile, for a cold corner, and backing finally, into the hottest one, and darting out again in a second, only remarking "Outch!"—and repeating it when he sits down, and springs up the same moment off the hot bench. This was fun of the most comfortable character; but nothing could be more agreeable than to put your eye to the little square hole in the door, and see your boiled and smoking comrade writhing under the cold shower-bath, to see him shrink till his shoulders are level with the top of his head, and then shut his eyes and gasp and catch his breath, while the cruel rain pattered down on his back and sent a ghastly shiver through every fibre of his body. It will always be a comfort to me to recall these little incidents. After the shower-bath, you return to the ante-room and scrub yourself all over with coarse towels until your hide glows like a parlor carpet—after which, you feel as elastic and vigorous as an acrobat. Then if you are sensible, you take no exercise, but just eat your breakfast and go to bed—you will find that an hour's nap will not hurt you any.
A few days ago I fell a victim to my natural curiosity and my solicitude for the public weal. Everybody had something to say about "wake-up-Jake." If a man was low-spirited; if his appetite failed him; if he did not sleep well at night; if he were costive; if he were bilious; or in love; or in any other kind of trouble; or if he doubted the fidelity of his friends or the efficacy of his religion, there was always some one at his elbow to whisper, "Take a 'wake-up,' my boy." I sought to fathom the mystery, but all I could make out of it was that the "Wake-up Jake" was a medicine as powerful as "the servants of the lamp," the secret of whose decoction was hidden away in Dr. Ellis' breast. I was not aware that I had any use for the wonderful "wake-up," but then I felt it to be my duty to try it, in order that a suffering public might profit by my experience—and I would cheerfully see that public suffer perdition before I would try it again. I called upon Dr. Ellis with the air of a man who would create the impression that he is not so much of an ass as he looks, and demanded a "Wake up-Jake" as unostentatiously as if that species of refreshment were not at all new to me. The Doctor hesitated a moment, and then fixed up as repulsive a mixture as ever was stirred together in a table-spoon. I swallowed the nauseous mess, and that one meal sufficed me for the space of forty-eight hours. And during all that time, I could not have enjoyed a viler taste in my mouth if I had swallowed a slaughter-house. I lay down with all my clothes on, and with an utter indifference to my fate here or hereafter, and slept like a statue from six o'clock until noon. I got up, then, the sickest man that ever yearned to vomit and couldn't. All the dead and decaying matter in nature seemed buried in my stomach, and I "heaved, and retched, and heaved again," but I could not compass a resurrection—my dead would not come forth. Finally, after rumbling, and growling, and producing agony and chaos within me for many hours, the dreadful dose began its work, and for the space of twelve hours it vomited me, and purged me, and likewise caused me to bleed at the nose.
I came out of that siege as weak as an infant, and went to the bath with Palmer, of Wells, Fargo & Co., and it was well I had company, for it was about all he could do to keep me from boiling the remnant of my life out in the hot steam. I had reached that stage wherein a man experiences a solemn indifference as to whether school keeps or not. Since then, I have gradually regained my strength and my appetite, and am now animated by a higher degree of vigor than I have felt for many a day. 'Tis well. This result seduces many a man into taking a second, and even a third "wake-up-Jake," but I think I can worry along without any more of them. I am about as thoroughly waked up now as I care to be. My stomach never had such a scouring out since I was born. I feel like a jug. If I could get young Wilson or the Unreliable to take a "wake-up Jake," I would do it, of course, but I shall never swallow another myself—I would sooner have a locomotive travel through me. And besides, I never intend to experiment in physic any more, just out of idle curiosity. A "wake-up-Jake" will furbish a man's machinery up and give him a fresh start in the world—but I feel I shall never need anything of that sort any more. It would put robust health, and life and vim into young Wilson and the Unreliable—but then they always look with suspicion upon any suggestion that I make.
GOOD-BYE.
Well, I am going home to Virginia to-day, though I dislike to part from the jolly boys (not to mention iced milk for breakfast, with eggs laid to order, and spiced oysters after midnight with the Reverend Jack Holmes and Bingham) at the Steamboat Springs Hotel. In conclusion, let me recommend to such of my fellow citizens as are in feeble health, or are wearied out with the cares of business, to come down and try the hotel, and the steam baths, and the facetious "wake up-Jake." These will give them rest, and moving recreation—as it were.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, August 27, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
YE BULLETIN CYPHERETH.—The Bulletin folks have gone and swallowed an arithmetic; that arithmetic has worked them like a "wake up-Jake," and they have spewed up a multitude of figures. We cypher up the importance of the Territory sometimes so recklessly that our self-respect lies torpid within us for weeks afterwards—but we see now that our most preposterous calculations have been as mild as boardinghouse milk; we perceive that we haven't the nerve to do up this sort of thing with the Bulletin. It estimates the annual yield of the precious metals at $730,000,000! Bully! They say figures don't lie—but we doubt it. We are distanced—that must be confessed; yet, appalled as we are, we will venture upon the Bulletin's "boundless waste" of figures, and take the chances. A Gould & Curry bar with $2,000 in it weighs nearly 100 pounds; $100,000 worth of their bullion would weigh between two and two and a half tons; it would take two of Wells Fargo's stages to carry that $100,000 without discommoding the passengers; it would take 100 stages to carry $5,000,000, 2,000 stages to carry $100,000,000, and 14,600 stages to carry the Bulletin's annual yield of $730,000,000! Wells, Fargo & Co. transport all the bullion out of the Territory in their coaches, and to attend to this little job, they would have to send forty stages over the mountains daily throughout the year, Sundays not excepted, and make each of the forty carry considerably more than a ton of bullion!—yet they generally send only two stages, and the greatest number in one day, during the heaviest rush, was six coaches; they didn't each carry a ton of bullion, though, old smarty from Hongkong. The Bulletin also estimates the average yield of ore from our mines at $1,000 a ton! Bless your visionary soul, sixty dollars—where they get it "regular like"—is considered good enough in Gold Hill, and it is a matter of some trouble to pick out many tons that will pay $400. From sixty to two hundred is good rock in the Ophir, and when that company, or the Gould & Curry, or the Spanish, or any other of our big companies get into a chamber that pays over $500, they ship it to the Bay, my boy. But they don't ship thousands of tons at a time, you know. In Esmeralda and Humboldt, ordinary "rich rock" yields $100 to $200, and when better is found, it is shipped also. Reese River appears to be very rich, but you can't make an "average" there yet awhile; let her mines be developed first. We place the average yield of the ore of our Territory at $100 a ton—that is high enough; we couldn't starve, easily, on forty-dollar rock. Lastly, the Bulletin puts the number of our mills at 150. That is another mistake; the number will not go over a hundred, and we would not be greatly amazed if it even fell one or two under that. While we are on the subject, though, we might as well estimate the "annual yield" of the precious metals, also; we did not intend to do it at first. Mr. Valentine, Wells Fargo's handsome and accomplished agent, has handled all the bullion shipped through the Virginia office for many a month. To his memory—which is excellent—we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company's business in the Virginia office since the first of January, 1862: From January 1st to April 1st, about $270,000 worth of bullion passed through that office; during the next quarter, $570,000; next quarter, $800,000; next quarter, $956,000; next quarter, $1,275,000; and for the quarter ending on the 30th of last June, about $1,600,000. Thus in a year and a half, the Virginia office only shipped $5,330,000 in bullion. During the year 1862 they shipped $2,615,000, so we perceive the average shipments have more than doubled in the last six months. This gives us room to promise for the Virginia office $500,000 a month for the year 1863, and now, perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we too, like the Bulletin, are "underestimating," somewhat. This gives us $6,000,000 for the year. Gold Hill and Silver City together can beat us—we will give them eight, no, to be liberal, $10,000,000. To Dayton, Empire City, Ophir and Carson City, we will allow an aggregate of $8,000,000, which is not over the mark, perhaps, and may possibly be a little under it. To Esmeralda we give $4,000,000. To Reese River and Humboldt $2,000,000, which is liberal now, but may not be before the year is out. So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion this year will be about $30,000,000. Placing the number of mills in the Territory at 100, this gives to each the labor of $300,000 in bullion during the twelve months. Allowing them to run 300 days in the year, (which none of them more than do) this makes their work average $ 1,000 a day—one ton of the Bulletin's rock, or ten of ours. Say the mills average 20 tons of rock a day and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have got the actual work of our 100 mills figured down just about to a spot—$1,000 a day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate. Oh no!—we have never been to school—we don't know how to cypher. Certainly not—we are probably a natural fool, but we don't know it. Anyhow, we have mashed the Bulletin's estimate all out of shape and cut the first left-hand figure off its $730,000,000 as neatly as a regular banker's clerk could have done it.
Territorial Enterprise, September 4-5, 1863
I hope some bird will catch this Grub the next time he calls Lake Bigler by so disgustingly sick and silly a name as "Lake Tahoe." I have removed the offensive word from his letter and substituted the old one, which at least has a Christian English twang about it whether it is pretty or not. Of course Indian names are more fitting than any others for our beautiful lakes and rivers, which knew their race ages ago, perhaps, in the morning of creation, but let us have none so repulsive to the ear as "Tahoe" for the beautiful relic of fairy-land forgotten and left asleep in the snowy Sierras when the little elves fled from their ancient haunts and quitted the earth. They say it means "Fallen Leaf"—well suppose it meant fallen devil or fallen angel, would that render its hideous, discordant syllables more endurable? Not if I know myself. I yearn for the scalp of the soft-shell crab—be he injun or white man—who conceived of that spoony, slobbering, summer-complaint of a name. Why, if I had a grudge against a half-price nigger, I wouldn't be mean enough to call him by such an epithet as that; then, how am I to hear it applied to the enchanted mirror that the viewless spirits of the air make their toilets by, and hold my peace? "Tahoe"—it sounds as weak as soup for a sick infant. "Tahoe" be—forgotten! I just saved my reputation that time. In conclusion, "Grub," I mean to start to Lake Bigler myself, Monday morning, or somebody shall come to grief.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, September 17, 1863
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
SAN FRANCISCO, September 13, 1863
EDITORS ENTERPRISE: The trip from Virginia to Carson by Messrs. Carpenter & Hoog's stage is a pleasant one, and from thence over the mountains by the Pioneer would be another, if there were less of it. But you naturally want an outside seat in the day time, and you feel a good deal like riding inside when the cold night winds begin to blow; yet if you commence your journey on the outside, you will find that you will be allowed to enjoy the desire I speak of unmolested from twilight to sunrise. An outside seat is preferable, though, day or night. All you want to do is to prepare for it thoroughly. You should sleep forty-eight hours in succession before starting so that you may not have to do anything of that kind on the box. You should also take a heavy overcoat with you. I did neither. I left Carson feeling very miserable for want of sleep, and the voyage from there to Sacramento did not refresh me perceptibly. I took no overcoat and I almost shivered the shirt off myself during that long night ride from Strawberry Valley to Folsom. Our driver was a very companionable man, though, and this was a happy circumstance for me, because, being drowsy and worn out, I would have gone to sleep and fallen overboard if he had not enlivened the dreary hours with his conversation. Whenever I stopped coughing, and went to nodding, he always watched me out of the corner of his eye until I got to pitching in his direction, and then he would stir me up and inquire if I were asleep. If I said "No" (and I was apt to do that), he always said "it was a bully good thing for me that I warn't, you know," and then went on to relate cheerful anecdotes of people who had got to nodding by his side when he wasn't noticing, and had fallen off and broken their necks. He said he could see those fellows before him now, all jammed and bloody and quivering in death's agony—"G'lang! d—n that horse, he knows there's a parson and an old maid in side, and that's what makes him cut up so; I've saw him act jes' so more'n a thousand times!" The driver always lent an additional charm to his conversation by mixing his horrors and his general information together in this way. "Now," said he, after urging his team at a furious speed down the grade for a while, plunging into deep bends in the road brimming with a thick darkness almost palpable to the touch, and darting out again and again on the verge of what instinct told me was a precipice, "Now, I seen a poor cuss—but you're asleep again, you know, and you've rammed your head agin' my side-pocket and busted a bottle of nasty rotten medicine that I'm taking to the folks at the Thirty-five Mile House; do you notice that flavor? ain't it a ghastly old stench? The man that takes it down there don't live on anything else it's vittles and drink to him; anybody that ain't used to him can't go a-near him; he'd stun 'em—he'd suffocate 'em; his breath smells like a grave yard after an earthquake—you Bob! I allow to skelp that ornery horse, yet, if he keeps on this way; you see he's been on the over land till about two weeks ago, and every stump he sees he cal'lates it's an Injun." I was awake by this time, holding on with both hands and bouncing up and down just as I do when I ride a horse back. The driver took up the thread of his discourse and proceeded to soothe me again: "As I was a saying, I see a poor cuss tumble off along here one night—he was monstrous drowsy, and went to sleep when I'd took my eye off of him for a moment—and he fetched up agin a boulder, and in a second there wasn't anything left of him but a promiscus pile of hash! It was moonlight, and when I got down and looked at him he was quivering like jelly, and sorter moaning to himself, like, and the bones of his legs was sticking out through his pantaloons every which way, like that." ( Here the driver mixed his fingers up after the manner of a stack of muskets, and illuminated them with the ghostly light of his cigar.) "He warn't in misery long though. In a minute and a half he was deader'n a smelt—Bob! I say I'll cut that horse's throat if he stays on this route another week." In this way the genial driver caused the long hours to pass sleeplessly away, and if he drew upon his imagination for his fearful histories, I shall be the last to blame him for it, because if they had taken a milder form I might have yielded to the dullness that oppressed me, and got my own bones smashed out of my hide in such a way as to render me useless forever after—unless, perhaps, some one chose to turn me to account as an uncommon sort of hat-rack.
MR. BILLET IS COMPLIMENTED BY A STRANGER
Not a face in either stage was washed from the time we left Carson until we arrived in Sacramento; this will give you an idea of how deep the dust lay on those faces when we entered the latter town at eight o'clock on Monday morning. Mr. Billet, of Virginia, came in our coach, and brought his family with him—Mr. R. W. Billet of the great Washoe Stock and Exchange Board of Highwaymen—and instead of turning his complexion to a dirty cream color, as it generally serves white folks, the dust changed it to the meanest possible shade of black: however, Billet isn't particularly white, anyhow, even under the most favorable circumstances. He stepped into an office near the railroad depot, to write a note, and while he was at it, several lank, gawky, indolent immigrants, fresh from the plains, gathered around him. Missourians—Pikes—I can tell my brethren as far as I can see them. They seemed to admire Billet very much, and the faster he wrote the higher their admiration rose in their faces, until it finally boiled over in words, and one of my countrymen ejaculated in his neighbor's ear,—"Dang it, but he writes mighty well for a nigger!"
THE MENKEN—WRITTEN ESPECIALLY FOR GENTLEMEN
When I arrived in San Francisco, I found there was no one in town—at least there was no body in town but "the Menken"—or rather, that no one was being talked about except that manly young female. I went to see her play "Mazeppa," of course. They said she was dressed from head to foot in flesh-colored "tights," but I had no opera-glass, and I couldn't see it, to use the language of the inelegant rabble. She appeared to me to have but one garment on—a thin tight white linen one, of unimportant dimensions; I forget the name of the article, but it is indispensable to infants of tender age—I suppose any young mother can tell you what it is, if you have the moral courage to ask the question. With the exception of this superfluous rag, the Menken dresses like the Greek Slave; but some of her postures are not so modest as the suggestive attitude of the latter. She is a finely formed woman down to her knees; if she could be herself that far, and Mrs. H. A. Perry the rest of the way, she would pass for an unexceptionable Venus. Here every tongue sings the praises of her matchless grace, her supple gestures, her charming attitudes. Well, possibly, these tongues are right. In the first act, she rushes on the stage, and goes cavorting around after "Olinska"; she bends herself back like a bow; she pitches headforemost at the atmosphere like a battering ram; she works her arms, and her legs, and her whole body like a dancing-jack: her every movement is as quick as thought; in a word, without any apparent reason for it, she carries on like a lunatic from the beginning of the act to the end of it. At other times she "whallops" herself down on the stage, and rolls over as does the sportive pack-mule after his burden is removed. If this be grace then the Menken is eminently graceful. After a while they proceed to strip her, and the high chief Pole calls for the "fiery untamed steed"; a subordinate Pole brings in the fierce brute, stirring him up occasionally to make him run away, and then hanging to him like death to keep him from doing it; the monster looks round pensively upon the brilliant audience in the theatre, and seems very willing to stand still—but a lot of those Poles grab him and hold on to him, so as to be prepared for him in case he changes his mind. They are posted as to his fiery untamed nature, you know, and they give him no chance to get loose and eat up the orchestra. They strap Mazeppa on his back, fore and aft, and face upper most, and the horse goes cantering up-stairs over the painted mountains, through tinted clouds of theatrical mist, in a brisk exciting way, with the wretched victim he bears unconsciously digging her heels into his hams, in the agony of her sufferings, to make him go faster. Then a tempest of applause bursts forth, and the curtain falls. The fierce old circus horse carries his prisoner around through the back part of the theatre, behind the scenery, and although assailed at every step by the savage wolves of the desert, he makes his way at last to his dear old home in Tartary down by the foot lights, and beholds once more, O, gods! the familiar faces of the fiddlers in the orchestra. The noble old steed is happy, then, but poor Mazeppa is insensible—"ginned out" by his trip, as it were. Before the act closes, however, he is restored to consciousness and his doting old father, the king of Tartary; and the next day, without taking time to dress—without even borrowing a shirt, or stealing a fresh horse—he starts off on the fiery untamed, at the head of the Tartar nation, to exterminate the Poles, and carry off his own sweet Olinska from the Polish court. He succeeds, and the curtain falls upon a bloody combat, in which the Tartars are victorious. "Mazeppa" proved a great card for Maguire here; he put it on the boards in first-class style, and crowded houses went crazy over it every night it was played. But Virginians will soon have an opportunity of seeing it themselves, as "the Menken" will go direct from our town there without stopping on the way. The '"French Spy" was played last night and the night before, and as this spy is a frisky Frenchman, and as dumb as an oyster, Miss Menken's extravagant gesticulations do not seem so overdone in it as they do in "Mazeppa." She don't talk well, and as she goes on her shape and her acting, the character of a fidgety "dummy" is peculiarly suited to her line of business. She plays the Spy, without words, with more feeling than she does Mazeppa with them.
I am tired writing, now, so you will get no news in this letter. I have got a note-book full of interesting hieroglyphics, but I am afraid that by the time I am ready to write them out, I shall have forgotten what they mean. The lady who asked me to furnish her with the Lick House fashions, shall have them shortly—or if I ever get time, I will dish up those displayed at the great Pioneer ball, at Union Hall, last Wednesday night.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, October 1863
[portion of original]
First Annual Fair of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Society
Carson City, October 19,1863
Late on Saturday afternoon, after the announcement of the awards in class A had been made, all the stock that had received premiums formed in a sort of triumphal procession, with the band at the head, and the stock following in the order of precedence to which they were entitled by the decision of the Judges, and marched down to the city, through the principal streets of which they paraded two or three times back and forth before final dismissal. The parade of so many fine animals in the streets was really a very fine sight, and was witnessed by everybody with much pleasure, being the first grand parade of the kind ever seen in the Territory.
While waiting at the race course on Saturday for the arrival of some of the officers from the Pavilion, some of the boys belonging to the brass band in attendance concluded to do what they could for the amusement of those present, and so took possession of the platform from which the awards were to be made. One of the party was introduced to the audience as a very eloquent gentleman, who had volunteered to favor those present with a speech on the success of the Fair. The speaker took his position and made a polite bow to his audience, another of the musicians prepared to take down the speech and the third acted in the capacity of bottle holder. The speaker soon launched forth, and in a few moments had worked himself up into a tremendous state of excitement. His lips worked convulsively, though no sound escaped them. He pointed toward the rocky peaks of the Sierras, then at the surrounding brown hills, finishing with a complacent wave of his hand toward the broad valley in which he stood. He was leaning far over the railing of the platform in the middle of a most eloquent appeal to the crowd, occasionally pointing heavenward, when his bottle-holder was suddenly overtaken by a violent fit of admiration, which he felt constrained to manifest by a most vigorous stamping upon the boards of the platform—so vigorous that he burst through one of the boards and hung suspended by the arms. A keg of nails was kicked over in the row, and the great oratorical effort came to an end amid the prolonged shouts and cheers of the crowd. I was favored with a look at the speech as taken down by the reporter, and give the following extract: "_____! _____! _____? _____! (?)_____; _____, _____, _____!!! _____." There were some ten pages in the same style, but as your readers will perhaps be better pleased with the extract I have given than with the whole speech, as taken down by the reporter, I will omit the balance.
The challenge of "Deuces" against the field on Friday, for $300, catch-weights, barring "Breckinridge," was accepted by "Kate Mitchell," but to-day she was lame and forfeited. After the failure of these horses to run, a race was gotten up between three Spanish nags, for a purse of $27.50, single dash of a mile. In starting "Grey Dick" and the black nag, "Sheep," got off at the tap of the drum, but the sorrel horse "Split-ear," was held by his owner. "Sheep" and "Grey Dick" dashed forward, when the cry of "Come back!" was raised by several, also by a voice or two on the Judges' stand. "Grey Dick's" rider came back, but the rider of "Sheep" (Johnny Craddock), after riding back a short distance and ascertaining that the drum had tapped, turned about and rode leisurely around the track, winning the race and purse, according to the decision of the Judges and the rules of the Carson Racing Club. The decision was that once the drum was tapped, it was a go—the riders not being required to pay any attention to the calls to come back from anybody. Outside bets were declared drawn. A new race was now made up between the same nags. Theo. Winters paid the entrance fees for the three horses, amounting to $15; purse, $20; single dash of a mile. The horses got a very fair start; on the first quarter "Sheep" got the lead, "Grey Dick" came next, and "Split-ear" brought up the rear. "Sheep" still held his own on nearing the home-stretch, but "Grey Dick" soon began to gain on him, and they were soon head and head. Both riders used the whip freely on the home-stretch and the race was more stubbornly contested than any one that has taken place on the track this week. The betting had been very free on "Sheep" and "Grey Dick," "Sheep" seeming to be the favorite, and the excitement was intense. "Sheep" passed the score 6 inches ahead of "Grey Dick," winning the purse; time, 1:58. A purse of $16.25 was now made up, the same horses to run, single dash of one mile. "Grey Dick" had the track, "Split-ear" second, "Sheep" third. The horses got a very good start. "Grey Dick" led for the first half mile, "Sheep" following closely and "Split-ear" far behind. "Grey Dick" kept the lead down the home stretch, the others following in about the same order in which they passed the half mile post, and came in three lengths ahead of "Sheep," "Split-ear" being three or four hundred yards behind. "Grey Dick" won the purse; time, 2:08. A purse of $25 was now made up for a slow race—the slowest horse of the three to win—riders to change horses. "Split-ear" had the track, "Sheep" second, "Grey Dick" third. "Sheep's" owners had given him all the water he could drink on the sly, and from the start he was behind and kept at least three hundred yards behind all the way round the track, "Grey Dick" came in first, "Split-ear" second and "Sheep" rolled along far behind. "Sheep" won the race and purse; time 2:17.
There are some things that kept running through my mind while looking through the city of Carson, and considering the peculiarities of its site, that I cannot refrain from jotting down here, though not coming strictly under the head of the Fair. However, they were suggested by improvements made on the Plaza in preparing for the holding of the Fair, and may, therefore, be considered as one of its legitimate fruits. I think that every person who attended the Fair must have been most forcibly struck with the great improvement made in the appearance of the Plaza by the planting of evergreens on it in front of and about the Pavilion; this first led me to consider the site of the town and the many advantages its location afforded for making it one of the prettiest and pleasantest cities on the Eastern Slope. Situated on a wide, and almost level, plain, at but a short distance from the eastern base of the Sierras, with numerous fine mountain streams tumbling down the hills behind it, Carson might have every street as well supplied with ditches of water as are those of Salt Lake City. The water from these ditches might be made to cause a thousand gardens in the city to "bloom as the rose." At no very great expense, the water of one of the mountain streams nearby might be brought upon the Plaza in pipes, and used to supply fountains in various parts of the grounds; about these fountains willows and plats of flowers might be planted, which, with a liberal sprinkling of cottonwood and other trees in various parts, would make it a far prettier place than the "Willows," near San Francisco. With some such improvements Carson would be apt to attract nearly all the wealthy men owning mines and mills, or doing business in this part of the Territory—they would all wish to reside in or near so pretty and pleasant a place. If the Plaza was turned into a park as pleasant and beautiful as it might be made, it would soon become a general place of resort on Saturdays and Sundays for all the young people, and pleasure seekers in general, of all the neighboring towns and cities. If the present Pavilion is allowed to stand where it is, it should be raised at least six to eight feet higher than it is by putting under it some kind of basement; then, with a broad flight of steps at the entrance of each wing, it would be a really imposing edifice, and one that would at once elicit the admiration of every stranger passing through the town. Mr. Curry, one of the most public-spirited men in Carson, has already put a beautiful and substantial fence around the Plaza, and has offered to build a fountain that will throw a stream some twenty-five feet high, provided the Water Company, now about supplying water to the city, would furnish the amount of water needed. The people of Carson have, as I remarked above, the foundations for the handsomest city on the Eastern Slope, and the fault will lie with themselves if they don't make it such.
THE FAIR A SUCCESS AND A VALUABLE LESSON
I have not yet been able to obtain the exact amount of all the receipts of the Fair, and will therefore defer all mention of sums. The receipts in full will shortly be obtained and published; I may, however, say that I heard it stated that the receipts would be much more than adequate to the liquidation of all outstanding liabilities of the Society, and that the $2,000 appropriated by the Legislature could be allowed to stand over untouched for the Fair of next year. A number of the members of the Society have acted most generously, and done much toward contributing to the financial success of the institution. Theodore Winters in the start donated the Society $200; afterwards he presented to the Society all his winnings, amounting to $225, and has in various other ways aided the institution to near the amount of $1,000. The owners of the Carson Race Course, as I took occasion to mention in a former letter, acted in the most liberal and handsome manner by the Society, in giving them the free use of all their grounds and buildings, to say nothing of the fact of their having worked all the week like Trojans for the success of the Fair. Mr. Gillespie, the Secretary, and many other officers of the Society, labored day and night during the progress of the exhibition, that nothing might be left undone that could further the plans or aid the triumphant result of an institution which too many had predicted would die in an inglorious fizzle. But we have no "fizzle" to chronicle. We have not, it is very true, made the grandest display of the kind ever seen on the Pacific Coast, but there have been much worse. We came to the exhibition, many of us, with a feeling of dubiousness in our hearts—half ashamed to tell where we were going, even when on the way. When we came away, we felt quite proud, held up our heads, and said we'd "been to the Fair!" We have most of us been dwellers in the mountains and delvers in the mines, and knew little of the agricultural capacity of our valleys; we had rather supposed that we should be obliged always to look to California for our supplies of such articles of farm produce as we might need; but we have now had a faint glimpse of what may be done upon our soil, and feel no hesitancy in calling upon all who wish to till the earth in a land where the soil yields a bountiful return, and the best market in the world is open at the door of the cultivator, to come and occupy the land lying ready and free for all settlers. All who are now engaged in the cultivation of the soil of Washoe, and were present at the exhibition—and even those who only hear of it from the reports going forth—will now go to work in greater earnestness and with more confidence. Especially will this be the case with those contemplating fruit culture; and we shall expect soon to see orchards in all our valleys and vineyards gracing the slopes of all our hills.
Territorial Enterprise, October 28, 1863
From Abram Curry, who arrived here yesterday afternoon from Carson, we have learned the following particulars concerning a bloody massacre which was committed in Ormsby county night before last. It seems that during the past six months a man named P. Hopkins, or Philip Hopkins, has been residing with his family in the old log house just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick's. The family consisted of nine children—five girls and four boys—the oldest of the group, Mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest, Tommy, about a year and a half. Twice in the past two months Mrs. Hopkins, while visiting in Carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence, and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take her life. It was Mrs. Hopkins' misfortune to be given to exaggeration, however, and but little attention was paid to what she said. About ten o'clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon. Hopkins expired in the course of five minutes, without speaking. The long red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of Mrs. Hopkins. A number of citizens, headed by Sheriff Gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to Hopkins' house, where a ghastly scene met their gaze. The scalpless corpse of Mrs. Hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist. Near her lay the ax with which the murderous deed had been committed. In one of the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about the floor. They were all dead. Their brains had evidently been dashed out with a club, and every mark about them seemed to have been made with a blunt instrument. The children must have struggled hard for their lives, as articles of clothing and broken furniture were strewn about the room in the utmost confusion. Julia and Emma, aged respectively fourteen and seventeen, were found in the kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is possible. The eldest girl, Mary, must have taken refuge, in her terror, in the garret, as her body was found there, frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her side. The two girls, Julia and Emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, state that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them. They think they were the first attacked. They further state that Hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence. He flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind. Curry says Hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of Western Pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very recently we had never heard of his ill treating his family. He had been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia and Gold Hill, but when the San Francisco papers exposed the game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested to an immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company of San Francisco. He was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-cooking system as applied to the Daney Mining Company recently. Hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the Comstock lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired property, their water totally dried up, and Spring Valley stock went down to nothing. It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family. The newspapers of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which cunning financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the villainy at work. We hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence.
Territorial Enterprise, October 29, 1863
[the text of this article is from C. A. V. Putman's "Dan De Quille and Mark Twain," published in the Salt Lake City Tribune on April 25, 1898. It may be based upon memory and incomplete.]
The story published in the Enterprise reciting the slaughter of a family near Empire was all a fiction. It was understood to be such by all acquainted with the locality in which the alleged affair occurred. In the first place, Empire City and Dutch Nick's are one, and in the next there is no "great pine forest" nearer than the Sierra Nevada mountains. But it was necessary to publish the story in order to get the fact into the San Francisco papers that the Spring Valley Water company was "cooking" dividends by borrowing money to declare them on for its stockholders. The only way you can get a fact into a San Francisco journal is to smuggle it in through some great tragedy.
Territorial Enterprise, November, 1863
Carson City, November 7, 1863
EDS. ENTERPRISE: This has been a busy week—a notable and a historical week—and the only one which has yet passed over this region, perhaps, whose deeds will make any important stir in the outside world. Some dozens of people in America have heard of Nevada Territory (which they vaguely understand to be in Virginia City, though they have no definite idea as to where Virginia City is) as the place which sends silver bricks to the Sanitary fund; and some other dozens have heard of Washoe, without exactly knowing whether the name refers to the Northwest passage or to the source of the Nile—but when it is shouted abroad through the land that a new star has risen on the flag—a new State born to the Union—then the nation will wake up for a moment and ask who we are and where we came from. They will also ascertain that the new acquisition is called Nevada; they will find out its place on the map, and always recollect afterwards, in a general way, that it is in North America; they will see at a glance that Nevada is not in Virginia City and be surprised at it; they will behold that neither is it in California, and will be unable to comprehend it; they will learn that our soil is alkali flats and our shrubbery sage-brush, and be as wise as they were before; their mouths will water over statistics of our silver bricks, and verily they will believe that God createth silver in that form. This week's work is the first step toward giving the world a knowledge of Nevada, and it is a giant stride, too, for it will provoke earnest inquiry. Immigration will follow, and wild-cat advance.
This Convention of ours is well worth being proud of. There is not another commonwealth in the world, of equal population, perhaps, that could furnish the stuff for its fellow. I doubt if any Constitutional Convention ever officiated at the birth of any State in the Union which could boast of such a large proportion of men of distinguished ability, according to the number of its members, as is the case with ours. There are thirty-six delegates here, and among them I could point out fifteen who would rank high in any community, and the balance would not be second rate in most Legislatures. There are men in this body whose reputations are not local, by any means—such as Governor Johnson, Wm. M. Stewart, Judge Bryan, John A. Collins, N. A. H. Ball, General North and James Stark, the tragedian. Such a constellation as that ought to shed living light upon our Constitution. General North is President of the Convention; Governor Johnson is Chairman of the Legislative Committee—one of the most important among the Standing Committees, and one which has to aid in the construction of every department of the Constitution; Mr. Ball occupies his proper place as Chairman of the Committee on Finance, State Debt, etc.; the Judiciary Committee is built of sound timber, and is hard to surpass; it is composed of Messrs. Stewart, Johnson, Larrowe and Bryan.
We shall have a Constitution that we need not be ashamed of, rest assured; but it will not be framed in a week. Every article in it will be well considered and freely debated upon.
And just here I would like to know if it would not be as well to get up a constitutional silver brick or so, and let the Sanitary fund rest a while. It would cost at least ten thousand dollars to put this Convention through in anything approaching a respectable style; yet the sum appropriated by the Legislature for its use was only $3,000, and the scrip for it will not yield $1,500. The new State will have to shoulder the present Territorial debt of $90,000, but it seems to me we might usher her into the world without adding to this an accouchement fee—so to speak—of ten or fifteen thousand more. Why, the Convention is so poor that it cannot even furnish newspapers for its members to read; kerosene merchants hesitate to afford it light; unfeeling draymen who haul wood to the people, scorn its custom; it elected official reporters, and for two days could negotiate no desks for them to write on: it confers upon them no spittoons, to this day; in fact, there is only one spittoon to every 7 members and they furnish their own fine-cut into the bargain; in my opinion there are not inkstands enough to go around, or pens either, for that matter; Col. Youngs, Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means (to pay expenses), has gone blind and baldheaded, and is degenerating into a melancholy lunatic; this is all on account of his financial troubles; it all comes of his tireless efforts to bullyrag a precarious livelihood for the Convention out of Territorial scrip at forty-one cents on the dollar. Will ye see him die, when fifty-nine cents would save him? I wish I could move the Convention up to Virginia, that you might see the Delegates worried, and business delayed or brought to a stand still every hour in the day by the eternal emptiness of the Treasury. Then would you grow sick, as I have done, of hearing members caution each other against breeding expense. I begin to think I don't want the Capital at Virginia if this financial distress is always going to haunt us. Now, I had forgotten until this moment that all these secrets about the poverty of the Convention treasury, and the inoffensive character of Territorial scrip, were revealed to the house yesterday by Colonel Youngs, with a feeling request that the reporters would keep silent upon the subject, lest people abroad should smile at us. I clearly forgot it—but it is too late to mend the matter now.
Hon. Gordon N. Mott is in town, and leaves with his family for San Francisco to-morrow. He proposes to start to Washington by the steamer of the 13th.
Mr. Lemmon's little girl, two years old, had her thigh bone broken in two places this afternoon; she was run over by a wagon. Dr. Tjader set the limb, and the little sufferer is doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances.
I used to hear Governor Johnson frequently mentioned in Virginia as a candidate for the United States Senate from this budding State of ours. He is not a candidate for that or any other office, and will not become one. I make this correction on his own authority, and, therefore, the various Senatorial aspirants need not be afraid to give it full credence.
Messrs. Pete Hopkins and A. Curry have compromised with me, and there is no longer any animosity existing on either side. They were a little worried at first, you recollect, about that thing which appeared recently (I think it was in the Gold Hill News), concerning an occurrence which has happened in the great pine forest down there at Empire.
We sent our last report to you by our stirring official, Gillespie, Secretary of the Convention. I thought that might account for your not getting it, in case you didn't get it, you know.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, November 17, 1863
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
CARSON, November 15, 1863
EDITORS ENTERPRISE: Compiled by our own Reporter! Thus the Virginia Union of this morning gobbles up the labors of another man. That "Homographic Record of the Constitutional Convention" was compiled by Mr. Gillespie, Secretary of the Convention, at odd moments snatched from the incessant duties of his position, and unassisted by "our own reporter" or anybody else. Now this isn't fair, you know. Give the devil his due—by which metaphor I refer to Gillespie, but in an entirely inoffensive manner, I trust; and do not go and give the credit of this work to one who is not entitled to it. I copied that chart myself, and sent it to you yesterday, and I don't see why you couldn't have come out and done the complimentary thing, by claiming its paternity for me. In that case, I should not have mentioned this matter at all. But the main object of the present letter is to furnish you with the revolting details of—
A massacre, in which no less than a thousand human beings were deprived of life without a moment's warning of the terrible fate that was in store for them. This ghastly tragedy was the work of a single individual—a man whose character was gifted with many strong points, among which were great benevolence and generosity, and a kindness of heart which rendered him susceptible of being persuaded to do things which were really, at times, injurious to himself, and which noble trait in his nature made him a very slave to those whom he loved—a man whose disposition was a model of mildness until a fancied wrong drove him mad and impelled him to the commission of this monstrous crime—this wholesale offering of blood to the angry spirit of revenge which rankled in his bosom. It is said that some of his victims were so gashed, and torn, and mutilated, that they scarcely retained a semblance of human shape. As nearly as I can get at the facts in the case—and I have taken unusual pains in collecting them—the dire misfortune occurred about as follows: It seems that certain enemies ill-treated this man, and in revenge he burned a large amount of property belonging to them. They arrested him, and bound him hand and foot, and brought him down to Lehi, the county seat, for trial. And the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands. And he found a new jaw-bone of an ass, and put forth his hand and took it, and slew a thousand men there with. When he had finished his terrible tragedy, the desperado, criminal (whose name is Samson), deliberately wiped his bloody weapon upon the leg of his pantaloons, and then tried its edge upon his thumb, as a barber would a razor, simply remarking, "With the jaw-bone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men." He even seemed to reflect with satisfaction upon what he had done, and to derive great comfort from it—as if he would say, "ONLY a mere thousand—Oh, no I ain't on it, I reckon."
I am sorry that it was necessary for me to furnish you with a narrative of this nature, because my efforts in this line have lately been received with some degree of suspicion; yet it is my inexorable duty to keep your readers posted, and I will not be recreant to the trust, even though the very people whom I try to serve, upbraid me.
MARK TWAIN
P.S.—Now keep dark, will you? I am hatching a deep plot. I am "laying," as it were, for the editor of that San Francisco Evening Journal. The massacre I have related above is all true, but it occurred a good while ago. Do you see my drift? I shall catch that fool. He will look carefully through his Gold Hill and Virginia exchanges, and when he finds nothing in them about Samson killing a thousand men, he will think it is another hoax, and come out on me again, in his feeble way, as he did before. I shall have him foul, then, and I will never let up on him in the world (as we say in Virginia). I expect it will worry him some, to find out at last, that one Samson actually did kill a thousand men with the jaw-bone of one of his ancestors, and he never heard of it before.
MARK
Territorial Enterprise, November 1863
["Ingomar, the Barbarian," was presented at Maguire's Opera House in Virginia City during the fall of 1863. Mark Twain reviewed the play after this own fashion:]
REVIEW OF "INGOMAR THE BARBARIAN"
ACT. 1.—Mrs. Claughley appears in the costume of a healthy Greek matron (from Limerick). She urges Parthenia, her daughter, to marry Polydor, and save her father from being sold out by the sheriff—the old man being in debt for assessments.
Scene 2.—Polydor—who is a wealthy, spindle-shanked, stingy old stockbroker—prefers his suit and is refused by the Greek maiden—by the accomplished Greek maiden, we may say, since she speaks English with out any perceptible foreign accent.
Scene 3.—The Comanches capture Parthenia's father, old Myron (who is the chief and only blacksmith in his native village) they tear him from his humble cot, and carry him away, to Reese River. They hold him as a slave. It will cost thirty ounces of silver to get him out of soak.
Scene 4.—Dusty times in the Myron family. Their house is mortgaged—they are without dividends—they cannot "stand the raise."
Parthenia, in this extremity, applies to Polydor. He sneeringly advises her to shove out after her exiled parent herself.
She shoves!
ACT II.—Camp of the Comanches. In the foreground, several of the tribe throwing dice for tickets in Wright's Gift Entertainment. In the background, old Myron packing faggots on a jack. The weary slave weeps—he sighs—he slobbers. Grief lays her heavy hand upon him.
Scene 2.—Comanches on the war-path, headed by the chief, Ingomar. Parthenia arrives and offers to remain as a hostage while old Myron returns home and borrows thirty dollars to pay his ransom with. It was pleasant to note the varieties of dress displayed in the costumes of Ingomar and his comrades. It was also pleasant to observe that in those ancient times the better class of citizens were able to dress in ornamental carriage robes, and even the rank and file indulged in Benkert boots, albeit some of the latter appeared not to have been blacked for several days.
Scene 3.—Parthenia and Ingomar alone in the woods. "Two souls with but a single thought, etc." She tells him that is love. He "can't see it."
Scene 4.—The thing works around about as we expected it would in the first place. Ingomar gets stuck after Parthenia.
Scene 5.—Ingomar declares his love—he attempts to embrace her—she waves him off, gently, but firmly—she remarks, "Not too brash, Ing., not too brash, now!" Ingomar subsides. They finally flee away, and hie them to Parthenia's home.
ACTS III and IV.—Joy! Joy! From the summit of a hill, Parthenia beholds once more the spires and domes of Silver City.
Scene 2.—Silver City. Enter Myron. Tableau! Myron begs for an extension on his note—he has not yet raised the whole ransom, but he is ready to pay two dollars and a half on account.
Scene 3.—Myron tells Ingomar he must shuck himself, and dress like a Christian; he must shave; he must work; he must give up his sword! His rebellious spirit rises. Behold Parthenia tames it with the mightier spirit of Love. Ingomar weakens—he lets down—he is utterly demoralized.
Scene 4.—Enter old Timarch, Chief of Police. He offers Ingomar—but this scene is too noble to be trifled with in burlesque.
Scene 5.—Polydor presents his bill—213 drachmas. Busted again—the old man cannot pay. Ingomar compromises by becoming the slave of Polydor.
Scene 6.—The Comanches again, with Thorne at their head! He asks who enslaved the chief? Ingomar points to Polydor. Lo! Thorne seizes the trembling broker, and snatches him bald-headed!
Scene 7.—Enter the Chief of Police again. He makes a treaty with the Comanches. He gives them a ranch apiece. He decrees that they shall build a town on the American Flat, and appoints great Ingomar to be its Mayor! [Applause by the supes.]
Scene 8.—Grand tableau—Comanches, police, Pi-Utes, and citizens generally—Ingomar and Parthenia hanging together in the centre. The old thing—The old poetical quotation, we mean—They double on it—Ingomar observing "Two souls with but a single Thought," and she slinging in the other line, "Two Hearts that Beat as one." Thus united at last in a fond embrace, they sweetly smiled upon the orchestra and the curtain fell.
[reprinted in the Golden Era, NOV. 29, 1863]
Territorial Enterprise, c. November 27, 1863
[Mark Twain on Artemus Ward, "The Wild Humorist of the Plains"]
We understand that Artemus Ward contemplates visiting this region to deliver his lectures, and perhaps make some additions to his big "sho." In his last letter to us he appeared particularly anxious to "sekure a kupple ov horned todes; alsowe, a lizard which it may be persessed of 2 tales, or any comical snaix, and enny sich little unconsidered trifles, as the poets say, which they do not interest the kommun mind. Further, be it nown, that I would like a opportunity for to maik a moddel in wax of a average size wash-owe man, with feet attached, as an kompanion pictur to a waxen figger of a nigger I have sekured, at an large outlaye, whitch it has a unnatural big hed onto it. Could you also manage to gobbel up the skulp of the layte Missus Hopkins? I adore sich foot-prints of atrocity as it were, muchly. I was roominatin' on gittin' a bust of Mark Twain, but I've kwit kontemplatin' the work. They tell me down heer to the Bay that the busts air so kommun it wood only bee an waist of wax too git us kounterfit presentiment." We shall assist Mr. Ward in every possible way about making his Washoe collection and have no doubt but he will pick up many curious things during his sojourn.
Territorial Enterprise, December 1-3, 1863
[excerpt from original article concerning an affair in Virginia City]
Afterwards, Mr. Mark Twain being enthusiastically called upon, arose, and without previous preparation, burst forth in a tide of eloquence so grand, so luminous, so beautiful and so resplendent with the gorgeous fires of genius, that the audience were spell-bound by the magic of his words, and gazed in silent wonder in each other's faces as men who felt that they were listening to one gifted with inspiration [Applause.] The proceedings did not end here, but at this point we deemed it best to stop reporting and go to dissipating, as the dread solitude of our position as a sober, rational Christian, in the midst of the driveling and besotted multitude around us, had begun to shroud our spirits with a solemn sadness tinged with fear. At ten o'clock the curtain fell.
Territorial Enterprise, December 1863
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
Carson City, December 5, 1863
EDITOR'S ENTERPRISE: The church in Carson prospereth. A fine edifice will soon be completed here, wherein the gospel may be comfortably preached, and listened to in comfort likewise. A complimentary benefit to this enterprise was given at the theatre last night by Hon. James Stark and Mrs. Cutler, the profits of which amounted to upwards of two hundred dollars. Mrs. Cutler recited several poems, and sang a few choice songs with such grace and excellence as won for her the compliment of repeated and enthusiastic encores. Mr. Stark's readings were well selected and admirably delivered. His recital of the speech of Sergeant Buzfuz, in the great breach of promise case of Bardell vs. Pickwick, was a very miracle of declamation. If all men could read it like him, that speech would live after Cicero's very creditable efforts had been forgotten; yet heretofore I had looked upon that as the tamest of Mr. Dickens' performances.
And just here, I am constrained, in behalf of the community, to do justice to Charley Parker's liberality and good citizenship. He prepared his theatre for this church benefit, put a stove in the green room, and had the house duly cleaned and lighted—all at his own expense. It was a good action, and gracefully and unostentatiously performed.
The Convention will probably complete its labors about Wednesday. The members are growing restive and impatient under this long exile from their private business, and are anxious to finish their work and get back home. Three of the Esmeralda delegation—Messrs. Stark, Conner and Bechtel, being imperatively called away by the necessity of attending to their private affairs, have been granted indefinite leave of absence. These gentlemen have been constantly at their posts, and unremitting in the discharge of their duties, and well deserved this kindness at the hands of the Convention. And between you and me, if there were no ladies in Carson, my estimable old fossil, Colonel Youngs, would ask permission to go home, also. Now, why will a man, when he gets to be a thousand years old, go on hanging around the women, and taking chances on fire and brimstone, instead of joining the church and endeavoring, with humble spirit and contrite heart, to ring in at the eleventh hour, like the thief on the cross? Why will he?
Mr. STERNS rose to a question of privilege again, to-day, and requested that the reporters would publish his speeches verbatim or not at all. The fact is, they ought to be reported verbatim, but then we work eighteen hours a day, and still have not time to give more than the merest skeletons of the speeches made in the Convention. Johnson and Stewart, and Larrowe, and Bryan, and others, complain not, however, although we condense their remarks fearfully. Even Judge Brosnan's stately eloquence, adorned with beautiful imagery and embellished with classic quotations, hath been reported by us thus tersely: "Mr. Brosnan opposed the motion." Only that, and nothing more. But we had taste enough not to mar a noble speech with the deadly engines of reduction and the third person.
Now, in condensing the following speech, the other day, we were necessarily obliged to leave out some of its most salient points, and I acknowledge that my friend Sterns had ample cause for being annoyed at its mutilation. I hope he will find the present report all right, though (albeit the chances are infernally against that result)I have got his style verbatim, whether I have the substance or not.
The question being on the amendment offered in Committee of the Whole, to Mr. Stewart's proposed substitute for Section 1 of the Article entitled "Taxation," as reported from the Standing Committee:
Mr. STERNS said—Mr. President, I am opposed, I am hostile, I am uncompromisingly against this proposition to tax the mines. I will go further, sir. I will openly assert, sir, that I am not in favor of this proposition. It is wrong entirely wrong, sir (as the gentleman from Washoe has already said); I fully agree (with the gentleman who has just taken his seat) that it is unjust and unrighteous. I do think, Mr. President, that (as has been suggested by the gentleman from Ormsby) we owe it to our constituents to defeat this pernicious measure. Incorporate it into your Constitution, sir, and (as was eloquently and beautifully set forth in the speech of the gentleman from Storey) the gaunt forms of want, and poverty, and starvation, and despair will shortly walk in the high places of this once happy and beautiful land. Add it to your fundamental law, sir, and (as was stated yesterday by the gentleman from Lander) God will cease to smile upon your labors. In the language (of my colleague), I entreat you, sir, and gentlemen, inflict not this mighty iniquity upon generations yet unborn! Heed the prayers of the people and be merciful! Ah, sir, the quality of mercy is not strained, so to speak (as has been aptly suggested heretofore), but droppeth like the gentle dew from Heaven, as it were. The gentleman from Douglas has said this law would be unconstitutional, and I cordially agree with him. Therefore, let its course to the ramparts be hurried—let the flames that shook the battle's wreck, shine round it o'er the dead—let it go hence to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns (as hath been remarked by the gentleman from Washoe, Mr. Shamp), and in thus guarding and protecting the poor miner, let us endeavor to do unto others as we would that others should do unto us (as was very justly and properly observed by Jesus Christ upon a former occasion).
After which, the Convention not knowing of any good reason why they should not tax the miners, they went to work and taxed them.
Now, that is verbatim, as nearly as I could come at it. I took it from my own mysterious short-hand notes, which are mighty shaky, I am willing to admit; but then, I guarded against inaccuracy by consulting the several authorities quoted in the speech, and from them I have the assurance that my report of Mr. Sterns' comprehensive declamation is eminently correct. I cannot bet on it, though, nevertheless—I cannot possibly bet on it.
I think I have hit upon the right plan, now. It is better to report a member verbatim, occasionally, and keep him pacified, than have him rising to these uncomfortable questions of privilege every now and then. I hope to be able to report Bill Stewart verbatim in the course of a day or two, if he will hold on a spell.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, December 1863
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
Carson City, December 12, 1863
Such is my destination. Thither I go to recuperate. I take with me a broken spirit, blighted hopes and a busted constitution. Also some gin. I shall return again, after many days, restored to vigorous health; restored to original purity; free from sin, and prepared to accept any lucrative office the people can be induced to force upon me. If elected, I shall donate my salary to charitable institutions. I will finish building this chronic brick church here, and lease a high-priced parson to run it. Also, an exorbitant choir. Everything connected with the church shall be conducted in the bulliest manner. The Logan Hotel is situated on the banks of Lake Bigler—or Lake Tahoe, which signifieth "grasshopper" in the Digger tongue. I am not going with any of the numerous pleasure parties which go daily to the lake and infest the Logan Hotel. I shall travel like Baxter's hog—in a gang by myself. I am weary of the gay world, and I pine for an hour of solitude. The hotel is new, handsomely furnished, and commodious; it stands within fifty feet of the water's edge, and commands a view of all the grand scenery there about; its table is furnished with the best the market affords, and behold they eat trout there every day; fifteen miles over the new King's Canyon road is all the journey it is necessary to take—after which the worn pilgrim may rest in peace in the bosom of Logan & Stewart. That is as good a thing as I want, as long as I am not married.
A year from now, there will not be a mine left in this Territory. This is an appalling statement, but it is a true one. I guessed it from remarks made by that disreputable old cottonhead, Bill Stewart, who as good as promised me ten feet in the "Justis," and then backed down again when the stock went up to $80 a foot. That was a villainous way to treat me, who have gone on juries for him, and held my grip through all the monstrous fabrications he chose to present in his eloquent sophistry, and then brought in a verdict for him, when it seemed morally certain that Providence would interfere and stop the nefarious business. I said, the last time, that I would never serve on one of Bill Stewart's juries again, until they put a lightning rod on the Court House. I said it, and my word is good. I am not going to take any more chances like that. But what I commenced to tell about was, that last night, after the Convention adjourned, and the political meeting was called together, Bill Stewart went to work with his characteristic indecent haste (just a parallel case with that Justis affair), to construe the Constitution!—construe and determine the species of the new-laid egg from which is to be hatched our future power and greatness, while the tender thing was warm yet! Bill Stewart is always construing something—eternally distorting facts and principles. He would climb out of his coffin and construe the burial service. He is a long-legged, bull-headed, whopper-jawed, constructionary monomaniac. Give him a chance to construe the sacred law, and there wouldn't be a damned soul in perdition in a month. I have my own opinion of Bill Stewart, and if it would not appear as if I were a little put out about that Justis (that was an almighty mean thing), I would as soon express it as not. He construed the Constitution, last night, as I remarked before. He gave the public to understand that the clause providing for the taxation of the mines meant nothing in particular; that he wanted the privilege of construing that section to suit himself; that a mere hole in the ground was not a mine, and it wasn't property (he slung that in because he has a costly well on his premises in Virginia); and that it would be a difficult matter to determine in our courts what does really constitute a mine. Do you see his drift? Well, I do. He will prove to the satisfaction of the courts that there are only two definite kinds of mine; that one of these is an excavation from which metallic ores or other mineral substances are "DUG" (which is the dictionary phrase). Then of course, the miners will know enough to stop "digging" and go to blasting. Bill Stewart will then show, easily enough, that these fellows' claims are not "mines" according to the dictionary, and consequently they cannot be taxed. He will show that the only other species of "mine" is a "pronominal adjective," and proceed to prove that there is nothing in the Constitution that will permit the State to tax English grammar. He will demonstrate that a mere hole in the ground is not a mine, and is not liable to taxation. The end will be that a year from now we shall all own in these holes in the ground, but no man will acknowledge that he owns in a "mine"; and about that time custom, and policy, and construction, combined, will have taught us to speak of the staunch old bulwark of the State as "The Great Gould & Curry Hole-in-the Ground." Bill Stewart will put them up to it. In one short year, sir, from this date, I feel within me that Bill Stewart will have succeeded in construing the last vestige of a mine out of this country.
This subject worried the Convention some. In the first place, the Standing Committee reported an article providing for the election of a State Printer, whose compensation was to be fixed by law, etc. The members, without even showing the Committee the courtesy of discussing the matter, snubbed them very pointedly, by pitching the bill overboard without offering the semblance of an apology for their conduct. They substituted an article providing for printing State work by contract. That was debated to death, and duly buried with its still-born predecessor. Then they tried a Superintendent of Public Printing. That plan appeared to suit them. They adopted it, and looked upon the work of their hands and pronounced it good. There the matter rested until last night, when Governor Johnson got up and asked unanimous consent to substitute the original State Printer article for the Superintendent. He pointed out to the Convention that the office of Superintendent would be turned into a mere sinecure, and its incumbent would accomplish no good to the State and behold, without a word of objection, the change was made! Verily, it is vastly better to yield to wisdom at last, than not at all.
Speaking of State Printer, reminds me that we made a mistake in the report published this morning. We said the school moneys were to be invested only in United States bonds—whereas, the truth is, it was decided that they might be invested in either United States or State bonds.
A superb gold watch, worth five or six hundred dollars, was presented to Hank Monk, here, night before last. The donors were John S. Henning, Joe Clark, H. H. Raymond, Alex. O'Neil, William Thompson, Jr., John 0. Earl, W. M. Lent and three others. The ceremonies were conducted at Frank Ludlow's daguerrean rooms. Judge Turner made the presentation speech, and Judge Hardy replied on behalf of the defendant. Champagne flowed freely. The watch is gorgeously embellished with coaches and horses, and with charms and seals in keeping with the same, and bears for a motto Hank's famous remark to Horace Greeley: "KEEP YOUR SEAT, HORACE—I'LL GET YOU THERE ON TIME!"
Lovejoy has issued the first number of his paper at Washoe City, and the above is its name. It is as pretty as a sweetheart, and as readable as a love-letter—and in my experience, these similes express a good deal. But why should Lovejoy spell it Pah-Utah? That isn't right—it should be Pi-Uty, or Pi-Ute. I speak by authority. Because I have carefully noted the little speeches of self-gratulation of our noble red brother, and he always delivers himself in this wise: "Pi-Uty boy heepy work—Washoe heep lazy." But if you question his nationality, he remarks, with oppressive dignity: "Me no dam Washoe—me Pi-Ute!" Wherefore, my researches have satisfied me that one of these, or both, is right. Lovejoy ought to know this, even better than me; he came here before May, 1860, and is, consequently, a blooded Pi-Ute, while I am only an ignorant half-breed.
CARSON CITY
Call your Constitutioners home. They do nothing but sing the praises of Carson City, and Carson society, and Carson climate. Hite, and Brosnan, and Youngs, and Sterns, and half the balance of them, are more than half inclined to stay here. It is absurd. Pipe to quarters!
FINAL REPORT
The Third House of the Constitutional Convention met in solemn grandeur, at 1l o'clock last night. To-morrow or next day I shall compile a verbatim report of its proceedings for the forthcoming volume of official reports of the Convention, and if you think you can afford to pay enough for it I will allow you to publish it in advance of that volume.
MARK TWAIN
President Constitutional Convention (Third House)
Territorial Enterprise, December 1863
[The "Third House" was an informal group of pranksters who often met and burlesqued the legislative process.]
Nevada State Constitutional Convention; Third House
Carson City, December 13, 1863
REPORTED IN PHONOGPAPHIC SHORT-HAND BY MARK TWAIN
The Third House met in the Hall of the Convention at 11 P. M., Friday, immediately after the final adjournment of the First House.
On motion of Mr. Nightingill, the rules were suspended and the usual prayer dispensed with, on the ground that it was never listened to by the members of the First House, which was composed chiefly of the same gentlemen which constitute the Third, and was consequently merely ornamental and entirely unnecessary.
Mr. Mark Twain was elected President of the Convention, and Messrs. Small and Hickok appointed to conduct him to the Chair, which they did amid a dense and respectful silence on the part of the house, Mr. Small stepping grandly over the desks, and Mr. Hickok walking under them.
The President addressed the house as follows, taking his remarks down in short-hand as he proceeded.
Gentlemen—This is the proudest moment of my life. I shall always think so. I think so still. I shall ponder over it with unspeakable emotion down to the latest syllable of recorded time. It shall be my earnest endeavor to give entire satisfaction in the high and bully position to which you have elevated me. [Applause.]
The President appointed Mr. Small, Secretary, Mr. Gibson, official reporter, and Mr. Pete Hopkins, Chief Page, and Uncle Billy Patterson, First Assistant Page. These officers came forward and took the following oath:
"We do solemnly affirm that we have never seen a duel, never been connected with a duel, never heard of a duel, never sent or received a challenge, never fought a duel, and don't want to. Furthermore, we will support, protect and defend this constitution which we are about to frame, until we can't rest, and will take our pay in scrip." Mr. Youngs—"Mr. President: I, ah—I—that is—"
The President—"Mr. Youngs, if you have got anything to say, say it; and don't stand there and shake your head and gasp 'I—ah, I—ah,' as you have been in the habit of doing in the former Convention."
Mr. Youngs—"Well, sir, I was only going to say that I liked your inaugural, and I perfectly agree with the sentiments you appeared to express in it, but I didn't rightly understand what—"
The President—"You have been sitting there for thirty days, like a bump on a log, and you never rightly understand anything. Take your seat, sir, you are out of order. You rose for information? Well, you'll not get it—sit down. You will appeal from the decision of the Chair? Take your seat, sir, the Chair will entertain no appeals from its decisions. And I would suggest to you, sir, that you will not be permitted, here, to growl in your seat, and make malicious side remarks in an undertone, for fifteen minutes after you have been called to order, as you have habitually done in the other house."
The President—"The subject before the house is as follows. The Secretary will read:"
Secretary—"A-r, ar,—t-i, ti—arti, c-l-e, cle,—article—"
The President—"What are you trying to do, sir?"
Secretary—"Well, I am only a helpless orphan, and I can't read writing."
The Chair appointed Mr. Hickok to assist Mr. Small, and discharged Mr. Gibson, the official reporter, because he did not know how to write.
Mr. Youngs—(singing)—"For the lady I love will soon be a bride, with the diadem on her brow-ow-ow."
President—"Order, you snuffling old granny!"
Mr. Youngs—"I AM in order, sir."
The President—"You are not, sir—sit down."
Mr. Youngs—"I won't, sir! I appeal to—."
The President—"Take your—seat!"
Mr. Youngs—"But I insist that Jefferson's Manual—."
The President—"D—n Jefferson's Manual! The Chair will transact its own business in its own way, sir."
Mr. Chapin—"Mr. President: I do hope the amendment will not pass. I do beg of gentlemen—I do beseech of gentlemen—that they will examine this matter carefully, and earnestly, and seriously, and with a sincere desire to do the people all the good, and all the justice, and all the benefit it is in their power to do. I do hope, Mr. President-."
The President—"Now, there YOU go! What are you trying to get through your head?—there's nothing before the house."
The question being on Section 4, Article 1 (free exercise of religious liberty):
Mr. Stewart said—"Mr. President: I insist upon it, that if you tax the mines, you impose a burden upon the people which will be heavier than they can bear. And when you tax the poor miner's shafts, and drifts, and bed-rock tunnels, you are NOT taxing his property; you are NOT taxing his substance; you are NOT taxing his wealth—no, but you are taxing what may become property some day, or may not; you are taxing the shadow from which the substance may eventually issue or may not; you are taxing the visions of Alnaschar; which may turn to minted gold, or only prove the forerunners of poverty and misfortune; in a word, sir, you are taxing his hopes; taxing the aspirations of his soul; taxing the yearnings of his heart of hearts! Yes, sir, I insist upon it, that if you tax the mines, you will impose a burden upon the people which will be heavier than they can bear. And when you tax the poor miner's shafts, and drifts, and bed-rock tunnels, you are NOT taxing his property; you are NOT taxing his substance; you are NOT taxing his wealth—no, but you are taxing what may become property some day, or may not; you are taxing the shadow from which the substance may eventually issue or may not; you are taxing the visions of Alnaschar, which may turn to minted gold, or merely prove the fore runners of poverty and misfortune; in a word, sir, you are taxing his hopes! taxing the aspirations of his soul!—taxing the yearnings of his heart of hearts! Ah, sir, I do insist upon it that if you tax the mines, you will impose a burden upon the people which will be heavier than they can bear. And when you tax the poor miner's shafts, and drifts, and bed-rock tunnels—"
The President—"Take your seat, Bill Stewart! I am not going to sit here and listen to that same old song over and over again. I have been reporting and re-reporting that infernal speech for the last thirty days, and want you to understand that you can't play it off on this Convention any more. When I want it, I will repeat it myself—I know it by heart, anyhow. You and your bed-rock tunnels, and blighted miners' blasted hopes, have gotten to be a sort of nightmare to me, and I won't put up with it any longer. I don't wish to be too hard on your speech, but if you can't add something fresh to it, or say it backwards, or sing it to a new tune, you have simply got to simmer down for awhile."
Mr. Johnson—"Mr. President: I wish it distinctly understood that I am not a candidate for the Senate, or any other office, and have no intention of becoming one. And I wish to call the attention of the Convention to the fact, sir, that outside influences have been brought to bear, here, that—"
The President—"Governor Johnson, there is no necessity of your putting in your shovel here, until you are called upon to make a statement. And if you allude to the engrossing clerk as an outside influence, I must inform you, sir, that his battery has been silenced with Territorial scrip at forty cents on the dollar."
Mr. Sterns—"Mr. President, I cordially agree with the gentleman from Storey county, that if we tax the mines we shall impose a burden upon the people that will be heavier than they can bear. I agree with him, sir, that in taxing the poor miner's shafts, and drifts, and bed-rock tunnels, we would not be taxing his property, or his wealth, or his substance, but only that which may become such at some future day—an Alnascharean vision, which might turn to coin or might only result in disaster and disappointment to the defendant—in a word, sir, I coincide with him in the opinion that it would be equivalent to taxing the hopes of the poor miner—his aspirations—the dear yearnings of his—"
The President—"Yearnings of his grandmother! I'll slam this mallet at the next man that attempts to impose that tiresome old speech on this body. SET DOWN! You have been pretty regular about re-hashing other people's platitudes heretofore, Mr. Sterns, but you have got to be a little original in the Third House. Your sacrilegious lips will be marring the speeches of the Chair, next."
Mr. Ralston—"Mr. President: I have but a word to say, and I do not wish to occupy the attention of the house any longer than I can help; although I could, perhaps, throw more light upon the matter of our eastern boundary than those who have not visited that interesting but comparatively unknown section of our budding commonwealth. It is growing late, and I do not feel as if I had a right to tax the patience—"
The President—"Tax! Take your seat, sir, take your seat. I will NOT be bullyragged to death with this threadbare subject of taxation. You are out of order, anyhow. How do you suppose anybody can listen in any comfort to your speech, when you are fumbling with your coat all the time you are talking, and trying to button it with your left hand, when you know you can't do it? I have never seen you succeed yet, until just as you got the last word out. And then the moment you sit down, you always unbutton it again. You may speak, hereafter, Mr. Ralston, but I want you to understand that you have got to button your coat before you get up. I do not mean to be kept in hot water all the time by your little oratorical eccentricities ."
Mr. Larrowe—"Mr. President: There are nine mills in Lander county already—let me see—there is Dobson's, five stamp; Thompson's, eight stamp; Johnson's, three stamp—well, I cannot give the names of all of them, but there are nine, sir—NINE splendid, steam-power quartz-mills, disturbing with their ceaseless thunder the dead silence of centuries! Nine noble quartz-mills, sir, cheering with the music of their batteries the desponding hearts of pilgrims from every land!—nine miraculous quartz-mills, sir, from whose steam-pipes and chimneys ascends a grateful incense to the god of Labor and Progress!—nine sceptred and anointed quartz-mills, sir, whose mission it is to establish the power, and the greatness, and the glory of Nevada, and place her high along the—"
The President—"Now will you just take your seat, and hold your clatter until somebody asks you for your confounded Reese River quartz-mill statistics? What has Reese River got to do with religious freedom?—and what have quartz-mills got to do with it—and what have you to do with it yourself? You are out of order, sir—plant yourself. And moreover, when you get up here to make a speech, I don't want you to yell at me as if you thought I were in San Francisco—I'm not hard of hearing. I don't see why President North didn't tone you down long ago."
Mr. Larrowe—"I think I am in order, Mr. President. It was a rule in the other Convention that no member could speak when there was no question before the house; but after the question had been announced by the Chair, members could then go on and speak on any subject they pleased—or rather, that was the custom, sir—the ordinary custom."
The President—"Yes, sir, I know it has been the custom for thirty days and thirty nights in the other Convention, but I will let gentlemen know that they can't ring in three-stamp Reese River quartz mills on the third house when I am considering the question of religious liberty—the same being dear to every American heart. Plant yourself, sir—plant yourself. I don't want any more yowling out of you, now.
Mr. Small—"The Secretary would beg leave to state, for the information of the Con——-"
The President—"There, now, that's enough of that. You learned that from Gillespie, I won't have any of that kind of nonsense here. When you have got anything to say, talk it right out; and see that you use the personal pronoun 'I,' also, and drop that presumptuous third person. 'The Secretary would beg leave to state!' The devil he would. Now suppose you take a back seat, and wait until somebody asks you to state something. Mr. Chapin, you will please stop catching flies while the Chair is considering the subject of religious toleration.
Mr. Ball—"Mr. President: The Finance Committee, of which I have the honor to be chairman, have arrived at the conclusion that it is a hundred and thirty miles from here to Folsom; that it will take two hundred and thirty miles of railroad iron to build a road that distance, without counting the switches; this would figure up as follows: Bars, 14 feet 3 inches long; weight, 800 pounds; 1,000 bars to the mile, 800,000 pounds; 130,000 bars for the whole distance, weight, 104,000,000 pounds; original cost of the iron, with insurance and transportation to Folsom from St. Louis, via Salt Lake City, added, say three dollars and a half a pound, would mount to a fraction over or under $312,722,239.42. Three hundred and twelve million, seven hundred and twenty-two thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine dollars and forty-two cents, sir. That is the estimate of the Committee, sir, for prime cost of one class of material, without counting labor and other expenses. In view of these facts, sir, it is the opinion of the Committee that we had better not build the road. I did not think it necessary to submit a written report, because—"
The President—"Take your seat, Mr. Ball—take your seat, sir, your evil eye never lights upon this Chair but the spirit moves you to confuse its intellect with some of your villainous algebraical monstrosities. I will not entertain them, sir; I don't know anything about them. You needn't mind bringing in any written reports here—or verbal ones either, unless you can confine yourself to a reasonable number of figures at a time, so that I can understand what you are driving at. No, sir, the Third House will not build the railroad. The other Convention's donation of $3,000,000 in bonds, worth forty cents on the dollar, will buy enough of one of those bars to make a breastpin, and that will have to satisfy this common wealth for the present. I observe that Messrs. Wasson and Gibson and Noteware and Kennedy have their feet on their desks. The chief page will proceed to remove those relics of ancient conventional barbarism from sight."
Mr. Musser—"Mr. President: To be, or not to be that is the question—
The President—"No, sir! The question is, shall we tolerate religious indifference in this community; or the rights of conscience; or the right of suffrage; or the freedom of the press; or free speech, or free schools, or free niggers. The Chair trusts it knows what it is about, without any instructions from the members."
Mr. Musser—"But, sir, it was only a quotation from—"
The President—"Well, I don't care, I want you to sit down. The Chair don't consider that you know much about religion anyhow, and consequently the subject will suffer no detriment from your letting it alone. You and Judge Hardy can subside, and study over the preamble until you are wanted."
Mr. Brosnan—"Mr. President, these proceedings have all been irregular, extremely and customarily irregular. I will move, sir, that the question be passed, for the present, and that we take up the next section."
Mr. Mitchell—"I object to that, Mr. President. I move that we go into Committee of the Whole on it."
Mr. Wasson—"I move that it be referred back to the Standing Committee."
Mr. North—"I move that the rules be suspended and the whole article placed upon its final passage."
The President—"Gentlemen, those of you who are in favor of adopting the original proposition, together with the various motions now pending before the house, will signify the same by saying aye."
No one voting in the negative, the chair decided the vote to be unanimous in the affirmative.
The President—"Gentlemen, your proceedings have been exactly similar to those of the convention which preceded you. You have considered a subject which you knew nothing about; spoken on every subject but the one before the house, and voted without knowing what you were voting for or having any idea what would be the general result of your action. I will adjourn the Convention for an hour, on account of my cold, to the end that I may apply the remedy prescribed for it by Dr. Tjader—the same being gin and molasses. The Chief Page is hereby instructed to provide a spoonful of molasses and a gallon of gin, for the use of the President."
OUR CARSON DISPATCH—SECOND SESSION
BY TELEGRAPH
Third House met after recess, and transacted the following business:
Secretary read Section 15, Legislative Department:
"SECTION 15. The doors of each house shall be kept open during the session."
Kinkead moved to amend by adding the words "and the windows also, if the weather will permit."
Secretary read Section 32, Legislative Department:
"SECTION 32. No law shall be passed authorizing married women to carry on business as sole traders."
On motion of Stems, construed to mean that married women shall not preach.
Secretary read Section 6, Declaration of Rights:
"SECTION 6. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed."
Youngs moved to amend by striking out the word "bair'l" and inserting the word "board." Adopted, unanimously.
SECTION 1. Miscellaneous Provisions, was amended so as to read as follows:
"SECTION 1. The seat of government shall be at Carson, and the Legislature shall hold its session in the plaza during the first six years."
Section added empowering the President of the Third House of the Convention to convene, by proclamation, the Third House of the State Legislature, for the purpose of electing two United States Senators, within thirty days after the Constitution shall have been ratified.
Name of the State changed to "Washoe," in conformity with the law which called the Convention together.
New section added, as follows:
"SECTION—. No Sheriff or other officer shall be expected to arrest any assassin or other criminal on strong presumptive evidence, merely, nor any other evidence, unless such assassin or other criminal shall insist upon his privilege of being arrested."
The hour having arrived for the President to take his regular gin and molasses, the Convention adjourned.
Last night, about 12 o'clock—[here the telegraph ceased working.-BLOOMER, operator.]
Territorial Enterprise, December 25—27, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
A CHRISTMAS GIFT.—"Mr. Twain—compliments of Miss Chase—Christmas, 1863." This handwriting disposed us to suspect treachery, and to regard the box as a deadly infernal machine. It was on this account that we got a stranger to open it. This precaution was unnecessary. The diabolical box had nothing in it but a ghastly, naked, porcelain doll baby. However, we are much obliged—we always had a hankering to have a baby, and now we are satisfied—the mythical "Miss Chase" helped us to the business, and she has our cordial thanks for her share in it.
Territorial Enterprise, late December 1863
[Mark Twain's review of Artemus Ward's lecture]
"There are perhaps fifty subjects treated in it, and there is a passable point in every one of them, and a healthy laugh, also, for any of God's creatures who hath committed no crime, the ghastly memory of which debars him from smiling again while he lives. The man who is capable of listening to the 'Babes in the Wood' from beginning to end without laughing either inwardly or outwardly must have done murder, or at least meditated it, at some time during his life."
Territorial Enterprise, December 29, 1863
LOCAL COLUMN
CHRISTMAS PRESENTS.—We received from Carson, Saturday, a long yellow box, of suspicious appearance, with the following inscription upon it: "Mark Twain, ENTERPRISE Office, Virginia—Free—Politeness Langton's Pioneer Express—Be-hi-me-soi-vin." That last phrase is Greek, and means "Bully for you!" We are not sure that it was written by Mrs. H. F. R., of Carson, and there was no evidence accompanying the box to show that it was. This is what makes us so obstinate in the opinion that it might have been written by somebody else. The box contained a toy rabbit, of the jackass persuasion, gifted with ears of aggravated dimensions, and swathed in sage-brush; an Indian chief—a mere human creation—made of raisins, strung on a skeleton formed of a single knitting-needle, with a solitary fig for a body, and a chicken feather driven into the head of the effigy, to denote its high official character. One more present remained—the same being a toy watchman's rattle, made of pine and tastefully painted. We are glad to have that rattle now, but when we asked for such a thing at a certain convivial party in Carson, it will be remembered that we meant to bestow it upon another young man who was present, and whose absent mind, we imagined, might be collected together and concentrated by means of such an instrument. We have presented the rabbit to Artemus Ward, to be preserved as a specimen of our resources; the other presents we shall always wear near our heart. The following report of the committee, accompanying the box, has been received, accepted, adopted, and the same referred to the Committee of the Whole people:
CARSON City, December 25, 1863.
Mr. MARK TWAIN—Sir: The undersigned has the honor to be selected by the gay company of ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls and Santa Claus, who came in person with Judge Dixson's wolf-skin cap, coat, pants and a mask, and sleigh bells around his waist, and dashed in the room just after Mrs. Cutter and two long rows of children had sung a pretty piece, and read a letter from Santa Claus, when that individual immediately dashed into the room to the terror of some of the children, thirty-six in all, and climbed the Christmas tree, all covered with presents, and little lighted candles, and handed down things for everybody, and afterwards danced with the now reconciled children, and then dashed out; after which there was supper and dancing by the ladies and gentlemen; and the school which was thus made to enjoy them selves last night till midnight, was Miss H. K. Clapp and Mrs. Cutter's Seminary, which is one of the best there is, and instructed me to send you these things, which I do by Langton's Express, handed down from the Christmas tree by Santa Claus, marked "Mark Twain," to wit: One rabbit under a sage brush, to represent your design for a seal in the Constitutional Convention; one rattle, presented by a lady of whom you begged for one when you were here last, and a Pi-Ute to be eaten, being a chief with a chicken feather in his hat, composed of a fig for his body and otherwise raisins, sent to you by request of a lady of the medical profession, all of which is submitted by
WILLIAM A. TRINITY, Committee.
Territorial Enterprise, December 30, 1863
AT 7 o'clock last night a large number of citizens met at the Court House for the purpose of selecting sixteen new delegates, which they hoped might prove more acceptable to the State Convention than those elected by the regular County Convention day before yesterday. There appeared to be some discord in this Convention as well as in that which preceded it, but of course the manner in which it was constituted prevented the possibility of anyone's bolting from it in the regular and recognized way. It was a gorgeous sight to behold those two hundred fearless spirits of Storey—those noble human soda-bottles, so to speak, effervescing with the holy gas of pure unselfish patriotism, rising in their might to bust out, as it were, the infamous action of 3,000 voters of Storey county, as done in the County Convention by their chosen representatives. But we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we glorious Americans will occasionally astonish the God that created us when we get a fair start.
The proceedings opened with three cheers and a tiger for the stars and stripes.
Mr. Corson moved that Dr. Minneer be elected chairman of the meetings. Carried.
Mr. Barclay nominated Wm. H. Davenport and James Phelan as Secretaries. They were elected without opposition.
The following Vice Presidents were then elected: James Brannon, Dighton Corson, Judge Leconey, J. W. Noyes, Thos. Lynch, Judge Ferris, John A. Collins, A. B. Elliott, E. Bond, W. H. Young, J. S. Black, Thos. G. Taylor, S. A. Kellogg, Judge Frizell, J. H. Heilshorn, P. Quigley, J. T. Sage, John Church, W. R. Warnock and R. H. Rider. [Several of these gentlemen were said to be present.]
The Chairman reviewed the action of the County Convention, and said it was not satisfactory to the majority of the community; therefore the people had met now to improve upon that action in their sovereign capacity as fountain-head of power in the land. He said the present Convention would nominate sixteen delegates, and hoped they would be accepted by the State Convention in preference to the delegates elected by the late packed Convention.
[A voice—"Three cheers!" No response.]
A committee previously and mysteriously appointed immediately brought in a report containing the following names. There was no suspicion of packing about it, however. The report reads as follows:
Report of the committee appointed by a meeting of citizens held at the Court House on Monday evening, December 29th, to select the names of sixteen citizens to be presented to the mass meeting this evening as suitable persons to represent Storey county in the Union State Convention, to be held at Carson on the 31st inst., beg leave to submit the following names: Dr. Geiger, John Dohle, Thomas Lynch, Captain White, Joseph Loryea, J. L. Black, George E. Brickett, Thomas Hannah, J. D. Meagher, Augustus Ash.
Mr. Corson moved that the report be accepted, and the committee discharged. Carried.
Mr. Fitch was called for and addressed the Convention at great length, re-hashing, adding to and improving his most recent editorials in the Virginia Union. He was heard with interest and was frequently applauded.
As is always his custom, Mr. Brosnan spoke eloquently and feelingly, and was repeatedly and loudly cheered. Public speakers are not given to adhering strictly to the truth as a general thing, but we know Judge Brosnan is. However, he stood up there last night and misrepresented old Nestor—a poor devil who has been dead hundreds and hundreds of years. And Judge Brosnan knew perfectly well that he was departing from the record when he unblushingly abused old Nestor's wardrobe and said he wore a poisoned shirt. Now why couldn't he confine himself to living convention-packers and let dead foreigners alone? That's it—we are down on that kind of thing, you know.
[Cries, "Hannah! Hannah!" "Gentlemen, wait a moment!" "I call for the adoption of the report before we have any speaking!"]
However, Mr. Hannah came forward and said that "As had been remarked by both gentlemen who have preceded me," and then went on and made both gentlemen's speeches over again, in such a pleasant way, and with such vehemence of manner that "the people"—that mighty lever being present, and filling very nearly three-fourths of the house—"the people" applauded each familiar argument as it fell upon their ears, and felt really comfortable over it. He touched us very agreeably by speaking of us as "those intelligent reporters who officiated at the late Constitutional Convention." [The word "intelligent" is our own. We had an idea it would make the sentence read better.] Toward the last, Mr. Hannah soared into originality, and touched upon a multitude of subjects on his own hook. Notwithstanding its apparent originality, however, we shall always be haunted by the dreadful suspicion that the fag-end of Tom Hannah's speech was gobbled out of the Babes in the Wood.
Mr. Brosnan moved that a committee of five be appointed to draft resolutions.
Mr. Pepper suggested that there was already a question before the house. [A voice "Sit down."]
The Chairman remarked that there was a question before the house, and proceeded to state it as being on the adoption of the report of the Committee on Nominations.
The house refused to entertain the report in its entirety, and demanded, in great confusion, that the candidates should be voted for separately, which was done, and the following gentlemen elected:
Messrs. Geiger, Dohle, Lynch, White, Black, Hannah, Warnock, Ash, Phillips, G. H. [sic], J. Y. Paul, Doak (?), Frizell, Burke, Knox, Brickett.
Messrs. Loryea and Meagher were voted for and rejected, and confusion grew worse confounded in the meantime.
Mr. Warnock moved the appointment of a Nominating Committee of ten, to present names to the next mass meeting, as candidates for Legislators, Judges, etc. Carried.
The Committee on Resolutions was appointed as follows: Messrs. Brosnan, Frizell, Hannah, Corson, Bond.
The committee created by Mr. Warnock's resolution was then nominated and elected, as follows: Messrs. Warnock, Jas. Campbell, Hannah, Jacob Young, Manning, Lackey, Dimock, Carey, Van Vliet and Flood.
Mr. Corson moved to add five to the committee, and take them from Gold Hill and Flowery. Carried.
The following gentlemen were nominated and elected: Messrs. Phillips, La Flower and Bishop.
[Here great trouble arose about a suggestion that the Convention might possibly be electing people who were opposed to them. It was a wise and bully idea. Mr. James Campbell called at our office after the Convention adjourned, and requested us to remove his name from the nominating committee.]
After which, with remarkable unanimity, the Convention struck off the names of the Gold Hill members from the nominating committee, and left it to the President to fill up with other Gold Hill men.
Mr. Frizell submitted the following names, which he said had been selected by a mass meeting in Gold Hill: Wm. C. Derall, E. R. Burke, Ed. C. Morse, Sam Doak, and J. W. Phillips.
They were unanimously elected.
Chas. H. Knox of Flowery was added to the committee.
The Committee on Resolutions then reported as follows:
Resolved, That as subjects of a Government, yet free, we rejoice at the inestimable right and privilege to publicly assemble and approve or condemn, when the general good requires it, the manner in which our representatives may have discharged the duties as signed them by the suffrages of the people.
2. As the sense of this large assemblage of citizens which may justly be denominated a spontaneous uprising of an outraged and insulted constituency, that the action of the County Nominating Convention, held in Virginia on the 28th day of December, instant, has been unjust, unfair, arbitrary, and without precedent in the history of conventional legislation.
3. That the resolutions adopted, and the other proceedings had by the said Convention, fail to express the true sentiments of the people of this county, and only proclaim the sentiments of a few interested individuals. Regarding them as such, we unanimously repudiate them, and declare that those resolutions and proceedings ought not to have, and have not, any binding force upon the political action of the free, independent and Union-loving electors of Storey county.
4. That copies of the proceedings of this meeting be transmitted to the members of the ensuing State Nominating Convention, from other counties, accompanied with a respectful request that they will do justice to the great majority of the people of Storey county, and rebuke the odious and unjust system of "packing" conventions by admitting the nominees of this meeting to seats in the Convention, as the true delegates and representatives of the people of Storey.
The resolutions were unanimously adopted.
A County Central Committee was elected, as follows: J. L. Black, Chas. Knox, Jas. Phelan, E. R. Burke, Samuel Doak, T. R. P. Dimock, Thos. Barclay, Dighton Corson, W. D. [sic] Warnock, Jacob Young.
Motion that the delegates elected be instructed to go to Carson to-morrow (Wednesday ) and that no proxies be allowed except in extreme cases, and that such extreme cases be attended to by the delegates, themselves. Carried.
A motion that the Central Committee meet in the District Court room to-morrow (Wednesday) evening, prevailed.
Also, a motion that the Convention adjourn until next Monday evening—to meet then at the District Court room.
The meeting broke up with cheers for the Convention, the Union, the old flag, and groans for Stewart and Baldwin.
It was a dusty, a very dusty, Convention, and as has been previously remarked in America, we are a great people.
CARD
EDS. ENTERPRISE.—The gentleman who reported the proceedings of the Union mass meeting last evening for the ENTERPRISE, unintentionally misquotes. He says Mr. Brosnan slandered the defunct "Nestor." Not so—Mr. B____ made no allusion to that hair brained, crazy old fool, "Nestor," nor to his "wardrobe." But Mr. B____ did mention that other jealous and wicked "cuss," Nessus, and his historical, villainous "shirt."
Now, if that facetious sinner, blunderer and sage-brush painter, "Mark Twain," had thus libelled me, I could forgive him; but to be thus misrepresented (though undesignedly) by the "intelligent" reporter of the ENTERPRISE is, as Mrs. Partington would say, assolutely inseparable.
Virginia, Dec. 30th
C. M. BROSNAN
Territorial Enterprise, December 30, 1863
Dr. May, of the International Hotel, has put into our hands the following documents, which will afford an idea of how infinitely mean some people can become when they get a chance. This firm of Read & Co., Bankers, 42 South Third street, Philadelphia, will do to travel—but not in Washoe, if we understand the peculiar notions of this people. The accompanying letter, circular, and certificate of stock were sent by Read & Co. to Dr. May's nephew, Theodore E. Clapp, Esq., Postmaster at White Pigeon, Michigan. Through the Doctor, Mr. Clapp had learned a good deal about Washoe, and saw at a glance, of course, that a swindle was on foot which would not only cheat multitudes of the poorest classes of men in the States, but would go far toward destroying confidence in our mines and our citizens if permitted to succeed. He lost no time, therefore, in forwarding the villainous papers to Dr. May, and we are sure the people of the Territory are right heartily thankful to him for doing so.
The certificate of stock is a curiosity in the way of unblushing rascality. It does not state how many shares there are in the company, or what a share is represented by. It is a comprehensive arrangement—the company propose to mine all over "Nevada Territory, adjoining California"! They are not partial to any particular mining district. They are going to "carry on" a general "gold and silver mining business"!—the untechnical, leather-headed thieves! The company is "TO BE" organized—at some indefinite period in the future probably in time for the resurrection. The company is "to be" incorporated "for the purpose of purchasing machinery"—they only organize a company in order to purchase machinery—the inference is, that they calculate to steal the mine. And only to think—a man has only got to peddle forty or fifty of these certificates of stock for Messrs. Read & Co. in order to become fearfully and wonderfully wealthy!—or, as they eloquently put it, "By taking hold now, and assisting to raise the capital stock of this company, you have it within your grasp to place yourself [in] a way to receive a large income annually without spending one cent!" Oh, who wouldn't take hold now? Breathes there a man with soul so lead that he wouldn't take hold under such seductive circumstances? Scasely. Read & Co. want to get money—rather than miss, they will even grab at a paltry two-and-a-half piece thus: "You can send in $2.50 at a time." Two and a half at a time, to buy shares in another Gould & Curry!
But the coolest, the soothingest, the most refreshingest paragraph (to speak strongly) is that one which is stuck in at the bottom of the circular, with an air about it which mutely says, "it's of no consequence, and scarcely worth mentioning, but then it will do to fill out the page with." The paragraph reads as follows: "N.B.—Subscribers can receive their dividends, as they fall due, at Messrs. Read & Co's Banking House, No. 42 South Third street, Philadelphia, or have them forwarded by express, of which all will be regularly notified!" We imagine we can see a denizen of some obscure western town walking with stately mien to the express office to get his regular monthly dividend; we imagine less fortunate people making way for him, and whispering together, "There goes old Thompson—owns ten shares in the People's Gold and Silver Mining Company—Lord! but he's rich!—he's going after his dividends now." And we imagine we see old Thompson and his regular dividends fail to connect. And finally, we imagine we see the envied Thompson jeered at by his same old neighbors as "the old fool who got taken in by the most palpable humbug of the century."
Who is "Wm. Heffly, Esq., of San Francisco," who knows it all, and who has calmly waited for three years without once swerving from his purpose of "starting a mining company" as soon as he could become satisfied that quartz-mining was a permanent thing? Cautious scoundrel! You couldn't fool him into going into a highway robbery like the "People's Gold and Silver Mining Company," until he was certain he could make the thing look plausible. But if he wrote those circulars and things, he was never a week in Washoe in his life, because we don't talk about "cap rock" in this country—that's a Pike's Peak phrase; and when we talk about "cab-rock," we never say it pays "$24 to the ton," or any other price; we don't crush wall-rock, as a general thing. There is no "Washoe Mining District" in this Territory, and the President of the People's Company did a bully good thing when he "reserved the right to change the location" of operations whenever he pleased. Mr. Heffly's knowledge of the prices of leading stocks here borders on the marvelous. He says Gould & Curry is worth "$5,000 per share." A "share" is three inches; but Gould & Curry don't sell at $20,000 a foot; he puts Ophir at $2,400 "per share"; now a "share" of Ophir is one inch. All the other prices mentioned by Mr. Heffly are wrong, and never were right at any time, perhaps. In the items written by Mr. Heffly, and pretended to be clipped from the Bulletin and the Standard, he uses mining technicalities never uttered either by miners or newspaper men in this part of America. The only true statement in these documents is the one which reads—"Therefore, in subscribing to the capital stock of this company, you are acting on a certainty, and taking no risk whatever." That is eminently so. You are acting on a certainty of being swindled, and so far from there being any risk about that result, it is the deadest "open and shut" thing in the world.
Now this swindle ought to be well ventilated by the newspapers—not that sound business men will ever be swindled by it, but the unsuspecting multitude, who yearn to grow suddenly rich, will assuredly have their slender purses drained by it.
Territorial Enterprise, January, 1864
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
January 10, 1864
EDITORS ENTERPRISE: Well, how are you and the News and the Bulletin making out for the Constitution in Storey?
I suppose it will be voted down here. I said so to a Virginia man yesterday. "Well," says he, "that reminds me of a circumstance. A good old practical Dutchman once contributed liberally toward the building of a church. By and by they wanted a lightning rod for it, and they came to the Dutchman again. 'Not a dam cent,' says he, 'not a dam cent! I helps to puild a house for te Lord, und if he joose to dunder on it and knock it down, he must do it at his own risk!' Now in the Constitution, we have placed the Capital here for several years; Carson has always fared well at our hands in the legislature, and finally, we have tacitly consented to say nothing more about the Mint being built in this inconvenient locality. This is the house that has been built for Carson—and now if she chooses to go and dunder on it and knock it down, by the Lord she'll have to take the consequences! The fact is all our bullion is silver, and we don't want the country flooded with silver coin; therefore, we can save the Government a heavy expense, and do the Territory a real kindness, by showing the authorities that we don't need a mint, and don't want one. And as to that Capital, we'll move it up to Storey, where it belongs."
So spake the Virginian. I listened as one having no taxable property and never likely to have; as one being out of office and willing to stay out; as one having no tangible right to take an interest in the Constitution, and consequently not caring a straw whether it carried or not. The man spoke words of wisdom, though. I am aware that the capital could have been removed last session, and from the complexion of the new Territorial Assembly, I suppose it can be done this year. Notwithstanding these things though, and notwithstanding I am a free white male citizen of Storey county, I conjecture that I have a right to my private opinion that Carson is the proper place for the seat of Government and it ought to remain here so long as I don't try to make capital out of that opinion. Nobody has a right to arrest me for being disorderly on such ground as that.
BAGGAGE
Dan, will you send my baggage down here, or have I got to go on borrowing clothes from Pete Hopkins through all eternity?
YOUNG GILLESPIE
Young Gillespie is down here in my employ. On a small salary. I have got him figuring with the Legislators for extra compensation for the reporters.
The Territorial Legislature will meet here next Tuesday at noon. The rooms used last year in the county buildings, have been let by the County Commissioners for the use of the two Houses, at $500 for the session of forty days, payable in greenbacks. The halls are now being fitted up, and will be ready at the proper time.
All Carson went out to warm Theodore Winters' new house, in Washoe Valley, on Friday evening, and had a pleasant time of it. The house and its furniture together, cost $50,000.
WARREN ENGINE COMPANY
The Warren boys brought out their superb machine for practice yesterday. She threw a heavy stream entirely over the tall flag-staff in the Plaza.
Religious matters are booming along in Carson. Mrs. Wiley, who is an unusually talented vocalist, has been requested to give a concert for the benefit of my old regular chronic brick church, and will probably do so shortly.
A jury has finally been empaneled in this murder case, or man slaughter case, or justifiable homicide, or whatever it is, and the trial set for to-morrow.
Concerning the Marsh troupe, R. G. Marsh sends the following note to Major Dallam, of the Independent: "—Please insert enclosed corrected advertisement, and make such flourish and announcement as your local feeling will admit of, consistent with a kleer konshuns. Yours till we meat and drink."
The Company will appear at the Carson Theatre on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings of the present week. Billy O'Neil comes along, too.
I received a letter from Artemus Ward, to-day, dated "Austin, January 1." It has been sloshing around between Virginia and Carson for awhile. I hope there is no impropriety in publishing extracts from a private letter—if there be, I ought not to copy the following paragraph of his:
"I arrived here yesterday morning at 2 o'clock. It is a wild, untamable place, but full of lion-hearted boys. I speak tonight. See small bills. *** I hope, some time, to see you and Kettle-belly Brown in New York. My grandmother—my sweet grandmother—she, thank God, is too far advanced in life to be affected by your hellish wiles. My aunt—she might fall. But didn't Warren fall, at Bunker Hill? [The old woman's safe. And so is the old girl, for that matter.-MARK.] DO not sir, do not, sir, do not flatter yourself that you are the only chastely-humorous writer onto the Pacific slopes. *** I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, and all others must or rather cannot be, 'as it were.'"
I am glad that old basket-covered jug holds out. I don't know that it does, but I have an impression that way. At least I can't make anything out of that last sentence. But I wish him well, and a safe journey, drunk or sober.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, January 12-13, 1864
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
CARSON, 11 A.M., January 12, 1864.
The Constitution pot boils. Gentlemen from the different sections of the Territory—visiting brethren of the Legislature agree in the opinion that the Constitution will carry by a very respectable vote on the 19th. This will have its effect upon Ormsby county, which, strangely enough, considering the advantages she would derive from having the Capital permanently located at Carson, a mint built here, and the number of resident officials increased, has heretofore been opposed to the establishment of a State Government.
And speaking of the mint, I have an item of news relating to that subject. Mr. Lockhart, the Indian Agent, has just received a letter from Commissioner Bennet, in which he says he has been informed by Secretary Chase that no further steps will be taken toward building a mint in this region until our State Representatives arrive in Washington! This is in consequence of efforts now being made by Mr. Conness to have the mint located at Virginia. The authorities want advice from representatives direct from the people. As I said before, the people of Ormsby will oppose the Constitution.
O, certainly they will! They will if they are sick—or sentimental—or consumptive—or don't know their own interests—or can't see when God Almighty smiles upon them, and don't care anyhow. Now if Ormsby votes against the Constitution, let us clothe ourselves in sackcloth and put ashes on our heads; for in that hour religious liberty will be at an end here—her next step will be to vote against her eternal salvation. However the anti-Constitutional sentiment here is growing weak in the knees.
Most of the members have arrived, and the wheels of government will begin to churn at 12 M.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, January 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
Carson City, January 13, 1864
Before the Legislature begins its labors, I will just mention that the Marsh Troupe will perform in Virginia to-morrow night (Thursday)—at the Opera House of course—for the benefit of Engine Company No. 2. They played here last night—"Toodles," you know. Young George Marsh—whose theatrical costumes are ungainly enough, but not funny—took the part of Toodles, and performed it well—performed it as only cultivated talent, or genius, or which you please, or both, could enable him to do it. Little Jenny Arnot (she with the hideous—I mean affected—voice) appeared as Mrs. Toodles. Jenny is pretty—very pretty; but by the usual sign, common to all those of her sex similarly gifted, I perceive she knows it. Therefore, let us not speak of it. Jenny is smart—but she knows that too, and I grant you it is natural that she should. And behold you, when she does forget herself and make use of her own natural voice, and drop her borrowed one, it is the pleasantest thing in life to see her play. The other ladies—however, I neglected to preserve a theatre bill, and I do not know what characters they personified. However, one was a handsome sailor boy, and the other was a lovely, confiding girl with auburn hair—the same being stuck after each other. Alexander was gotten up in considerable taste as a ratty old gentleman—the father of one of the stuck—the auburn one, I think. Beatty was one of those dear reformed pirates, who comes in at the finale with a bandaged head and a broken heart, and leans up against the side-scenes and slobbers over his past sins, and is so interesting. Billy O'Neil was so successful in keeping the house in a roar as the Limerick Boy, and especially as the Irish Schoolmaster, that he was frequently driven from his own masterly gravity. After the performance was over, he said, "Those girls on the front seats knew where the laugh came in, didn't they?" I said they did. I further observed that if there was any place where the laugh didn't come in, those girls on the front seats didn't know it. Wherefore, if so, he had them there. My head was level. I think I am not transcending the limits of truth, when I assert that my head was eminently level. I would not flatter Billy O'Neil, yet I cannot help thinking that as "Barney the Baron," night before last, he was the drunkest white man that ever crossed the mountains. George Boulden, assisted by Mr. Alexander, sang "When this Cruel War is Over, as it Were," and was thrice encored.
A circumstance happened to an acquaintance of mine this week, which I promised to say nothing about. A young man from one of the neighboring counties, took a good deal of silk dress, with a moderate amount of girl in it, home from the theatre, and on his way back to his constituents he jammed his leg into a suburban post-hole, and remained anchored out there in the dark until considerably after midnight. He wept, and he prayed, and he cussed. He continued to cuss. He cussed himself, and the Board of Alder men, and the County Commissioners. He even cussed his own relations, and more particularly his grandmother, which was innocent. It seemed a good deal mixed as to whether he was ever going to get loose or not; but the coyotes got to skirmishing around him and grabbing at his independent leg, and made him uncommon lively. Whereat, he put on his strength, and tugged and cussed, and kicked at the coyotes, and cussed again, and tugged, and finally, out he came—but he pulled the post-hole up by the roots in doing of it. It was funny—exceedingly funny. However, I don't mind it; I slept all the same, and just as well.
I have received that carpet-sack of mine at last. It contained two shirts and six empty champagne bottles. Also one garrote collar, with a note from Dan written on it in pencil, accounting for the bottles under the plea that "voluminous baggage maketh a man to be respected." It was an airy and graceful thought, and a credit to his great mind. The shirts were marked respectively "R. M. Daggett" and "Sandy Baldwin," from which I perceive that Dan has been foraging again.
We organized yesterday. "We" is the House of Representatives, you understand. Simmons will make a good Speaker; and, besides, I shall be nearby to volunteer a little of my Third House experience, occasionally. The Council did not expend half an hour in getting very thoroughly and permanently organized. The regular joint committees were appointed to wait on the Governor, and that Body will be produced in Court this morning to testify concerning the condition of the country. N.B.—The several departments of the law-making power are called Bodies. The Governor is one of them, by law—therefore it is disrespectful to speak of him otherwise than as a Body—a jolly, unctuous, oleaginous old Body. That's it. I do not consider that we are entirely organized yet, either. You see, we are entitled to a Chaplain. The Organic Act vouchsafes unto us the consolations of religion—payable in Greenbacks at three dollars a day. We roped in the Rev. Mr. White, yesterday, and gouged him out of a prayer, for which, of course, we never intend to pay him. We go in for ministers looking to Providence in little matters of this kind. Well, there is no harm in us, and we calculate to run this institution without a Chaplain. In accordance with a motion of Mr. Nightingill, we dispensed with the services of Chaplain in the Third House, and it is a matter of no little pride to me to observe that this Aggregation of Wisdom manifests a disposition, not only in this but in many other respects, to send Jefferson's Manual and the Organic Act to the d—l and take the published proceedings of that Body as its parliamentary gospel—its guide to temporal glory and ultimate salvation. The House will proceed to business now in a few minutes.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, January 1864
Carson, January 14, 1864
HOUSE—THIRD DAY
Say—you have got a compositor up there who is too rotten particular, it seems to me. When I spell "devil" in my usual frank and open manner, he puts it "d—l"! Now, Lord love his conceited and accommodating soul, if I choose to use the language of the vulgar, the low-flung and the sinful, and such as will shock the ears of the highly civilized, I don't want him to appoint himself an editorial critic and proceed to tone me down and save me from the consequences of my conduct; that is, unless I pay him for it, which I won't. I expect I could spell "devil' before that fastidious cuss was born.—MARK TWAIN.
The Speaker called the House to order at 10 A.M.
RESOLUTIONS
Mr. Heaton introduced a concurrent resolution, that when the Legislative Assembly adjourn to-morrow, it be to meet again on Wednesday, 21st, at 12 M.
A motion to suspend the rules was put to a vote and carried—ayes 15; noes, Messrs. Clagett, Curley, Gillespie, Gove, Hess, Hunter, Jones and Trask.
Mr. Gillespie moved to amend by making the hour 1 P.M.
[More skirmishing about parliamentary usage but the Chair is not in fault.—REPORTER.]
Mr. Fisher offered an amendment, to read "the House of Representatives and Council concurring." [Mr. Fisher got his notion from—well—say inspiration, for instance.—REPORTER.]
Mr. Clagett finally got up and straightened the blasted resolution.
The Speaker made a suggestion concerning the wording of the document. [Half an hour more will get it all right, you know. The parliamentary skirmishing still goes on, with unabated intelligence. This Aggregation of Wisdom can frame a concurrent resolution, but we must have time we must have a reasonable length of time to do it in. I could have furnished all the amendments offered to this document, and all the transmogrifications it has passed through—but then you don't want a column of that kind of information. I don't consider it important.—REP.]
The resolution as infinitely amended and improved, was voted upon at last, and carried—ayes 18, noes 5—Messrs. Clagett, Gillespie, Gove, Hunter and Phillips. [I asked the Clerk what the resolution proposed to do now? And he said he'd be d—d if he knew.—REP.]
Mr. Clagett offered a resolution that the regular daily sessions of the House commence at 10 A.M.
Mr. Fisher moved to insert "except when otherwise ordered."
On a division the motion was lost—14 to 6.
The resolution was then adopted.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS—HOUSE—FOURTH DAY
Carson, January 15.
The Committee on Rules for the Government of the House, reported yesterday the good old-fashioned and entirely proper rule that members and officers should keep their seats at adjournment until the Speaker had declared the House adjourned and left the Chair. Well, sir, the House debated it and voted it down. I can prove it by the Clerk's Journal. Now, considering that it was a harmless measure, and a customary one, and a mark of respect to the Chair; and considering that it is very seldom enforced, and also, that it was a little disrespectful to the Chair to vote it down, the action of the House in the matter seems somewhat strained. But I will interrupt you just here, if you please, and suggest to you that it is none of your business, and I want to know what you are putting in your lip about it for? I expect we can attend to our own affairs. And didn't they bullyrag that concurrent resolution yesterday? I reckon not. I do not admire the taste of the lobby members, though, in letting on as if they knew so much more about it, when the House is being rent with the mortal agonies of an effort to adjourn itself over for a week without adjourning the Council at the same time. The House did not wish to adjourn the Council without being asked to do so by that body, and if the House found it very nearly impossible to word the resolution so as not to adjourn the Council aforesaid, I do not conceive that it was dignified on the part of the lobby members to express by their countenances that they had their own opinions concerning the House. But didn't the House worry that concurrent resolution for a few hours or so? You bet you. However, we had better let "parliamentary usage" alone for the present, until our former knowledge on the knotty subject returns to our memories. Because Providence is not going to put up with this sort of thing much longer, you know. I observe there is no lightning rod on these county buildings.—MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, January 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—NINTH DAY
Carson, January 20
Mr. Dean offered a resolution to employ a copying clerk.
Mr. Gillespie offered an amendment requiring the Engrossing and Enrolling Clerks to do this proposed officer's work. [These two officers are strictly ornamental—have been under wages since the first day of the session—haven't had anything to do, and won't for two weeks yet—and now by the eternal, they want some more useless clerical jewelry to dangle to the Legislature. If the House would discharge its extra scribblers, and let the Chief Clerk hire assistance only when he wants it, it seems to me it would be better.—REP.]
Without considering the appointment of a new jimcrack ornament, and starting his pay six weeks before he goes to work ( only thirteen dollars a day), the House adjourned.
Territorial Enterprise, January 19-20, 1864
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
CARSON, January 14.
By authority of an invitation from Hon. Wm. M. Gillespie, member of the House Committee on Colleges and Common Schools, I accompanied that statesman on an unofficial visit to the excellent school of Miss Clapp and Mrs. Cutler, this afternoon. The air was soft and balmy—the sky was cloudless and serene—the odor of flowers floated upon the idle breeze—the glory of the sun descended like a benediction upon mountain and meadow and plain—the wind blew like the very devil, and the day was generally disagreeable.
The school—however, I will mention, first that a charter for an educational institution to be called the Sierra Seminary, was granted to Miss Clapp during the Legislative session of 1861, and a bill will be introduced while the present Assembly is in session, asking an appropriation of $20,000 to aid the enterprise. Such a sum of money could not be more judiciously expended, and I doubt not the bill will pass.
The present school is a credit both to the teachers and the town. It now numbers about forty pupils, I should think, and is well and systematically conducted. The exercises this afternoon were of a character not likely to be unfamiliar to the free American citizen who has a fair recollection of how he used to pass his Friday afternoons in the days of his youth. The tactics have undergone some changes, but these variations are not important. In former times a fellow took his place in the luminous spelling class in the full consciousness that if he spelled cat with a "k," or indulged in any other little orthographical eccentricities of a similar nature, he would be degraded to the foot or sent to his seat; whereas, he keeps his place in the ranks now, in such cases, and his punishment is simply to "'bout face." Johnny Eaves stuck to his first position, to-day, long after the balance of the class had rounded to, but he subsequently succumbed to the word "nape," which he persisted in ravishing of its final vowel. There was nothing irregular about that. Your rightly-constructed schoolboy will spell a multitude of hard words without hesitating once, and then lose his grip and miss fire on the easiest one in the book.
The fashion of reading selections of prose and poetry remains the same; and so does the youthful manner of doing that sort of thing. Some pupils read poetry with graceful ease and correct expression, and others place the rising and falling inflection at measured intervals, as if they had learned the lesson on a "see-saw;" but then they go undulating through a stanza with such an air of unctuous satisfaction, that it is a comfort to be around when they are at it.
"The boy—stoo-dawn—the burning deck—
When-sawl—but him had fled—
The flames—that shook—the battle—zreck—Shone round—him o'er—the dead."
That is the old-fashioned impressive style—stately, slow-moving and solemn. It is in vogue yet among scholars of tender age. It always will be. Ever since Mrs. Hemans wrote that verse, it has suited the pleasure of juveniles to emphasize the word "him," and lay atrocious stress upon that other word "o'er," whether she liked it or not; and I am prepared to believe that they will continue this practice unto the end of time, and with the same indifference to Mrs. Hemans' opinions about it, or any body's else.
They sing in school, now-a-days, which is an improvement upon the ancient regime; and they don't catch flies and throw spit-balls at the teacher, as they used to do in my time—which is another improvement, in a general way. Neither do the boys and girls keep a sharp look-out on each other's shortcomings and report the same at headquarters, as was a custom of by-gone centuries. And this reminds me of Gov. Nye's last anecdote, fulminated since the delivery of his message, and consequently not to be found in that document. The company were swapping old school reminiscences, and in due season they got to talking about that extinct species of tell-tales that were once to be found in all minor educational establishments, and who never failed to detect and impartially denounce every infraction of the rules that occurred among their mates. The Governor said that he threw a casual glance at a pretty girl on the next bench one day, and she complained to the teacher—which was entirely characteristic, you know. Says she, "Mister Jones, Warren Nye's looking at me." Whereupon, without a suggestion from anybody, up jumped an infamous, lisping, tow-headed young miscreant, and says he, "Yeth, thir, I thee him do it!" I doubt if the old original boy got off that ejaculation with more gusto than the Governor throws into it.
The "compositions" read to-day were as exactly like the compositions I used to hear read in our school as one baby's nose is exactly like all other babies' noses. I mean the old principal ear-marks were all there: the cutting to the bone of the subject with the very first gash, without any preliminary foolishness in the way of a gorgeous introductory; the inevitable and persevering tautology; the brief, monosyllabic sentences (beginning, as a very general thing, with the pronoun "I"); the penchant for presenting rigid, uncompromising facts for the consideration of the hearer, rather than ornamental fancies; the depending for the success of the composition upon its general merits, without tacking artificial aids to the end of it, in the shape of deductions, or conclusions, or clap-trap climaxes, albeit their absence sometimes imparts to these essays the semblance of having come to an end before they were finished—of arriving at full speed at a jumping-off place and going suddenly overboard, as it were, leaving a sensation such as one feels when he stumbles without previous warning upon that infernal "To be Continued" in the midst of a thrilling magazine story. I know there are other styles of school compositions, but these are the characteristics of the style which I have in my eye at present. I do not know why this one has particularly suggested itself to my mind, unless the literary effort of one of the boys there to-day left with me an unusually vivid impression. It ran something in this wise:
"I like horses. Where we lived before we came here, we used to have a cutter and horses. We used to ride in it. I like winter. I like snow. I used to have a pony all to myself, where I used to live before I came here. Once it drifted a good deal—very deep—and when it stopped I went out and got in it."
That was all. There was no climax to it, except the spasmodic bow which the tautological little student jerked at the school as he closed his labors.
Two remarkably good compositions were read. Miss P.'s was much the best of these—but aside from its marked literary excellence, it possessed another merit which was peculiarly gratifying to my feelings just at that time. Because it took the conceit out of young Gillespie as completely as perspiration takes the starch out of a shirt-collar. In his insufferable vanity, that feeble member of the House of Representatives had been assuming imposing attitudes, and beaming upon the pupils with an expression of benignant imbecility which was calculated to inspire them with the conviction that there was only one guest of any consequence in the house. Therefore, it was an unspeakable relief to me to see him forced to shed his dignity. Concerning the composition, however. After detailing the countless pleasures which had fallen to her lot during the holidays, the authoress finished with a proviso, in substance as follows—I have forgotten the precise language: "But I have no cheerful reminiscences of Christmas. It was dreary, monotonous and insipid to the last degree. Mr. Gillespie called early, and remained the greater part of the day!" You should have seen the blooming Gillespie wilt when that literary bombshell fell in his camp! The charm of the thing lay in the fact that that last naive sentence was the only suggestion offered in the way of accounting for the dismal character of the occasion. However, to my mind it was sufficient—entirely sufficient.
Since writing the above, I have seen the architectural plans and specifications for Miss Clapp and Mrs. Cutler's proposed "Sierra Seminary" building. It will be a handsome two-story edifice, one hundred feet square, and will accommodate forty "boarders" and any number of pupils beside, who may board elsewhere. Constructed of wood, it will cost $12,000; or of stone, $18,000. Miss Clapp has devoted ten acres of ground to the use and benefit of the institution. I sat down intending to write a dozen pages of variegated news. I have about accomplished the task—all except the "variegated." I have economised in the matter of current news of the day, considerably more than I purposed to do, for every item of that nature remains stored away in my mind in a very unwritten state, and will afford unnecessarily ample material for another letter. It is useless material, though, I suspect, because, inasmuch as I have failed to incorporate it into this, I fear me I shall not feel industrious enough to weave out of it another letter until it has become too stale to be interesting. Well, never mind—we must learn to take an absorbing delight in educational gossip; nine-tenths of the revenues of the Territory go into the bottomless gullet of that ravenous school fund, you must bear in mind.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, January, 1864
HOUSE—TENTH DAY
Carson, January 21
An officer of the House—Charles Carter, Messenger—is lying at the point of death this morning. He ruptured a blood vessel of the brain, night before last, previous to which time he was in robust health. He was a youth of great promise, and was respected and esteemed by all who knew him. He held the position of Messenger of the House during the session of 1862, and his faithful attention to the duties of the office then was endorsed by his re-election the present session.
The chief portion of the population of Carson spent last night in feasting and dancing at the Warm Springs. Such of them as are out of bed at this hour, declare the occasion to have been one of unmitigated felicity.
The House met at 10 A.M.
LEAVE OF ABSENCE
Mr. Calder asked and obtained leave for one day for Mr. Clagett who was engaged in drafting a bill.
QUESTION OF PRIVILEGE
Mr. Stewart rose to a question of privilege, and said the ENTERPRISE and Union reporters had been moving Ellen Redman's toll-bridge from its proper position on the Carson Slough to an illegal one on the Humboldt Slough. [I did that. If Ellen Redman don't like it, I can move her little bridge back again—but under protest. I waded that Humboldt Slough once, and I have always had a hankering to see a bridge over it since.—MARK.]
Mr. Phillips moved to amend Mr. Gillespie's resolution by striking out that portion which puts the Enrolling and Engrossing Clerks under the sole control of the Chief Clerk. Lost.
A warm debate sprung up on the subject. Mr. Gillespie manfully contended for the justness and expediency of adopting his resolution, and stated several propositions which were eminently correct, to-wit: that these subordinate officers ought to be under the control of the Chief Clerk; that they were under the pay of the House, and had been for some time, and yet had nothing to do; and finally, that copying being within the scope of their duties, they ought to be put at it and afforded an opportunity of rendering an equivalent for their salaries. Messrs. Stewart, Dixson and others were very fearful of discommoding the subordinate clerks, and very anxious to embellish the House with some more fellows calculated to swing a sinecure gracefully. The Chief Clerk stated that Mr. Powell, the Enrolling Clerk, had labored assiduously, from the first, in rendering any and all assistance asked at his hands, but nobody coming forward to say how much Captain Murphy had done, and nobody being supplied with a pile of estimates [sufficient] to portray how much he hadn't done, it became the general impression that Captain Murphy had been considerably more ornamental than useful to the House of Representatives. But I am here only during the courtesy of the House—on my good behavior, as it were—and I am a little afraid that if I say this aggregation of Wisdom elected Captain Murphy more out of regard for his military services than respect for the nasty manner in which he can sling a pen, I shall get notice to quit.—MARK.
Mr. Gillespie, on leave, amended his resolution by adding "Provided said clerks shall not be interfered with in the discharge of their respective duties"—and had the resolution not been furnished with this loophole if it had not been thus emasculated, it would not have passed. By a scratch it carried, though, and here are the voters' names:
AYES—Messrs. Calder, Elliott, Gillespie, Gove, Hess, Hunter, McDonald, Nelson, Requa, Trask, Ungar, Speaker—12.
NOES-Messrs. Barclay, Curler, Dean, Dixson, Fisher, Heaton, Jones, Phillips, Stewart, Tennant—10.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—SIXTEENTH DAY
Carson City, January 27
GENERAL ORDERS
The House resolved itself into Committee of the Whole, Mr. Fisher in the chair, upon the unfinished business of the general orders, and occupied the remainder of the forenoon session in the consideration of the Act providing for the appointment of Notaries Public and defining their duties. [This is a most important bill, and if passed will secure clearer and more comprehensible records hereafter. It will leave Storey county twelve Notaries in place of the fifteen hundred we have at present, and these twelve will have to be men of solid reputation, since they will have to give heavier bonds than all the fifteen hundred combined do at present; they must give bail in the sum of $5,000 each—$60,000 altogether. Mr. Fisher said three would be sufficient for Douglas county—he didn't want all the property there tied up in Notary's bonds. Mr. Clagett said there was scarcely a valid deed on the Humboldt records, because the certificates attached to them by ignorant Notaries were worthless, and he supposed property worth millions had already been jeopardized in the Territory by this kind of officers. He said one really splendid ignoramus out there who forwarded a bond in the sum of $10, had it returned with a notification that it must be increased to $500; he couldn't straddle the blind, and had to give up his commission. Besides, Mr. Clagett said, the passage of this Act would oust from office some twenty-five rabid Secessionists in Humboldt county alone! [Sensation.] If you could just see the official bonds drawn up and sent to the office of the Secretary of the Territory by some of these mentally deaf, dumb and blind Notaries, you would wonder, as I do, what they have been and gone and done, that Heaven should be down on them so. They never use revenue stamps—they don't subscribe the oath, they—well, they don't do anything that could lay them liable to an accusation of knowing it all, or even any fraction of it.
[Mr. Tennant said some few secesh had been appointed in Lander, but not so many as in Humboldt—they found one secesh in Lander last spring, and Acting-Governor Clemens captured him. I send you a copy of the bill, as they have just finished amending it in the Committee of the Whole, and suggest that you publish it.—MARK]
Territorial Enterprise, January 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
Carson City, January 28, 1864
HOUSE—SEVENTEENTH DAY
I delivered that message last night, but I didn't talk loud enough—people in the far end of the hall could not hear me. They said "Louder—louder," occasionally, but I thought that was a way they had—a joke, as it were. I had never talked to a crowd before, and knew none of the tactics of the public speaker. I suppose I spoke loud enough for some houses, but not for that District Court room, which is about seventy-five feet from floor to roof, and has no ceiling. I hope the people will deal as mildly with me, however, as I did with the public officers in the annual message. Some folks heard the entire document, though—there is some comfort in that. Hon. Mr. Clagett, Speaker Simmons of the inferior House, Hon. Hal Clayton, Speaker of the Third House, Judge Haydon, Dr. Alban, and others whose opinions are entitled to weight, said they would travel several miles to hear that message again. It affords me a good deal of satisfaction to mention it. It serves to show that if the audience could have heard-me distinctly, they would have appreciated the wisdom thus conferred upon them. They seemed to appreciate what they did hear though, pretty thoroughly. After the first quarter of an hour I ceased to whisper, and became audible. One of these days, when I get time, I will correct, amend and publish the message, in accordance with a resolution of the Third House ordering 300,000 copies in the various languages spoken at the present day.
P.S.—Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters heard that message, anyhow, and by thunder they appreciated it, too. They have sent a hundred dollars apiece to San Francisco this morning, to purchase a watch chain for His Excellency Governor Twain. I guess that is a pretty good result for an incipient oratorical slouch like me, isn't it? I don't know that anybody tendered the other Governor a testimonial of any kind.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, November 1863-February 1864
LETTER FROM DAYTON
[extract]
[TRAVELING WITH ADOLPH SUTRO.—] Eight left Virginia yesterday and came down to Dayton with Mr. Sutro. Time 30 minutes—distance 8 or 9 miles. There is nothing very slow about that kind of travel. We found Dayton the same old place but taking up a good deal more room than it did the last time I saw it, and looking more brisk and lively with its increase of business, and more handsome on account of the beautiful dressed stone buildings with which it is being embellished of late.
Just as we got fairly under way, and were approaching Ball Robert's bridge, Sutro's dog, "Carlo," got to skirmishing around in the extravagant exuberance of his breakfast, and shipped up a fight with six or seven other dogs whom he was entirely unacquainted with, had never met before and probably has no desire to meet again. He waltzed into them right gallantly and right gallantly waltzed out again.
We also left at about this time and trotted briskly across Ball Robert's bridge. I remarked that Ball Robert's bridge was a good one and a credit to that bald gentleman. I said it in a fine burst of humor and more on account of the joke than anything else, but Sutro is insensible to the more delicate touches of American wit, and the effort was entirely lost on him. I don't think Sutro minds a joke of mild character any more than a dead man would. However, I repeated it once or twice without producing any visible effect, and finally derived what comfort I could by laughing at it myself.
Mr. Sutro being a confirmed businessman, replied in a practical and businesslike way. He said the bridge was a good one, and so were all public blessings of a similar nature when entrusted to the hands of private individuals. He said if the county had built the bridge it would have cost an extravagant sum of money, and would have been eternally out of repair. He also said the only way to get public work well and properly done was to let it out by contract.
"For instance," says he, "they have fooled away two or three years trying to capture Richmond, whereas if they had let the job by contract to some sensible businessman, the thing would have been accomplished and forgotten long ago." It was a novel and original idea and I forgot my joke for the next half hour in speculating upon its feasibility...
Territorial Enterprise, February 9, 1864
Letter from Carson City
A strange, strange thing occurred here yesterday, to wit:
A MAN APPLIED FOR A NOTARY'S COMMISSION.
Think of it. Ponder over it. He wanted a notarial commission—he said so himself. He was from Storey county. He brought his little petition along with him. He brought it on two stages. It is voluminous. The County Surveyor is chaining it off. Three shifts of clerks will be employed night and day on it, deciphering the signatures and testing their genuineness. They began unrolling the petition at noon, and people of strong mining proclivities at once commenced locating claims on it. We are too late, you know. But then they say the extensions are just as good as the original. I believe you.
Since writing the above, I have discovered that the foregoing does not amount to much as a sensation item, after all. The reason is, because there are seventeen hundred and forty-two applications for notaryships already on file in the Governor's office. I was not aware of it, you know. There are also as much as eleven cords of petitions stacked up in his back yard. A watchman stands guard over this combustible material—the back yard is not insured. Since writing the above, strange events have happened. I started downtown, and had not gone far, when I met a seedy, ornery, ratty, hang-dog-looking stranger, who approached me in the most insinuating manner, and said he was glad to see me. He said he had often sighed for an opportunity of becoming acquainted with me—that he had read my effusions (he called them "effusions,") with solemn delight, and had yearned to meet the author face to face. He said he was Billson—Billson of Lander—I might have heard of him. I told him I had—many a time—which was an infamous falsehood. He said "D—n it, old Quill-driver you must come and take a drink with me"; and says I, "D—n it, old Vermin-ranch, I'll do it." [I had him there.] We took a drink, and he told the bar-keeper to charge it. After which, he opened a well-filled carpet-sack and took out a shirt-collar and a petition. He then threw the empty carpet-sack aside and unrolled several yards of the petition—"just for a starter," he said. "Now," says he, "Mark, have you got a good deal of influence with Governor?" "Unbounded," says I, with honest pride; "when I go and use my influence with Governor Nye, and tell him it will be a great personal favor to me if he will do so and so, he always says it will be a real pleasure to him—that if it were any other man—any other man in the world—but seeing it's me, he wont." Mr. Billson then remarked that I was the very man; he wanted a little notarial appointment, and he would like me to mention it to the Governor. I said I would, and turned away, resolved to damn young Billson's official aspirations with a mild dose of my influence.
I walked about ten steps, and met a cordial man, with the dust of travel upon his garments. He mashed my hands in his, and as I stood straightening the joints back into their places again, says he, "Why darn it, Mark, how well you're looking! Thunder! It's been an age since I saw you. Turn around and let's look at you good. 'Gad, it's the same old Mark! Well, how've you been—and what have you been doing with yourself lately? Why don't you never come down and see a fellow? Every time I come to town, the old woman's sure to get after me for not bringing you out, as soon as I get back. Why she takes them articles of yourn, and slathers 'em into her old scrap-book, along with deaths and marriages, and receipts for the itch, and the small-pox, and hell knows what all, and if it warn't that you talk too slow to ever make love, dang my cats if I wouldn't be jealous of you. But what's the use fooling away time here?—let's go and gobble a cocktail." This was old Boreas, from Washoe. I went and gobbled a cocktail with him. He mentioned incidentally, that he wanted a notaryship, and showed me a good deal of his petition. I said I would use my influence in his behalf, and requested him to call at the Governor's office in the morning, and get his commission. He thanked me most heartily, and said he would. [I think I see him doing of it.]
I met another stranger before I got to the corner—a pompous little man with a crooked-handled cane and sorrel moustache. Says he, "How do you do, Mr. Twain—how do you do, sir? I am happy to see you, sir—very happy indeed, sir. My name is _____ _____. Pardon me, sir, but I perceive you do not entirely recollect me—I am J. Bidlecome Dusenberry, of Esmeralda, formerly of the city of New York, sir." "Well," says I, "I'm glad to meet you, Dysentery, and—" "No, no Dusenberry, sir, Dusenberry!—you—" "Oh, I beg your pardon," says I; "Dusenberry—yes, I understand, now; but it's all the same, you know—Dusenberry, by any other name would—however, I see you have a bale of dry goods—for me, perhaps." He said it was only a little petition, and proceeded to show me a few acres of it, observing casually that he was the candidate in the notarial line—that he had read my lucumbrations (he called it all that) with absorbing interest, and he would like me to use my influence with the Governor in his behalf. I assured him his commission would be ready for him as soon as it was signed. He appeared overcome with gratitude, and insisted, and insisted, and insisted, until at last I went and took a drink with him.
On the next corner I met Chief Justice Turner, on his way to the Governor's office with a petition. He said, "God bless you, my dear fellow—I'm delighted to see you—" and hurried on, after receiving my solemn promise that he should be a Notary Public if I could secure his appointment. Next I met William Stewart, grinning in his engaging way, and stroking his prodigious whiskers from his nose to his stomach. Sandy Baldwin was with him, and they both had measureless petitions on a dray with the names all signed in their own handwriting. I knew those fellows pretty well and I didn't promise them my influence. I knew if the Governor refused to appoint them, they would have an injunction on him in less than twenty-four hours, and stop the issuance of any more Notary commissions. I met John B. Winters, next, and Judge North, and Mayor Arick, and Washoe Jim, and John O. Earl, and Ah Foo, and John H. Atchinson, and Hong Wo, and Wells Fargo, and Charley Strong, and Bob Morrow, and Gen. Williams, and seventy-two other prominent citizens of Storey county, with a long pack-train laden with their several petitions. I examined their documents, and promised to use my influence toward procuring notaryships for the whole tribe. I also drank with them.
I wandered down the street, conversing with every man I met, examining his petition. It became a sort of monomania with me, and I kept it up for two hours with unflagging interest. Finally, I stumbled upon a pensive, travel-worn stranger, leaning against an awning-post. I went up and looked at him. He looked at me. I looked at him again, and again he looked at me. I bent my gaze upon him once more, and says I, "Well?" He looked at me very hard, and says he, "Well—" "Well what?" says I, "Well I would like to examine your petition, if you please."
He looked very much astonished—I may say amazed. When he had recovered his presence of mind, he says "What the devil do you mean?" I explained to him that I only wanted to glance over his petition for a notaryship. He said he believed I was a lunatic—he didn't like the unhealthy light in my eye, and he didn't want me to come any closer to him. I asked him if he had escaped the epidemic, and he shuddered said he didn't know of any epidemic. I pointed to the large placard on the wall: "Coaches will leave the Ormsby House punctually every fifteen minutes, for the Governor's mansion, for the accommodation of Notorial aspirants, etc., etc.—Schemerhorn, Agent"—and I asked him if he didn't know enough to understand what that meant? I also pointed to the long procession of petition-laden citizens filing up the street toward the Governor's house, and asked him if he was not aware that all those fellows were going after notarial commissions—that the balance of the people had already gone, and that he and I had the whole town to ourselves? He was astonished again. Then he placed his hand upon his heart, and swore a frightful oath that he had just arrived from over the mountains, and had no petition, and didn't want a notaryship. I gazed upon him a moment in silent rapture, and then clasped him to my breast. After which, I told him it was my turn to treat, by thunder. Whereupon, we entered a deserted saloon, and drank up its contents. We lay upon a billiard table in a torpid condition for many minutes, but at last my exile rose up and muttered in a sepulchral voice, "I feel it—O Heavens, I feel it in me veins!" "Feel what?" says I, alarmed. Says he, "I feel—O me sainted mother!—I feel—feel—a hankering to be a Notary Public!" And he tore down several yards of wall-paper, and fell to writing a petition on it. Poor devil—he had got it at last, and got it bad. I was seized with the fatal distemper a moment afterward. I wrote a petition with frantic haste, appended a copy of the Directory of Nevada Territory to it, and we fled down the deserted streets to the Governor's office.
But I must draw the curtain upon these harrowing scenes—the memory of them scorches my brain. Ah, this Legislature has much to answer for in cutting down the number of Notaries Public in this Territory, with their infernal new law.
Territorial Enterprise, February 12, 1864
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
Carson City, February 5, 1864
EDITORS ENTERPRISE: Theodore Winters handsome dwelling in Washoe Valley, is an eloquent witness in behalf of Mr. Steele's architectural skill. The basement story is built of brick, and the spacious court which surrounds it, and whose columns support the verandah above, is paved with large, old-fashioned tiles. On this floor is the kitchen, dining-room, bath-room, bed-chambers for servants, and a commodious store-room, with shelves laden with all manner of substantials and luxuries for the table. All these apartments are arranged in the most convenient manner, and are fitted and furnished handsomely and plainly, but expensively. Water pipes are numerous in this part of the house, and the fluid they carry is very pure, and cold and clear. On the next floor above, are two unusually large drawing-rooms, richly furnished, and gotten up in every respect with faultless taste which is a remark one is seldom enabled to apply to parlors and drawing-rooms on this coast. The colors in the carpets, curtains, etc., are of a warm and cheerful nature, but there is nothing gaudy about them. The ceilings are decorated with pure, white mouldings of graceful pattern. Two large bed-chambers adjoin the parlors, and are supplied with elaborately carved black walnut four-hundred-dollar bedsteads, similar to those used by Dan and myself in Virginia; the remainder of the furniture of these chambers is correspondingly sumptuous and expensive. On the floor above are half a dozen comfortable bedrooms for the accommodation of visitors; also a spacious billiard-room which will shortly be graced by a table of superb workmanship. The windows of the house are of the "Gothic" style, and set with stained glass; the chandeliers are of bronze; the stair railings of polished black walnut, and the principal doors of some kind of dark-colored wood—mahogany, I suppose. There are two peculiarly pleasant features about this house the ceilings are high, and the halls of unusual width. The building—above the basement story—is of wood, and strongly and compactly put together. It stands upon tolerably high ground, and from its handsome verandah, Mr. Winters can see every portion of his vast farm. From the stables to the parlors, the house and its belongings is a model of comfort, convenience and substantial elegance; everything is of the best that could be had, and there is no circus flummery visible about the establishment.
I went out there to a party a short time ago, in the night, behind a pair of Cormack's fast horses, with John James. On account of losing the trail of the telegraph poles, we wandered out among the shingle machines in the Sierras, and were delayed several hours. We arrived in time, however, to take a large share in the festivities which were being indulged in by the Governor and the Supreme Court and some twenty other guests. The party was given by Messrs. Joe Winters and Pete Hopkins (at Theodore Winters' expense) as a slight testimonial of their regard for the friends they invited to be present. There was nothing to detract from the pleasure of the occasion, except Lovejoy, who detracted most of the wines and liquors from it.
I expect Mr. Lawlor keeps the best private school in the Territory—or the best school of any kind, for that matter. I attended one of his monthly examinations a week ago, or such a matter, with Mr. Clagett, and we arrived at the conclusion that one might acquire a good college education there within the space of six months. Mr. Lawlor's is a little crib of a school-house, papered from door to ceiling with black-boards adorned with impossible mathematical propositions done in white chalk. The effect is bewildering, to the stranger, but otherwise he will find the place comfortable enough. When we arrived, the teacher was talking in a rambling way upon a great many subjects, like a member of the House speaking to a point of order, and three boys were making verbatim reports of his remarks in Graham's phonographic short-hand on the walls of the school-room. These pupils had devoted half an hour to the study and practice of this accomplishment every day for the past four or five months, and the result was a proficiency usually attained only after eighteen months of application. It was amazing. Mr. Lawlor has so simplified the art of teaching in every department of instruction, that I am confident he could impart a thorough education in a short time to any individual who has as much as a spoonful of brains to work upon. It is in no spirit of extravagance that I set it down here as my serious conviction that Mr. Lawlor could even take one of our Miss Nancy "Meriden" Prosecuting Attorneys and post him up so in a month or two that he could tell his own witnesses from those of the defense in nine cases out of ten. Mind, I do not give this as an absolute certainty, but merely as an opinion of mine and one which is open to grave doubts, too, I am willing to confess, now, when I come to think calmly and dispassionately about it. No—the truth is, the more I think of it, the more I weaken. I expect I spoke too soon—went off before I was primed, as it were. With your permission, I will take it all back. I know two or three prosecuting attorneys, and I am satisfied the foul density of their intellects would put out any intellectual candle that Mr. Lawlor could lower into them. I do not say that a Higher Power could not miraculously illuminate them. No, I only say I would rather see it first. A man always has more confidence in a thing after he has seen it, you know; at least that is the way with me. But to proceed with that school. Mr. Clagett invited one of those phonographic boys—Master Barry Ashim—to come and practice his short-hand in the House of Representatives. He accepted the invitation, and in accordance with resolutions offered by Messrs. Clagett and Stewart, he was tendered the compliment of a seat on the floor of the House during the session, and the Sergeant-at-Arms instructed to furnish him with a desk and such stationery as he might require. He has already become a reporter of no small pretensions. There is a class in Mr. Lawlor's school composed of children three months old and upwards, who know the spelling book by heart. If you ask them what the first word is, in any given lesson, they will tell you in a moment, and then go on and spell every word (thirty five) in the lesson, without once referring to the book or making a mistake. Again, you may mention a word and they will tell you which particular lesson it is in, and what words precede it and follow it. Then, again, you may propound an abstruse grammatical enigma, and the school will solve it in chorus—will tell you what language is correct, and what isn't; and why and wherefore; and quote rules and illustrations until you wish you hadn't said anything. Two or three doses of this kind will convince a man that there are youngsters in this school who know everything about grammar that can be learned, and what is just as important, can explain what they know so that other people can understand it. But when those fellows get to figuring, let second-rate mathematicians stand from under! For behold, it is their strong suit. They work miracles on a black-board with a piece of chalk. Witchcraft and sleight-of-hand, and all that sort of thing is foolishness to the facility with which they can figure a moral impossibility down to an infallible result. They only require about a dozen figures to do a sum which by all ordinary methods would consume a hundred and fifty. These fellows could cypher a week on a sheet of foolscap. They can find out anything they want to with figures, and they are very quick about it, too. You tell them, for instance, that you were born in such and such a place, on such and such a day of the month, in such and such a year, and they will tell you in an instant how old your grandmother is. I have never seen any banker's clerks who could begin to cypher with those boys. It has been Virginia's unchristian policy to grab everything that was of any account that ever came into the Territory—Virginia could do many a worse thing than to grab this school and move it into the shadow of Mount Davidson, teacher and all.
There is a system of extortion going on here which is absolutely terrific, and I wonder the Carson Independent has never ventilated the subject. There seems to be only one undertaker in the town, and he owns the only graveyard in which it is at all high-toned or aristocratic to be buried. Consequently, when a man loses his wife or his child, or his mother, this undertaker makes him sweat for it. I appeal to those whose firesides death has made desolate during the few fatal weeks just past, if I am not speaking the truth. Does not this undertaker take advantage of that unfortunate delicacy which prevents a man from disputing an unjust bill for services rendered in burying the dead, to extort ten-fold more than his labors are worth? I have conversed with a good many citizens on this subject, and they all say the same thing: that they know it is wrong that a man should be unmercifully fleeced under such circumstances, but, according to the solemn etiquette above referred to, he cannot help himself. All that sounds very absurd to me. I have a human distaste for death, as applied to myself, but I see nothing very solemn about it as applied to anybody—it is more to be dreaded than a birth or a marriage, perhaps, but it is really not as solemn a matter as either of these, when you come to take a rational, practical view of the case. Therefore I would prefer to know that an undertaker's bill was a just one before I paid it; and I would rather see it go clear to the Supreme Court of the United States, if I could afford the luxury, than pay it if it were distinguished for its unjustness. A great many people in the world do not think as I do about these things. But I care nothing for that. The knowledge that I am right is sufficient for me. This undertaker charges a hundred and fifty dollars for a pine coffin that cost him twenty or thirty, and fifty dollars for a grave that did not cost him ten—and this at a time when his ghastly services are required at least seven times a week. I gather these facts from some of the best citizens of Carson, and I can publish their names at any moment if you want them. What Carson needs is a few more undertakers—there is vacant land enough here for a thousand cemeteries. MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—TWENTY-EIGHTH DAY
Carson, February 8, 1864
This bill appears—to a man up a tree—to be a bill of sale of Nevada Territory to the California State Telegraph Company. They never print this kind of bills—wherefore I shall have to copy it myself for you. It flashed through the House under a suspension of the rules, before you could wink, they tell me. It provides that Mr. Watson (his other name is the California State Telegraph Company) shall have the exclusive right to connect Star, Unionville, Austin, Virginia, Gold Hill, Carson, etc., etc., with Sacramento and San Francisco, and nobody else shall be permitted to do likewise, for five years after this line is completed, and with a liberal length of time allowed Mr. Watson in which to get ready to begin to commence completing it. To have all the telegraph lines in the hands of one Company, makes it a little binding on newspapers and other people.—MARK.]
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—TWENTY-NINTH DAY
Carson, February 9.
I see you want the ayes and noes on all important measures. Long ago I got a batch of roll-calls and prepared to post the people concerning the final action of this body upon the various bills presented. But I got tired of it. I found the House too unanimous; they always voted aye, and I discovered that the list of noes was a useless incumbrance to the roll-call. Now when an important measure passes this House, and I neglect the roll-call, that need be no excuse for your doing the same thing; just publish the list of members and say they voted "aye"—you'll be about right. The thing is done thus: When a bill is on its final passage, and a member hears his name called, he rouses up and asks what's going on? The Speaker says, by way of information, "Third reading of a bill, sir." The member says, "Oh!—well, I vote aye," and becomes torpid again at once. Now, concerning that infamous telegraph monstrosity, it passed to its third reading in this House on the 4th of February. Messrs. Babcock, Dixson, Gray and Stewart were absent, and had no opportunity of voting aye but all the balance voted affirmatively, of course, as follows: AYES—Messrs. Barclay, Brumfield, Calder, Clagett, Curler, Deane, Elliott, Fisher, Gillespie, Gove, Heaton, Hess, Hunter, Jones, McDonald, Nelson, Phillips, Requa, Tennant, Trask, Ungar and Mr. Speaker.
NOES—None.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—TUESDAY AFTERNOON
CARSON, February 10
The House then went into Committee of the Whole on the special order—Mr. Fisher in the Chair—and took up the first bill on the list. [Some seventy-five ladies have swarmed into the House, and the process of swarming still continues. I have a presentiment that I am to have an exhaustless stream of weak platitudes inflicted upon me by Young Gillespie and other unmarried members.—MARK.]
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—THIRTY-FIRST DAY
CARSON, February 11
The House met at 10 A.M. Present, 18. Absent, Messrs. Clagett, Dixson, Gillespie, Phillips, Stewart and Ungar.
QUESTIONS OF PRIVILEGE
Mr. Heaton rose to a question of privilege, and said he was reported in the ENTERPRISE as having moved that the Committee of the Whole recommend the rejection of Miss Clapp's Seminary bill. That was a mistake. He said his motion was to refer the bill back to the Standing Committee on Colleges and Common Schools. [I suppose that is true; I do not consider myself responsible for mistakes made when the House is full of beautiful women, who are: writing tender notes to me all the time and expecting me to answer them. In cases of this kind, I would just as soon misrepresent a member as any other way.—MARK] Mr. Heaton was easy on the reporters, but he was very severe on Mr. Gillespie. He said it would appear from the report that Mr. Gillespie included him among those members who had dodged the issue on the telegraph bill—whereas he was absent from the House, by permission of the Speaker, with the Prison Committee.
The Speaker said there was nothing incorrect about the report—that Mr. Heaton was shielded from Mr. Gillespie's insinuation by a preceding paragraph, which stated the fact that he had been excused from attendance.
Whereupon Jefferson's Manual arose the same being known on the credit accounts of the several saloons as "Young Gillespie"—and proceeded to waste the time of the House, as usual, in dilating upon some trivial distinction without a difference. [He was after the reporter of the ENTERPRISE, in the first place, but before I could catch his drift, he fell a victim to his old regular "parliamentary usage" dysentery,—passed his brains, and became a smiling, sociable, driveling lunatic. Consequently, I failed to find out what I had been doing to young Gillespie, after all.—MARK TWAIN.]
HOUSE—AFTERNOON SESSION
MESSAGE
A message was received from the Council, transmitting the following bills:
Council bill incorporating the Austin Christian Association. [The Speaker was at a loss to know what committee to refer a bill of such an unusual nature to—wherein his head was level. He finally referred it to the Lander delegation, two of the most faithful and consistent supporters of the Devil there are in the House.—MARK.]
Council bill for the relief of certain parties. Referred to the Committee on Claims.
At 5 P.M. the House adjourned until 6:30 P.M.
[While I was absent a moment, yesterday, on important business, taking a drink, the House, with its accustomed engaging unanimity, knocked one of my pet bills higher than a kite, without a dissenting voice. I convened the members in extra session last night, and deluged them with blasphemy, after which I entered into a solemn compact with them, whereby, in consideration of their re-instating my bill, I was to make an ample apology for all the mean things I had said about them for passing that infamous, unchristian, infernal telegraph bill the other day. I also promised to apologize for all the mean things that other people had published against them for their depraved action aforesaid. They reinstated my pet to-day, unanimously, thus fulfilling their contract to the letter, and in conformity with my promise above referred to, I hereby solemnly apologize for their rascally conduct in passing the infamous telegraph bill above mentioned. Under ordinary circumstances, they never would have done such a thing—but upon that occasion I think they had been fraternizing with Clagett and Simmons at the White House, and were under the vicious influence of Humboldt whisky. Consequently, they were not responsible, Sir—they were not responsible, either to anybody on earth or in heaven.—MARK TWAIN.]
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—FRIDAY AFTERNOON
CARSON, February 12
An Act to amend an Act relating to game and fish. The passage of this bill was also recommended. [It provides that trout shall neither be caught in this Territory, nor exposed for sale, between the first of January and the first of April, under a penalty of $25 for each fish caught, killed or destroyed, or bought, sold or exposed for sale. The Act goes into effect on the first of the coming March, and therefore it would be well to publish it for the information of the people. It is a good law, and calls our lake by its right name Lake Bigler—and rejects the spooney appellation of "Tahoe," which signifieth "grasshopper" in the Digger tongue, and "breech clout" in the Washoe lingo. Bigler is the legitimate name of the Lake, and it will be retained until some name less flat, insipid and spooney than "Tahoe" is invented for it. I am sorry, myself, that it was not called in the first place by some cognomen that could be persuaded to rhyme with something, because, you see, every sentimental cuss who goes up there and becomes pregnant with a poem invariably miscarries because of the unfortunate difficulty I have just mentioned. I speak of the matter lightly, but it is not a frivolous one, for all that. A very beautiful thing was once written by a distinguished English poet about our royal river at home, but the loveliness was all mashed out of it by the stress of weather to which he was obliged to succumb in order to gouge a rhyme out of its name. He had to call it "Mississip"!—MARK.]
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—SATURDAY AFTERNOON
CARSON, February 13
An Act to incorporate the Virginia, Gold Hill, Washoe and Carson railroad.
[More railroads, you observe. The Council killed the Virginia and Dayton Railroad bill the other day. That franchise was well guarded, and the road would have been built. Will this, or any of the others?—REP.]
Mr. Barclay moved to lay the bill on the table. Lost.
The bill then passed by the following vote: [ayes 11, noes 9].
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN
Carson City, February 13, 1864
THE CARSON UNDERTAKER—CONTINUED
EDITORS ENTERPRISE: The Independent takes hold of a wretched public evil and shakes it and bullyrags it in the following determined and spirited manner this morning:
"Our friend, Mark Twain, is such a joker that we cannot tell when he is really in earnest. He says in his last letter to the ENTERPRISE, that our undertaker charges exorbitantly for his services—as much as $150 for a pine coffin, and $50 for a grave and is astonished that the Independent has not, ere this, said something about this extortion. As yet we have had no occasion for a coffin or a bit of ground for grave purposes, and therefore know nothing about the price of such things. If any of our citizens think they have been imposed upon in this particular, it is their duty to ventilate the matter. We have heard no complaints."
That first sentence is false, and that clause in the second, which refers to the Independent, is false, also. I knew better than to be astonished when I wrote it. Unfortunately for the public of Carson, both propositions in the third sentence are true. Having had no use for a coffin himself, the editor "therefore knows nothing about the price of such things." It is my unsolicited opinion that he knows very little about anything. And anybody who will read his paper calmly and dispassionately for a week will endorse that opinion. And more especially his knowing nothing about Carson, is not surprising; he seldom mentions that town in his paper. If the Second advent were to occur here, you would hear of it first in some other newspaper. He says, "If any of our citizens think they have been imposed upon in this particular, it is their duty to ventilate the latter." It is their duty—the duty of the citizens—to ferret out abuses and correct them, is it? Correct them through your advertising columns and pay for it—is that it? And then turn to your second page and find one of your insipid chalk-milk editorials, defending the abuse and apologizing for the perpetrator of it; or when public sentiment is too well established on the subject, pretending, as in the above case, that you are the only man in the community who don't know anything about it. Where did you get your notion of the duties of a journalist from? Any editor in the world will say it is your duty to ferret out these abuses, and your duty to correct them. What are you paid for? What use are you to the community? What are you fit for as conductor of a newspaper, if you cannot do these things? Are you paid to know nothing, and keep on writing about it every day? How long do you suppose such a jack-legged newspaper as yours would be supported or tolerated in Carson, if you had a rival no larger than a foolscap sheet, but with something in it, and whose editor would know, or at least have energy enough to find out, whether a neighboring paper abused one of the citizens justly or unjustly? That paragraph which I have copied, seems to mean one thing, while in reality it means another. It's true translation is, for instance: "Our name is Independent—that is, in different phrase, Opinionless. We have no opinions on any subject—we reside permanently on the fence. In order to have no opinions, it is necessary that we should know nothing—therefore, if this undertaker is fleecing the people, we will not know it, and then we shall not offend him. We have heard no complaints, and we shall make no inquiries, lest we do hear some."
Now, when I published a sarcasm upon the San Francisco Water Company, and the iniquity of "cooking dividends," some time ago, in the attractive form of a massacre at Dutch Nick's, by an irresponsible crazy man, this lively Independent came after me with the spirit of Old Hopkins strong upon him, and launched at me the red bolts of its virtuous wrath for bringing the high mission of journalism into disrepute for leading the citizens of California to believe that the murderous proclivities of this people were more extensive than they really were, or, in other words, creating the impression abroad that we were all lunatics and liable to slay and destroy one another upon the slightest provocation. I did not reply to that, because I took it to be the fellow's honest opinion; and being his honest opinion, it was his duty to express it, whether it galled me or not. But he has permitted so many greater wrongs to pass unnoticed since then, that I have arrived at the conclusion that he only did it to modify the circulation of the ENTERPRISE hereabouts. I should be sorry to think he did it to procure my discharge. He would not, if he knew I was an orphan. Yet the same eyes that saw a great public wrong in that article on the massacre, wilfully see no wrong in this undertaker's impoverishing charges for burying people—charges which are made simply because, from the nature of the service rendered, a man dare not demur to their payment, lest the fact be talked of around town and he be disgraced. Oh, your Independent is a consistent, harmless, non-committal sheet. I never saw a paper of that non-committal name that wasn't. Even the religious papers bearing it give a decided, whole-souled support to neither the Almighty nor the Devil.
The editor of the Independent says he don't know anything about this undertaker business. If he would go and report a while for some responsible newspaper, he would learn the knack of finding out things. Now if he wants to know that the undertaker charged three or four prices for a coffin (the late Mr. Nash's) upon one occasion, and then refused to let it go out of his hands, when the funeral was waiting, until it was paid for, although the estate was good for it, being worth $20,000—let him go and ask Jack Harris. If he wants any amount of information, let him inquire of Curry, or Pete Hopkins, or Judge Wright. Stuff! let him ask any man he meets in the street—the matter is as universal a topic of conversation here as is the subject of "feet" in Virginia. But I don't suppose you want to know anything about it. I want to shed one more unsolicited opinion, which is that your Independent is the deadest, flattest, [most] worthless thing I know—and I imagine my cold, unsmiling undertaker has his hungry eye upon it.
Mr. Curry says if the people will come forward and take hold of the matter, a city cemetery can be prepared and fenced in a week, and at a trivial cost—a cemetery from which a man can set out for Paradise or perdition just as respectably as he can from the undertaker's private grounds at present. Another undertaker can then be invited to come and take charge of the business. Mr. Curry is right—and no man can move in the matter with greater effect than himself. Let the reform be instituted.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—THIRTY-FIFTH DAY
CARSON, February 15
At one o'clock this morning, as Mr. Gray, barkeeper at Bingham's, was leaving the saloon with his cash box in his hand, two men jumped out from the shadow of a door, enveloped him in a blanket, and seized the box. Gray held on to the property until the handle came off, and then, having no pistol, shouted with good enough effect to attract the attention of two foot passengers who had. These gentlemen opened a brisk fire on the retreating highwaymen—sent eight or ten navy balls after them—caused them to observe, plaintively, "O God!" and drop the box. All the dogs in town woke up and barked—they always do on such occasions, but they never bite, and they are opposed to chasing highwaymen—so the same escaped. Mr. Gray recovered the box, of course, which contained about one thousand dollars.—MARK.
You have got a mighty responsible delegation here from Storey county. As Mr. Curler remarked the other day, "When you put your finger on that delegation, as a general thing, they ain't there." I believe you. In the face of a notice given last Saturday by Mr. Clagett, of the introduction of a little bill to remove the Capital to Virginia—in the face of it, I say, only one member from Storey, out of eight, was present when the proper time arrived this morning for the introduction of the bill. Mr. Elliott was present—he always is, for that matter, and always awake. It has been a good thing for the whole Territory, on more than one occasion, that he was at his post in this House. One member was present—seven were absent: Messrs. Gillespie, Heaton, Nelson, Phillips, Requa, Ungar and Barclay. Several of these gentlemen arrived an hour after the order for the introduction of bills had been passed. Now if the people of Storey do not want the Capital, it was the duty of these members, since they knew the question was before the House, to be on hand to use their best efforts to kill the bill—and if the people do want the Capital, then it was the duty of those members to be here and do what they could toward securing it. Above all things, they had no business to be absent at such a time. They knew what was going on, and they knew, moreover, that the fact that they have been pretty regular in their attendance when toll-roads were to be voted on, will indifferently palliate the offense of being absent upon this occasion. Last session Storey offered an immense price for the capital, and nothing in the world could have kept her from getting it but her own delegation. They kept her from it, though. Mr. Burke was absent. His vote, at the proper time, would have moved the Capital—and in the meantime, Mr. Tuttle, of Douglas, was brought from a sick bed to vote no. I suppose this bill will be introduced to-morrow (Tuesday) morning, at 10 o'clock—and I suppose some of the Storey delegation will be absent again. But if you want the roll-call to-morrow, you can have it. I have made a mistake. Mr. Gillespie came in this morning before the introduction of bills, though he was absent at an earlier hour, when the roll was called.—MARK.
Territorial Enterprise, February 16, 1864
EDITORS ENTERPRISE: I have just returned from the Capital, where I have been a Legislative spectator for a while. The strongest conviction which the experience of my visit forced upon my mind was, that the Capital ought to be removed from Carson City.
I think you would be of my opinion if you could see with your own eyes, and hear with your own ears, the doings of the Legislature for a few days.
My first and best reason for thinking the Capital ought to be removed is, that while it remains in Carson, the Legislative Assembly is beyond the pale of newspaper criticism—beyond its restraining influence, and consequently beyond the jurisdiction of the people, in a manner, since the people are left in ignorance of what their servants are doing, and cannot protest against their acts until it is too late. Your reports of proceedings take up as much room in the city papers as can well be spared, I suppose, and they are ample enough for all intents and purposes—or rather, they would be, if the Virginia newspapers could stay in Carson and criticize these proceedings, and also the members, editorially, occasionally. A mere skeleton report carries but an indifferent conception of the transactions of a Legislative body to the minds of the people. For instance, in the style and after the manner of one of these synopses: Mr. Stewart gave notice of a bill entitled an Act to audit the claim of D. J. Gasherie. A day or so afterward, we learn that according to former notice, Mr. Stewart introduced his bill. You hear of it again in some committee report. And again, as having been reported "favorably' by a Committee of the Whole. Next, your report says Mr. Stewart's bill passed by so many ayes, and so many noes. The work is done; none of your readers have the slightest idea what Mr. Gasherie's claim was for, and neither does one of them imagine himself even remotely interested in knowing anything about it. Yet the chief portion of your readers, I take it, were very particularly interested in that bill—because they will have to contribute money from their own pockets to pay Mr. Gasherie's claim; and they were further interested, on general principles, because the passage of that bill inflicted a great wrong upon the Territory. Now, if the Legislature had been in session in Virginia, under the eyes of the press, instead of those of six or seven idle lobby members, I doubt if Mr. Stewart would have introduced the bill; I doubt if the Committee of the Whole would have presumed to consider it; I know the House and the Council would not have passed it. When Mr. Elliott rose in his place and objected that this was a bill to provide payment of a sum out of the Territorial Treasury, amounting to between $1,800 and $1,900, for the maintenance by Sheriff Gasherie, of several Ormsby county paupers, the newspapers would have promptly seconded him in the suggestion that Ormsby county maintain her own paupers, and pay the bill out of her own pocket. And when Mr. Stewart acknowledged the justness of the suggestion, but said Ormsby had bankrupted herself by purchasing a set of fine county buildings, and must therefore beg this favor at the hands of the people of the whole Territory, the newspapers would have known all about it, would have demurred, and the members, with a sense of responsibility thus forced upon them would have intentionally voted no upon the bill, instead of voting aye without really knowing, perhaps, what particular measure was before the House. Moreover, several other outrageous laws, already passed, could never have been passed in Virginia. Twenty thousand dollars of the people's money have been asked for to build a seminary in Carson City and present it to two of her citizens—a private affair, and no more public in its character than Mr. Chauvel's fencing school here, and no more deserving of a Territorial appropriation of $20,000. Members were not wanting to vote for the measure, and to advocate it strongly. The bill would even have passed, probably, if Messrs. Clagett, and Elliott had withheld their earnest opposition to it. Yet a bill to provide for the establishment and maintenance of a public mining college—a polytechnic school—has excited small interest among the members. They forget that a mining education can be best acquired here in the Territory—they forget, also, that the Seminary could offer no inducements of a similar nature, since our citizens, for many years to come, will prefer to educate their daughters at the inexpensive and efficient seminaries of Benicia, San Jose, and Santa Clara. The Seminary bill was resurrected on Saturday, consolidated with the Polytechnic bill, $30,000 of public money added, and again brought before the Legislature. So—$20,000 for a building, and a tax of 1 per cent. on $30,000,000 of property, for "sundries." A crowd of young gentlemen and ladies in one building might affect the matter of public morals more than that of public education, I think. The school is not located, in the bill, but the Ormsby delegation propose to have it established in Carson. The Governor is to appoint the trustees, and they are to fix upon a location, I believe. A mining school in a town fifteen miles from a mine, would be a beneficial thing, in the abstract. Yet this $50,000 bill may pass, after all. So may the act to purchase Mr. Curry's prison for $80,000 more—$130,000 to Carson, by way of compensation for the stream of iniquitous private franchises which has been flowing from one or two members of her delegation during the entire session. Could these bills, unmodified, pass, if the people could be thoroughly posted as to their merits, by the press? I suppose not. Clagett, Brumfield, Elliott, and two or three other intelligent, industrious and upright members have saved the credit of the Lower House, and protected the interests of the people, in nearly every case where it has been done at all—but they have received no commendation for it; neither have idle members, and members of easy integrity, been censured. It is because the people have been left in the dark as to who they ought to praise and who they ought to blame.
It was urged, last session, that Storey county was disposed to stow away, in her ravenous maw, everything that came in her way. That argument lost her the Capital, by one vote—that argument, and one other, which was a written pledge, on the part of Ormsby county, that if the Capital were permitted to remain in Carson, halls should be furnished for the use of the Legislature, free of charge. Storey county offered to erect capital buildings at her own expense, and move the officers and other governmental appurtenances within her lines, also at her own expense. Let Storey county make that proposition to-day, and it will be accepted. It is Ormsby county, now that is striving with extraordinary energy, to swallow all public benefits—not Storey. And Ormsby has failed to redeem her pledge—for she has charged the Legislature $500 for the use of her Court-house, and after making the contract, is now dissatisfied because the granting of a greater sum is refused her.
Four members of one branch of the Legislature support the Specific Contract bill because it will result to their personal advantage, in sums varying from $1,000 to $4,000. More than that number have supported private franchises on personal pecuniary grounds. One member would vote $20,000 to the Seminary because he would reap an advantage, in dollars and cents, from the passage of the bill. Inasmuch as these statements come from the gentlemen referred to, themselves, they are entitled to full credence. If there could be a merit attached to a wrong motive, I think that merit might be considered to be the small amount of intelligence required to keep from telling about it. But all Legislators are not diplomats. Would it not be well to place the Assembly where the press, and through the press the people, could look after it?
Mr. Clagett gave notice, on Saturday, of an Act to remove the Capital, and the bill will probably be formally introduced to-day (Monday). If the people of Storey county want the seat of government in their midst, let them signify it promptly and cordially.
A LOOKER-ON
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
CARSON, February 16, 1864
Mayor Arick, Joe Goodman, George Birdsall, Young Harris, and other solid citizens of Virginia arrived at 3 this morning, having left home at midnight. They came down to see how the Capital question was going. Send a lot more down—the more the merrier, and the greater degree of interest is exhibited. Virginia seldom does things by halves—she generally comes out strong when she takes hold of a question.—MARK.
* * * * * *
Mr. McDonald moved a recess.
Mr. Clagett hoped the motion would not prevail. He wished to go on with the regular business—introduction of bills etc. [Sensation among opponents to the removal of the Capital.]
The motion was lost.
Mr. Clagett moved a call of the House. [Numerous objections.] The motion was carried—ayes 7, noes 5.
After a moment's delay, Mr. Dixson moved that further proceedings under the call be dispensed with. Lost.
The absentees, Messrs. Ungar and Curler, were brought forward and excused, and further proceedings under the call were then dispensed with. Mr. Phillips moved a recess. Lost-ayes 9, noes 1l.
Mr. Clagett then, pursuant to previous notice, introduced an Act to locate permanently the Capital of the Territory. [At Virginia—that city to provide suitable buildings for 5 years at her own cost, before October 1, 1864—otherwise the Act to be null and void.]
The bill was read in answer to numerous calls.
Mr. Elliott moved that the rules be suspended and the bill engrossed for a third reading.
Mr. Dixson strenuously objected, and said he couldn't see the object of rushing this bill through with such indecent haste. [Behold the virtuous member from Lander—the heart of the same being in Carson.—MARK.]
Mr. Ungar moved to refer the bill to the Storey delegation, with instructions to report forthwith.
Mr. Phillips moved to amend by substituting the Gold Hill portion of the Storey delegation.
Mr. Clagett hoped the amendments would be rejected and Mr. Elliott's motion agreed to, and in his remarks called attention to the fact that Ormsby county made a written pledge last year that she would furnish free halls to the Legislature from and after that session—but had violated her pledge, inasmuch as those same County Commissioners have charged and received $500 for the halls now being used by the Assembly.
Mr. Dixson did not want things rushed so—he wanted things printed; he didn't know anything about things, and he wanted time to gain information. He couldn't see what members meant by springing things in this way. [Emotion, indicative of the distress which a Lander member with his heart in Ormsby must naturally feel when he sees an attempt made to ravish Carson against her will.]
Mr. Dixson sat down weeping, and snuffling, and wiping his nose on his coat sleeve. [That's a joke of mine—he had a handkerchief with him.—MARK.]
Mr. Tennant called for the reading of Ormsby's pledge, and Mr. Clagett got it from Mr. Calder, and read it.
Mr. Stewart made an eloquent appeal in behalf of Ormsby county, and moved as a substitute to the three or four motions already before the House, that the bill be referred to a special committee, to consist of one member from each county, with instructions to report to-morrow morning. Carried; on a division—ayes 13, noes 4.
The Speaker appointed the committee as follows: Messrs. Clagett, Stewart, Curler, Dean, Elliott, Gove, McDonald, Tennant and Partridge.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—THIRTY-SEVENTH DAY
CARSON, February 17
[Dallam, of the Carson Independent, makes a full and unqualified apology to me this morning—an entire column of it. He says he was not in his right mind at the time, and hardly ever is. Now, when a man comes out like that, and owns up with such pleasant candor, I think I ought to accept his apology. Consequently, we will call it square. It is flattering to me to observe that Dallam's editorials display great ability this morning, and that the paper shows an extraordinary degree of improvement in every respect. A becoming modesty should characterize us all—it is not for me to say who the credit is due to for the improvements mentioned. I only say I am glad to see the Independent looking healthy and vigorous again.—MARK.]
PETITION
Mr. Stewart presented a petition, signed by most of the responsible citizens of Ormsby, he said, setting forth that it had just come to a knowledge of the fact that the Ormsby Commissioners had pledged free Legislative Halls, and violated that pledge. The petitioners promise that the rent money shall be at once refunded.
Mr. Stewart also presented a communication from the Secretary of the Territory acknowledging the receipt of the full amount of the rent money ($500) as paid over to him by the petitioners yesterday.
Mr. Stewart moved the reference of the two documents to the Special Committee on removal of the Capital.
Mr. McDonald objected that the Committee spoken of were ready now to report, according to instructions. He moved to lay the papers on the table, to be taken up at pleasure. Carried.
QUESTION OF PRIVILEGE
Mr. Stewart rose to a question of privilege, and spoke at considerable length upon two editorials in the ENTERPRISE in relation to the removal of the capital, and a communication upon the same subject in the same paper, written by one "Looker-On," but whom Mr. Stewart, with ghastly humor and with relentless and malignant irony, persisted in calling "Looker On or Hanger-On, I don't know which!" He said the Gasherie bill for supporting Ormsby county paupers, and which expense the Territory was asked to pay, only amounted to $877, instead of the large amount stated by the writer of the article!
[The amount being less, don't you see, the principle is not the same. Of course. Certainly. Wherefore? Why not? The gentleman's question of privilege was well taken. As long as the paupers did not cost, or propose to cost the Territory much, it was impertinent in a newspaper to mention it. That is the way Mr. Stewart and I look at it.—MARK.]
Mr. Stewart said the balance of the money was cash paid out of Mr. Gasherie's own pocket in the catching of Territorial criminals, and of course as anybody would willingly acknowledge, it was the Territory's place to pay it.
Mr. Clagett, from the Special Committee on the removal of the capital, presented a majority report favoring the removal.
Mr. Stewart, from the same committee, presented a minority report recommending the indefinite postponement of the bill.
Mr. Dixson moved the reference of both reports to Committee of the Whole.
Mr. McDonald moved to amend by accepting the majority report.
On a division, Mr. Dixson's motion prevailed—13 to 11.
Mr. Clagett called for the reading of the amendments recommended by the majority report, which was done. [Stipulates that Virginia shall also furnish Supreme Court rooms and Clerk's offices for five years.—REP.]
Mr. Stewart moved that the Ormsby petition and the communication from the Secretary of the Territory be referred to Committee of the Whole. Carried.
Mr. Barclay moved a re-consideration of the vote by which the bill and the above documents were referred to Committee of the Whole. Lost by the following vote:
AYES—Messrs. Barclay, Clagett, Curler, Elliott, Gillespie, Heaton, McDonald, Nelson, Requa, Tennant, Ungar—11
NOES-Messrs. Brumfield, Calder, Dean, Dixson, Fisher, Gove, Hess, Hunter, Jones, Phillips, Stewart, Trask, Mr. Speaker—13.
Mr. Elliott moved that the Capital Bill be made the special order for tomorrow morning at 11 A.M. Lost by the following vote (required a two-thirds vote to carry):
AYES—Messrs. Barclay, Calder, Clagett, Elliott, Fisher, Gillespie, Heaton, McDonald, Nelson, Phillips, Requa, Tennant, Ungar and Mr. Speaker—14.
NOES—Messrs. Brumfield, Curler, Dean, Dixson, Gove, Hess, Hunter, Jones, Stewart and Trask—10.
Mr. Brumfield moved to change the time to 12 o'clock Saturday night (the moment when the Legislature adjourns finally).
Mr. Clagett opposed the motion.
Lost, by the following vote:
AYES—Messrs. Brumfield, Dean, Dixson, Gove, Hess, Hunter, Jones, Stewart—9.
NOES—Messrs. Barclay, Calder, Clagett, Curler, Elliott, Fisher, Gillespie, Heaton, McDonald, Nelson, Phillips, Requa, Tennant, Trask, Ungar, Mr. Speaker—16.
Mr. Clagett said that in order to stop this frittering away of valuable time, and in order to get a test vote, he would move that the bill be considered engrossed and ordered to a third reading. Carried by the following vote:
AYES—Messrs. Barclay, Brumfield, Calder, Curler, Clagett, Elliott, Fisher, Gillespie, Gove, Heaton, Hunter, Jones, McDonald, Nelson, Phillips, Requa, Stewart, Tennant, Trask, Ungar—20.
NOES—Messrs. Dean, Dixson, Hess, Mr. Speaker—4.
Mr. McDonald moved that the bill be read by title only. Carried.
FINAL PASSAGE OF THE CAPITAL BILL
The bill was accordingly read a third time by title, and finally passed, by the following vote:
AYES—Messrs. Barclay, Calder, Clagett, Curler, Elliott, Gillespie, Heaton, McDonald, Nelson, Requa, Tennant, Ungar and Mr. Speaker—13.
NOES—Messrs. Brumfield, Dean, Dixson, Fisher, Gove, Hess, Hunter, Jones, Phillips, Stewart and Trask—11.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—THIRTY-EIGHTH DAY
CARSON, February 18, 1864
Mr. Calder, according to previous notice, moved a reconsideration of the vote of yesterday, by which the Capital bill passed. He said his objections had been removed by the bond submitted by Mr. Stewart.
Mr. Clagett spoke at some length on the subject, in demonstration of the fact that a bond could not be drawn under such circumstances that would be valid and binding.
Mr. Brumfield replied rather warmly. In reply to the old argument about newspaper criticism which could be brought to bear on the Legislature if the Capital were in Virginia, he was especially bitter on the Bulletin—said he supposed it would be the favorite—that paper which was to have been teeming with mining taxation articles to-day, but was silent—had been purchased again, doubtless. As for the advantage a community might derive from the presence of the Capital, he couldn't appreciate the proposition; he didn't want the Capital at Virginia; he was going there to live, and he didn't want to be bothered with it. As to buying the Capital with the bond now before the House, neither Ormsby county nor the Legislature had a right to buy and sell the Capital.
After some further debate, Mr. Gillespie moved the previous question, which motion prevailed, and discussion was blockaded.
The motion to reconsider was then put and lost [!—REP.] by the following tie vote [clinching the thing as far as the House is concerned].
AYES—Messrs. Brumfield, Dean, Dixson, Fisher, Gove, Hess, Hunter, Jones, Phillips, Stewart and Trask—1l
NOES—Messrs. Calder, Clagett, Curler, Elliott, Gillespie, Heaton, McDonald, Nelson, Tennant, Ungar and Mr. Speaker—11.
ABSENT—Mr. Requa—don't know whether he dodged or not.
DODGED THE ISSUE—Mr. Barclay.
After the above bully proceedings, and on motion of Mr. McDonald, the House took a recess until 2:30 P.M.
Thursday Afternoon
The Sergeant-at-Arms brought in Messrs. Dean, Phillips, Tennant, Jones, Gillespie and Ungar.
Mr. Dean had been talking over family matters. Mr. Phillips had been engineering a lawsuit. Mr. Tennant had been on committee business. Messrs. Jones and Gillespie were playing billiards, and Mr. Ungar's child was sick and he had been playing marbles with her.
Mr. Brumfield moved that Mr. Ungar be granted leave of absence to continue playing marbles with her. [Laughter.]
A motion to fine Mr. Gillespie a box of cigars for engaging in the unholy practice of playing billiards, was lost by a tie vote 10 to 10 [notwithstanding that youth has a remittance at Wells Fargo's from his creditors in Virginia, and which he denied the same.—MARK. ]
The absentees were all excused.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
Friday afternoon
CARSON, February 19
Mr. Gillespie moved to reduce the Sergeant-at-Arms' salary to $9 per day, and strike out that portion which gives the reporters $7 per day.
Mr. Barclay said Mr. Gillespie was not so economical when he presented his own bill. Mr. Fisher said he ought to remember the verse,
"The mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me."
Considering the mercy shown him by the House, his opposition comes with a bad grace from him.
[I feel called upon to observe that Mr. Gillespie got huffy—I would prefer to call it by a milder term, but I cannot conscientiously do so. Mr. Gillespie got huffy.—REP.]
After some further debate, Mr. Gillespie explained that there was no vindictiveness in him—all his motives were dictated from on high—from on high, sir!—[Tremendous applause.] He went on and made further and even more aggravatedly absurd remarks. Mr. Barclay said it was customary to pay the reporters.
Mr. Gillespie's motion in relation to the reporters was lost, by the following vote:
AYES—Messrs. Clagett, Gillespie, Hess, Hunter, Nelson, Phillips, Tennant and Trask—8. NOES—Messrs. Barclay, Brumfield, Calder, Curler, Dean, Dixson, Fisher, Gove, Heaton, Jones, McDonald, Stewart, Ungar and Mr. Speaker—15.
COUNCIL-AFTERNOON SESSION-THIRTY-NINTH DAY
CARSON, February 19
REMOVAL OF THE CAPITAL
Mr. Daggett moved that the Capital bill be taken from the table. Mr. Coddington moved that the bill be indefinitely postponed.
Upon the latter's motion a lengthy discussion ensued. Mr. Daggett opposing, and Messrs. Curry, Coddington, Sturtevant, Negus and Hall supporting it.
Mr. Curry presented a communication from certain citizens of Carson City, binding themselves in the sum of $20,000, to furnish suitable halls and rooms for the Legislature and Territorial offices free of cost, provided that the Capital be allowed to remain at Carson City, while Nevada remained a Territory.
At the close of the debate, the motion to indefinitely postpone was carried by the following vote:
AYES—Messrs. Coddington, Curry, Negus, Sturtevant, Waldron, Mr. President.
NOES—Messrs. Daggett, Flagg, Sheldon, Thompson.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1864
LEGISLATIVE PROCEEDINGS
HOUSE—LAST DAY—FORTIETH
CARSON, February 20
The Chaplain not being present, Mr. Fisher suggested that the Virginia reporter be requested to officiate in his place.
By courtesy of the House, the Virginia reporter was allowed to explain that he was not on it. [Excused.]
Mr. Phillips moved a call of the House. Carried.
Mr. Gillespie was produced before the bar of the House.
Mr. Brumfield moved, as the heaviest punishment that could be inflicted upon him, that he be denied the comfort of making a single motion for the space of an hour. [Laughter.]
Mr. Barclay moved that he be fined $5, and the same be paid to the Sergeant-at-Arms.
Mr. Phillips moved to amend by contributing the money to the Sanitary Fund.
The motions were lost.
Messrs. Dixson and Hunter were brought in and fined a box of cigars each.
The Sergeant-at-Arms said Mr. Clagett was sick in bed.
The Speaker said he must come anyhow.
Mr. Fisher wanted the editor of the Independent sent for. [Laughter.]
The Speaker said he did not think Mr. Clagett needed purging. [Laughter.]
Mr. Heaton came forward and was excused.
NOTICE
Mr. Stewart gave notice of an act to permanently locate the Capital on the South side of Capt. Pray's saw mill on Lake Tahoe, in Douglas county. [Sensation.]
[But nothing further appears in the record concerning this proposed bill.—H. N. S.]
A Message was received from the Council asking the return of the bill for the removal of the Capital. [Another of those grave Council jokes—REP.]
In view of these portentous symptoms, a call of the House was ordered.
After calling the roll, Mr. Stewart moved that further proceedings under the call be dispensed with.
The Chair decided the motion carried.
A motion to indefinitely postpone the Council message was lost—ayes 9, noes 1l.
The motion to comply with the Council's request, carried—ayes 11, noes 8. [Confusion and contention—so to speak. The vote was even taken over again, with the following result: ]
AYES—Messrs. Barclay, Calder, Clagett, Elliott, Gillespie, Heaton, McDonald, Nelson, Tennant, Ungar and Mr. Speaker—11.
NOES—Messrs. Brumfield, Curler, Dean, Dixson, Fisher, Gove, Hunter, Jones, Phillips, Stewart and Trask—11.
Mr. Speaker pro tem.—Mr. Fisher—decided the motion lost.
Mr. Barclay wished to remind our worthy reporter that he didn't dodge the question this time. [His head is right. I cannot even swear that he dodged it before, with malice aforethought. Good authority says his absence before was unavoidable. I believe it. A man who votes as firmly as Mr. Barclay does for reporters against log-rolling members, would be apt to stick to his points upon all occasions when the same was possible. How's that?—REP.]
Saturday Afternoon
Council bill to amend the Act to prohibit gambling. The bill was read. [The Clerk pronounces the names of all games glibly, and without any perceptible foreign accent.—REP.]
Saturday Night
[Mr. Stewart drew his everlasting toll-road on the House again. This has been the old regular result of every five minutes idleness to-day.—REP.]
The institution resolved itself into a respectable body, as expressed in the above heading.
Mr. Thos. Hannah was elected assistant Clerk, and came forward and took the oath.
Mr. Clagett introduced a voluminous bill for the relief of certain citizens of Ormsby county. [It appropriates Curry's Warm Springs—gives it to these parties as a franchise for a swimming school—and—never mind, I will cease reporting and listen to the fun.—REP.]
[The Independent of this morning touched upon Mr. Clagett's seeming repugnance to the use of the comb. On this hint, Mr. Barclay and other members of the House, had procured a prodigious wooden comb and conferred upon your servant the honor of presenting it.—REP.]
Mr. Mark Twain inquired if testimonials were still in order, and received an affirmative reply from the Speaker. He arose in his place and addressed Mr. Clagett as follows—[Never mind publishing it again. I had no speech prepared, and therefore I was obliged to infringe upon etiquette to some extent—that is to say, I had to take Mr. Fisher's speech (apologizing to that gentleman, of course) and read it to Mr. Clagett, merely saying "comb" where the word "cane" occurred, and "legislator" in the place of "parliamentarian," and slinging in a few "as it weres," and "so to speaks," etc., to add grace and vigor to the composition. I think I must be a pretty good reader—the audience appeared to admire Fisher's speech more when I delivered it than they did when he delivered it himself.]
Mr. Clagett received the testimonial, and replied felicitously—as he is wont to do. He concluded by saying it was a college practice to give the ugliest student a penknife, with instructions to give it to a man uglier than himself, if he should ever find one. He liked the idea—he thought it his duty to confer the comb upon some person whose hair needed its offices more than his own. [He passed it over to Mr. Hunter, of Washoe. Applause and Laughter.]
Baskets of wine were now brought in, with the compliments of Theodore Winters, President of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Society, and the House rested awhile to drink health and prosperity to that gentleman.
Shortly after, other baskets were produced, per order, and at the expense of the Speaker, and the operation of drinking was further continued.
HUNTER'S MEMORIAL
Mr. Hunter, by request, came forward and read a long, solemn, magnificent, hifalutin memorial about the mines, religion, chemistry, social etiquette, agriculture, and other matter proper to a document of this kind. The House applauded tempestuously—and laughed. They laughed immoderately. Why they did it, I cannot imagine, for I never heard an essay like this one before in my life. Now that is honest. Mr. Hunter finally got angry and refused to finish reading the discourse, but when it was explained to him that only lobby members had been laughing all the time he was satisfied of course. I would like to hear the memorial read in Virginia.
Mr. Stewart, from the special Committee, reported that the Governor had no further communications to make.
Mr. Elliott offered a resolution that the House adjourn sine die at 11:30 P.M.
Mr. McDonald, true to his old regular motion [to adjourn] moved to amend by making the hour 12 P.M. The motion prevailed.
And from this time until midnight, fun ran high.
At 12 P.M. Mr. Speaker declared the House adjourned sine die.
The members went up to the Governor's and had a good time for an hour. The old man is as competent as any that walks, to make an evening pass pleasantly. Wine, music, anecdotes and sentiments composed the programme.
At 2 A.M. the exhilarated members closed the frolic by serenading the Speaker, at the White House.
Territorial Enterprise, April 20, 1864
FRIGHTFUL ACCIDENT TO DAN DE QUILLE
Our time-honored confrere, Dan, met with a disastrous accident, yesterday, while returning from American City on a vicious Spanish horse, the result of which accident is that at the present writing he is confined to his bed and suffering great bodily pain. He was coming down the road at the rate of a hundred miles an hour (as stated in his will, which he made shortly after the accident,) and on turning a sharp corner, he suddenly hove in sight of a horse standing square across the channel; he signaled for the starboard, and put his helm down instantly, but too late, after all; he was swinging to port, and before he could straighten down, he swept like an avalanche against the transom of the strange craft; his larboard knee coming in contact with the rudder-post of the adversary, Dan was wrenched from his saddle and thrown some three hundred yards (according to his own statement, made in his will, above mentioned,) alighting upon solid ground, and bursting himself open from the chin to the pit of the stomach. His head was also caved in out of sight, and his hat was afterwards extracted in a bloody and damaged condition from between his lungs; he must have bounced end-for-end after he struck first, because it is evident he received a concussion from the rear that broke his heart; one of his legs was jammed up in his body nearly to his throat, and the other so torn and mutilated that it pulled out when they attempted to lift him into the hearse which we had sent to the scene of the disaster, under the general impression that he might need it; both arms were indiscriminately broken up until they were jointed like a bamboo; the back was considerably fractured and bent into the shape of a rail fence. Aside from these injuries, however, he sustained no other damage. They brought some of him home in the hearse and the balance on a dray. His first remark showed that the powers of his great mind had not been impaired by the accident, nor his profound judgment destroyed—he said he wouldn't have cared a d—n if it had been anybody but himself. He then made his will, after which he set to work with that earnestness and singleness of purpose which have always distinguished him, to abuse the assemblage of anxious hash house proprietors who had called on business, and to repudiate their bills with his customary promptness and impartiality. Dan may have exaggerated the above details in some respects, but he charged us to report them thus, and it is a source of genuine pleasure to us to have the opportunity of doing it. Our noble old friend is recovering fast, and what is left of him will be around the Brewery again to-day, just as usual.
Territorial Enterprise, April 1864
[by Dan De Quille]
Some three days since, in returning to this city from American Flat, we had the misfortune to be thrown from a fiery untamed steed of Spanish extraction—a very strong extract, too. Our knee was sprained by our fall and we were for a day or two confined to our room—of course knowing little of what was going on in the great world outside. Mark Twain, our confrere and room-mate, a man in whom we trusted, was our only visitor during our seclusion. We saw some actions of his that almost caused us to suspect him of contemplating treachery towards us, but it was not until we regained in some degree the use of our maimed limb that we discovered the full extent—the infamousness of this wretch's treasonable and inhuman plottings. He wrote such an account of our accident as would lead the public to believe that we were injured beyond all hope of recovery. The next day he tied a small piece of second-hand crape about his hat, and putting on a lugubrious look, went to the Probate Court, and getting down on his knees commenced praying—it was the first time he ever prayed for anything or to anybody—for letters of administration on our estate. Before going to the Court to pray he had stuffed the principal part of our estate—consisting of numerous shares in the Pewterinctum—into his vest pocket; also had secured our tooth-brush and had been using it a whole day. He had on our only clean shirt and best socks, also was sporting our cane and smoking our meerschaum. But what most showed his heartlessness and utter depravity was the disposition he made of our boots and coat. When we missed these we applied to Marshall Cooke. The Marshall said he thought he could find them for us. He went on to say that for sometime past he had noticed the existence of a suspicious intimacy between Twain and a nigger saloon keeper, who had a dead-fall on North B street. Proceeding to this palace he found that he was correct in his conjecture. Twain had taken our boots and coat to the darkey, and traded them off for a bottle of vile whiskey, with which he got drunk; and when the police were about to snatch him for drunkenness, he commenced blubbering, saying that he was "overcome for the untimely death of poor Dan." By this dodge he escaped the lock-up, but if he does not shortly give up our Pewtertinctum stock—which is of fabulous vale—shell out our tooth-brush and take off our socks and best shirt, he will not so easily escape the Territorial prison.
P. S.—We have just learned that he stole the crape he tied about his hat from the door knob of Three's engine house, South B street.
Territorial Enterprise, April 1864
MARK TWAIN TAKES A LESSON IN THE MANLY ART
[by Dan DeQuille]
We may have said some harsh things of Mark Twain, but now we take them all back. We feel like weeping for him—yes, we would fall on his breast and mingle our tears with his'n. But that manly shirt front of his air now a bloody one, and his nose is swollen to such an extent that to fall on his breast would be an utter impossibility.
Yesterday, he brought back all our things and promised us that he intended hereafter to lead a virtuous life. This was in the forenoon; in the afternoon he commenced the career of virtue he had marked out for himself and took a first lesson in boxing. Once he had the big gloves on, he imagined that he weighed a ton and could whip his weight in Greek-fire. He waded into a professor of the "manly art" like one of Howlan's rotary batteries, and the professor, in a playful way he has, when he wants to take the conceit out of forward pupils, let one fly straight out from the shoulder and "busted" Mr. Twain in the "snoot," sending him reeling—not exactly to grass, but across a bench—with two bountiful streams of "claret" spouting from his nostrils. At first his nose was smashed out till it covered nearly the whole of his face and then looked like a large piece of tripe, but it was finally scraped into some resemblance of a nose, when he rushed away for surgical advice. Pools of gore covered the floor of the Club Room where he fought, and he left a bloody trail for half a mile through the city. It is estimated that he lost several hogsheads of blood in all. He procured a lot of sugar of lead and other cooling lotions and spent the balance of the day in applying them with towels and sponges.
After dark, he ventured forth with his nose swollen to the size of several junk bottles—a vast, inflammed and pulpy old snoot—to get advice about having it amputated. None of his friends recognize him now, and he spends his time in solitude, contemplating his ponderous vermillion smeller in a two-bit mirror, which he bought for that purpose. We cannot comfort him, for we know his nose will never be a nose again. It always was somewhat lopsided; now it is a perfect lump of blubber. Since the above was in type, the doctors have decided to amputate poor Mark Twain's smeller. A new one is to be made for him of a quarter of veal.
Territorial Enterprise, April 28, 1864
Carson City, April 25
EDS. ENTERPRISE: The road from Virginia to Carson—as traveled by Wilson's coaches—is in excellent condition, the same being neither muddy nor very dusty. The stages do not even stop to rest on the chalk hill.
We came by the penitentiary, but I did not consider it worth while to stop at the institution more than a few minutes, inasmuch as I had been in it before. Bob Howland, the Warden, was at his post, and I had sufficient confidence in him to leave him there. He is probably there yet. N.B.—When you journey in this direction, stop at the penitentiary and examine the native silver fish on exhibition there in the aquarium. They are caught in the Warm Springs. They are very like gold-fish, only they are longer, and not so wide, and are white instead of yellow, and also differ from gold-fish to some extent in the respect that they do not resemble them. This description may sound a little incoherent, but then I have set it down just as I got it from Bob Howland, in whom I have every confidence. Mr. Curry is erecting a handsome stone edifice at the Warm Springs, to be used as a hotel.
I heard in the stage, and also since I arrived here, that an organized effort will shortly be made to rescue Jaynes, the murderer, from the Storey county jail. Whether it be true or not, it will not be amiss to put the officers on their guard with a hint.
The Supreme Court began its session here to-day, and adjourned over until to-morrow, after hearing arguments for a new trial of Johnson for killing Horace Smith. The ground upon which a new trial is sought, is that some testimony was admitted upon the first trial in the District Court which should have been ruled out. I have spoken with District Attorney Corson on the subject, and he thinks the movement for a rehearing will not succeed. From present appearances, I think Alderman Earl will hold his seat for some time yet (if the sacred ambition to sit in a high place in spite of law and gospel to the contrary shall continue to animate him), as it has already been decided to submit his case, through the District and City Attorneys, to the District Court, and the long session now anticipated for the Supreme Court, will doubtless delay his trial for some time. It would have been better, wouldn't it, for the Council to have declared his seat vacant, and allowed him to take legal steps for its restitution himself?
Governor Nye has not yet returned. It is said he will start back to Carson to-morrow.
Acting-Governor Clemens made a requisition upon H. F. Rice, Esq., a day or two since, for offices for the Secretary of the Territory, rent-free, in accordance with the contract entered into by certain citizens during the late session of the Legislature when the subject of removing the Capital to Virginia was agitated. The requisition was duly honored, and in the course of the week, handsome offices will be fitted up in the second story of the north end of the county buildings for the use of the Secretary and his clerks.
Mr. Colburn, or Coleman, or whatever his name is—the young man with a penchant for trying unique experiments, and who was accused of committing a rape on an infant here three years ago—is in trouble again. A young girl who alleges that he seduced her in California some time ago, is over here suing him for damages in the Probate Court.
Your carrier here neglects some of his subscribers as often as two or three times a week, sometimes, or else his papers are stolen after he leaves them. Let the matter be attended to—the people hunger after Dan's intellectual rubbish.
The ladies gave a festival here last Friday for the benefit of my chronic brick church. The net proceeds amounted to upwards of $500, and will be applied to furnishing the edifice, which is still in a high state of preservation, and is gradually but surely becoming really ornamental. That is the church for the benefit of which I delivered a Governor's message once, and consequently I still take a religious interest in its welfare. I could sling a strong prayer for its prosperity, occasionally, if I thought it would do any good. However, perhaps it wouldn't—it would certainly be taking chances anyhow.
The ladies are making extraordinary preparations for a grand fancy-dress ball, to come off in the county buildings here on the 5th of May, for the benefit of the great St. Louis Sanitary Fair. The most pecuniary results are anticipated from it, and I imagine, from the interest that is being taken in the matter, the ladies of Gold Hill had better be looking to their laurels, lest the fame of their recent brilliant effort in the Sanitary line be dimmed somewhat by the financial achievements of this forthcoming ball.
The infernal telegraph monopoly saddled upon this Territory by the last Legislature, in the passage of that infamous special Humboldt telegraph bill, and afterwards clinched by a still more rascally enactment on the same occasion, is bearing its fruits, and the people here, as well as at Virginia, are beginning to wince under illegal and exorbitant telegraphic charges. They double the tariff allowed by law, and a man has to submit to the imposition, because he cannot afford the time and trouble of going to law for a trifle of five or ten dollars, notwithstanding the comfort and satisfaction he would derive from worrying the monopolists. The moment that law received the Governor's signature last winter, you will recollect the Telegraph Company doubled their prices for dispatches to and from San Francisco. And that is not the worst they have done, if common report be true. This common report says the telegraph is used by its owners to aid them in stock gambling schemes. I recollect that on the night the jury went out in the Savage and North Potosi case and failed to agree, our San Francisco dispatch failed to come to hand, and the reason assigned was that a dispatch of 3,000 words was being sent from Virginia to San Francisco and the line could not be used for other messages. Now that Telegraph Company may have made money by trading in North Potosi on that occasion, but who is young enough to believe they ever got two dollars and a half for that voluminous imaginary dispatch? That telegraph is a humbug. The Company are allowed to charge $3.50 for the first ten words across the continent, and must submit to a considerable deduction on longer dispatches—but they take the liberty of increasing that rate some thirty-five per cent, and people have to put up with it. Colonel Cradlebaugh tells me that last year, when he was a delegate at Washington from this Territory, they always charged him more for dispatches sent here than if they went through to California. The Government pays the Overland Telegraph Company $40,000 a year, with the understanding that Government messages are to pass over the lines free of charge—but I know of several dispatches of this character that were not permitted to leave the telegraph offices until they were paid for. It is properly the District Attorney's business to look after these telegraphic speculators, and that officer ought to be reminded of the fact. The next Grand Jury here will endeavor to make it interesting to the Telegraph Company.
Gillespie's monument—the ratty old Agricultural Fair shanty—still rears its ghastly form in the plaza, and serves to remind me of that statesman's extraordinary career in the House of Representatives. It consisted in saving to his country the usual, but extravagant sum of eight or ten dollars a day extra pay to Legislative reporters, and in making a speech in favor of the Sierra Seminary bill which had the effect of killing that really worthy measure. All through the session Gillespie was mighty handy about smashing the life out of any little incipient law that he chose to befriend, with one of his calamitous speeches. His vote was patent, too; his "nay" invariably passed a bill, and his "aye" was the deadest thing! [My language may be unrefined, but it has the virtue of being uncommonly strong.] But that monument in the plaza looks as hungry as Gillespie does himself, and much more unsightly, and I look for one of them to eat the other some day, if they ever get close enough together.
I depart for Silver Mountain in the Esmeralda stage at 7 o'clock to-morrow morning. It is the early bird that catches the worm, but I would not get up at that time in the morning for a thousand worms, if I were not obliged to.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, April 28 or 30, 1864
[fragment of original]
The idea of a plebeian like Dan supposing he could ever ride a horse! He! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they saw him go by. Of course, he would be thrown off. Of course, any well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like Dan stay on his back! When they gathered him up he was just a bag of scraps, but they put him together, and you'll find him at his old place in the Enterprise office next week, still laboring under the delusion that he's a newspaper man.
Territorial Enterprise, May 1—May 15, 1864
SPRINGFIELD, MO., April 12.
"DEAR SIR:—My object in writing to you is to have you give me a full history of Nevada: What is the character of its climate? What are the productions of the earth? Is it healthy? What diseases do they die of mostly? Do you think it would be advisable for a man who can make a living in Missouri to emigrate to that part of the country? There are several of us who would emigrate there in the spring if we could ascertain to a certainty that it is a much better country than this. I suppose you know Joel H. Smith? He used to live here; he lives in Nevada now; they say he owns considerable in a mine there. Hoping to hear from you soon, etc., I remain yours, truly,
WILLIAM _____.
DEAREST WILLIAM:—Pardon my familiarity—but that name touchingly reminds me of the loved and lost, whose name was similar. I have taken the contract to answer your letter, and although we are now strangers, I feel we shall cease to be so if we ever become acquainted with each other. The thought is worthy of attention, William. I will now respond to your several propositions in the order in which you have fulminated them.
Your object in writing is to have me give you a full history of Nevada. The flattering confidence you repose in me, William, is only equalled by the modesty of your request. I could detail the history of Nevada in five hundred pages octavo, but as you have never done me any harm, I will spare you, though it will be apparent to everybody that I would be justified in taking advantage of you if I were a mind to do it. However, I will condense. Nevada was discovered many years ago by the Mormons, and was called Carson county. It only became Nevada in 1861, by act of Congress. There is a popular tradition that God Almighty created it; but when you come to see it, William, you will think differently. Do not let that discourage you, though. The country looks something like a singed cat, owing to the scarcity of shrubbery, and also resembles that animal in the respect that it has more merits than its personal appearance would seem to indicate. The Grosch brothers found the first silver lead here in 1857. They also founded Silver City, I believe. (Observe the subtle joke, William.) But the "history" of Nevada which you demand, properly begins with the discovery of the Comstock lead, which event happened nearly five years ago. The opinion now prevailing in the East that the Comstock is on the Gould & Curry is erroneous; on the contrary, the Gould & Curry is on the Comstock. Please make the correction, William. Signify to your friends, also, that all the mines here do not pay dividends as yet; you may make this statement with the utmost unyielding inflexibility—it will not be contradicted from this quarter. The population of this Territory is about 35,000, one half of which number reside in the united cities of Virginia and Gold Hill. However, I will discontinue this history for the present, lest I get you too deeply interested in this distant land and cause you to neglect your family or your religion. But I will address you again upon the subject next year. In the meantime, allow me to answer your inquiry as to the character of our climate.
It has no character to speak of, William, and alas! in this respect it resembles many, ah, too many chambermaids in this wretched, wretched world. Sometimes we have the seasons in their regular order, and then again we have winter all the summer and summer all winter. Consequently, we have never yet come across an almanac that would just exactly fit this latitude. It is mighty regular about not raining, though, William. It will start in here in November and rain about four, and sometimes as much as seven days on a stretch; after that, you may loan out your umbrella for twelve months, with the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces. Sometimes the winter begins in November and winds up in June; and sometimes there is a bare suspicion of winter in March and April, and summer all the balance of the year. But as a general thing, William, the climate is good, what there is of it.
What are the productions of the earth? You mean in Nevada, of course. On our ranches here, anything can be raised that can be produced on the fertile fields of Missouri. But ranches are very scattering—as scattering, perhaps, as lawyers in heaven. Nevada, for the most part, is a barren waste of sand, embellished with melancholy sage-brush, and fenced in with snow clad mountains. But these ghastly features were the salvation of the land, William, for no rightly constituted American would have ever come here if the place had been easy of access, and none of our pioneers would have staid after they got here if they had not felt satisfied that they could not find a smaller chance for making a living anywhere else. Such is man, William, as he crops out in America.
"Is it healthy?" Yes, I think it is as healthy here as it is in any part of the West. But never permit a question of that kind to vegetate in your brain, William, because as long as providence has an eye on you, you will not be likely to die until your time comes.
"What diseases do they die of mostly?" Well, they used to die of conical balls and cold steel, mostly, but here lately erysipelas and the intoxicating bowl have got the bulge on those things, as was very justly remarked by Mr. Rising last Sunday. I will observe, for your information, William, that Mr. Rising is our Episcopal minister, and has done as much as any man among us to redeem this community from its pristine state of semi-barbarism. We are afflicted with all the diseases incident to the same latitude in the States, I believe, with one or two added and half a dozen subtracted on account of our superior altitude. However, the doctors are about as successful here, both in killing and curing, as they are anywhere.
Now, as to whether it would be advisable for a man who can make a living in Missouri to emigrate to Nevada, I confess I am somewhat mixed. If you are not content in your present condition, it naturally follows that you would be entirely satisfied if you could make either more or less than a living. You would exult in the cheerful exhilaration always produced by a change. Well, you can find your opportunity here, where, if you retain your health, and are sober and industrious, you will inevitably make more than a living, and if you don't you won't. You can rely upon this statement, William. It contemplates any line of business except the selling of tracts. You cannot sell tracts here, William; the people take no interest in tracts; the very best efforts in the tract line—even with pictures on them—have met with no encouragement here. Besides, the newspapers have been interfering; a man gets his regular text or so from the Scriptures in his paper, along with the stock sales and the war news, every day, now. If you are in the tract business, William, take no chances on Washoe; but you can succeed at anything else here.
"I suppose you know Joel H. Smith?" Well—the fact is—I believe I don't. Now isn't that singular? Isn't it very singular? And he owns "considerable" in a mine here, too. Happy man. Actually owns in a mine here in Nevada Territory, and I never even heard of him. Strange—strange—do you know, William, it is the strangest thing that ever happened to me? And then he not only owns in a mine, but owns "consider able;" that is the strangest part about it—how a man could own considerable in a mine in Washoe and I not know anything about it. He is a lucky dog, though. But I strongly suspect that you have made a mistake in the name; I am confident you have; you mean John Smith—I know you do; I know it from the fact that he owns considerable in a mine here, because I sold him the property at a ruinous sacrifice on the very day he arrived here from over the plains. That man will be rich one of these days. I am just as well satisfied of it as I am of any precisely similar instance of the kind that has come under my notice. I said as much to him yesterday, and he said he was satisfied of it, also. But he did not say it with that air of triumphant exultation which a heart like mine so delights to behold in one to whom I have endeavored to be a benefactor in a small way. He looked pensive a while, but, finally, says he, "Do you know, I think I'd a been a rich man long ago if they'd ever found the d—d ledge?" That was my idea about it. I always thought, and I still think, that if they ever do find that ledge, his chances will be better than they are now. I guess Smith will be all right one of these centuries, if he keeps up his assessments—he is a young man yet. Now, William, I have taken a liking to you, and I would like to sell you "considerable" in a mine in Washoe. I think I could get you a commanding interest in the "Union," Gold Hill, on easy terms. It is just the same as the "Yellow Jacket," which is one of the richest mines in the Territory. The title was in dispute between the two companies some two years ago, but that is all settled now. Let me hear from you on the subject. Greenbacks at par is as good a thing as I want. But seriously, William, don't you ever invest in a mining stock which you don't know anything about; beware of John Smith's experience.
You hope to hear from me soon? Very good. I shall also hope to hear from you soon, about that little matter above referred to. Now, William, ponder this epistle well; never mind the sarcasm, here and there, and the nonsense, but reflect upon the plain facts set forth, because they are facts, and are meant to be so understood and believed.
Remember me affectionately to your friends and relations, and especially to your venerable grand-mother, with whom I have not the pleasure to be acquainted—but that is of no consequence, you know. I have been in your town many a time, and all the towns of the neighboring counties—the hotel keepers will recollect me vividly. Remember me to them—I bear them no animosity.
Yours, affectionately,
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, May 24, 1864
[ I ]
ENTERPRISE OFFICE,
Saturday, May 21, 1864
JAMES LAIRD, ESQ.—Sir: In your paper of the present date appeared two anonymous articles, in which a series of insults were leveled at the writer of an editorial in Thursday's ENTERPRISE, headed "How is it?—How it is." I wrote that editorial.
Some time since it was stated in the Virginia Union that its proprietors were alone responsible for all articles published in its columns. You being the proper person, by seniority, to apply to in cases of this kind, I demand of you a public retraction of the insulting articles I have mentioned, or satisfaction. I require an immediate answer to this note. The bearer of this—Mr. Stephen Gillis—will receive any communication you may see fit to make.
SAM. L. CLEMENS
[ II ]
OFFICE OF THE VIRGINIA DAILY UNION
VIRGINIA, May 21, 1864
SAMUEL CLEMENS, ESQ.—Mr. James Laird has just handed me your note of this date. Permit me to say that I am the author of the Article appearing in this morning's Union. I am responsible for it. I have nothing to retract. Respectfully,
J. W. WILMINGTON
[ III ]
ENTERPRISE OFFICE,
Saturday Evening, May 21, 1864
JAMES LAIRD, ESQ.—Sir:—I wrote you a note this afternoon demanding a published retraction of insults that appeared in two Articles in the Union of this morning—or satisfaction. I have since received what purports to be a reply, written by a person who signs himself "J. W. Wilmington," in which he assumes the authorship and responsibility of one of said infamous articles. Mr. Wilmington is a person entirely unknown to me in the matter, and has nothing to do with it. In the columns of your paper you have declared your own responsibility for all articles appearing in it, and any farther attempt to make a catspaw of any other individual and thus shirk a responsibility that you had previously assumed will show that you are a cowardly sneak. I now peremptorily demand of you the satisfaction due to a gentleman—without alternative.
SAM. L. CLEMENS
[ IV ]
OFFICE OF THE VIRGINIA DAILY UNION,
VIRGINIA, Saturday evening, May 21st, 1864
SAM'L. CLEMENS, ESQ:—Your note of this evening is received. To the first portion of it I will briefly reply, that Mr. J. W. Wilmington, the avowed author of the article to which you object, is a gentleman now in the employ of the Union office. He formerly was one of the proprietors of the Cincinnati Enquirer. He was Captain of a Company in the Sixth Ohio Regiment, and fought at Shiloh. His responsibility and character can be vouched for to your abundant satisfaction.
For all editorials appearing in the Union, the proprietors are personally responsible; for communications, they hold themselves ready, when properly called upon, either to give the name and address of the author, or failing that, to be themselves responsible.
The editorial in the ENTERPRISE headed "How is it?" out of which this controversy grew, was an attack made upon the printers of the Union. It was replied to by a Union printer, and a representative of the printers, who in a communication denounced the writer of that article as a liar, a poltroon and a puppy. You announce yourself as the writer of the article which provoked this communication, and demand "satisfaction"—which satisfaction the writer informs you, over his own signature, he is quite ready to afford. I have no right, under the rulings of the code you have invoked, to step in and assume Mr. Wilmington's position, nor would he allow me to do so. You demand of me, in your last letter, the satisfaction due to a gentleman, and couple the demand with offensive remarks. When you have earned the right to the title by complying with the usual custom, I shall be most happy to afford you any satisfaction you desire at any time and in any place. In short, Mr. Wilmington has a prior claim upon your attention. When he is through with you, I shall be at your service. If you decline to meet him after challenging him, you will prove yourself to be what he has charged you with being: "a liar, a poltroon and a puppy," and as such, can not of course be entitled to the consideration of a gentleman.
Respectfully,
JAMES L. LAIRD
[ V ]
ENTERPRISE OFFICE, VIRGINIA CITY
May 21,1864—9 o'clock, P.M.
JAMES L. LAIRD, ESQ.—Sir: Your reply to my last note in which I peremptorily demanded satisfaction of you, without alternative—is just received, and to my utter astonishment you still endeavor to shield your craven carcass behind the person of an individual who in spite of your introduction is entirely unknown to me, and upon whose shoulders you cannot throw the whole responsibility. You acknowledge and reaffirm in this note that "For all editorials appearing in the Union, the proprietors are personally responsible." Now, sir, had there appeared no editorial on the subject endorsing and reiterating the slanderous and disgraceful insults heaped upon me in the "communication," I would have simply called upon you and demanded the name of its author, and upon your answer would have depended my farther action. But the "Editorial" alluded to was equally vile and slanderous as the "communication," and being an "Editorial" would naturally have more weight in the minds of readers. It was the following undignified and abominably insulting slander appearing in your "Editorial" headed "The 'How is it' issue," that occasioned my sending you first an alternative and then a peremptory challenge:
"Never before in a long period of newspaper intercourse—never before in any contact with a contemporary, however unprincipled he might have been, have we found an opponent in statement or in discussion, who had no gentlemanly sense of professional propriety, who conveyed in every word, and in every purpose of all his words, such a groveling disregard for truth, decency and courtesy as to seem to court the distinction, only, of being understood as a vulgar liar. Meeting one who prefers falsehood; whose instincts are all toward falsehood; whose thought is falsification; whose aim is vilification through insincere professions of honesty; one whose only merit is thus described, and who evidently desires to be thus known, the obstacles presented are entirely insurmountable, and whoever would touch them fully, should expect to be abominably defiled."—Union, May 21
You assume in your last note, that I "have challenged Mr. Wilmington," and that he has informed me "over his own signature," that he is quite ready to afford me "satisfaction." Both assumptions are utterly false. I have twice challenged you, and you have twice attempted to shirk the responsibility. Mr. W's note could not possibly be an answer to my demand of satisfaction from you; and besides, his note simply avowed authorship of a certain "communication" that appeared simultaneously with your libelous "editorial," and states that its author had "nothing to retract." For your gratification, however, I will remark that Mr. Wilmington's case will be attended to in due time by a distant acquaintance of his who is not willing to see him suffer in obscurity. In the meantime, if you do not wish yourself posted as a coward, you will at once accept my peremptory challenge, which I now reiterate.
SAM. L. CLEMENS
[ VI ]
OFFICE TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE
VIRGINIA, May 21, 1864
J. W. WILMINGTON—Sir: You are, perhaps, far from those who are wont to advise and care for you, else you would see the policy of minding your own business and letting that of other people alone. Under these circumstances, therefore, I take the liberty of suggesting that you are getting out of your sphere. A contemptible ass and coward like yourself should only meddle in the affairs of gentlemen when called upon to do so. I approve and endorse the course of my principal in this matter, and if your sensitive disposition is aroused by any proceeding of his, I have only to say that I can be found at the ENTERPRISE office, and always at your service.
S. E. GILLIS
[To the above, Mr. Wilmington gave a verbal reply to Mr. Millard—the gentleman through whom the note was conveyed to him—stating that he had no quarrel with Mr. Gillis; that he had written his communication only in defense of the craft, and did not desire a quarrel with a member of that craft; he showed Mr. G's note to Mr. Millard, who read it, but made no comments upon it.]
[ VII ]
OFFICE OF THE VIRGINIA DAILY UNION,
Monday Morning, May 23, 1864
SAMUEL CLEMENS, ESQ.:—In reply to your lengthy communication, I have only to say that in your note opening this correspondence, you demanded satisfaction for a communication in the Union which branded the writer of an article in the ENTERPRISE as a liar, a poltroon and a puppy. You declare yourself to be the writer of the ENTERPRISE article, and the avowed author of the Union communication stands ready to afford satisfaction. Any attempt to evade a meeting with him and force one upon me will utterly fail, as I have no right under the rulings of the code, to meet or hold any communication with you in this connection. The threat of being posted as a coward cannot have the slightest effect upon the position I have assumed in the matter. If you think this correspondence reflects credit upon you, I advise you by all means to publish it; in the meantime you must excuse me from receiving any more long epistles from you. JAMES L. LAIRD
I denounce Mr. Laird as an unmitigated liar, because he says I published an editorial in which I attacked the printers employed on the Union, whereas there is nothing in that editorial which can be so construed. Moreover, he is a liar on general principles, and from natural instinct. I denounce him as an abject coward, because it has been stated in his paper that its proprietors are responsible for all articles appearing in its columns, yet he backs down from that position; because he acknowledges the "code," but will not live up to it; because he says himself that he is responsible for all "editorials," and then backs down from that also; and because he insults me in his note marked "IV," and yet refuses to fight me. Finally, he is a fool, because he cannot understand that a publisher is bound to stand responsible for any and all articles printed by him, whether he wants to do it or not.
SAM. L. CLEMENS
Territorial Enterprise, May 24, 1864
We published a rumor, the other day, that the moneys collected at the Carson Fancy Dress Ball were to be diverted from the Sanitary Fund and sent forward to aid a "miscegenation" or some other sort of Society in the East. We also stated that the rumor was a hoax. And it was—we were perfectly right. However, four ladies are offended. We cannot quarrel with ladies—the very thought of such a thing is repulsive; neither can we consent to offend them even unwittingly—without being sorry for the misfortune, and seeking their forgiveness, which is a kindness we hope they will not refuse. We intended no harm, as they would understand easily enough if they knew the history of this offense of ours, but we must suppress that history, since it would rather be amusing than otherwise, and the amusement would be at our expense. We have no love for that kind of amusement—and the same trait belongs to human nature generally. One lady complained that we should at least have answered the note they sent us. It is true. There is small excuse for our neglect of a common politeness like that, yet we venture to apologize for it, and will still hope for pardon, just the same. We have noticed one thing in this whole business—and also in many an instance which has gone before it—and that is, that we resemble the majority of our species in the respect that we are very apt to get entirely in the wrong, even when there is no seeming necessity for it; but to offset this vice, we claim one of the virtues of our species, which is that we are ready to repair such wrongs when we discover them.
Territorial Enterprise, June 17-23, 1864
"MARK TWAIN" IN THE METROPOLIS
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 a cement of alkali dust; whose nostrils know no perfume but the rank odor of sage-brush—and whose eyes know no landscape but barren mountains and desolate plains; where the winds blow, and the sun blisters, and the broken spirit of the contrite heart finds joy and peace only in Limburger 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.
Here you are expected to breakfast on salmon, fried oysters and other substantials from 6 till half-past 12; you are required to lunch on cold fowl and so forth, from half-past 12 until 3; you are obliged to skirmish through a dinner comprising such edibles as the world produces, and keep it up, from 3 until half-past 7; you are then compelled to lay siege to the tea-table from half-past 7 until 9 o'clock, at which hour, if you refuse to move upon the supper works and destroy oysters gotten up in all kinds of seductive styles until 12 o'clock, the landlord will certainly be offended, and you might as well move your trunk to some other establishment. [It is a pleasure to me to observe, incidentally, that I am on good terms with the landlord yet.]
Why don't you send Dan down into the Gould & Curry mine, to see whether it has petered out or not, and if so, when it will be likely to peter in again. The extraordinary decline of that stock has given rise to the wildest surmises in the way of accounting for it, but among the lot there is harm in but one, which is the expressed belief on the part of a few that the bottom has fallen out of the mine. Gould & Curry is climbing again, however.
It has been many a day since San Francisco has seen livelier times in her theatrical department than at present. Large audiences are to be found nightly at the Opera House, the Metropolitan, the Academy of Music, the American, the New Idea, and even the Museum, which is not as good a one as Barnum's. The Circus company, also, played a lucrative engagement, but they are gone on their travels now. The graceful, charming, clipper-built Ella Zoyara was very popular.
Miss Caroline Richings has played during the past fortnight at Maguire's Opera House to large and fashionable audiences, and has delighted them beyond measure with her sweet singing. It sounds improbable, perhaps, but the statement is true, nevertheless.
You will hear of the Metropolitan, now, from every visitor to Washoe. It opened under the management of the new lessees, Miss Annette Ince and Julia Dean Hayne, with a company who are as nearly all stars as it was possible to make it. For instance—Annette Ince, Emily Jordan, Mrs. Judah, Julia Dean Hayne, James H. Taylor, Frank Lawlor, Harry Courtaine and Fred. Franks, (my favorite Washoe tragedian, whose name they have put in small letters in the programme, when it deserves to be in capitals—because, whatever part they give him to play, don't he always play it well? and does he not possess the first virtue of a comedian, which is to do humorous things with grave decorum and without seeming to know that they are funny?)
The birds, and the flowers, and the Chinamen, and the winds, and the sunshine, and all things that go to make life happy, are present in San Francisco to-day, just as they are all days in the year. Therefore, one would expect to hear these things spoken of, and gratefully, and disagreeable matters of little consequence allowed to pass without comment. I say, one would suppose that. But don't you deceive yourself—any one who supposes anything of the kind, supposes an absurdity. The multitude of pleasant things by which the people of San Francisco are surrounded are not talked of at all. No—they damn the wind, and they damn the dust, and they give all their attention to damning them well, and to all eternity. The blasted winds and the infernal dust—these alone form the eternal topics of conversation, and a mighty absurd topic it seems to one just out of Washoe. There isn't enough wind here to keep breath in my body, or dust enough to keep sand in my craw. But it is human nature to find fault—to overlook that which is pleasant to the eye, and seek after that which is distasteful to it. You take a stranger into the Bank Exchange and show him the magnificent picture of Sampson and Delilah, and what is the first object he notices?—Sampson's fine face and flaming eye? or the noble beauty of his form? or the lovely, half-nude Delilah? or the muscular Philistine behind Sampson, who is furtively admiring her charms? or the perfectly counterfeited folds of the rich drapery below her knees? or the symmetry and truth to nature of Sampson's left foot? No, sir, the first thing that catches his eye is the scissors on the floor at Delilah's feet, and the first thing he says, "Them scissors is too modern—there warn't no scissors like that in them days, by a d—d sight!"
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, June 27—30, 1865
Immorality is not decreasing in San Francisco. I saw a girl in the city prison last night who looked as much out of place there as I did myself—possibly more so. She was petite and diffident, and only sixteen years and one month old. To judge by her looks, one would say she was as sinless as a child. But such was not the case. She had been living with a strapping young nigger for six months! She told her story as artlessly as a school-girl, and it did not occur to her for a moment that she had been doing anything unbecoming; and I never listened to a narrative which seemed more simple and straightforward, or more free from ostentation and vain-glory. She told her name, and her age, to a day; she said she was born in Holborn, City of London; father living, but gone back to England; was not married to the negro, but she was left without any one to take care of her, and he had taken charge of that department and had conducted it since she was fifteen and a half years old very satisfactorily. All listeners pitied her, and said feelingly: "Poor heifer! poor devil!" and said she was an ignorant, erring child, and had not done wrong wilfully and knowingly, and they hoped she would pass her examination for the Industrial School and be removed from the temptation and the opportunity to sin. Tears—and it was a credit to their manliness and their good feeling—tears stood in the eyes of some of those stern policemen.
O, woman, thy name is humbug! Afterwards, while I sat taking some notes, and not in sight from the women's cell, some of the old blisters fell to gossiping, and lo! young Simplicity chipped in and clattered away as lively as the vilest of them! It came out in the conversation that she was hail fellow well met with all the old female rapscallions in the city, and had had business relations with their several establishments for a long time past. She spoke affectionately of some of them, and the reverse of others; and dwelt with a toothsome relish upon numberless reminiscences of her social and commercial intercourse with them. She knew all manner of men, too—men with quaint and suggestive names, for the most part—and liked "Oyster-eyed Bill," and "Bloody Mike," and "The Screamer," but cherished a spirit of animosity toward "Foxy McDonald" for cutting her with a bowie-knife at a strumpet ball one night. She a poor innocent kitten! Oh! She was a scallawag whom it would be base flattery to call a prostitute! She a candidate for the Industrial School! Bless you, she has graduated long ago. She is competent to take charge of a University of Vice. In the ordinary branches she is equal to the best; and in the higher ones, such as ornamental swearing, and fancy embroidered filagree slang, she is a shade superior to any artist I ever listened to.
Territorial Enterprise, July 7-19, 1865
[portion of letter from San Francisco describing black marchers in Fourth of July celebration]
And at the fag-end of the procession was a long double file of the proudest, happiest scoundrels I saw yesterday—niggers. Or perhaps I should say "them damned niggers," which is the other name they go by now. They did all it was in their power to do, poor devils, to modify the prominence of the contrast between black and white faces which seems so hateful to their white fellow-creatures, by putting their lightest colored darkies in the front rank, then glooming down by some unaggravating and nicely graduated shades of darkness to the fell and dismal blackness of undefiled and unalloyed niggerdom in the remote extremity of the procession. It was a fine stroke of strategy—the day was dusty and no man could tell where the white folks left off and the niggers began. The "damned naygurs"—this is another descriptive title which has been conferred upon them by a class of our fellow-citizens who persist, in the most short-sighted manner, in being on bad terms with them in the face of the fact that they have got to sing with them in heaven or scorch with them in hell some day in the most familiar and sociable way, and on a footing of most perfect equality—the "damned naygurs," I say, smiled one broad, extravagant, powerful smile of grateful thankfulness and profound and perfect happiness from the beginning of the march to the end; and through this vast, black, drifting cloud of smiles their white teeth glimmered fitfully like heat-lightning on a summer's night. If a white man honored them with a smile in return, they were utterly overcome, and fell to bowing like Oriental devotees, and attempting the most extravagant and impossible smiles, reckless of lock-jaw. They might as well have left their hats at home, for they never put them on. I was rather irritated at the idea of letting these fellows march in the procession myself, at first, but I would have scorned to harbor so small a thought if I had known the privilege was going to do them so much good. There seemed to be a religious-benevolent society among them with a banner—the only one in the colored ranks, I believe—and all hands seemed to take boundless pride in it. The banner had a picture on it, but I could not exactly get the hang of its significance. It presented a very black and uncommonly sick looking nigger, in bed, attended by two other niggers—one reading the Bible to him and the other one handing him a plate of oysters; but what the very mischief this blending of contraband dissolution, raw oysters and Christian consolation, could possibly be symbolical of, was more than I could make out.
Territorial Enterprise, October 10-11, 1865
[Portion of Letter from San Francisco]
SINGULAR EFFECTS OF THE SHOCK ON THE REV. MR. STEBBINS.
Now the Rev. Mr. Stebbins acted like a sensible man—a man with his presence of mind about him—he did precisely what I thought of doing myself at the time of the earthquake, but had no opportunity—he came down out of his pulpit and embraced a woman. Some say it was his wife. Well, and so it might have been his wife—I'm not saying it wasn't, am I? I am not going to intimate anything of that kind—because how do I know but what it was his wife? I say it might have been his wife—and so it might—I was not there, and I do not consider that I have any right to say it was not his wife. In reality I am satisfied it was his wife—but I am sorry, though, because it would have been so much better presence of mind to have embraced some other woman. I was in Third street. I looked around for some woman to embrace, but there was none in sight. I could have expected no better fortune, though, so I said, "O certainly—just my luck."
When the earthquake arrived in Oakland, the commanding officer of the Congregational Sabbath School was reading these words, by way of text: "And the earth shook and trembled!" In an instant the earthquake seized the text and preached a powerful sermon on it. I do not know whether the commanding officer resumed the subject again where the earthquake left off or not, but if he did I am satisfied that he has got a good deal of "cheek." I do not consider that any modest man would try to improve on a topic that had already been treated by an earthquake.
A MODEL ARTIST STRIKES AN ATTITUDE.
A young gentleman who lives in Sacramento street, rushed down stairs and appeared in public with no raiment on save a knit undershirt, which concealed his person about as much as its tin foil cap conceals a champagne bottle. He struck an attitude such as a man assumes when he is looking up, expecting danger from above, and bends his arm and holds it aloft to ward off possible missiles—and standing thus he glared fiercely up at the fire-wall of a tall building opposite, from which a few bricks had fallen. Men shouted at him to go in the house, people seized him by the arm and tried to drag him away—even tender-hearted women, (O, Woman!—O ever noble, unselfish, angelic woman!—O, Woman, in our hours of ease uncertain, coy, and hard to please—when anything happens to go wrong with our harness, a ministering angel thou), women, I say, averted their faces, and nudging the paralyzed and impassible statue in the ribs with their elbows beseeched him to take their aprons—to take their shawls—to take their hoop-skirts—anything, anything, so that he would not stand there longer in such a plight and distract people's attention from the earthquake. But he wouldn't budge—he stood there in his naked majesty till the last tremor died away from the earth, and then looked around on the multitude—and stupidly enough, too, until his dull eye fell upon himself. He went back upstairs, then. He went up lively.
WHAT HAPPENED TO A FEW VIRGINIANS—CHARLEY BRYAN CLIMBS A TELEGRAPH POLE.
But where is the use in dwelling on these incidents? There are enough of them to make a book. Joe Noques, of your city, was playing billiards in the Cosmopolitan Hotel. He went through a window into the court and then jumped over an iron gate eighteen feet high, and took his billiard cue with him. Sam Witgenstein took refuge in a church—probably the first time he was ever in one in his life. Judge Bryan climbed a telegraph pole. Pete Hopkins narrowly escaped injury. He was shaken abruptly from the summit of Telegraph Hill and fell on a three-story brick house ten feet below. I see that the morning papers (always ready to smooth over things), attribute the destruction of the house to the earthquake. That is newspaper magnanimity—but an earthquake has no friends. Extraordinary things happened to everybody except me. No one even spoke to me—at least only one man did, I believe—a man named Robinson—from Salt Lake, I think—who asked me to take a drink. I refused.
Territorial Enterprise, October 21-24, 1865
[portion of letter from San Francisco written October 19, 1865]
BOB ROACH'S PLAN FOR CIRCUMVENTING A DEMOCRAT
Where did all these Democrats come from? They grow thicker and thicker and act more and more outrageously at each successive election. Now yesterday they had the presumption to elect S. H. Dwinelle to the Judgeship of the Fifteenth District Court, and not content with this, they were depraved enough to elect four out of the six Justices of the Peace! Oh, 'Enery Villiam, where is thy blush! Oh, Timothy Hooligan, where is thy shame! It's out. Democrats haven't got any. But Union men staid away from the election—they either did that or else they came to the election and voted Democratic tickets—I think it was the latter, though the Flag will doubtless say it was the former. But these Democrats didn't stay away—you never catch a Democrat staying away from an election. The grand end and aim of his life is to vote or be voted for, and he accommodates to circumstances and does one just as cheerfully as he does the other. The Democracy of America left their native wilds in England and Connaught to come here and vote—and when a man, and especially a foreigner, who don't have any voting at home any more than an Arkansas man has ice-cream for dinner, comes three or four thousand miles to luxuriate in occasional voting, he isn't going to stay away from an election any more than the Arkansas man will leave the hotel table in "Orleans" until he has destroyed most of the ice cream. The only man I ever knew who could counteract this passion on the part of Democrats for voting, was Robert Roach, carpenter of the steamer Aleck Scott, "plying to and from St. Louis to New Orleans and back," as her advertisement sometimes read. The Democrats generally came up as deck passengers from New Orleans, and the yellow fever used to snatch them right and left—eight or nine a day for the first six or eight hundred miles; consequently Roach would have a lot on hand to "plant" every time the boat landed to wood—"plant" was Roach's word. One day as Roach was superintending a burial the Captain came up and said:
"God bless my soul, Roach, what do you mean by shoving a corpse into a hole in the hill-side in this barbarous way, face down and its feet sticking out?"
"I always plant them foreign Democrats in that manner, sir, because, damn their souls, if you plant 'em any other way they'll dig out and vote the first time there's an election—but look at that fellow, now—you put 'em in head first and face down and the more they dig the deeper they'll go into the hill."
In my opinion, if we do not get Roach to superintend our cemeteries, enough Democrats will dig out at the next election to carry their entire ticket. It begins to look that way.
Territorial Enterprise, October 26-28, 1865
San Francisco Letter
[written October 24, 1865; some portions missing]
Well, you ought to see the new style of bonnets, and then die. You see, everybody has discarded ringlets and bunches of curls, and taken to the clod of compact hair on the "after-guard," which they call a "waterfall," though why they name it so I cannot make out, for it looks no more like one's general notion of a waterfall than a cabbage looks like a cataract. Yes, they have thrown aside the bunches of curls which necessitated the wearing of a bonnet with a back-door to it, or rather, a bonnet without any back to it at all, so that the curls bulged out from under an overhanging spray of slender feathers, sprigs of grass, etc. You know the kind of bonnet I mean; it was as if a lady spread a diaper on her head, with two of the corners brought down over her ears, and the other trimmed with a bunch of graceful flummery and allowed to hang over her waterfall—fashions are mighty tanglesome things to write—but I am coming to it directly. The diaper was the only beautiful bonnet women have worn within my recollection—but as they have taken exclusively to the waterfalls, now, they have thrown it aside and adopted, ah me, the infernalest, old-fashionedest, ruralest atrocity in its stead you ever saw. It is perfectly plain and hasn't a ribbon, or a flower, or any ornament whatever about it; it is severely shaped like the half of a lady's thimble split in two lengthwise—or would be if that thimble had a perfectly square end instead of a rounded one—just imagine it—glance at it in your mind's eye—and recollect, no ribbons, no flowers, no filagree—only the plainest kind of plain straw or plain black stuff. It don't come forward as far as the hair, and it fits to the head as tightly as a thimble fits, folded in a square mass against the back of the head, and the square end of the bonnet half covers it and fits as square and tightly against it as if somebody had hit the woman in the back of the head with a tombstone or some other heavy and excessively flat projectile. And a woman looks as distressed in it as a cat with her head fast in a tea-cup. It is infamous.
The Plaza, or Portsmouth Square, is "done," at last, and by a resolution passed by the Board of Supervisors last night, is to be thrown open to the public henceforth at 7 o'clock A. M. and closed again at 7 o'clock P. M. every day. The same resolution prohibits the visits of dogs to this holy ground, and denies to the public the privilege of rolling on its grass. If I could bring myself to speak vulgarly, I should say that the latter clause is rough—very rough on the people. To be forced to idle in gravel walks when there is soft green grass close at hand, is tantalizing; it is as uncomfortable as to lie disabled and thirsty in sight of a fountain; or to look at a feast without permission to participate in it, when you are hungry; and almost as exasperating as to have to smack your chops over the hugging and kissing going on between a couple of sweethearts without any reasonable excuse for inserting your own metaphorical shovel. And yet there is one consolation about it on Nature's eternal equity of "compensation." No matter how degraded and worthless you may become here, you cannot go to grass in the Plaza, at any rate. The Plaza is a different thing from what it used to be; it used to be a text from a desert—it was not large enough for a whole chapter; but now it is traversed here and there by walks of precise width, and which are graded to a degree of rigid accuracy which is constantly suggestive of the spirit level; and the grass plots are as strictly shaped as a dandy's side whiskers, and their surfaces clipped and smoothed with the same mathematical exactness. In a word, the Plaza looks like the intensely brown and green perspectiveless diagram of stripes and patches which an architect furnishes to his client as a plan for a projected city garden or cemetery. And its glaring greenness in the midst of so much sombreness is startling and yet piercingly pleasant to the eye. It reminds one of old John Dehle's vegetable garden in Virginia, which, after a rain, used to burn like a square of green fire in the midst of the dull, gray desolation around it.
MORE FASHIONS—EXIT "WATERFALL."
I am told that the Empress Eugenie is growing bald on the top of her head, and that to hide this defect she now combs her "back hair" forward in such a way as to make her look all right. I am also told that this mode of dressing the hair is already fashionable in all the great civilized cities of the world, and that it will shortly be adopted here. Therefore let your ladies "stand-by" and prepare to drum their ringlets to the front when I give the word. I shall keep a weather eye out for this fashion, for I am an uncompromising enemy of the popular "waterfall," and I yearn to see it in disgrace. Just think of the disgusting shape and appearance of the thing. The hair is drawn to a slender neck at the back, and then commences a great fat, oblong ball, like a kidney covered with a net; and sometimes this net is so thickly bespangled with white beads that the ball looks soft, and fuzzy, and filmy and gray at a little distance—so that it vividly reminds you of those nauseating garden spiders in the States that go about dragging a pulpy, grayish bag-full of young spiders slung to them behind; and when I look at these suggestive waterfalls and remember how sea-sick it used to make me to mash one of those spider-bags, I feel sea-sick again, as a general thing. Its shape alone is enough to turn one's stomach. Let's have the back-hair brought forward as soon as convenient. N. B.—I shall feel much obliged to you if you can aid me in getting up this panic. I have no wife of my own and therefore as long as I have to make the most of other people's it is a matter of vital importance to me that they should dress with some degree of taste.
Territorial Enterprise, October 15-31, 1865
[portion of Letter from San Francisco]
Where's Ajax now, with his boasted defiance of the lightning? Who is Ajax to Popper, and what is lightning to an earthquake? It is taking no chances to speak of to defy the lightning, for it might pelt away at you for a year and miss you every time—but I don't care what corner you hide in, if the earthquake comes it will shake you; and if you will build your house weak enough to give it a fair show, it will melt it down like butter. Therefore, I exalt Popper above Ajax, for Popper defieth the earthquake. The famous shake of the 8th of October snatched the front out of Popper's great four-story shell of a house on the corner of Third and Mission as easily as if it had been mere pastime; yet I notice that the reckless Popper is rebuilding it again just as thin as it was before, and using the same old bricks. Is this paying proper respect to earthquakes? I think not. If I were an earthquake, I would never stand for such insolence from Popper. I am confident that I would shake that shell down, even if it took my last shake.
Territorial Enterprise, October 31-November 2, 1865
[portion of San Francisco letter]
I feel savage this morning. And as usual, when one wants to growl, it is almost impossible to find things to growl about with any degree of satisfaction. I cannot find anything in the steamer departures to get mad at. Only, I wonder who "J. Schmeltzer" is?—and what does he have such an atrocious name for?—and what business has he got in the States?—who is there in the States who cares whether Schmeltzer comes or not? The conduct of this unknown Schmeltzer is exasperating to the last degree.
And off goes General Rosecrans, without ever doing anything to give a paper a chance to abuse him. He has behaved himself, and kept quiet, and avoided scandalous meddling with the Oakland Seminaries, and paid his board in the most aggravating manner. Let him go.
And Conness is gone. Oh, d—n Conness!
Territorial Enterprise, November 1865
It is bound to come! There is no help for it. I smell it afar off—I see the signs in the air! Every day and every hour of every day I grow more and more nervous, for with every minute of waning time the dreadful infliction comes nearer and nearer in its inexorable march! In another week, maybe, all San Francisco will be singing "Wearing of the Green!" I know it. I have suffered before, and I know the symptoms. This holds off long, but it is partly that the calamity may gather irresistible worrying-power, and partly because it is harder to learn than Chinese. But that is all the worse; for when the people do learn it they will learn it bad—and terrible will be the distress it will bring upon the community. A year ago "Johnny came marching home!" That song was sung by everybody, in every key, in every locality, at all hours of the day and night, and always out of tune. It sent many unoffending persons to the Stockton asylum. There was no stopping the epidemic, and so it had to be permitted to run its course and wear itself out. Short was our respite, and then a still more malignant distemper broke out in the midst of this harried and suffering community. It was "You'll not forget me, mother, mother, mother, mother!" with an ever-accumulating aggravation of expression upon each successive "mother." The fire-boys sat up all night to sing it; and bands of sentimental stevedores and militia soldiers patroled the streets and howled its lugubrious strains. A passion for serenading attacked the youth of the city, and they sang it under verandahs in the back streets until the dogs and cats destroyed their voices in unavailing efforts to lay the devilish spirit that was driving happiness from their hearts. Finally there came a season of repose, and the community slowly recovered from the effects of the musical calamity. The respite was not long. In an unexpected moment they were attacked, front and rear, by a new enemy—"When we were marching through Georgia!" Tongue cannot tell what we suffered while this frightful disaster was upon us. Young misses sang it to the guitar and the piano; young men sang it to the banjo and the fiddle; the un-blood stained soldier yelled it with enthusiasm as he marched through the imaginary swamps and cotton plantations of the drill-room; the firemen sang it as they trundled their engines home from conflagrations; and the hated serenader tortured it with his damned accordeon. Some of us survived, and some have gone the old road to a haven of rest at Stockton, where the wicked cease from troubling and the popular songs are not allowed. For the space of four weeks the survivors have been happy.
But as I have said before, it is bound to come! Arrah-na-Pogque is breeding a song that will bedeck some mountain with new-made graves! In another week we shall be "Wearing of the Green," and in a fortnight some will be wearing of the black in consequence. Three repetitions of this song will produce lunacy, and five will kill—it is that much more virulent than its predecessors. People are finding it hard to learn, but when they get it learned they will find it potent for harm. It is Wheatleigh's song. He sings it in Arrah-na-Pogque, with a sprig of shamrock in his hat. Wheatleigh sings it with such aggravated solemnity as to make an audience long for the grave. It is doled out slowly, and every note settles deliberately to its place on one's heart like a solid iceberg—and by the time it is finished the temperature of the theatre has fallen to twenty degrees. Think what a dead-cold winter we shall have here when this Arctic funeral melody becomes popular! Think of it being performed at midnight, in lonely places, upon the spirit depressing accordeon! Think of being driven to blow your brains out under such circumstances, and then dying to the grave-yard cadences of "Wearing of the Green!" But it is bound to come, and we may as well bow our heads and submit with such degree of Christian resignation as we are able to command.
THE CALIFORNIAN, Saturday, November 11, 1865
EXIT "BUMMER."—As we have devoted but little space to an event which has filled our local contemporaries with as much sorrow (judging from the columns of lamentations it has called forth) as would the decease of the best biped in the city, we give "Mark Twain's" view of the occurrence as recorded in the ENTERPRISE of the 8th. Strangely enough, Mark, who can't stand "ballad infliction" seems to think there has not been quite enough of "Bummer":
"The old vagrant 'Bummer' is really dead at last; and although he was always more respected than his obsequious vassal, the dog 'Lazarus,' his exit has not made half as much stir in the newspaper world as signalised the departure of the latter. I think it is because he died a natural death: died with friends around him to smooth his pillow and wipe the death-damps from his brow, and receive his last words of love and resignation; because he died full of years, and honor, and disease, and fleas. He was permited to die a natural death, as I have said, but poor Lazarus 'died with his boots on'—which is to say, he lost his life by violence; he gave up the ghost mysteriously, at dead of night, with none to cheer his last moments or soothe his dying pains. So the murdered dog was canonized in the newspapers, his shortcomings excused and his virtues heralded to the world; but his superior, parting with his life in the fullness of time, and in the due course of nature, sinks as quietly as might the mangiest cur among us. Well, let him go. In earlier days he was courted and caressed; but latterly he has lost his comeliness—his dignity had given place to a want of self-respect, which allowed him to practice mean deceptions to regain for a moment that sympathy and notice which had become necessary to his very existence, and it was evident to all that the dog had had his day; his great popularity was gone forever. In fact, Bummer should have died sooner: there was a time when his death would have left a lasting legacy of fame to his name. Now, however, he will be forgotten in a few days. Bummer's skin is to be stuffed and placed with that of Lazarus."
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 31, 1864
The lamented Lazarus departed this life about a year ago, and from that time until recently poor Bummer has mourned the loss of his faithful friend in solitude, scorning the sympathy and companionship of his race with that stately reserve and exclusiveness which has always distinguished him since he became a citizen of San Francisco. But, for several weeks past, we have observed a vagrant black puppy has taken up with him, and attends him in his promenades, bums with him at the restaurants, and watches over his slumbers as unremittingly as did the sainted Lazarus of other days. Whether that puppy really feels an unselfish affection for Bummer, or whether he is actuated by unworthy motives, and goes with him merely to ring in on the eating houses through his popularity at such establishments, or whether he is one of those fawning sycophants that fasten upon the world's heroes in order that they may be glorified by the reflected light of greatness, we can not yet determine. We only know that he hangs around Bummer, and snarls at intruders upon his repose, and looks proud and happy when the old dog condescends to notice him. He ventures upon no puppyish levity in the presence of his prince, and essays no unbecoming familiarity, but in all respects conducts himself with the respectful decorum which such a puppy so situated should display. Consequently, in time, he may grow into high favor.
Territorial Enterprise, November 9-12, 1865
[portion of San Francisco letter describing trip on tugboat "Rescue"]
We lunched, then, and shortly began to drink champagne—by the basket. I saw the tremendous guns frowning from the fort; I saw San Francisco spread out over the sand-hills like a picture; I saw the huge fortress at Black Point looming hazily in the distance; I saw tall ships sweeping in from the sea through the Golden Gate; I saw that it was time to take another drink, and after that I saw no more. All hands fell to singing "When we were Marching Through Georgia," and the remainder of the trip was fought out on that line. We landed at the steamboat wharf at 5 o'clock, safe and sound. Some of those reporters I spoke of said we had been to Benicia, and the others said we had been to the Cliff House, but, poor devils, they had been drinking, and they did not really know where we had been. I know, but I do not choose to tell. I enjoyed that trip first-rate. I am rather fond of a trip on a fast boat with a jolly crowd. That was a jolly crowd. Sometimes they were all out forward standing on their heads, and then the boat wouldn't steer because her rudder was sticking up in the air like a sail of a wind-mill; and sometimes they were all aft turning hand springs and playing "mumble peg," and then the boat wouldn't steer because she stood so straight up in the water that her head caught all the wind that was blowing; and sometimes they were all on the starboard side eating and drinking and singing, and then she wouldn't steer because she was listed worse than any soldier that ever listed since the war began. Still, even under these trying circumstances, the boat made fifteen miles an hour, and so I suppose that on an even keel she can make a hundred, or thereabouts. I enjoyed that excursion.
Territorial Enterprise, November 15-18, 1865
[portion of letter from San Francisco]
Let "John Wychecombe Smith, Esq., one of our pioneer merchants, and one among our wealthiest and most respected citizens," leave in the steamer "to revisit the home of his nativity," and one of these papers will give you half a column of sorrow and distress about it, and wind up with the eternal "but we are happy to say that not many months will elapse ere he will be with us again"—and forget to mention that a distinguished and war-bronzed Major-General went in the same steamer with the wealthy and successful Smith. The other paper would let John Wychecombe Smith go to the States, or to the devil, either, a dozen times over, and always maintain an insolent silence about it: but let Moike Mulrooney, or Tim Murphy, or Judy O'Flaherty, receive a present of raal Irish whisky from the ould country, and it will never let you hear the last of it.
Territorial Enterprise, November 18, 1865
[portion of letter from San Francisco]
As usual, the Alta reporter fastens the mysterious What Cheer robbery on the same horrible person who knocked young Meyers in the head with a slung-shot a year ago and robbed his father's pawnbroker shop of some brass jewelry and crippled revolvers, in broad daylight; and he laid that exploit on the horrible wretch who robbed the Mayor's Clerk, who half-murdered detective officer Rose in a lonely spot below Santa Clara; and he proved that this same monster killed the lone woman in a secluded house up a dark alley with a carpenter's chisel, months before; and he demonstrated by inspired argument that the same villain who chiselled the woman tomahawked a couple of defenceless women in the most mysterious manner up another dark alley a few months before that. Now, the perpetrator of these veiled crimes has never been discovered, yet this wicked reporter has taken the whole batch and piled them coolly and relentlessly upon the shoulders of one imaginary scoundrel, with a comfortable, "Here, these are yours," and with an air that says plainly that no denial, and no argument in the case, will be entertained. And every time anything happens that is unlawful and dreadful, and has a spice of mystery about it, this reporter, without waiting to see if maybe somebody else didn't do it, goes off at once and jams it on top of the old pile, as much as to say, "Here—here's some more of your work." Now this isn't right, you know. It is all well enough for Mr. Smythe to divert suspicion from himself—nobody objects to that—but it is not right for him to lay every solitary thing on this mysterious stranger, whoever he is—it is not right, you know. He ought to give the poor devil a show. The idea of accusing "The Mysterious" of the What Cheer burglary, considering who was the last boarder to bed and the first one up!
Smythe is endeavoring to get on the detective police force. I think it will be wronging the community to give this man such a position as that—now you know that yourself, don't you? He would settle down on some particular fellow, and every time there was a rape committed, or a steamship stolen, or an oyster cellar rifled, or a church burned down, or a family massacred, or a black-and-tan pup stolen, he would march off with portentous mien and snatch that fellow and say, "Here, you are at it again, you know," and snake him off to the Station House.
Territorial Enterprise, November 19 or 21, 1865
It was estimated that four hundred persons were present at the ball. The gentlemen wore the orthodox costume for such occasions, and the ladies were dressed the best they knew how. N. B.—Most of these ladies were pretty, and some of them absolutely beautiful. Four out of every five ladies, present were pretty. The ratio at the Colfax party was two out of every five. I always keep the run of these things. While upon this department of the subject, I may as well tarry a moment and furnish you with descriptions of some of the most noticeable costumes.
Mrs. W. M. was attired in an elegant pate de foi gras, made expressly for her, and was greatly admired.
Miss S. had her hair done up. She was the centre of attraction for the gentlemen, and the envy of all the ladies.
Miss G. W. was tastefully dressed in a tout ensemble, and was greeted with deafening applause wherever she went.
Mrs. C. N. was superbly arrayed in white kid gloves. Her modest and engaging manner accorded well with the unpretending simplicity of her costume, and caused her to be regarded with absorbing interest by every one.
The charming Miss M. M. B. appeared in a thrilling waterfall, whose exceeding grace and volume compelled the homage of pioneers and emigrants alike. How beautiful she was!
The queenly Mrs. L. R. was attractively attired in her new and beautiful false teeth, and the bon jour effect they naturally produced was heightened by her enchanting and well sustained smile. The manner of this lady is charmingly pensive and melancholy, and her troops of admirers desired no greater happiness than to get on the scent of her sozodont-sweetened sighs and track her through her sinuous course among the gay and restless multitude.
Miss R. P., with that repugnance to ostentation in dress which is so peculiar to her, was attired in a simple white lace collar, fastened with a neat pearl-button solitaire. The fine contrast between the sparkling vivacity of her natural optic and the steadfast attentiveness of her placid glass eye was the subject of general and enthusiastic remark.
The radiant and sylph-like Mrs. T., late of your State, wore hoops. She showed to good advantage, and created a sensation wherever she appeared. She was the gayest of the gay.
Miss C. L. B. had her fine nose elegantly enameled, and the easy grace with which she blew it from time to time, marked her as a cultivated and accomplished woman of the world; its exquisitely modulated tone excited the admiration of all who had the happiness to hear it.
Being offended with Miss X., and our acquaintance having ceased permanently, I will take this opportunity of observing to her that it is of no use for her to be slopping off to every ball that takes place, and flourishing around with a brass oyster-knife skewered through her waterfall, and smiling her sickly smile through her decayed teeth, with her dismal pug nose in the air. There is no use in it—she don't fool anybody. Everybody knows she is old; everybody knows she is repaired (you might almost say built) with artificial bones and hair and muscles and things, from the ground up—put together scrap by scrap—and everybody knows, also, that all one would have to do would be to pull out her key-pin and she would go to pieces like a Chinese puzzle. There, now, my faded flower, take that paragraph home with you and amuse yourself with it; and if ever you turn your wart of a nose up at me again I will sit down and write something that will just make you rise up and howl.
Territorial Enterprise, November 28-30, 1865
I will now relate an affecting incident of my meeting with Uncle Lige, as a companion novelette to the one published by Dan the other day, entitled "Uncle Henry."
A day or two since—before the late stormy weather—I was taking a quiet stroll in the western suburbs of the city. The day was sunny and pleasant. In front of a small but neat "bit house," seated upon a bank—a worn out and discarded faro bank—I saw a man and a little girl. The sight was too much for me, and I burst into tears. Oh, God! I cried, this is too rough! After the violence of my emotion had in a manner spent itself, I ventured to look once more upon that touching picture. The left hand of the girl (how well I recollect which hand it was! by the warts on it)—a fair-haired, sweet-faced child of about eight years of age—rested upon the right shoulder (how perfectly I remember it was his right shoulder, because his left shoulder had been sawed off in a saw-mill) of the man by whose side she was seated. She was gazing toward the summit of Lone Mountain, and prating of the gravestones on the top of it and of the sunshine and Diggers resting on its tomb-clad slopes. The head of the man drooped forward till his face almost rested upon his breast, and he seemed intently listening. It was only a pleasing pretence, though, for there was nothing for him to hear save the rattling of the carriages on the gravel road beside him, and he could have straightened himself up and heard that easy enough, poor fellow. As I approached, the child observed me, notwithstanding her extreme youth, and ceasing to talk, smilingly looked at me, strange as it may seem. I stopped, again almost overpowered, but after a struggle I mastered my feelings sufficiently to proceed. I gave her a smile—or rather, I swapped her one in return for the one I had just received, and she said:
"This is Uncle Lige—poor blind-drunk Uncle Lige."
This burst of confidence from an entire stranger, and one so young withal, caused my subjugated emotions to surge up in my breast once more, but again, with a strong effort, I controlled them. I looked at the wine-bred cauliflower on the poor man's nose and saw how it had all happened.
"Yes," said he, noticing by my eloquent countenance that I had seen how it had all happened, notwithstanding nothing had been said yet about anything having happened, "Yes, it happened in Reeseriv' a year ago; since tha(ic)at time been living here with broth—Robert'n lill Addie (e-ick.')."
"Oh, he's the best uncle, and tells me such stories!" cried the little girl.
"At's aw-ri, you know (ick!)—at's aw ri," said the kind hearted, gentle old man, spitting on his shirt bosom and slurring it off with his hand.
The child leaned quickly forward and kissed his poor blossomy face. We beheld two great tears start from the man's sightless eyes, but when they saw what sort of country they had got to travel over, they went back again. Kissing the child again and again and once more and then several times, and afterwards repeating it, he said:
"H(o-ook!)—oorah for Melical eagle star-spalgle baller! At's aw-ri, you know—(ick!)—at's aw-ri"—and he stroked her sunny curls and spit on his shirt bosom again.
This affecting scene was too much for my already over charged feelings, and I burst into a flood of tears and hurried from the spot.
Such is the touching story of Uncle Lige. It may not be quite as sick as Dan's, but there is every bit as much reasonable material in it for a big calf like either of us to cry over. Cannot you publish the two novelettes in book form and send them forth to destroy such of our fellow citizens as are spared by the cholera?
Territorial Enterprise, December 8-10, 1865
Tom Maguire,
Torn with ire,
Lighted on Macdougall,
Grabbed his throat,
Tore his coat,
And split him in the bugle.
Shame! Oh, fie!
Maguire, why
Will you thus skyugle?
Why bang and claw,
And gouge and chaw
The unprepared Macdougall?
Of bones bereft,
See how you've left,
Vestvali, gentle Jew gal—
And now you've slashed,
And almost hashed,
The form of poor Macdougall.
Territorial Enterprise, December 13-15, 1865
[portion of San Francisco Letter, written December 11, 1865]
"Christian Spectator"—REV. O. P. FITZGERALD, of the Minna street Methodist Church South, is fairly under way, now, with his new Christian Spectator. The second number is before me. I believe I can venture to recommend it to the people of Nevada, of both Northern and Southern proclivities. It is not jammed full of incendiary religious matter about hell-fire, and brimstone, and wicked young men knocked endways by a streak of lightning while in the act of going fishing on Sunday. Its contents are not exciting or calculated to make people set up all night to read them. I like the Spectator a great deal better than I expected to, and I think you ought to cheerfully spare room for a short review of it. The leading editorial says: "A journal of the character of the Spectator is always to a great extent the reflex of the editor's individuality." Then follows a pleasant moral homily entitled "That Nubbin;" then puffs of a religious college and a Presbyterian church; then some poetical reflections on the happy fact "The War is Over;" then a "hyste" of some old slow coach of a preacher for not getting subscribers for the Spectator fast enough; then a confidential hint to the reader that he turn out and gather subscriptions—and forward the money; then a puff of the Oakland Female Seminary; then a remark that the Spectator's terms are cash; then a suggestion that the paper would make a gorgeous Christmas present—the only joke in the whole paper, and even this one is written with a fine show of seriousness; then a complimentary blast for Bishop Pierce; then a column of "Personal Items" concerning distinguished Confederates, chiefly; then something about "Our New Dress"—not one of Ward's shirts for the editor, but the paper's new dress; then a word about "our publishing house at Nashville, Tenn.;" then a repetition of the fact that "our terms are cash;" then something concerning "our head"—not the editor's, which is "level," but the paper's; then follow two columns of religious news not of a nature to drive one into a frenzy of excitement. On the outside is one of those entertaining novelettes, so popular among credulous Sabbath-school children, about a lone woman silently praying a desperate and blood-thirsty robber out of his boots—he looking on and fingering his clasp-knife and wiping it on his hand, and she calmly praying, till at last he "blanched beneath her fixed gaze, a panic appeared to seize him, and he closed his knife and went out." Oh, that won't do, you know. That is rather too steep. I guess she must have scalded him a little. There is also a column about a "remarkable police officer," and praising him up to the skies, and showing, by facts, sufficient to convince me that if he belonged to our force, Mr. Fitzgerald was drawing it rather strong. I read it with avidity, because I wished to know whether it was Chief Burke, or Blitz, or Lees, the parson was trying to curry favor with. But it was only an allegory, after all; the impossible police man was "Conscience." It was one of those fine moral humbugs, like some advertisements which seduce you down a column of stuff about General Washington and wind up with a recommendation to "try Peterson's aromatic soap."
Subscribe for the vivacious Christian Spectator; C. A. Klose is financial agent.
More Romance—The pretty waiter girls are always getting people into trouble. But I beg pardon—I should say "ladies," not "girls." I learned this lesson "in the days when I went gypsying," which was a long time ago. I said to one of these self-important hags, "Mary, or Julia, or whatever your name may be, who is that old slab singing at the piano—the girl with the 'bile' on her nose?" Her eyes snapped. "You call her girl!—you shall find out yourself—she is a lady, if you please!" They are all "ladies," and they take it as an insult when they are called anything else. It was one of these charming ladies who got shot, by an ass of a lover from the wilds of Arizona, yesterday in the Thunderboldt Saloon, but unhappily not killed. The fellow had enjoyed so long the society of ill-favored squaws who have to be scraped before one can tell the color of their complexions, that he was easily carried away with the well seasoned charms of "French Mary" of the Thunderboldt Saloon, and got so "spooney" in his attentions that he hung around her night after night, and breathed her garlicky sighs with ecstasy. But no man can be honored with a beer girl's society without paying for it. French Mary made this man Vernon buy basket after basket of cheap champagne and got a heavy commission, which is usually their privilege; in the saloon her company always cost him five or ten dollars an hour, and she was doubtless a still more expensive luxury out of it.
It is said that he was always insisting upon her marrying him, and threatening to leave and go back to Arizona if she did not. She could not afford to let the goose go until he was completely plucked, and so she would consent, and set the day, and then the poor devil, in a burst of generosity, would celebrate the happy event with a heavy outlay of cash. This ruse was played until it was worn out, until Vernon's patience was worn out, until Vernon's purse was worn out also. Then there was no use in humbugging the poor numscull any longer, of course; and so French Mary deserted him, to wait on customers who had cash—the unfeeling practice always observed by lager beer ladies under similar circumstances. She told him she would not marry him or have anything more to do with him, and he very properly tried to blow her brains out. But he was awkward, and only wounded her dangerously. He killed himself, though, effectually, and let us hope that it was the wisest thing he could have done, and that he is better off now, poor fellow.
Territorial Enterprise, December 16-17, 1865
[extract of original letter dated December 13—pertaining to theater critics and the upcoming visit of Edwin Forrest]
San Francisco Letter
These mosquitoes would swarm around him and bleed dramatic imperfections from him by the column. With their accustomed shameless presumption, they would tear the fabric of his well earned reputation to rags, and call him a poor, cheap humbug and an overrated concentration of mediocrity...They would always wind up their long-winded "critiques"—these promoted newsboys and shoemakers would—with the caustic, the cutting, the withering old stand-by which they have used with such blighting effect on so many similar occasions, to wit: "If Mr. Forrest calls that sort of thing acting—very well; but we must inform him, that although it may answer in other places, it will not do here..." Their grand final shot is always a six-hundred pounder, and always comes in the same elegant phraseology: they would pronounce Mr. Forrest a "bilk!" You cannot tell me anything about these ignorant asses who do up what is called "criticism" hereabouts—I know them "by the back."
Territorial Enterprise, December 1865
One may easily find room to abuse as many as several members of Chief Burke's civilian army for laziness and uselessness, but the detective department is supplied with men who are sharp, shrewd, always on the alert and always industrious. It is only natural that this should be so. An ordinary policeman is chosen with especial reference to large stature and powerful muscle, and he only gets $125 a month, but the detective is chosen with especial regard to brains, and the position pays better than a lucky faro-bank. A shoemaker can tell by a single glance at a boot whose shop it comes from, by some peculiarity of workmanship; but to a bar-keeper all boots are alike; a printer will take a number of newspaper scraps, that show no dissimilarity to each other, and name the papers they were cut from; to a man who is accustomed to being on the water, the river's surface is a printed book which never fails to divulge the hiding place of the sunken rock, or betray the presence of the treacherous shoal. In ordinary men, this quality of detecting almost imperceptible differences and peculiarities is acquired by long practice, and goes not beyond the limits of their own occupation—but in the detective it is an instinct, and discovers to him the secret signs of all trades, and the faint shades of difference between things which look alike to the careless eye.
Detective Rose can pick up a chicken's tail feather in Montgomery street and tell in a moment what roost it came from at the Mission; and if the theft is recent, he can go out there and take a smell of the premises and tell which block in Sacramento street the Chinaman lives in who committed it, by some exquisite difference in the stink left, and which he knows to be peculiar to one particular block of buildings.
Mr. McCormick, who should be on the detective force regularly, but as yet is there only by brevet, can tell an obscene photograph by the back, as a sport tells an ace from a jack.
Detective Blitz can hunt down a transgressing hack-driver by some peculiarity in the style of his blasphemy.
The forte of Lees and Ellis, is the unearthing of embezzlers and forgers. Each of these men are best in one particular line, but at the same time they are good in all. And now we have Piper, who takes a cake, dropped in the Lick House by a coat-thief, and sits down to read it as another man would a newspaper. It informs him who baked the cake; who bought it; where the purchaser lives; that he is a Mexican; that his name is Salcero; that he is a thief by profession—and then Piper marches away two miles, to the Presidio, and grabs this foreigner, and convicts him with the cake that cannot lie, and makes him shed his boots and finds $200 in greenbacks in them, and makes him shuck himself and finds upon him store of stolen gold. And so Salcero goes to the station-house. The detectives are smart, but I remarked to a friend that some of the other policemen were not. He said the remark was unjust—that those "other policemen were as smart as they could afford to be for $125 a month." It was not a bad idea. Still, I contend that some of them could not afford to be Daniel Websters, maybe, for any amount of money.
Ah, but Fitz Smythe can be severe when it suits his humor. He knocks "Outcroppings" as cold as a wedge in his last "Amigo" letter to the Gold Hill News, in a single paragraph—yet it cost you a whole page of the Enterprise to express your disapprobation of that volume of poems. He says, "The contents are of course suited to the capacity of children only." This will make those Eastern papers feel mighty bad, because several of them have spoken highly of the book and thought it was written for men and women to read.
But I attach no weight to Smythe's criticisms, because he don't know anything about polite literature; he has had no experience in it further than to write up runaway horse items for the Alta and act as Private Secretary to Emperor Norton. And even in the latter capacity he has never composed the Emperor's proclamations; his duties extended no further than to copy them for the Gold Hill News, and anybody could do that. As for poetry, he never wrote but two poems in his life. One was entitled, "The Dream of Norton I, Emperor," which was tolerably good, but not as good as the "Chandos Picture," and the other was one which he composed when the news came of the assassination of the President. This latter effort was bad, but I do not really think he knows it, else why should he feel so injured because it was not inserted in "Outcroppings"? But perhaps it is not fair in me thus to pass judgment upon that poem, when possibly I am no more competent to discern poetical merit or demerit than I conceive him to be himself. Therefore, rather than do Fitz Smythe an unintentional injustice, I will quote one verse from the poem which I have called "bad," and leave the people to endorse my criticism or reject it, as shall seem unto them best:
Gone! gone! gone!
Forever and forever! Gone! gone! gone!
The tidings ne'er shall sever! Gone! gone! gone!
Wherever! Oh, wherever! Gone! gone! gone!
Gone to his endeavor!
( RECAPITULATION. )
Gone forever!
To wherever!
Ne'er shall sever!
His endeavor!
From our soul's high recompense!
I consider that the chief fault in this poem is that it is ill-balanced—lop-sided, so to speak. There is too much "gone" in it, and not enough "forever." I will do the author the credit to say, however, that there is in it a manifestation of genius of a high order. It is a dangerous kind of genius, however, as two poets here, gifted exactly similar, have lately demonstrated—they both transgressed laws whereof the penalty is capital punishment. I have to be a little severe, now, because I am a friend to "Outcroppings," and I do not like to see you and Smythe trying to bring the book into disrepute.
Territorial Enterprise, December 1865
[dated December 20, 1865]
The new swimming bath in South Park is attracting large crowds of curious visitors, who are anxious to test its virtues, but as yet it is not quite ready to be thrown open to the public. The great bath-house is finished, however, and this morning they are ornamenting its ample front with an immense painting, representing men swimming in all manner of impossible attitudes. It is as full of gorgeous coloring as a Presbyterian picture of hell, and is as good as a panorama to look at. It promises to be a very popular institution. The North Beach and South Park cars pass directly in front of it.
The eccentric Fourteenth Regulars is the gayest crowd of lads that any war ever did produce, I suppose. It is funny to read the accounts of their doings in the papers every day. They are so supremely indifferent to consequences—or public opinion—or law, or gospel, the police, the devil, or anything else! Each happy Fourteener sallies forth in a gang by himself, like Baxter's hog, and in the course of an hour he has captured a horse, or waylaid a stagecoach, or carried off a showcase, or devastated a dwelling, or snatched a policeman, or got a hundred and fifty people corraled in a narrow court, where he guards the sole exit, and entertains himself by charging on them with his bowie-knife from time to time, and laughing in his hoarse, stormy way when they stampede. Oh, they are gay!
I am really sorry to see that Col. Drumn is about to tone down the exuberance of the Fourteeners, and I am satisfied that my grief is shared by every reporter in town, for three months ago the press oozed columns of the most insipid and resultless run-away beer-wagon items; whereas lately it has scintillated with the most thrilling and readable exploits and adventures of the Fourteeners. Col. Drumn recommends to the Commander of the Department the limiting of passes to the issuance of not more than two at a time—and Chief Burke, I have no doubt, will take care that the whole police force turns out, armed to the teeth, to look after these two. The Fourteeners have been accustomed to carnage and battle in the Eastern wars so long, that they don't mind a small squad of police at all—look upon such as only a troublesome interruption to their amusements, but not a positive obstruction.
Territorial Enterprise, December 19-21, 1865
[portion of San Francisco Letter]
GRAND FETE-DAY AT THE CLIFF HOUSE
PERFORMANCE TO COMMENCE PRECISELY AT HIGH NOON.
The following celebrated artistes have been engaged at a ruinous expense, and will perform the following truly marvelous feats:
PETE HOPKINS, the renowned Spectre of the Mountains, will walk a tight rope—the artist himself being tighter than the rope at the time—from the Cliff House to Seal Rock, and will ride back on the Seal known as Ben Butler, or the Seal will ride back on him, as circumstances shall determine.
JIM EOFF will exhibit the horse Patchen, and explain why he did not win the last race.
HARRIS COVEY will exhibit Lodi and Jim Barton, and BILLY WILLIAMSON will favor the audience with their pedigree and sketches of their history. N.B.—This will be very entertaining.
JEROME LELAND will exhibit the famous cow, in a circus ring prepared for the occasion, and perform several feats of perilous cowmanship on her back.
COMMODORE PERRY CHILDS will take a drink—the weather permitting. This was to have been done by another acrobat, but he is out of practice, and Mr. Childs has kindly volunteered in his place.
MICHAEL REESE will dance the Stock Gallopade, in which fine exhibition he will be assisted by several prominent brokers.
After which JUDGE BRYAN will sing two verses of "Neapolitaine"—by request.
The whole to conclude with the grand tableau of the "Children in the Wood"—Children in the Wood: Emperor Norton and the Spectre of the Mountains.
Territorial Enterprise, December 22-23, 1865
The talk occasioned by Maguire's unseemly castigation of Macdougall, while the latter was engaged in conversation with a lady, was dying out, happily for both parties, but Mr. Macdougall has set it going again by bringing that suit of his for $5,000 for the assault and battery. If he can get the money, I suppose that is at least the most profitable method of settling the matter. But then, will he? Maybe so, and maybe not. But if he feels badly—feels hurt—feels disgraced at being chastised, will $5,000 entirely soothe him and put an end to the comments and criticisms of the public? It is questionable. If he would pitch in and whale Maguire, though, it would afford him real, genuine satisfaction, and would also furnish me with a great deal more pleasing material for a paragraph than I can get out of the regular routine of events that transpire in San Francisco—which is a matter of still greater importance. If the plaintiff in this suit of damages were to intimate that he would like to have a word from me on this subject, I would immediately sit down and pour out my soul to him in verse. I would tune up my muse and sing to him the following pretty
Come, now, Macdougall!
Say—
Can lucre pay
For thy dismembered coat—
Thy strangulated throat—
Thy busted bugle?
Speak thou! poor W. J.!
And say—
I pray—
If gold can soothe your woes,
Or mend your tattered clothes,
Or heal your battered nose,
Oh bunged-up lump of clay!
No!—arise!
Be wise!
Macdougall, d—n your eyes!
Don't legal quips devise
To mend your reputation,
And efface the degradation
Of a blow that's struck in ire!
But 'ware of execration,
Unless you take your station
In a strategic location,
In mood of desperation,
And "lam" like all creation
This infernal Tom Maguire!
Territorial Enterprise, December 24 or 26, 1865
[portion of letter]
San Francisco Letter
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 22.
[discusses recent problems with local judge—text not available]
EDITORIAL POEM.
The following fine Christmas poem appears in the Alta of this morning, in the unostentatious garb of an editorial. This manner of "setting it" robs it of half its beauty. I will arrange it as blank verse, and then it will read much more charmingly:
"CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR."
"The Holidays are approaching. We hear
Of them and see their signs every day.
The children tell you every morn
How long it is until the glad New Year.
The pavements all are covered o'er
With boxes, which have arrived
Per steamer and are being unpacked
In anticipation sweet, of an unusual demand.
The windows of the shops
Montgomery street along,
Do brilliant shine
With articles of ornament and luxury;
The more substantial goods,
Which eleven months now gone
The place have occupied,
Having been put aside for a few revolving weeks,
Silks, satins, laces, articles of gold and silver,
Jewels, porcelains from Sevres,
And from Dresden;
Bohemian and Venetian glass,
Pictures, engravings,
Bronzes of the finest workmanship
And price extravagant, attract
The eye at every step
Along the promenades of fashion.
The hotels
With visitors are crowded, who have come
From the ultimate interior to enjoy
Amusements metropolitan, or to find
A more extensive market, and prices lower
For purchases, than country towns afford.
Abundant early rains a prosperous year
Have promised—and the dry
And sunny weather which prevailed hath
For two weeks past, doth offer
Facilities profound for coming to the city,
And for enjoyment after getting here.
The ocean beach throughout the day,
And theatres, in shades of evening, show
A throng of strangers glad residents as well.
All appearances do indicate
That this blithe time of holiday
In San Francisco will
Be one of liveliness unusual, and brilliancy withal!"
[Exit Chief Editor, bowing low—impressive music.]
I cannot admire the overstrong modesty which impels a man to compose a stately anthem like that and run it together in the solid unattractiveness of a leading editorial.
This morning's Alta is brilliant. The fine poem I have quoted is coppered by a scintillation of Fitz Smythe's in the same column. He calls the thieving scalliwags of the Fourteenth Infantry "niptomaniacs." That is not bad considering that it much more intelligently describes their chief proclivity than "kleptomaniac" describes the weakness of another kind of thieves. The merit of this effort ranks so high that it is a mercy it is only a smart remark instead of a joke—otherwise Fitz Smythe must have perished, and instantly. For fear that this remark may be obscure to some persons I will explain by informing the public that the soothsayers were called in at the time of Fitz Smythe's birth, and they read the stars and prophecied that he was destined to lead a long and eventful life, and to arrive to great distinction for his untiring industry in endeavoring, for the period of near half a century, to get off a joke. They said that many times during his life the grand end and aim of his existence would seem to be in his reach, and his mission on earth on the point of being fulfilled; but again and again bitter disappointment would overtake him; what promised so fairly to be a joke would come forth still-born; but he would rise superior to despair and make new and more frantic efforts. And these wise men said that in the evening of his life, when hope was well nigh dead with him, he would some day, all unexpectedly to himself, and likewise to the world, produce a genuine joke, and one of marvelous humor—and then his head would cave in, and his bowels be rent asunder, and his arms and his legs would drop off and he would fall down and die in dreadful agony. "Niptomaniac" is a felicitous expression, but God be thanked it is not a joke. If it had been, it would have killed him—the mission of Armand Leonidas Fitz Smythe would have been accomplished.
The last news from Frank Mayo will be gratifying to his host of friends and admirers in California and Nevada. His rank is "Stock Star," and he plays the leading characters in heavy pieces, and, the Boston papers say, plays them as well as is done by any great actor in America, and make no exceptions. He traveled through the chief cities with the Keans, starring by himself in afterpieces, and playing with the Keans when there was no afterpiece—taking such parts as "Henry VIII." The Philadelphia papers said the Keans were very well, but Mr. Mayo was the best actor in the lot!
Louis Aldrich, in his new Boston engagement, will take high rank also, and play "first old man" and such characters. He will do well in the East. You never saw a man make such striding advances in professional excellence as Aldrich has done since he first played in Virginia. He "holds over" Mayo in one respect—he will study, and study hard, too—and Mayo won't.
In an editorial setting forth the palpable fact that California and Nevada are cutting their own throats by their mistaken sagacity in hanging on to their double-eagle circulating medium, instead of smoothing the way for the adoption of greenbacks as our currency, the Flag touches upon several matters of immediate interest to Washoe, and I make an extract:
In the large city of Virginia, the San Francisco system of moneyed exclusiveness prevails completely. Two or three usurers have taken advantage of the necessities of the community and, upon loans at exorbitant interest, obtained some sort of possession of nearly all of the real estate and house property in the city. The Bank of California through its various connections, has worked itself into the proprietorship of the most valuable mines, and this has been accomplished by first depreciating the stock and then buying it under the stress of "a stock panic." Men who cannot sustain the depreciation, maintain their credit and transact their business independent of a high value of their mining stock, must yield in order to ease their fall, and then, as they become ruined, they witness the outrage of their ruin, and retire in despair from enterprise and competition. The stock market has lately been unusually depressed. The California speculators and Specific Contract fellows of the two States have caused the depression, and now, having absorbed nearly all of the mining property, they are preparing to create a "revival" of stock speculation whereby they will again deceive the public, realize enormous sums and effect new ruin in every direction but their own.
I do not know why I should head these two items from the Call "personal," but I do:
THE "TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE."—This admirably conducted paper has entered on its eighth year of existence.
CHANGED.—The Virginia Union has changed from a morning to an evening paper. It manifests a restlessness which may precede speedy dissolution.
A French broker on Montgomery street quarreled with his rival in a tender affair, the other day, and a challenge passed, and was accepted. The seconds determined to merely load the pistols with blank cartridges, and have some fun out of the matter; but they got to drinking rather freely, ran all night, and when the party arrived on the dueling ground, at early dawn, the seconds were not sober enough to act their part with sufficient gravity to carry their plan through successfully. The principals discovered that they were being trifled with, and indignantly left the ground. I could get no names. All I could find out was that the seconds were two well-known "sports," that the challenge was sent and accepted in good faith, and that one of the principals was a broker.
The Alta is most unusually and astonishingly brilliant this morning. I cannot do better than give it space and let it illumine your columns. It lets off a level column of editorial to prove that bees eat clover; mice eat bees; cats eat mice; cats bask in the sun; the spots on the sun derange the electric currents; that derangement produces earthquakes; earthquakes make cold weather; and the bees, and the mice, and the cats, and the spots on the sun, and the electric currents, and the earthquakes, and the cold weather, mingling together in one grand fatal combination, produce cholera! Listen to the Alta:
We know that we have sometimes to go a long way around to trace an effect to its cause. Darwin, in "The Origin of Species," states a fact which may be used with advantage in illustration, viz.: The presence of a large number of cats in a village is favorable to the spread of red clover. The reader will at once exclaim—what on earth can cats have to do with that species of the genus trifolium? The answer is—the humble-bee, by a peculiarity of its organization, can alone extract the nectar from the flower of the red clover. In passing from flower to flower it conveys the pollen necessary for the fertilization and consequent spread of the plant. The field mice prey upon the humble-bee, break up its nests, and eat its stores of honey, while the cats destroy the mice; hence it follows that in the natural propagation of the plant in question, the feline tribe perform an important part. Bearing such curious revelations as these in mind, it is easy enough to present a theory to cover the case of mother earth at this time, namely: that the spots on the face of the sun derange the electric currents of the earth; that the derangement of the electric currents produces earthquakes; that earthquakes contribute to cold weather, by permitting the escape of some of the caloric of the interior of the globe, and that all these changes, in some way, are the cause of the rinder-pest and cholera.
Solomon's wisdom was foolishness to this.
MARK TWAIN
Territorial Enterprise, December 26-27, 1865
[portion of San Francisco Letter written December 23, 1865]
A Mr. P. M. Scoofy, of this city, has been raising oysters for two years past, on the Mexican coast, and his first harvest—eight tons—arrived yesterday on the John L. Stephens. They arrived in admirable condition—finer and fatter than they were when they started; for oysters enjoy traveling, and thrive on it; and they learn a good deal more on a flying trip than George Marshall did, and nearly as much as some other Washoe European tourists I could mention, but they are dignified and do not gabble about it so much. I would rather have the society of a traveled oyster than that of George Marshall, because I would not hesitate to show my displeasure if that oyster were to suddenly become gay and talkative, and say: "I was in England, you know, by G—; I went up to Liverpool and there I took the cars and went to London, by _____ _____; I been in Pall Mall, and Cheapside, and Whitefriars, and all them places—been in all of 'em: I been in the Tower of London, and seen all them d—d armors and things they used to wear in an early day; I hired a feller for a shil'n', and he took me all around there and showed me the whole hell-fired arrangement, you know, by G—; and I give him a glass of of'n-of, as they call it, and he jus' froze to me. You show one of them fellers the color of a bit, and he'll stay with you all day, by _____ _____. And I went to Rome—that ain't no slouch of a town, you know—and old? _____ _____! you bet your life. There ain't anything like it in this country—you can't put up any idea how it is; you can't tell a d—d thing about Rome 'thout you see it, by. And I been to Paris—Parree, French call it—you never hear them say Parriss—they would laugh if they was to hear any body call it Parriss, you know. I was there three weeks. I was on the Pong-Nuff, and I been to the Pal-lay Ro-yoll and the Tweeleree, all them d—d places, and the Boolyver and the Boys dee Bullone. I stood there in the Boys dee Bullone and see old Loois Napoleon and his wife come by in his carrage—I was as close to him as from here to that counter there, by G—; I see him take his hat off and bow to them whoopin' French bilks by _____ _____; I stood right there that close—as close as that counter when he went by; I was close enough to a spit in his face if I'd been a mind to, by Hell, a feller might live here a million years, and what would he ever see, by G-d. Parree's the place—style, there, you know—people got money, there, by _____ _____. Let's take a drink, by G—." I wouldn't let a traveled oyster inflict that sort of thing on me, you understand, and refer to the Deity, and to the Savior by his full name, to verify every other important statement. I would rather have the oyster's company than Marshall's when his reminiscences are big within him, but the moment I received the information that "I been to Europe, and all them places, by G—," I would start that oyster on a journey that would astonish it more than all the wonders of "Parree" and "all them d—d places" combined.
I have forgotten what I was going to say about Mr. Scoofy and his Mexican oyster farm, but it don't matter. The main thing is that he will hereafter endeavor to keep this market supplied with his delicious marine fruit; and another great point is that his Mexican oysters are as far superior to the poor little insipid things we are accustomed to here, as is the information furnished by Alexander Von Humboldt concerning foreign lands to that which one may glean from George Marshall in the course of a brief brandy-punch tournament.
San Francisco is a city of startling events. Happy is the man whose destiny it is to gather them up and record them in a daily newspaper! That sense of conferring benefit, profit and innocent pleasure upon one's fellow-creatures which is so cheering, so calmly blissful to the plodding pilgrim here below, is his, every day in the year. When he gets up in the morning he can do as old Franklin did, and say, "This day, and all days, shall be unselfishly devoted to the good of my fellow-creatures—to the amelioration of their condition—to the conferring of happiness upon them—to the storing of their minds with wisdom which shall fit them for their struggle with the hard world, here, and for the enjoyment of a glad eternity hereafter. And thus striving, so shall I be blessed!" And when he goes home at night, he can exult and say: "Through the labors of these hands and this brain, which God hath given me, blessed and wise are my fellow-creatures this day!
"I have told them of the wonder of the swindling of the friend of Bain, the unknown Bain from Petaluma Creek, by the obscure Catharine McCarthy, out of $300—and told it with entertaining verbosity in half a column.
"I have told them that Christmas is coming, and people go strangely about, buying things—I have said it in forty lines.
"I related how a vile burglar entered a house to rob, and actually went away again when he found he was discovered. I told it briefly, in thirty-five lines.
"In forty lines I told how a man swindled a Chinaman out of a couple of shirts, and for fear the matter might seem trivial, I made a pretense of only having mentioned it in order to base upon it a criticism upon a grave defect in our laws.
"I fulminated again, in a covert way, the singular conceit that Christmas is at hand, and said people were going about in the most unaccountable way buying stuff to eat, in the markets—52 lines.
"I glorified a fearful conflagration that came so near burning something, that I shudder even now to think of it. Three thousand dollars worth of goods destroyed by water—a man then went up and put out the fire with a bucket of water. I puffed our fine fire organization—64 lines.
"I printed some other extraordinary occurrences—runaway horse—28 lines; dog fight—30 lines; Chinaman captured by officer Rose for stealing chickens—90 lines; unknown Chinaman dead on Sacramento steamer—5 lines; several 'Fourteener' items, concerning people frightened and boots stolen—52 lines; case of soldier stealing a washboard worth fifty cents—three-quarters of a column. Much other wisdom I disseminated, and for these things let my reward come hereafter."
And his reward will come hereafter—and I am sorry enough to think it. But such startling things do happen every day in this strange city!—and how dangerously exciting must be the employment of writing them up for the daily papers!
I spoke to you a day or two ago about the terrific panorama with which the proprietors of the new swimming baths out at South Park have glorified the ample front of their building by way of a sign. It never entered my head that any one's modesty would be shocked by that distressing caricature, but we live to learn, and I was mistaken. Some of the citizens of that vicinage complain that the picture is obscene, and they have taken steps to present it before the proper authorities as a nuisance! Oh, but this is air-drawn delicacy!
The dreadful picture is about thirty feet long and eight or ten feet wide. It is painted in defiance of all rules of art and the possibilities of nature. It represents a square tank as large as a plaza, and surrounded by long bulkheads of highly ornamental bath-room doors, after the fashion of steamboat cabin architecture. At one end a fountain squirts a vast spray of water into the air. Here and there men are seen jumping from spring-boards into the great tank; other men are swimming about in all sorts of attitudes except natural and passable ones. Two bald-headed patriarchs are skylarking around a small boat like a pair of schoolboys. Expensively dressed men are seen coming in to bathe, and other expensively dressed gentlemen are seen leaving the place after having performed their ablutions. The swimmers are the ones the fastidious South Parkers object to. Yet they make exactly the same appearance in that picture that daring equestrians and acrobats do in the circus bills. They are dressed about the loins in an exceedingly short pair of pantaloons, and the remainder of their bodies is naked or clad in tights—it is impossible to determine which. Their legs look like prize carrots, though this is not a good flesh color; wherefore I think the bath man will be able to demonstrate, on his trial, that his model artists are necessarily dressed in tights, since nature never painted human legs of such a preposterous color. This will establish the fact that his sign is not indelicate, and he will be allowed to go free and be no further molested. You only need to look once at that barbarous piece of mud-daubing to appreciate the absurdity of any one's modesty being offended by it. I have no doubt all those who are complaining of this sign went to see the Menken play Mazeppa in her much scantier attire, and blushed not.
Territorial Enterprise, December 10-31, 1865
[portion of San Francisco Letter]
One would hardly expect to receive a neat, voluntary compliment from so grave an institution as the United States Revenue Office, but such has been my good fortune. I have not been so agreeably surprised in many a day. The Revenue officers, in a communication addressed to me, fondle the flattering fiction that I am a man of means, and have got "goods, chattels and effects"—and even "real estate!" Gentlemen, you couldn't have paid such a compliment as that to any man who would appreciate it higher, or be more grateful for it than myself. We will drink together, if you object not.
I am taxed on my income! This is perfectly gorgeous! I never felt so important in my life before. To be treated in this splendid way, just like another William B. Astor! Gentlemen, we must drink.
Yes, I am taxed on my income. And the printed paper which bears this compliment—all slathered over with fierce-looking written figures—looks as grand as a steamboat's manifest. It reads thus:
"COLLECTOR'S OFFICE,
U. S. INTERNAL REVENUE, FIRST DIS'T. CAL.
Name—M. Twain
Residence—At Large
List and amount of tax—$31.25
Penalty—3.12
Warrant—2.45
Total amount—$36.82
Date—November 20, 1865.
C. ST GG,
Deputy Collector.
Please present this at the Collector's office."
Now I consider that really handsome. I have got it framed beautifully, and I take more pride in it than any of my other furniture. I trust it will become an heirloom and serve to show many generations of my posterity that I was a man of consequence in the land—that I was also the recipient of compliments of the most extraordinary nature from high officers of the national government.
On the other side of this complimentary document I find some happy blank verse headed "Warrant," and signed by the poet "Frank Soule, Collector of Internal Revenue." Some of the flights of fancy in this Ode are really sublime, and show with what facility the poetic fire can render beautiful the most unpromising subject. For instance: "You are hereby commanded to distrain upon so much of the goods, chattels and effects of the within named person, if any such can be found, etc." However, that is not so much a flight of fancy as a flight of humor. It is a fine flight, though, anyway. But this one is equal to anything in Shakspeare: "But in case sufficient goods, chattels and effects cannot be found, then you are hereby commanded to seize so much of the real estate of said person as may be necessary to satisfy the tax." There's poetry for you! They are going to commence on my real estate. This is very rough. But then the officer is expressly instructed to find it first. That is the saving clause for me. I will get them to take it all out in real estate. And then I will give them all the time they want to find it in.
But I can tell them of a way whereby they can ultimately enrich the Government of the United States by a judicious manipulation of this little bill against me—a way in which even the enormous national debt may be eventually paid off! Think of it! Imperishable fame will be the reward of the man who finds a way to pay off the national debt without impoverishing the land; I offer to furnish that method and crown these gentlemen with that fadeless glory. It is so simple and plain that a child may understand it. It is thus: I perceive that by neglecting to pay my income tax within ten days after it was due, I have brought upon myself a "penalty" of three dollars and twelve cents extra tax for that ten days. Don't you see?—let her run! Every ten days, $3.12; every month of 31 days, $10; every year, $120; every century, $12,000; at the end of a hundred thousand years, $1,200,000,000 will be the interest that has accumulated...
Territorial Enterprise, December 1865
THE BLACK HOLE OF SAN FRANCISCO
If I were Police Judge here, I would hold my court in the city prison and sentence my convicts to imprisonment in the present Police Court room. That would be capital punishment—it would be the Spartan doom of death for all crimes, whether important or insignificant. The Police Court room, with its deadly miasma, killed Judge Shepheard and Dick Robinson, the old reporter, and will kill Judge Rix, and Fitz Smythe also. The papers are just now abusing the police room—a thing which they do in concert every month. This time, however, they are more than usually exercised, because somebody has gone and built a house right before the only window the room had, and so it is midnight there during every hour of the twenty-four, and gas has to be burned while all other people are burning daylight.
That Police Court room is not a nice place. It is the infernalest smelling den on earth, perhaps. A deserted slaughter-house, festering in the sun, is bearable, because it only has one smell, albeit it is a lively one; a soap-factory has its disagreeable features, but the soap-factory has but one smell, also; to stand to leeward of a sweating negro is rough, but even a sweating negro has but one smell; the salute of the playful polecat has its little drawbacks, but even the playful polecat has but one smell, and you can bury yourself to the chin in damp sand and get rid of the odor eventually. Once enter the Police Court though—once get yourself saturated with the fearful combination of miraculous stenches that infect its atmosphere, and neither sand nor salvation can ever purify you any more! You will smell like a polecat, like a slaughter-house, like a soap-factory, like a sweating negro, like a graveyard after an earthquake—for all time to come—and you will have a breath like a buzzard. You enter the door of the Police Court, and your nostrils are saluted with an awful stench; you think it emanates from Mr. Hess, the officer in charge of the door; you say to yourself, "Some animal has crawled down this poor man's throat and died"; you step further in, and you smell the same smell, with another, still more villainous, added to it; you remark to yourself, "This is wrong—very wrong; these spectators ought to have been buried days ago." You go a step further and you smell the same two smells, and another more ghastly than both put together; you think it comes from the spectators on the right. You go further and a fourth, still more powerful, is added to your three horrible smells; and you say to yourself, "These lawyers are too far gone—chloride of lime would be of no benefit here." One more step, and you smell the Judge; you reel, and gasp; you stagger to the right and smell the Prosecuting Attorney—worse and worse; you stagger fainting to the left, and your doom is sealed; you enter the fatal blue mist where ten reporters sit and stink from morning until night—and down you go! You are carried out on a shutter, and you cannot stay in the same room with yourself five minutes at a time for weeks.
You cannot imagine what a horrible hole that Police Court is. The cholera itself couldn't stand it there. The room is about 24 x 40 feet in size, I suppose, and is blocked in on all sides by massive brick walls; it has three or four doors, but they are never opened—and if they were they only open into airless courts and closets anyhow; it has but one window, and now that is blocked up, as I was telling you; there is not a solitary air-hole as big as your nostril about the whole place. Very well; down two sides of the room, drunken filthy loafers, thieves, prostitutes, China chicken-stealers, witnesses, and slimy guttersnipes who come to see, and belch and issue deadly smells, are banked and packed, four ranks deep—a solid mass of rotting, steaming corruption. In the centre of the room are Dan Murphy, Zabriskie, the Citizen Sam Platt, Prosecuting Attorney Louderback, and other lawyers, either of whom would do for a censer to swing before the high altar of hell. Then, near the Judge are a crowd of reporters—a kind of cattle that did never smell good in any land. The house is full—so full that you have to actually squirm and shoulder your way from one part of it to another—and not a single crack or crevice in the walls to let in one poor breath of God's pure air! The dead, exhausted, poisoned atmosphere looks absolutely blue and filmy, sometimes—did when they had a little daylight. Now they have only gas-light and the added heat it brings. Another Judge will die shortly if this thing goes on.
Territorial Enterprise, December 1865
[written December 29, 1865]
INSPIRATION OF LOUDERBACK
Louderback, Prosecuting Attorney in the Police Court, has discovered something at last. How it thrills me to think of it! For two long years I have waited patiently for that man to discover something, and he never could do it. He has always gone through with his same old formula, in every case before the Court, and has never shown any inclination to branch out into anything fresh. That formula was as follows: Mr. Louderback addresses the witness:
"Did this all happen in the city'n county of San Francisco?"
Witness—"Yes."
L.—"You are sure of that, now?"
W—"Yes, sure."
L.—(With severity)—"Remember, you are on your oath—we can't have any prevarication here. You are certain it all happened in the city'n county of San Francisco?"
W—"Yes; certain. I know it did."
L.—(To witness)—"That'll do—set down" (To Judge)—"Your honor, I don't think there is any use in hearing the evidence on the other side—the defendant appears to be guilty."
As long as he flows along comfortably in that regular old groove of his, Louderback is bound to succeed—is bound to succeed as well as he ever has done. And why he should suddenly bulge out and go to "discovering" things in this startling and unexpected manner, is a mystery to me, and must be a source of distress and uneasiness to his nurse. But here is what the Call says:
A practice has obtained in the Police Court, which will no doubt convince the public that San Francisco practitioners are as shrewd as 'Philadelphia lawyers.' It is a habit certain attorneys have of engaging to defend a person charged with some petty offense, and getting some other person to represent them, while they state to the Court that they are retained on behalf of the prosecution, and then have the Court dismiss the case without investigation, by stating there is no prospect of obtaining a conviction, and that the time of the Court would be needlessly occupied. The Prosecuting Attorney has discovered the dodge, and will hereafter resist all such motions.
"The Prosecuting Attorney has discovered the dodge"—the Prosecuting Attorney discovered it! Good God!
Territorial Enterprise, December 31, 1865
[portion of San Francisco Letter written December 28, 1865]
Some one (I do not know who,) left me a card photograph, yesterday, which I do not know just what to do with. It has the names of Dan De Quille, W. M. Gillespie, Alf. Doten, Robert Lowery and Charles A. Parker on it, and appears to be a pictured group of notorious convicts, or something of that kind. I only judge by the countenances, for I am not acquainted with these people, and do not usually associate with such characters. This is the worst lot of human faces I have ever seen. That of the murderer Doten, (murderer, isn't he?) is sufficient to chill the strongest heart. The cool self-possession of the burglar Parker marks the man capable of performing deeds of daring confiscation at dead of night, unmoved by surrounding perils. The face of the Thug, De Quille, with its expression of pitiless malignity, is a study. Those of the light fingered gentry, Lowery and Gillespie, show that ineffable repose and self-complacency so deftly assumed by such characters after having nipped an overcoat or a pair of brass candlesticks and are aware that officers have suspected and are watching them. I am very glad to have this picture to keep in my room, as a hermit keeps a skull, to remind me what I may some day become myself. I have permitted the Chief of Police to take a copy of it, for obvious reasons.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
There was a good deal of visiting done here on New Year's Day. The air was balmy and spring-like, and the day was in every way suited to that sort of business. I say business, because it is more like business than pleasure when you call at a house where all are strangers, and the majority of one's New Year's Calls are necessarily of that description. You soon run through the list of your personal friends—and that part of the day's performances affords you genuine satisfaction—and then Smith comes along and puts you through your paces before a hundred people who treat you kindly, but whom you dare not joke with. You can be as easy and comfortable as a mud-turtle astraddle of a sawyer, but you must observe some show of decorum—you must behave yourself. It is irksome to me to behave myself. Therefore, I had rather call on people who know me and will kindly leave me entirely unrestrained, and simply employ themselves in looking out for the spoons.
When I started out visiting, at noon, the atmosphere was laden with a sweet perfume—a grateful incense that told of flowers, and green fields, and breezy forests far away. But this was only soda-water sentiment, for I soon discovered that these were the odors of the barber shop, and came from the heads of small squads of carefully-dressed young men who were out paying their annual calls.
I took wine at one house and some fruit at another, and after that I began to yearn for some breakfast. It took me two hours to get it. A lady had just given me the freedom of her table when a crowd of gentlemen arrived and my sense of propriety compelled me to destroy nothing more than a cup of excellent coffee. At the next house I got no further than coffee again, being similarly interrupted; at the next point of attack there were too many strange young ladies present, and at the next and the next, something always happened to interfere with my arrangements. I do not know, but perhaps it would be better to defer one's New Year's calls until after breakfast. I did finally corral that meal, and in the house of a stranger—a stranger, too, who was so pleasant that I was almost tempted to create a famine in her house.
It used to be customary for people to drink too much in the course of their annual visits, but few offended in this way on this occasion. I saw one well-dressed gentleman sitting on the curb-stone, propping his face between his knees, and clasping his shins with his hands; but he was the only caller I saw so much discouraged during the whole day. He said he had started out most too early, and I suppose he was right. Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms. Some of the ladies dressed "in character" on New Year's. I found Faith, Hope and Charity in one house, dealing out claret punch and kisses to the annual pilgrims. They had two kinds of kisses—those which you bite and "chaw" and swallow, and those which you simply taste, and then lick your chops and feel streaky. The only defect there was in the arrangement was that you were not permitted to take your choice. Two other ladies personated Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth; I also found a Cleopatra and a Hebe and a Semiramis and a Maria Antoinette; also a Beauty and the Beast. A young lady, formerly of Carson, was the Beauty, and took the character well; and I suppose Beecher was the Beast, but he was not calculated for the part. I think those are very neat compliments for both parties.
When it came to visiting among strangers, at last, I soon grew tired and quit. You enter with your friend and are introduced formally to some formal looking ladies. You bow painfully and wish the party a happy New Year. You then learn that the party desire that a like good fortune may fall to your lot. You are invited to sit down, and you do so. About this time the door-bell rings, and Jones, Brown and Murphy bluster in and bring the familiar fragrance of the barber shop with them. They are acquainted. They inquire cordially after the absent members of the family and the distant relatives of the same, and relate laughable adventures of the morning that haven't got anything funny about them. Then they cast up accounts and determine how many calls they have made and how many they have got to inflict yet. The ladies respond by exhibiting a balance sheet of their own New Year's Day transactions. Yourself and your friend are then conducted with funeral solemnity into the back parlor, where you sip some wine with imposing ceremony. If your human instincts get the upper hand of you and you explode a joke, an awful sensation creeps over you such as a man experiences when he catches himself whistling at a funeral. It is time for you to go, then.
New Year's was pretty generally enjoyed here, up stairs and down. At one place where I called, a servant girl was needed, for something, and the bell was rung for her several times without effect. Madame went below to see what the matter was, and found Bridget keeping "open house" and entertaining thirteen muscular callers in one batch. Up stairs there had been only eleven calls received, all told. One chambermaid notified her mistress that extra help must be procured for New Year's Day, as she and the cook had made arrangements to keep open house in the kitchen, and they desired that their visitors should not be discommoded by interruptions emanating from above stairs. I am told that nearly all the Biddies in town kept open house. Some of them set finer tables than their mistresses. The reason was because the latter did not consider anything more than tea and coffee and cakes necessary for their tables (being church members) but the former seized upon wines, brandies and all the hidden luxuries the closets afforded. Some people affect to think servant girls won't take liberties with people's things, but I suppose it is a mistake.
[Reprinted in the Golden Era, JAN. 14, 1866.]
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
[Dated January 8, 1866]
Nigger never spoke truer word. White man is mighty "onsartain." An instance of it is to be found in the ingenious manipulation of a certain recent speculation here by a white man whom I have in my mind's eye at present.
A small swimming bath was constructed out yonder at North Beach, as a sort of novel experiment, and everybody was surprised to see what a rush was made to it and what a thriving speculation it at once became. Many a smart man wished the idea had occurred to him, and then thought no more about it. Others pondered over it and thought the experiment might bear repetition, but then there was an uncomfortable possibility of the reverse proving the case. Mr. Aleck Badlam, late a member of the California Legislature, but latterly acting in the double capacity of nephew and business agent to Mr. Samuel Brannan, belonged to the latter class, but was rather more hopeful, more energetic and more fertile in expedients than the rest. He went to work and got up a joint stock association, composed of men with good bank accounts, and announced in the public prints that this association would immediately commence the construction of a colossal swimming bath, with all manner of admirable conveniences and accommodations, away out in Third Street opposite South Park. Many people went on swimming in the pioneer bath, and many others in the Bay, and both parties said the new speculation would prove a disastrous failure, and that they were sorry for the projectors of it, etc., and then bothered no more about it. In a day or two the local reporters fell heirs to a refreshing sensation and were made happy—a genuine shark was harpooned in the Bay of San Francisco! It was brought to town and was visited by crowds of timid citizens while it lay in state in the market place. Mr. Badlam went at once to the various newspaper offices and told the reporters, and was greeted with the ancient formula: "That's bully—there's pen and ink, write it up for a fellow, can't you?"—(you know if you walk a mile to accommodate one of these thieves with an item, he will always impose upon you, with infernal effrontery, the labor of writing it up for him, if you will stand it). Mr. Badlam wrote up the shark item. A few days elapsed, the sensation was cooling down and beginning to be forgotten, when another shark was harpooned in the Bay and exposed to view in the market. People shuddered again. Mr. Badlam went and told the reporters; the reporters got him to write it up. In the course of three days another shark was harpooned in the Bay and placed on exhibition. People began to show signs of uneasiness. Mr. Badlam told the reporters and wrote it up. The new swimming bath was being rushed forward to completion with all possible dispatch. From this time on, for the next six weeks a shark cashed in his checks every twenty-four hours in the Bay of San Francisco. Mr. Badlam discontinued the ceremony of telling the reporters, but he always came at 1 o'clock in the afternoon with several slips of manuscript, laid one down on the reporter's table, said "Shark item," and departed toward the next newspaper office on his regular beat. People began to say "Why, blame these sharks, the Bay's full of them—it ain't hardly as healthy to swim there as it used to was"—and they stopped swimming there. Reporters got to depending on the customary shark item pretty much as a matter of course, and the printers got to making these items "fat" by keeping them "standing" and making such unimportant alterations in them as the variations in the localities of the shark-killing demanded.
The fact of the business was, that Mr. Badlam, that "onsartain white man," had imported the old original shark from the coast of Mexico, and paid some Italian fishermen to take him out in the Bay and harpoon him, and then fetch him ashore and exhibit him in the market place. It was all in the way of business; he wanted to discourage bathing in the Bay and pave the way for the success of his great bath-house scheme at a later day. It is but just to say that he did make bathing in the Bay exceedingly unpopular. He imported all his sharks, and he kept a detachment of shark-killers under regular pay. Sharks come pretty high—sharks are very expensive and he economized occasionally by having the same old shark harpooned and exhibited over and over again as long as he would hang together; and when he had to bring on a fresh one he would vary the interest in the thing by having the fish captured alive and towed ashore and exposed to public view in all his native ferocity; and once he got a number of young pigs killed and scraped clean, towed a shark out in the Bay, fed the pigs to him, towed him back again and landed him at the head of the Long Bridge when there were about two thousand people promenading on it, got a multitude collected around the spot, killed and cut the shark open, took several chunks of the delicate white young pork out of its stomach, and then hid his face in his handkerchief and said with manifest emotion: "Oh God, this fellow's been eating a child—ah, how sad, how sad!" This culminating stroke of genius crowned Mr. Badlam's patient, long-continued efforts with a splendid success—no man has bathed in the Bay since Mr. B. wrote that item up and travelled his regular newspaper route with it. His labors were over, the bath-house was nearly finished, and he had nothing but easy sailing before him from that time forward. In a few days his monstrous tank was completed and the water turned on, and the very first day he opened business with a hundred and fifty swimmers an hour on an average, and a hundred and fifty more standing around in Menken costume waiting for a chance. There is nothing like trying, you know; and all experience teaches us that the best way to ascertain a thing is to find it. But when it comes to believing all the shark items a sagacious strategist favors you with in the papers, it is well to remember that the wise nigger saith "white man mighty onsartain."
The Alta of this morning publishes a correct statement of the embezzlement by young Macy of $39,000 from the mint, and you can copy it; but there are some little matters in the background which always come within a correspondent's province in cases of this kind, but which are usually omitted from the accounts in the local press, and these I will talk about. Mr. Cheeseman is U.S. Sub Treasurer, and ex officio treasurer of the mint. Macy, his brother in-law, was his paying clerk—his cashier. He is a green, gawky young fellow about twenty-four or—five years old; and by a glance at his gait and the shape of his head and his general appearance, an experienced business man would judge his capacity to be about equal to the earning of, say fifty dollars a month. But he was the Sub-Treasurer's brother-in-law—he was a barnacle, and had to be provided with a place in the Circumlocution Office, whether he knew enough to come in out of the rain or not. So he was made paying clerk, at a salary of $2,500 a year, and placed in a position where twenty millions in gold coin and oceans of greenbacks passed through his hands in the course of a year. Mr. Swain, the Superintendent of the mint, did not fancy this appointment, but it was out of his jurisdiction. Mr. Cheeseman has the appointing of his own clerks, although all their reports must be made finally to the Superintendent, and all their acts come under his supervision.
Naturally there was nothing bad about young Macy, but it is believed—well, I might go so far as to say it was known—that some mining speculators got around him and persuaded him to put mint funds in stocks, promising to "stand behind him." He did so, and they stood behind him until the crash in stocks warned them to stand some where else and then they dropped him—having made what they could out of him, no doubt. He had been speculating on the mint's money six months before he was found out—the work men occasionally going without their wages in the meantime because of the lack of supplies. Mr. Swain's suspicions were first aroused by seeing him so frequently in company with speculators and hearing so often on the street of his transactions in heavy stocks. But Macy's books came out right every month and nothing could be shown against him. One of his thefts was a bold one. The coiner sent him three "melts" at different times—three batches of gold coin—two of a hundred thousand dollars each and one of a hundred and twenty thousand. Each had the usual "tag," describing the amount contained. Macy removed and tore up the $120,000 "tag," and sent to the coiner a message that he had lost the tag from one of the $100,000 batches—a thing which sometimes occurs. The coiner sent him the necessary substitute, and he altered the date and placed the new tag on the $120,000 "melt"; but he carried off the extra $20,000 first.
At the last quarterly examination the money and the books were all right, but Macy displayed such distress and trepidation during the examination that he excited the suspicions of more than one of the mint officials; he had been shinning around the streets all day long, too, and it was thought that he had been getting a temporary loan to make his accounts straight with. Such a rigid surveillance was commenced then, and so many informal examinations instituted, that Macy finally packed and ran off. This was in December. The facts of this embezzlement have only just come to light and its full extent only just now finally ferreted out and made known to the public, but the Department at Washington has been kept posted upon the subject by telegraph from time to time during the last two or three weeks.
Saw two or three dozen invited guests in the new bath and a free champagne blow-out served up for them in an ante-room. The water was seven feet deep, and there was 300,000 gallons of it, heated to a pleasant temperature, barring the cold streaks here and there. Each man has a little stateroom to himself and a couple of towels. The price of the baths is one for 25 cents or 3 for a dollar, and you can swim an hour. Mr. Nash's swimming pupils pay $10 a month or $20 for 3 months, and bathe whenever they please. There are spring boards, parallel bars, rings, flying trapeze, ladders—a complete gymnasium—suspended over the water. Among the swimmers were—but as these individuals are represented in the panoramic sign on the front of the bath house, I will merely talk of their portraits and say nothing of their swimming. It is my duty to explain that sign, because many people imagine it is a fancy sketch, and are distressed to think any artist would be so depraved as to paint such impossible figures and faces and elevate the devilish libel in full view without a word of apology.
In the bath-house sign are very correct likenesses of the chief stockholders, and are as follows: The fleshy, smiling, bald-headed man hanging to the middle of the little life boat, is Mr. O. P. Sutton, in the banking interest. The bald headed man hanging on near the stern of the boat, is Mr. Aleck Badlam, the shark-fancier. The man on the left, who is just starting on the spring-board, is Col. Monstery, the fencing-master. The inverted young man on the bow of the boat who is performing some kind of extraordinary gymnastic feat and appears to have got it a little mixed, is Captain McComb. The central figure, swinging on the trapeze, is Mr. Edward Smith, of the banking interest. The half-submerged figure diving head-foremost at the right of the central fountain, is Mr. A. J. Snyder, the carpenter and builder, and is a very correct portrait as far as it goes. The handsome fat man facing you from the stateroom door on the extreme left, is Mr. Louis Cohn, and is considered a masterpiece of portrait painting. I cannot recognize the stockholder immediately under the spring board on the left, on account of his truly extraordinary position. It may be Fitz Smythe. The gentleman who is splashing himself behind the figure in the swing, and [has] upon his countenance an expression of lively enjoyment, is Professor Nash. The figure in the swing is most too many for me. It may be Menken, or it may be Jeff. Davis, or it may be some other man or some other woman. It is the very picture that so exasperates the South Parkers. It has got baggy breasts like a squaw, and the hips have the ample and rounded swell which belong to the female shape; but the head is masculine. That figure has worried the ladies of South Park a good deal, and it worries me just as much. I shall have to let this personage swing on undisturbed, and leave it to a wiser head to determine the sex and discover the name that belongs to it. It would be very uncomfortable, now, if it should turn out that I have been mistaken, and this remarkable picture should never have been intended for a collection of portraits, after all—in which case I beg pardon.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
I have seen some of the beautiful opals they find in Calaveras county near Mokelumne Hill. Some of them are very handsome. A day or two ago I was shown an Idaho diamond. It was very pure and brilliant, and was said to be a genuine diamond, and of the first water. I compared it with a couple of splendid twenty-five hundred dollar Brazilian diamonds in Tucker's window which have been dazzling people's eyes and attracting considerable attention for a few days past, and I could not swear to any difference. That amounts to something although I am not an expert where it comes to estimating the value and fineness of diamonds. And now they are finding superb moss agates and other precious stones on the river bank right up here at Martinez. This reminds me that there is a hill-side down the gulch below Aurora, Esmeralda, which is covered with round, hard, knotty-surfaced little boulders which display the most beautiful agates when broken open. Might not the Esmeralda people find it profitable to send a bushel or two of those things to the Eastern markets? Nobody cared anything about them when I was there three years ago.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
[dated January 11, 1866]
By Fitz Smythe!
The usual quiet of our city was rudely broken in upon this morning by the appearance in the Alta of one of those terrible solid column romances about the hair-breadth escapes and prodigies of detective sagacity of the San Francisco police—written by the felicitous novelist, Fitz Smythe. It is put up in regular chapters, with sub-headings, as is Fitz Smythe's custom, when he fulminates a stunning sensation.
Chapter I. is headed "The Koinickers"—dark and mysterious.
Chapter II. is headed "A New Koinicker in the Field!"—the plot thickens.
Then comes Chapter IV.—"The Police after him!"—exciting times.
Chapter V.—"The Decoy Duck?—more mystery.
Chapter VI.—"The New Decoy!"—the red hand of crime begins to show—somewhere.
Chapter VII.—"The Arrest! "—startling situation—thunder and lightning—blue lights burning.
Chapter VIII.—"The 'Queer' Obtained!"—thrilling revelations.
Chapter IX.—"The Conviction!"—closing in, closing in; the wicked are about to be punished, and the good rewarded.
Chapter X.—"Conclusion." The scattered threads are drawn together into one woof; the bad characters are sent to prison, to go from thence to [hell]; detective Lees marries detective Ellis; Chief Burke elevates his eyes and hands over the two kneeling figures and says unctuously, "God bless you my children—God bless you!" All the good characters are happy, even down to Fitz Smythe and his horse—the former in a chance to go through a Chinese funeral dinner, and the latter in the opportunity of eating up a tank of warm asphaltum while the workmen are gone to dinner.
Oh, but this is a lovely romance! And only think of the subject—the police! Think of a man going among the police for the hero of a novel!—unless he wanted a highwayman, or something of that kind.
The romance is gotten up with several objects in view. One is to show how mean a thing it is to call for investigations of police affairs as Dr. Rowell is doing; another is to try and bolster up the Grand Jury's recent "vindication" of the Police Department—the other day—a "vindication" which the public did not accept with as much confidence as they would if it had come from Heaven; another is to show that the stool-pigeon Ned Wellington—"Indian Ned"—who was appointed a special officer by Burke, is no more of a thief or a rascal than many another man on the force, and I think that is unjust to Wellington; and another object—an eternal one with Fitz Smythe—is to glorify his god, the police. This latter is a disease with him; it breaks out all over the Alta every day; and it phazes Smythe worse than the small-pox. Even his horse has become infected by the distemper, and will not bite a police man.
The unfiligreed facts in Smythe's column romance—or at least the facts in the case from which the romance was drawn—may be summed up in a few words, by leaving out the customary adulation of the inspired detectives: A counterfeiter named Farrell came here from the East; the police got after him in their bungling style and seared him away; he went to Virginia, and took $10,000 counterfeit money with him, and buried it under a house, where your police discovered and captured it; he returned here and a "decoy duck" was put on his track and appointed a special policeman—Ned Wellington—or "Smith" as Fitz Smythe with characteristic delicacy calls him in the romance, though why he should is not very plain, since Wellington is more notorious than Fitz Smythe himself. "Smith" was cunning, and trapped Farrell—though of course Smythe gives all the credit to Lees and Ellis. But now comes more trouble—"Smith" can show a commission—show that, "reposing especial confidence in the honesty, integrity," etc., etc., the Police Commissioners—one of whom was the Police Judge—had appointed him to a responsible position in the service of the city, and yet his character is so bad that it will not do to bring him on the stand to testify! More evidence must be had. Another stool-pigeon is put to work with "Smith"—one "Robert G. Crawford, the assumed name of a private clerk of Chief Burke," as Smythe says. [This man's real name was T. B. Fargo, alias Fogo, alias Howard, alias Crawford, and he was a grand rascal of considerable note, notwithstanding he was Chief Burke's confidential clerk.] The two pigeons worked the case through to a successful conclusion. Farrell's counterfeit money was captured, and Farrell himself sent to the Penitentiary. As is entirely proper, Fitz Smythe gives the credit to detective Lees, and glorifies him to the skies. There is the romance—all there is of it worth knowing or printing—yet it is turned into a novel of ten distinct chapters, and occupies more room and flames out with a grander sublimity in the Alta than did the capture of Richmond and the Southern armies, as published in the same paper. How marvelous are thy ways, O Lord!
Why shouldn't I print a romance? Why shouldn't I lionize "Smith" (Ned Wellington), and "Crawford" (T. B. Fargo)? Wouldn't they do for specimens of our police? I should think so—especially since the Grand Jury so triumphantly "vindicated" Wellington a few days ago. The following romance is from the pen of ex-special policeman L. W. Noyes:
Ned Wellington, alias "Indian Ned," is a stool pigeon for Captain Lees, of the police, and has a commission from the Police Commissioners, as a secret detective, notwithstanding they all knew of his having been arrested frequently for various offenses. Ned, with one T. B. Fargo, [worked on the] case of Wm. Farrell, alias "Minnie Price," the counterfeiter, who was arrested last January. During Farrell's trial, in the County Court, Ned was a witness. While on the stand, on the 11th March, he testified that he had a commission, as above stated, and that Captain Lees recommended him; thus the commission was retained to give him authority to carry a pistol for his own defense. On the 24th December, 1864, Ned (being at the time convivious) shot at a man on Pike street; he ran down Commercial street, and officer Blitz arrested him in Con Mooney's, corner of Commercial and Kearny streets. He had thrown the pistol away behind some barrels—went with Blitz and found it. He was taken to the station house, where he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon—bail forfeited. The Call of December 27th says the bail was fixed at $500 (I wonder if it was found). Ned has said that he intended to kill the man, and if he had he could have got out of it. I think he could. On the 11th of March, the facts of Ned having a commission having come out in Court, naturally worries some of the police; the Grand Jury have been overhauling some of them. Next day, the 12th March, Ned was arrested for being implicated in a robbery—was liberated that night. Next day, the 13th, he left for New York on the steamer, no doubt fearing that he might be put upon the stand in Grand Jury rooms. Ned is very shrewd, and he keeps his commission as a sort of fender to put in upon occasions. Ned's co-worker in the Farrell case (T. B. Fargo, alias T. B. Faga, alias I. B. Howard) is another of the same stripe; in the winter of 1864-5, he was an agent for Wells, Fargo & Co., in some of the Western States, where he was a defaulter. He has respectable connections East; his brother settled the matter for him, and started him for California, where he arrived in June; on the passage he gambled with one Winters and Baker, and lost [$7]00 in greenbacks; from June until October he peddled Grant pictures; on the 1st of October, with thirty-seven others, he donned the Police uniform, where he remained as the Chief's confidential clerk until December 15, at which time the Supervisors ordered the dismissal; but Fargo was kept around until Farrell was taken, and I think under pay. All this time he was living with one Hattie Shaw, a prostitute, at the corner of Washington and Pike street; he used to wait upon her to the New York Restaurant for meals, where she paid the bills. Sometimes he carried her meals to her room. He borrowed some $300 from Hattie, telling her that he had a draft on Wells, Fargo & Co. for $2,000 which he would get cashed and pay her. Ned Wellington here comes in and tells Hattie that he has seen the draft, and that Fargo is a gentleman, etc. But the draft never came, and Hattie had to go home with him in order to get coin.
After leaving the police force, he, through Captain Lees' influence, got a place with Donohue & Booth. Fargo represented to them that he was actually starving, and borrowed $20. Next day he was out riding with Hattie and got discharged, being there but a week or so. He then got into Wells, Fargo & Co.'s, during Mr. McLane's sickness, but was discharged as soon as he recovered.
During all this time the police were well aware of what kind of a man Fargo was, and there is no reason why the Chief and Commissioners should not know.
Mr. William McCaffry, who is well known in this city, took pains to tell them of his doings.
On the 13th of June Fargo went East on the opposition steamer; he bought tickets in the name of T.B. Howard, and Mrs. Howard, for himself and Hattie. On the steamer he went by the name of Fargo, and claimed to be a brother of Fargo, of Wells, Fargo & Co. So you see thieves have the inside track with Burke & Co.
I think that last remark of my historian, Noyes, is rather severe, but let it pass.
But I want Fitz Smythe to re-publish another flaming "chapter in the history of the San Francisco Police," and add the above chapter to it, and glorify the Chief's confidential clerk Mr. Fargo (not Crawford, Fitz Smythe,) and Indian Ned Wellington (not "Smith," Fitz Smythe,) and also Buckingham, whom you scarcely deigned to notice while he was on trial for gobbling up the widow's jewelry. I don't want all the glory fastened on the Captains and Chiefs and regulars, and the deeds of the specials—the scallawags who really do all the work—left unsung. Tune up another column of [praise of] them, and blast away, idolatrous Fitz Smythe!
Territorial Enterprise, January 16-18, 1866
[portion of San Francisco letter]
Yesterday, as I was coming along through a back alley, I glanced over a fence, and there was Fitz Smythe's horse. I can easily understand, now, why that horse always looks so dejected and indifferent to the things of this world. They feed him on old newspapers. I had often seen Smythe carrying "dead loads" of old exchanges up town, but I never suspected that they were to be put to such a use as this. A boy came up while I stood there, and said, "That hoss belongs to Mr. Fitz Smythe, and the old man—that's my father, you know—the old man's going to kill him."
"Who, Fitz Smythe?"
"No, the hoss—because he et up a litter of pups that the old man wouldn't a taken forty dol—"
"Who, Fitz Smythe?"
"No, the hoss—and he eats fences and everything—took our gate off and carried it home and et up every dam splinter of it; you wait till he gets done with them old Altas and Bulletins he's a chawin' on now, and you'll see him branch out and tackle a-n-y-thing he can shet his mouth on. Why, he nipped a little boy, Sunday, which was going home from Sunday school; well, the boy got loose, you know, but that old hoss got his bible and some tracts, and them's as good a thing as he wants, being so used to papers, you see. You put anything to eat anywheres, and that old hoss'll shin out and get it—and he'll eat anything he can bite, and he don't care a dam. He'd climb a tree, he would, if you was to put anything up there for him—cats, for instance—he likes cats—he's et up every cat there was here in four blocks—he'll take more chances—why, he'll bust in anywheres for one of them fellers; I see him snake a old tom cat out of that there flower-pot over yonder, where she was a sunning of herself, and take her down, and she a hanging on and a grabbling for a holt on some thing, and you could hear her yowl and kick up and tear around after she was inside of him. You see Mr. Fitz Smythe don't give him nothing to eat but them old newspapers and sometimes a basket of shavings, and so you know, he's got to prospect or starve, and a hoss ain't going to starve, it ain't likely, on account of not wanting to be rough on cats and sich things. Not that hoss, anyway, you bet you. Because he don't care a dam. You turn him loose once on this town, and don't you know he'd eat up m-o-r-e goods-boxes, and fences, and clothing-store things, and animals, and all them kind of valuables? Oh, you bet he would. Because that's his style, you know, and he don't care a dam. But you ought to see Mr. Fitz Smythe ride him around, prospecting for them items—you ought to see him with his soldier coat on, and his mustashers sticking out strong like a catfish's horns, and them long laigs of his'n standing out so, like them two prongs they prop up a step-ladder with, and a jolting down street at four mile a week—oh, what a guy!—sets up stiff like a close pin, you know, and thinks he looks like old General Macdowl. But the old man's a going to hornisswoggle that hoss on account of his goblin up them pups. Oh, you bet your life the old man's down on him. Yes, sir, coming!" and the entertaining boy departed to see what the "old man" was calling him for. But I am glad that I met the boy, and I am glad I saw the horse taking his literary breakfast, because I know now why the animal looks so discouraged when I see Fitz Smythe rambling down Montgomery street on him—he has altogether too rough a time getting a living to be cheerful and frivolous or anyways frisky.
WHAT HAVE THE POLICE BEEN DOING?
Ain't they virtuous? Don't they take good care of the city? Is not their constant vigilance and efficiency shown in the fact that roughs and rowdies here are awed into good conduct?—isn't it shown in the fact that ladies even on the back streets are safe from insult in the daytime, when they are under the protection of a regiment of soldiers?—isn't it shown in the fact that although many offenders of importance go unpunished, they infallibly snaffle every Chinese chicken-thief that attempts to drive his trade, and are duly glorified by name in the papers for it?—isn't it shown in the fact that they are always on the look-out and keep out of the way and never get run over by wagons and things? And ain't they spry?—ain't they energetic?—ain't they frisky?—Don't they parade up and down the sidewalk at the rate of a block an hour and make everybody nervous and dizzy with their frightful velocity? Don't they keep their clothes nice?—and ain't their hands soft? And don't they work?—don't they work like horses?—don't they, now? Don't they smile sweetly on the women?—and when they are fatigued with their exertions, don't they back up against a lamp-post and go on smiling till they break plum down? But ain't they nice?—that's it, you know!—ain't they nice? They don't sweat—you never see one of those fellows sweat. Why, if you were to see a policeman sweating you would say, "oh, here, this poor man is going to die—because this sort of thing is unnatural, you know." Oh, no—you never see one of those fellows sweat. And ain't they easy and comfortable and happy—always leaning up against a lamp-post in the sun, and scratching one shin with the other foot and enjoying themselves? Serene?—I reckon not.
I don't know anything the matter with the Department, but maybe Dr. Rowell does. Now when Ziele broke that poor wretch's skull the other night for stealing six bits' worth of flour sacks, and had him taken to the Station House by a policeman, and jammed into one of the cells in the most humorous way, do you think there way anything wrong there? I don't. Why should they arrest Ziele and say, "Oh, come, now, you say you found this stranger stealing on your premises, and we know you knocked him on the head with your club—but then you better go in a cell, too, till we see whether there's going to be any other account of the thing—any account that mightn't jibe with yours altogether, you know—you go in for confessed assault and battery, you know." Why should they do that? Well, nobody ever said they did.
And why shouldn't they shove that half senseless wounded man into a cell without getting a doctor to examine and see how badly he was hurt, and consider that next day would be time enough, if he chanced to live that long? And why shouldn't the jailor let him alone when he found him in a dead stupor two hours after—let him alone because he couldn't wake him—couldn't wake a man who was sleeping and with that calm serenity which is peculiar to men whose heads have been caved in with a club—couldn't wake such a subject, but never suspected that there was anything unusual in the circumstance? Why shouldn't the jailor do so? Why certainly—why shouldn't he?—the man was an infernal stranger. He had no vote. Besides, had not a gentleman just said he stole some flour sacks? Ah, and if he stole flour sacks, did he not deliberately put himself outside the pale of humanity and Christian sympathy by that hellish act? I think so. The department think so. Therefore, when the stranger died at 7 in the morning, after four hours of refreshing slumber in that cell, with his skull actually split in twain from front to rear, like an apple, as was ascertained by post mortem examination, what the very devil do you want to go and find fault with the prison officers for? You are always putting in your shovel. Can't you find somebody to pick on besides the police. It takes all my time to defend them from people's attacks.
I know the police department is a kind, humane and generous institution. Why, it was no longer ago than yesterday that I was reminded of that time Captain Lees broke his leg. Didn't the free-handed, noble Department shine forth with a dazzling radiance then? Didn't the Chief detail officers Shields, Ward and two others to watch over him and nurse him and look after all his wants with motherly solicitude—four of them, you know—four of the very biggest and ablest-bodied men on the force—when less generous people would have thought two nurses sufficient—had these four acrobats in active hospital service that way in the most liberal manner, at a cost to the city of San Francisco of only the trifling sum of five hundred dollars a month—the same being the salaries of four officers of the regular police force at $125 a month each. But don't you know there are people mean enough to say that Captain Lees ought to have paid his own nurse bills, and that if he had had to do it maybe he would have managed to worry along on less than five hundred dollars worth of nursing a month? And don't you know that they say also that interest parties are always badgering the Supervisors with petitions for an increase of the police force, and showing such increase to be a terrible necessity, and yet they have always got to be hunting up and creating new civil offices and berths, and making details for nurse service in order to find something for them to do after they get them appointed? And don't you know that they say that they wish to god the city would hire a detachment of nurses and keep them where they will be handy in case of accident, so that property will not be left unprotected while policemen are absent on duty in sick rooms. You can't think how it aggravates me to hear such harsh remarks about our virtuous police force. Ah, well, the police will have their reward hereafter—no doubt.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
Disembodied spirits have been on the rampage now for more than a month past in the house of one Albert Krum, in Kearny street—so much so that the family find it impossible to keep a servant forty-eight hours. The moment a new and unsuspecting servant-maid gets fairly to bed and her light blown out, one of those dead and damned scalliwags takes her by the hair and just "hazes" her; grabs her by the waterfall and snakes her out of bed and bounces her on the floor two or three time; other disorderly corpses shy old boots at her head, and bootjacks, and brittle chamber furniture—washbowls, pitchers, hair-oil, teeth brushes, hoop-skirts—anything that comes handy those phantoms seize and hurl at Bridget, and pay no more attention to her howling than if it were music. The spirits tramp, tramp, tramp, about the house at dead of night, and when a light is struck the footsteps cease and the promenader is not visible, and just as soon as the light is out that dead man goes waltzing around again. They are a bloody lot. The young lady of the house was lying in bed one night with the gas turned down low, when a figure approached her through the gloom, whose ghastly aspect and solemn carriage chilled her to the heart. What do you suppose she did?—jumped up and seized the intruder?—threw a slipper at him?—"laid" him with a misquotation from Scripture? No—none of these. But with admirable presence of mind she covered up her head and yelled. That is what she did. Few young women would have thought of doing that. The ghost came and stood by the bed and groaned—a deep, agonizing, heart-broken groan—and laid a bloody kitten on the pillow by the girl's head. And then it groaned again, and sighed, "Oh, God, and must it be?" and bet another bloody kitten. It groaned a third time in sorrow and tribulation, and went one kitten better. And thus the sorrowing spirit stood there, moaning in its anguish and unloading its mewing cargo, until it had stacked up a whole litter of nine little bloody kittens on the girl's pillow, and then, still moaning, moved away and vanished.
When lights were brought, there were the kittens, with the finger marks of bloody hands upon their white fur—and the old mother cat, that had come after them, swelled her tail in mortal fear and refused to take hold of them. What do you think of that? what would you think of a ghost that came to your bedside at dead of night and had kittens?
[reprinted in the Golden Era, JAN. 28, 1866]
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
The term—"Busted"—applies to most people here. When a noted speculator breaks, you all hear of it; but when Smith and Jones and Brown go under, they make no stir; they are talked about among a small circle of gratified acquaintances, but they industriously keep up appearances, and the world at large go on thinking them as rich as ever. The lists of rich stock operators of two years ago have quietly sunk beneath the wave and financially gone to the devil. Smithers, who owned a hundred and ninety-six feet in one of the big mines, and gave such costly parties, has sent his family to Europe. Blivens, who owned so much in another big mine, and kept such fast horses, has sent his family to Germany, for their health, where they can sport a princely magnificence on fifty dollars a month. Bloggs, who was high-you-a-muck of another great mine, has sent his family home to rusticate a while with his father-in-law. All the nabobs of '63 are pretty much ruined, but they send their families foraging in foreign climes, and hide their poverty under a show of "appearances." If a man's family start anywhere on the steamer now, the public say: "There's the death rattle again—another Croesus has gone in." These are sad, sad, times. We are all "busted," and our families are exiled in foreign lands.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
The old gentleman and the old lady must be seventy-five years old, now. They used to play with Dan Marble in New Orleans, twenty five years ago; earlier, they had a theatre built in a "broad horn," and floated down the Ohio and Mississippi clear to the Belize, tying up every night and knocking Richard III endways for the delectation of any number of graybacks that chose to come, from a dozen to a thousand, and selling tickets for money when they could, and taking Salt Lake currency when they couldn't. They have played in Canada and all over California and Washoe—played everywhere in North America, I may say, and lo! I come to tell you that they still "keep up their lick." I have been honored with a letter from the old lady, dated "Helena, Last Chance, Montana Territory, December 16." She says that they are just five miles from the Missouri river. I suppose they will build a raft in the spring and float down the river, astonishing the Indians with Othello, Richard, Jack Sheppard, etc., and the next thing we hear of them they will be in New Orleans again. The old lady further says:
"We have a theatre and company of Denverites, and are doing well. It is so cold that the quicksilver all froze, or I would tell you how many degrees below zero. Provisions high; salt, $1 per lb; butter, $2.50; flour, $30, and it would not do for you to be here, for tobacco is $6 a pound and scarce...So cold that 50 head of cattle and 2 men who were herding them froze to death on the night of the 14th. Great deal of suffering among miners who were out prospecting. This is a lively town; adjoining camps deserted; everybody wintering here...I play the part of Richard III tonight. Next week I appear as Mazeppa. We charge $1.50 for all seats."
The idea of the jolly, motherly old lady stripping to her shirt and riding a fiery untamed Montana jackass up flights of stairs and kicking and cavorting around the stage on him with the quicksilver frozen in the thermometers and the audience taking brandy punches out of their pockets and biting them, same as people eat peanuts in civilized lands! Why, there is no end to the old woman's energy. She'll go through with Mazeppa with flying colors even if she has to do it with icicles a yard long hanging to her jackass's tail.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
This is the Sabbath to-day. This is the day set apart by a benignant Creator for rest—for repose from the wearying toils of the week, and for calm and serious (Brown's dog has commenced to howl again—I wonder why Brown persists in keeping that dog chained up?) meditation upon those tremendous subjects pertaining to our future existence. How thankful we ought to be (There goes that rooster, now.) for this sweet respite; how fervently we ought to lift up our voice and (Confound that old hen—lays an egg every forty minutes, and then cackles until she lays the next one.) testify our gratitude. How sadly, how soothingly the music of that deep toned bell floats up from the distant church! How gratefully we murmur (Scat!—that old gray tom-cat is always bully-ragging that other one—got him down now, and digging the hair out of him by the handful.) thanksgiving for these Sabbath blessings. How lovely the day is! ("Buy a broom! buy a broom!") How wild and beautiful the ("Golden Era 'n' Sund' Mercry, two for a bit apiece!") sun smites upon the tranquil ("Alta, Mon' Call, an' Merican Flag!") city! ("Po-ta-to-o-o-es, ten pounds for two bits—po-ta-to o-o-es, ten pounds for quart-va dollar!" )
However, never mind these Sunday reflections—there are too many distracting influences abroad. This people have forgotten that San Francisco is not a ranch—or rather, that it ought not properly to be a ranch. It has got all the disagreeable features of a ranch, though. Every citizen keeps from ten to five hundred chickens, and these crow and cackle all day and all night; they stand watches, and the watch on duty makes a racket while the off-watch sleeps. Let a stranger get outside of Montgomery and Kearny from Pacific to Second, and close his eyes, and he can imagine himself on a well-stocked farm, without an effort, for his ears will be assailed by such a vile din of gobbling of turkeys, and crowing of hoarse-voiced roosters, and cackling of hens, and howling of cows, and whinnying of horses, and braying of jackasses, and yowling of cats, that he will be driven to frenzy, and may look to perform prodigies of blasphemy such as he never knew himself capable of before.
Sunday reflections! A man might as well try to reflect in Bedlam as in San Francisco when her millions of livestock are in tune. Being calm, now, I will call down no curse upon these dumb brutes (as they are called by courtesy), but I will go so far as to say I wish they may all die without issue, and that a sudden and violent death may overtake any person who afterwards attempts to reinstate the fowl and brute nuisance.
Territorial Enterprise, January 1866
[dated January 24, 1866]
I.
I find the following mysterious notice glaringly displayed in the advertising columns of the Bulletin: OUTCROPPINGS!—The second volume, compiled by W_____, will be issued next week.
Who is the publisher? There is no name mentioned, and I cannot conjecture. But that is of small consequence—what interests us more is to know who "W_____" is. Is it Wentworth (May Wentworth? ) or is it Wash Wright? or is it Washington Second? or is it Winnemucca? or is it the old original Whangdoodle? I shall have to inquire into this matter, unless "W" comes forward with the information himself very soon. If the volume were not promised "next week," we might suppose it was the first of Bancroft's forthcoming nine volumes of California verse—but you know we are not to look for any portion of that work before July. This second volume of Outcroppings is a humbug of some kind or other, no doubt.
Territorial Enterprise, January 30-31, 1866
[portion of San Francisco Letter]
January 28, 1866
The fine restaurant between Clay and Commercial, on Montgomery street, has been sold at auction. It was fitted up three months ago at a cost of thirty-six hundred dollars, and brought only fourteen hundred yesterday under the hammer. At first it did a prosperous business—made money fast. Everybody was glad of it, for the proprietor was an estimable man, and was struggling to gather together by honest industry a small independence, so that he might go back to the Fatherland of his daily dreams, and clasp once more to his breast the wife who has waited and watched for him through weary years, kiss once more his little ones, and hear their innocent prattle, and their childish glee, and the music of their restless little feet. But about that time Fitz Smythe went there to board, and that let him out, you know. But such is human life. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. A dream—a shadow—a ripple on the water—a thing for invisible gods to sport with for a season and then toss idly by—idly by. It is rough.
BEARDING THE FENIAN IN HIS LAIR
[Text partially reconstructed from The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches]
Wishing to post myself on one of the most current topics of the day, I hunted up an old friend, Dennis McCarthy, who is editor of the new Fenian journal in San Francisco, The Irish People. I found him sitting on a sumptuous candle-box, in his shirt-sleeves, solacing himself with a whiff of the national dhudeen or caubeen or whatever they call it—a clay pipe with no stem to speak of. I thought it might flatter him to address him in his native tongue, and so I bowed with considerable grace and said:
"Arrah!"
And he said, "Be jabers!"
"Och hone!" said I.
"Mavoureen dheelish, acushla machree," replied The McCarthy.
"Erin go bragh," I continued with vivacity.
"Asthore!" responded The McCarthy.
"Tare an' ouns!" said I.
"Bhe dha husth; fag a rogarah lums!" said the bold Fenian.
"Ye have me there, be me sowl!" said I, (for I am not "up" in the niceties of the language, you understand; I only know enough of it to enable me to "keep umy end up" in an ordinary conversation.)
What a comfort these reporters do take in that graveyard word! They stick it at the head of an item, in all its native impenetrability, and then slash away cheerfully and finish the paragraph. It is too many for me—that word is, for all it is so handy. Sometimes they write up a fine item about the capture of a chicken-thief—and head it "Neodamode"; or an exciting story of an infant with good clothes on and a strawberry on its little left arm, and a coat of arms stitched on its poor little shirt-tail being left in a market basket on someone's doorstep—and head it "Neodamode"; or an entertaining account of a crazy man going through his family and making it exceedingly warm for the same—and head it "Neodamode"; or an item about a large funeral; or a banquet; or a ball; or a wedding; or a prayer-meeting—anything, no matter what—all the same. They head it "Neodamode." It is the handiest heading I ever saw; it appears to fit any subject you please to tack it to. Why here lately they have even got to using it in items concerning the taking out of naturalization papers by foreigners. There is altogether too much Neodamy around to suit me. I would not mind it so much if it were not quite such an ugly word, and if I had a sort of general notion of what in the mischief it means. I would like to hear from one of the Neodamites.
I have got to go now and report a sermon. I trust it will be pleasanter work than writing a letter on Sunday, while the dogs and cats and chickens are glorifying their Maker and raising the mischief.
Territorial Enterprise, February 4, 1866
There was an audience of about 400 ladies and gentlemen present, and plenty of newspaper people—neuters. I saw a good-looking, earnest-faced, pale- red-haired, neatly dressed, young woman standing on a little stage behind a small deal table with slender legs and no drawers—the table, understand me; I am writing in a hurry, but I do not desire to confound my description of the table with my description of the lady. The lady was Mrs. Foye.
As I was coming up town with the Examiner reporter, in the early part of the evening, he said he had seen a gambler named Gus Graham shot down in a town in Illinois years ago, by a mob, and as probably he was the only person in San Francisco who knew of the circumstance, he thought he would "give the spirits Graham to chaw on awhile." (N. B. This young creature is a Democrat, and speaks with the native strength and inelegance of his tribe.) In the course of the show he wrote his old pal's name on a slip of paper and folded it up tightly and put it in a hat which was passed around, and which already had about five hundred similar documents in it. The pile was dumped on the table and the medium began to take them up one by one and lay them aside, asking "Is this spirit present?—or this?—or this?" About one in fifty would rap, and the person who sent up the name would rise in his place and question the defunct. At last a spirit seized the medium's hand and wrote "Gus Graham" backwards. Then the medium went skirmishing through the papers for the corresponding name. And that old sport knew his card by the back. When the medium came to it, after picking up fifty others, he rapped! A committee-man unfolded the paper and it was the right one. I sent for it and got it. It was all right. However, I suppose "all them Democrats" are on sociable terms with the devil. The young man got up and asked:
"Did you die in '51?—'52?—'53?—'54?—"
Ghost—"Rap, rap, rap."
"Did you die of cholera?—diarrhea?—dysentery?—dog-bite?—small-pox?—violent death?—"
"Rap, rap, rap."
"Were you hanged?—drowned?—stabbed?—shot?"
"Rap, rap, rap."
"Did you die in Mississippi?—Kentucky?—New York?—Sandwich Islands?—Texas?—Illinois?—"
"Rap, rap, rap."
"In Adams county?—Madison?—Randolph?—"
"Rap, rap, rap."
It was no use trying to catch the departed gambler. He knew his hand and played it like a Major.
I was surprised. I had a very dear friend, who, I had heard, had gone to the spirit land, or perdition, or some of those places, and I desired to know something concerning him. There was something so awful, though, about talking with living, sinful lips to the ghostly dead, that I could hardly bring myself to rise and speak. But at last I got tremblingly up and said with low and reverent voice:
"Is the spirit of John Smith present?"
"Whack! whack! whack!"
God bless me. I believe all the dead and damned John Smiths between hell and San Francisco tackled that poor little table at once! I was considerably set back—stunned, I may say. The audience urged me to go on, however, and I said:
"What did you die of?"
The Smiths answered to every disease and casualty that man can die of.
"Where did you die!"
They answered yes to every locality I could name while my geography held out.
"Are you happy where you are?"
There was a vigorous and unanimous "No!" from the late Smiths.
"Is it warm there?"
An educated Smith seized the medium's hand and wrote:
"It's no name for it."
"Did you leave any Smiths in that place when you came away?"
"Dead loads of them!"
I fancied, I heard the shadowy Smiths chuckle at this feeble joke—the rare joke that there could be live loads of Smiths where all are dead.
"How many Smiths are present?"
"Eighteen millions—the procession now reaches from here to the other side of China."
"Then there are many Smiths in the kingdom of the lost?"
"The Prince Apollyon calls all newcomers Smith on general principles; and continues to do so until he is corrected, if he chances to be mistaken."
"What do lost spirits call their dread abode?"
"They call it the Smithsonian Institute."
I got hold of the right Smith at last—the particular Smith I was after—my dear, lost, lamented friend—and learned that he died a violent death. I feared as much. He said his wife talked him to death. Poor wretch!
But without any nonsense, Mrs. Foye's seance was a very astonishing affair to me—and a very entertaining one. The Examiner man's "old pard," the gambler, was too many for me. He answered every question exactly right; and his disembodied spirit, invisible to mortal eyes, must have been prowling around that hall last night. That is, unless this pretended spiritualism is only that other black art called clairvoyance, after all. And yet, the clairvoyant can only tell what is in your mind—but once or twice last night the spirits brought facts to the minds of their questioners which the latter had forgotten before. Well, I cannot make anything out of it. I asked the Examiner man what he thought of it, and he said, in the Democratic dialect: "Well, I don 't know—I don't know—but it's d___d funny." He did not mean that it was laughable—he only meant that it was perplexing. But such is the language of Democracy.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1866
Ward, the shirt man, has issued a pamphlet of poems—burlesques of some of the poems in "Outcroppings," and purporting to be a second edition of that work, I suppose, as it bears the same title. It is simply an advertising affair, of course. It was written by "Trem." The burlesque of James Linen's "I Feel I'm Growing Auld," is the most outlandish combination of untranslatable Scotch phraseology I ever saw. I think it is a pretty good take-off on the fashion some folks have of humbugging Americans with poetry that defies criticism because its extravagant Scotchiness defies comprehension. We have come to think, in our day and generation, that every piece of Scotch verse which we cannot understand is necessarily pure, sweet poetry, and that all prose which is spelled atrociously is necessarily humorous and intensely funny. Perhaps you can dig some meaning out of—
I FEEL I'M GROWING MIRK
by Jean Lining
I feel I'm growing mirk, gude wife,
I feel I'm growing mirk,
Unsicker girns the graith an' doup,
An' aye, the stound is birk.
I've fash 'd mysel' wi' creeshie rax
O'er jouk an' hallan braw,
An' now I'll stowlins pit my duds
An' gar sark white as snaw.
I feel I'm growing mirk, gude wife,
I feel I'm growing mirk,
An' wae an' wae the giglet jinks,
Tis wheep-ed wi' my dirk.
My claes are mirk wi' howdie whangs,
But still my heart is fair,
Though sconnered yowics loup an' blink,
I'm nae so puir in gear.
I feel I'm growing mirk, gude wife,
I feel I'm growing mirk,
The howdie bicker skeeps my een—
Na mair the coof I'll shirk.
I'll get a Ward's Neat Fitting Shirt—
They'll glint wi' pawky een,
There's sax score Ward's Shirts sold, gude wife,
Since I called in yestreen.
Territorial Enterprise, February 6-7, 1866
[portion of San Francisco letter written February 3, 1866]
Fitz Smythe ("Amigo," of the Gold Hill News) is the champion of the police, and is always in a sweat because I find fault with them. Now I don't find fault with them often, and when I do I sometimes do it honestly; even Fitz Smythe will not have cheek to say he expresses his honest opinions when he invariably and eternally slobbers them over with his slimy praise and can never find them otherwise than pure and sinless in every case. No man is always blameless—Fitz Smythe ought to recollect that and bestow his praise with more judgment. Fitz knows he would abuse them like pirates if they were all to die suddenly. I know it, because he always abuses dead people. He was a firm, unswerving friend of poor Barney Olwell until the man was hanged and buried, and then look what hard names he called him in the last News. Fitz can ruin the reputation of any man with a paragraph or two of his praise. I don't say it in a spirit of anger, but I am telling it for a plain truth. I have only stirred the police up and irritated them a little with my cheerful abuse, but Fitz Smythe has utterly ruined their character with his disastrous praise. I don't ask any man to take my evidence alone in this matter—I refer doubters to the police themselves. But for Fitz Smythe's kindly meant but calamitous compliments, the police of San Francisco would stand as high to-day as any similar body of men in the world. But you know yourself that you soon cease to attach weight to the compliments of a man whose mouth is an eternally-flowing fountain of flattery. Fitz Smythe praises all alike—makes no distinction. There is that man Ansbro—I don't know him—never saw him, that I know of—but I know, and so does Fitz Smythe, that he does twice as much work as any other detective on the force—but does Fitz Smythe praise him any more than he praises those pets who never do anything at all? Not he—he makes no discrimination. And Chappell? but why argue the case? When those officers do anything Fitz impartially rings in all the balance of the force to share the credit, sometimes. Fitz, you won't do. I have told you so fifty times, and I tell you again, that you won't do. I can warm you up with ten sentences, and make you dance like a hen on a hot griddle, any time, Fitz Smythe. I know your weak spot. I can touch you on the raw whenever I please, make you lose your temper and write the most spiteful, undignified things. You see you will always be a little awkward with a pen, Fitz, because your head isn't sound—isn't well balanced; you have good points, you know, but they are kept down and crowded out by bad ones. You don't know that when a man is in a controversy he is at a great disadvantage when he loses his temper. It leaves him too open to ridicule, you know. And you can't stand ridicule, Fitz; it cuts you to the quick; it just makes you howl; I know that as well as you do, Fitz, and I am saying these things for your own good; you are young, and you are apt to let the fire of youth drive you into exceedingly unhappy performances. I do not mean that you are so young in years, you know, but young in experience of the world. You ought to be modest; the same wisdom which was so potent in Illinois and the wilds of Texas does not overpower the people of a great city like it used to do there, you know. Ah, no—they read you, attentively—because you write with a certain attractiveness Fitz Smythe—but they say "Oh, this prairie wisdom is too wide—too flat; and this swamp wisdom's too deep altogether."
And they don't attach any weight to your praise of the police. They say, "Oh, this fellow don't know—he ain't used to police—they don't have 'em in the wilds of Texas where this Ranger come from."
But you are certainly the most interesting subject to write about, Fitzy—I never get hold of you but I want to stay with you and hang on to you just as if you were a jug. I didn't intend to write two lines this time, Fitz; I only wanted to get you, as Excuser and Explainer-in-Chief to the Police, to go on the witness stand and inform me when it is possible for a man to lug a prisoner about a mile through the thickest settled portion of this city—clear to the station-house—and never come across a policeman. Read this communication from the Morning Call, Fitz—and it is a true version—and then go on and explain it, Fitz—try it, you long-legged rip!
EDITORS MORNING CALL:—On Thursday night a terrible onslaught was made on the house of a peaceable citizen on Larkin street by a band of soldiers. The man, awakened by this attempt to enter his dwelling, called on his neighbors for help. One came to his aid, the soldiers threatened to fire on the families, but, after a severe fight and long chase, the citizen and his neighbor captured two of the rascals near the Spring Valley School House. They have been held over to appear before the County Court. The citizen, with his prisoner, came from the Presidio Road, along Larkin, down Union, along Stockton, down Broadway to Kearny street, before he met an officer. The neighbor, with his prisoner, came from the same place, down Union to Powell, along that street to Washington, and down to the lower side of the Plaza, before he met an officer. This was between three and four, A. M. What I wish to know is, where were the Police, and cannot we, in the remote parts, be protected by at least one officer?
I spoke the other day of some singular proceedings of a firm of undertakers here, and now I come to converse about one or two more of the undertaker tribe. I begin to think this sort of people have no bowels—as the ancients would say—no heart, as we would express it. They appear to think only of business—business first, last, all the time. They trade in the woes of men as coolly as other people trade in candles and mackerel. Their hearts are ironclad, and they seem to have no sympathies in common with their fellow men.
A prominent firm of undertakers here own largely in Lone Mountain Cemetery and also in the toll-road leading to it. Now if you or I owned that toll-road we would be satisfied with the revenue from a long funeral procession and would "throw in" the corpse—we would let him pass free of toll—we would wink placidly at the gate-keeper and say, "Never mind this gentleman in the hearse—this fellow's a dead-head." But the firm I am speaking of never do that—if a corpse starts to Paradise or perdition by their road he has got to pay his toll or else switch off and take some other route. And it is rare to see the pride this firm takes in the popularity and respectability of their cemetery, and the interest and even enthusiasm which they display in their business.
A friend of mine was out at Lone Mountain the other day, and was moving sadly among the tombs thinking of departed comrades and recalling the once pleasant faces now so cold, and the once familiar voices now so still, and the once busy hands now idly crossed beneath the turf, when he came upon Mr. Smith, of the firm.
"Ah, good morning," says Smith, "come out to see us at last, have you?—glad you have! let me show you round—let me show you round. Pretty fine ain't it?—everything in apple pie order, eh? Everybody says so—everybody says mighty few graveyards go ahead of this. We are endorsed by the best people in San Francisco. We get 'em, sir, we get the pick and choice of the departed. Come, let me show you. Here's Major-General Jones- distinguished man, he was—very distinguished man—highsted him up on that mound, there, where he's prominent. And here's MacSpadden—rich?—Oh, my! And we've got Brigadier-General Jollopson here—there he is, over there—keep him trimmed up and spruce as a fresh "plant," all the time. And we've got Swimley, and Stiggers, the bankers, and Johnson and Swipe, the railroad men, and m-o-r-e Admirals and them kind of people—slathers of 'em! And bless you we've got as much as a whole block planted in nothing but hundred thousand-dollar fellows—and—"
(Here Mr. Smith's face lighted up suddenly with a blaze of enthusiasm, and he rubbed his hands together and ducked his head to get a better view through the shrubbery of the distant toll-road, and then exclaimed):
"Ah! is it another? Yes, I believe it is—yes it is! Third arrival to-day! Long procession! 'George this is gay! Well, so-long, Thompson, I must go and cache this party!"
And the happy undertaker skipped lightly away to offer the dismal hospitalities of his establishment to the unconscious visitor in the hearse.
Territorial Enterprise, February 8-10, 1866
[portion of San Francisco Letter, written on February 6, 1866]
I dreamed last night that I was sitting in my room smoking my pipe and looking into the dying embers on the hearth, conjuring up old faces in their changing shapes, and listening to old voices in the moaning winds outside, when there was a knock at the door and a man entered—bowed—walked deliberately forward and sat down opposite me. He was dressed in a queer old garb of I don't know how many centuries ago. He said, with a perceptible show of vanity:
"My name's Ananias—may have heard of me, perhaps?"
I said, reflectively, "No—no—I think not, Mr. Anan
"Never heard of me! Bismillah! Och hone! gewhil—. But you couldn't have read the Scriptures!"
I rose to my feet in great surprise: "Ah—is it possible?—I remember now—I remember your history. Yes, yes, yes, I remember you made a little statement that wouldn't wash, so to speak, and they took your life for it. They—they bounced a thunderbolt on your head, or something of that sort, didn't they?"
"Yes, but drop these matters and let's to business. The thief sympathizes with the thief, the murderer with the murderer, the vagabond with the vagabond: I, too, feel for my kind—I want to do something for this Fitz Smythe—'
"Give me your hand!—this sentiment does you honor, sir, it does you honor! And this solicitude of the Prince of Liars for the humble disciple Fitz Smythe is well merited, it is indeed—for although, Sire, his efforts may not be brilliant, they make up for that defect in bulk and quantity; such steady persistence as his, such unwearying devotion to his art, are deserving of the highest encomium."
"You know the man—I see that—and he is worthy of your admiration. As you say, his lies are not brilliant, but they never slack up—they are always on time. Some of them are awkward—very stupid and awkward—but that is to be expected, of course, where a man is at it so constantly and exhaustively as Fitz Smythe—or as we call him in hell, 'Brother Smythe'—we all take the Alta. But they are strong!—they are awkward and stupid, but they are powerful free from truth! You take his mildest lie—take those he tells about Mark Twain, for instance (who is the only newspaper man I have ever come across who wouldn't lie and couldn't lie, shame to him,)—take those lies—take even the very mildest of them, and don't you know they'd let a man out mighty quick in my time? Why there'd have been more thunder and lightning after him in two seconds! If Fitz Smythe had lived in my time and told that little lie he told about you last—just that little one, even—he'd have been knocked from Jericho to Jacksonville quick as winking! Lord bless you but they were mighty particular in those days! Notice how they hazed me!"
"So they did, sir, so they did—they snatched you very lively indeed, sir."
"But we'll come to business, now. No man's productions are more admired in the regions of the damned than Fitz Smythe's. We have watched his career with pride and satisfaction, and at a meeting held in Perdition last night a committee of the most distinguished liars the world has ever produced was appointed to visit the earth and confer upon our gifted disciple certain marks of distinction to which we consider him entitled—orders of merit, they are—honors which he has laboriously earned. We wish to confer these compliments upon him through you, his bosom friend. Now, therefore, I, Ananias Chief of Liars by Seniority, do hereby create our worthy disciple Armand Leonidas Fitz Smythe Amigo Stiggers, a Knight of the Grand Order of the Liars of St. Ananias, and confer upon him the freedom of hell. And the symbol of this order being a horse, I do hereby present him this noble animal, which manifests its preference for falsehood over truth by devouring daily newspapers in preference to any other food."
I looked at the horse, as he stood there chewing up my last Bulletin, and recognized him as the beast Fitz Smythe rides every day. Ananias now bade me good evening, and said his wife, another member of the Committee, would now call upon me.
The door opened, and the ancient Sapphira, who was stricken with death for telling a lie, ages ago, stood before me. She said:
"I have heard my husband; he has spoken well; it is sufficient. I do hereby create Armand Leonidas Fitz Smythe Amigo Stiggers a Knight of the Order of the Liars of St. Sapphira, and clothe him with the regalia pertaining to the same—this pair of gray pantaloons—a sign and symbol of the matrimonial supremacy which I have enjoyed in my household from time immemorial."
And she left the gray pantaloons and departed, saying the next member of the Committee who would appear would be the most noble the Baron de Munchausen. The door opened and the world famed liar entered:
"I come to do honor to my son, the inspired Armand Leonidas Fitz Smythe Amigo Stiggers. It ill beseemeth a father to boast at length of his own offspring, wherefore I shall say no more in that respect, but proceed to create him a Knight of the Noble Order of the Liars of St. Munchausen, and invest him with the regalia pertaining to the same—this gray frock coat—which hath been a symbol of depravity in all ages of the world." And the great Baron shed a few tears of paternal pride and murmured, "Kiss him for his father," and went away. As he disappeared he remarked that the next and last member of the committee would now wait upon me, in the person of Thomas Pepper. And in a moment the renowned Tom Pepper, who was such a preposterous liar that he couldn't get to heaven and they wouldn't have him in hell, was present! He said:
"I have watched the great Armand Leonidas Fitz Smythe Amigo Stiggers with extraordinary interest. So we all have—but how heedless we are! Those who were with you within this hour praised him without stint and mentioned his excellencies—yet not one of them has discovered his crowning grace—his highest gift. It is this—he always tells the truth with such windy, wordy, blundering awkwardness that nobody ever believes it, and so his truths usually pass for his most splendid falsehoods! [I could not help acknowledging to myself that this was so.] A man with such a talent as that is bound to achieve high distinction and do great service in our ranks; and for this talent of his more than for his wonderful abilities in distorting facts, I do hereby confer upon him the Sublime Order of the Knights of the Liars of St. Pepper, and present him with the symbol pertaining to the same—this grim, twisted, sharply-projecting, sunburned mustache, whose fashion and pattern are only permitted to be used by those noble knights whose nature it is to war against truth wherever they find it, and to go a long, long way out of their road to prospect for chances to lie. I am the only man the world ever produced who was so wonderful a romancer that he could neither get a show in heaven nor hell, and Fitz Smythe will be the second one. It will be jolly. It is lonesome now, but when Smythe comes we two will loaf around on the outside of damnation and swap lies and be p-e-r-fectly happy. Good day, old Petrified Facts, good day." And Tom Pepper, the most splendid liar the world ever gave birth to, was gone!
That was my dream. And don't you know that for as much as six hours afterwards I fully believed it was nothing but a dream? But just before three o'clock to-day I thought my hair would turn white with amazement when I saw Amigo Fitz Smythe issue from that alley near the Alta office riding the very horse Ananias gave him, and that horse eating a file of the Gold Hill News; and wearing the same gray pantaloons Mrs. Sapphira Ananias gave him; and the gray coat that Baron Munchausen gave him, and with his pensive nose overhanging those two skewers—that absurd sunburned mustache, I mean—which Tom Pepper gave him. So it was reality. It was no dream after all! This lets me out with Fitz Smythe, you know. I cannot associate with that kind of stock. I don't want the worst characters in hell to be running after me with friendly messages and little testimonials of admiration for Smythe, and blowing about his talents, and bragging on him, and belching their villainous fire and brimstone all through the atmosphere and making my place smell worse than a menagerie. I have too much regard for my good name and my personal comfort, and so this lets me out with Fitz Smythe.
The Rev. Richard F. Putnam, late Rector of the Episcopal Church at Grass Valley, has assumed the pastorate of the Church of the Advent in this City.—Call.
This gentleman, who was long connected with the editorial department of the Territorial Enterprise, and was latterly employed on the Sacramento Union, was one of the best men I ever knew. He was a man who could not whistle hard tunes—could not whistle easy ones so as to make a person wish him to keep it up long at a time. Some of the printers used to come to listen when he begun, but the more cultured usually went out—but he could swear and make up telegraph news with any man. He was a man who could go down into a beer cellar in the shank of the evening, and curse and swear, and play commercial seven-up with good average luck and without chicanery till dewy morn, and drink beer all the while—all the while. He was a man who was handy with his pen, and would write you a crusher on any subject under the sun, no matter whether he knew anything about it or not—and he would be growling at somebody or other all through; and if everybody went away and left him he would sit there and curse and swear at his lamp till it burned blue; and he cursed that boy that cleaned that lamp till the constitution of the same was permanently impaired. He was a man who would wade through snow up to his neck to serve his friend, and would convey him home when drunk, and peel him and put him to bed if it was a mile and a half. He was a man who was neck and crop and neck and heels for his friends, and blood, hair and the ground tore up to his enemies. Take him how you would, he was an ornament to his species—and there is no man that is more sorry than I am to see him forsake the pleasant fields he was wont to tread and confine himself to a limited beat on the Gospel—to a beat in a town which is small and where he cannot have full swing according to his dimensions, if I may so speak in connection with matters pertaining to the Scriptural line of business.
P.S.—But I find that this Putnam mentioned in the item above, is not the Putnam I have been speaking of. I was talking of C. A. V. Putnam, and I perceive that the above parson is Richard F. Well, I am glad—and it is all the better as it is.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1866
I attended the seance last night. After the house was crowded with ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Foye stepped out upon the stage and said it was usual to elect a committee of two gentlemen to sit up there and see that everything was conducted with perfect honesty and fairness. She said she wished the audience to name gentlemen whose integrity, whose conscientiousness—in a word whose high moral character, in every respect, was notorious in the community. The majority of the audience arose with one impulse and called my name. This handsome compliment was as grateful as it was graceful, and I felt the tears spring to my eyes. I trust I shall never do anything to forfeit the generous confidence San Francisco has thus shown in me. This touching compliment is none the less grateful to me when I reflect that it took me two days to get it up. I "put up" that hand myself. I got all my friends to promise to go there and vote for me to be on that committee—and having reported a good deal in Legislatures, I knew how to do it right. I had a two-thirds vote secured—I wanted enough to elect me over the medium's veto, you know. I was elected, and I was glad of it. I thought I would feel a good deal better satisfied if I could have a chance to examine into this mystery myself, without being obliged to take somebody else's word for its fairness, and I did not go on that stand to find fault or make fun of the affair—a thing which would not speak well for my modesty when I reflect that so many men so much older and wiser than I am see nothing in Spiritualism to scoff at, but firmly believe in it as a religion.
Mr. Whiting was chosen as the other committee man, and we sat down at a little table on the stage with the medium, and proceeded to business. We wrote the names of various departed persons. Mr. W. wrote a good many, but I found that I did not know many dead people; however, I put in the names of two or three whom I had known well, and then filled out the list with names of citizens of San Francisco who had been distinguished in life, so that most persons in the audience could tell whether facts stated by such spirits concerning themselves were correct or not. I will remark here that not a solitary spirit summoned by me paid the least attention to the invitation. I never got a word out of any of them. One of Mr. Whiting's spirits came up and stated some things about itself which were correct. Then some five hundred closely folded slips of paper containing names, were dumped in a pile on the table, and the lady began to lay them aside one by one. Finally a rap was heard. I took the folded paper; the spirit, so-called, seized the lady's hand and wrote "J. M. Cooke" backwards and upside down on a sheet of paper. I opened the slip I held, and, as Captain Cuttle would say, "J. M. Cooke" was the "dientical" name in it. A gentleman in the audience said he sent up the name. He asked a question or so, and then the spirit wrote "Would like to communicate with you alone." The privacy of this ghost was respected, and he was permitted to go to thunder again unmolested. "William Nelson" reported himself from the other world, and in answer to questions asked by a former friend of his in the audience, said he was aged 24 when he died; died by violence; died in a battle; was a soldier; had fought both in the infantry and cavalry; fell at Chickamauga; had been a Catholic on earth—was not one now. Then in answer to a pelting volley of questions, the shadowy warrior wrote: "I don't want to answer any more about it." Exit Nelson.
About this time it was suggested that a couple of Germans be added to the committee, and it was done. Mr. Wallenstein, an elderly man, came forward, and also Mr. Ollendorf, a spry young fellow, cocked and primed for a sensation. They wrote some names. Then young Ollendorf said something which sounded like:
"Ist ein geist hierans?" (bursts of laughter from the audience.)
Three raps—signifying that there was a geist hierans.
"Vollensie schriehen?" (more laughter). Three raps.
"Einzig stollen, linsowftterowlickter-hairowfterfrowleineruback folderol?" (Oh, this is too rough, you know. I can't keep the run of this sort of thing.) Incredible as it may seem, the spirit cheerfully answered yes to that astonishing proposition.
Young Ollendorf sprang to his feet in a state of consuming excitement. He exclaimed:
"Laties and shentlemen! I write de name for a man vot lifs! Speerit rabbing dells me he ties in yahr eighteen hoondert und dwelf, but he yoos as live und helty as—"
The Medium—"Sit down, sir!"
Mr. O.—"But de speerit cheat!—dere is no such speerit—" (All this time applause and laughter by turns from the audience.)
Medium—"Take your seat, sir, and I will explain this matter."
And she explained. And in that explanation she let off a blast which was so terrific that I half expected to see young Ollendorf shoot up through the roof. She said he had come up there with fraud and deceit and cheating in his heart, and a kindred spirit had come from the land of shadows to commune with him! She was terribly bitter. She said in substance, though not in words, that perdition was full of just such fellows as Ollendorf, and they were ready on the slightest pretext to rush in and assume any body's name, and rap, and write, and lie, and swindle with a perfect looseness whenever they could rope in a living affinity like poor Ollendorf to communicate with! (Great applause and laughter.)
Ollendorf stood his ground with good pluck, and was going to open his batteries again, when a storm of cries arose all over the house. "Get down! Go on! Speak on—we'll hear you! Climb down from that platform! Stay where you are—Vamose! Stick to your post—say your say!"
The medium rose up and said if Ollendorf remained, she would not. She recognized no one's right to come there and insult her by practicing a deception upon her and attempting to bring ridicule upon so solemn a thing as her religious belief.
The audience then became quiet, and the subjugated Ollendorf retired from the platform.
The other German raised a spirit, questioned it at some length in his own language, and said the answers were correct. The medium claims to be entirely unacquainted with the German language.
A spirit seized the medium's hand and wrote "G. L. Smith" very distinctly. She hunted through the mass of papers, and finally the spirit rapped. She handed me the folded paper she had just picked up. It had "T. J. Smith" in it. (You never can depend on these Smiths; you call for one and the whole tribe will come clattering out of hell to answer you.) Upon further inquiry it was discovered that both these Smiths were present. We chose "T. J." A gentleman in the audience said that was his Smith. So he questioned him, and Smith said he died by violence; he had been a teacher; not a school-teacher, but (after some hesitation) a teacher of religion, and was a sort of a cross between a Universalist and a Unitarian; has got straightened out and changed his opinion since he left here; said he was perfectly happy. Mr. George Purnell, having been added to the committee, proceeded in connection with myself, Mrs. Foye and a number of persons in the audience, to question this talkative and frolicksome old parson. Among spirits, I judge he is the gayest of the gay. He said he had no tangible body; a bullet could pass through him and never make a hole; rain could pass through him as through vapor, and not discommode him in the least (wherefore I suppose he don't know enough to come in when it rains—or don't care enough); says heaven and hell are simply mental conditions—spirits in the former have happy and contented minds; and those in the latter are torn by remorse of conscience; says as far as he is concerned, he is all right—he is happy; would not say whether he was a very good or a very bad man on earth (the shrewd old water-proof nonentity!—I asked the question so that I might average my own chances for his luck in the other world, but he saw my drift); says he has an occupation there—puts in his time teaching and being taught; says there are spheres—grades of perfection—he is making pretty good progress—has been promoted a sphere or so since his matriculation; (I said mentally: "Go slow, old man, go slow—you have got all eternity before you"—and he replied not); he don't know how many spheres there are (but I suppose there must be millions, because if a man goes galloping through them at the rate this old Universalist is doing, he will get through an infinitude of them by the time he has been there as long as old Sesostris and those ancient mummies; and there is no estimating how high he will get in even the infancy of eternity—I am afraid the old man is scouring along rather too fast for the style of his surroundings, and the length of time he has got on his hands); says spirits cannot feel heat or cold (which militates somewhat against all my notions of orthodox damnation—fire and brimstone); says spirits commune with each other by thought—they have no language; says the distinctions of the sex are preserved there—and so forth and so on.
The old parson wrote and talked for an hour, and showed by his quick, shrewd, intelligent replies, that he had not been sitting up nights in the other world for nothing, he had been prying into everything worth knowing, and finding out everything he possibly could—as he said himself, when he did not understand a thing he hunted up a spirit who could explain it; consequently he is pretty thoroughly posted; and for his accommodating conduct and its uniform courtesy to me, I sincerely hope he will continue to progress at his present velocity until he lands on the very roof of the highest sphere of all, and thus achieves perfection.
I have made a report of those proceedings which every person present will say is correct in every particular. But I do not know any more about the queer mystery than I did before. I could not even tell where the knocks were made, though they were not two feet from me. Sometimes they seemed to be on the corner of the table, sometimes under the center of it, and sometimes they seemed to proceed from the medium's knee joints. I could not locate them at all, though; they only had a general seeming of being in any one spot; sometimes they even seemed to be in the air. As to where that remarkable intelligence emanates from which directs those strangely accurate replies, that is beyond my reason. I cannot any more account for that than I could explain those wonderful miracles performed by Hindoo jugglers. I cannot tell whether the power is supernatural in either case or not, and I never expect to know as long as I live. It is necessarily impossible to know—and it is mighty hard to fully believe what you don't know.
But I am going to see it through, now, if I do not go crazy—an eccentricity that seems singularly apt to follow investigations of spiritualism.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1866
I once made up my mind to keep the ladies of the State of Nevada posted upon the fashions, but I found it hard to do. The fashions got so shaky that it was hard to tell what was good orthodox fashion, and what heretical and vulgar. This shakiness still obtains in everything pertaining to a lady's dress except her bonnet and her shoes. Some wear waterfalls, some wear nets, some wear cataracts of curls, and a few go bald, among the old maids; so no man can swear to any particular "fashion" in the matter of hair.
The same uncertainty seems to prevail regarding hoops. Little "highflyer" schoolgirls of bad associations, and a good many women of full growth, wear no hoops at all. And we suspect these, as quickly and as naturally as we suspect a woman who keeps a poodle. Some who I know to be ladies, wear the ordinary moderate sized hoops, and some who I also know to be ladies, wear the new hoop of the "spread-eagle" pattern—and some wear the latter who are not elegant and virtuous ladies—but that is a thing that may be said of any fashion whatever, of course. The new hoops with a spreading base look only tolerably well. They are not bell-shaped—the "spread" is much more abrupt than that. It is tent-shaped; I do not mean an army tent, but a circus tent—which comes down steep and small half way and then shoots suddenly out horizontally and spreads abroad. To critically examine these hoops—to get the best effect—one should stand on the corner of Montgomery and look up a steep street like Clay or Washington. As the ladies loop their dresses up till they lie in folds and festoons on the spreading hoop, the effect presented by a furtive glance up a steep street is very charming. It reminds me of how I used to peep under circus tents when I was a boy and see a lot of mysterious legs tripping about with no visible bodies attached to them. And what handsome vari-colored, gold-clasped garters they wear now-a-days! But for the new spreading hoops, I might have gone on thinking ladies still tied up their stockings with common strings and ribbons as they used to do when I was a boy and they presumed upon my youth to indulge in little freedoms in the way of arranging their apparel which they do not dare to venture upon in my presence now.
But as I intimated before, one new fashion seems to be marked and universally accepted. It is in the matter of shoes. The ladies all wear thick-soled shoes which lace up in front and reach half way to the knees. The shoe itself is very neat and handsome up to the top of the instep—but I bear a bitter animosity to all the surplus leather between that point and the calf of the leg. The tight lacing of this legging above the ankle-bone draws the leather close to the ankle and gives the heel an undue prominence or projection—makes it stick out behind and assume the shape called the "jay bird heel" pattern. It does not look well. Then imagine this tall shoe on a woman with a large, round, fat foot, and a huge, stuffy, swollen-looking ankle. She looks like she had on an elbow of stove pipe. Any foot and ankle that are not the perfection of proportion and graceful contour look surpassingly ugly in these high-water shoes. The pretty and sensible fashion of looping up the dress gives one ample opportunity to critically examine and curse an ugly foot. I wish they would cut down these shoes a little in the matter of leggings.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1866
Chief Burke's Star Chamber Board of Police Commissioners is the funniest institution extant, and the way he conducts it is the funniest theatrical exhibition in San Francisco. Now to see the Chief fly around and snatch up accuser and accused before the commission when any policeman is charged with misconduct in the public prints, you would imagine that fearful Commission was really going to raise the very devil. But it is all humbug, display, fuss and feathers. The Chief brings his policeman out as sinless as an angel, unless the testimony be heavy enough and strong enough, almost, to hang an ordinary culprit, in which case a penalty of four or five days' suspension is awarded.
Wouldn't you call that Legislature steeped in stupidity which appointed a father to try his own son for crimes against the State? Of course. And knowing that the father must share the disgrace if the son is found guilty, would you ever expect a conviction? Certainly not. And would you expect the father's blind partiality for his own offspring to weigh heavily against evidence given against that son. Assuredly you would. Well, this Police Commission is a milder form of that same principle. Chief Burke makes all these policemen, by appointment—breeds them—and feels something of a parent's solicitude for them; and yet, if any charge is brought against them, he is the judge before whom they are tried! Isn't it perfectly absurd? I think so. It takes all three of those commissioners to convict—the verdict must be unanimous—therefore, since every conviction of one of the Chief's offspring must in the nature of things be a sort of reflection upon himself, you cannot be surprised to know that police officers are very seldom convicted before the Police commissioners. Though the man's sins were blacker than night, the chief can always prevent conviction by simply with holding his consent. And this extraordinary power works both ways, too. See how simple and easy a matter it was for the chief to say to a political obstruction in his path: "You are dismissed, McMillan; I know of nothing to your discredit as an officer, but you are an aspirant to my position and I won't keep a stick to break my own back with." He simply said "Go," and he had to shove! If he had been one of the Chief's pets, he might have committed a thousand rascalities, but the powerful Commission would have shielded and saved him every time. Nay, more—it would have made a tremendous hubbub, and a showy and noisy pretense of trying him—and then brought him out blameless and shown him to be an abused and persecuted innocent and entitled to the public commiseration.
Why, the other day, in one of the commission trials, where a newspaper editor was summoned as a prosecutor, they detailed a substitute for the real delinquent, and tried him! There may be more joke than anything else about that statement, but I heard it told, anyhow. And then it is plausible—it is just characteristic of Star Chamber tactics.
You ought to see how it makes the Chief wince for any one to say a word against a policeman; they are his offspring, and he feels all a father's sensitiveness to remarks affecting their good name. It is natural that he should, and it is wrong to do violence to this purely human trait by making him swear that he will impartially try them for their crimes, when the thing is perfectly impossible. He cannot be impartial—is it human nature to judge with strict impartiality his own friends, his own dependent, his own offspring?
But what I mean to speak of, if I ever get through with these preliminary remarks, is the fact that the Flag yesterday said some thing severe about the police, and right away the reporter was summoned to stand before that terrible tribunal—the Police Commissioners—and prove his charges. Poor innocent! Why, he never can prove anything. They will come "Iowa justice" on him; he will swear he saw the prisoner do so and so, and the Chief will say, "Captain Baker send up thirty-five policemen to swear that they didn't see this thing done." They always manage to have the bulk of testimony on their side, anyhow. If Pontius Pilate was on the police he could crucify the Savior again with perfect impunity—but he would have to let Barabbas and that other policeman alone, who were crucified along with him, formerly.
There is a bill in the hands of a San Francisco legislator which proposes to put the police appointing power in the hands of the Mayor, the District Attorney, and the city and county attorney; and the trial of policemen and power to punish or dismiss them, in the hands of the county and police court prosecuting attorney. This would leave Chief Burke nothing to do but attend to his own legitimate business of keeping the police department up to their work all the time, and is just the kind of bill that ought to pass. It would reduce the Chief from autocrat of San Francisco, with absolute power, to the simple rank of Chief of Police with no power to meddle in outside affairs or do anything but mind his own particular business. He told me, not more than a week ago, that such an arrangement would exactly suit him. Now we shall see if it suits him. Don't you dare to send any log-rolling, wire-pulling squads of policemen to Sacramento, Mr. Burke.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1866
I (together with the Bulletin) have watched, with deep concern, the distress being wrought in our midst by spiritualism, during the past week or two; I (like the Bulletin) have done all I could to crush out the destroyer; I have published full reports of the seances of the so called "Friends of Progress," and the Bulletin has left out three columns of printed paragraphs pasted together by its New York correspondent to make room for a report of the spiritualist Laura Cuppy's lecture and I have followed in the Bulletin's wake and shouted every few days "Another Victim of the Wretched Delusion called Spiritualism!" and like that paper, have stated the number of persons it took to hold him and where his mother resided.
In some instances which have come under my notice, these symptoms are peculiarly sad. How touching it was, on Monday evening, in the Board of Supervisors—a body which should be a concentration of the wisdom and intellect of the city—to see Supervisor McCoppin, bereft of his accustomed sprightliness, and subdued, subjugated by spiritualism, rise in his place, and with bowed head, and stooping body, and frightened eyes peering from under overhanging brows, ejaculate in sepulchral tones:
FEE—FAW—FUM!
Great Heavens! to hear him say that and then sit down with the air of a man who has settled a mooted question forever, and done the work in a solid, substantial manner.
And it touched me to the very heart to see the Mayor of the city—a man of commanding presence and solemn demeanor—get up and repeat the following, as if it were a part of a litany:
Three blind mice,
See—how they—run.
The farmer's wife,
She cut off their tails
With the carving knife,
See—how—they run."
He then sat down and leaned his face in his hands, and Dr. Rowell got up and said:
"Spiritual department—paid spiritual department, when I was a Republican I poisoned rebels—now I am a Democrat, I poison Republicans. Woe, woe, woe, unto the traducers of the new light! woe, woe, woe, to the enemies of the new light! woe, woe, woe, unto them that hear the Cuppy and the Foye and the ministering spirits that fan us with invisible wings as they sweep by, and whisper eternal truths in our ears—woe, woe, woe!"
"Woe-haw, woe-haw, woe-haw-Buck You Duke!" said Mr. Ashbury, impressively.
Mr. McCoppin (counting on his fingers)—One ery—o'ery—ickery—Ann; fillisy, fallallacy, Nicholas John; queevy, quavy, English navy—stinklum, stanklum, Buck. Alas, my poor, poor country."
Mr. Shrader said, with deep feeling, but without gesticulation or straining after effect:
"Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For 'tis their nature thus—
Your little hands were never made
To tear out each other's eyes with."
My eyes filled with tears to see this body of really able men driveling in this foolish way, and as I walked sadly out, I said "This is more spiritualism; the Bulletin and I will soon have to record the departure of the Board of Supervisors for Stockton. Poor creatures—to have kept out of the asylum on one pretext or another so long, and then to fall at last through so weak a thing as spiritualism."
[reprinted in the Golden Era, FEB. 18, 1866.]
Territorial Enterprise, February 1866
Saw something the other night which surprised me more than my late investigations of spiritualism. It was some examples of the methods the United States Signal Corps to telegraph information from point to point on the battle-fields of the rebellion. The Signal Corps "mediums" were Colonel Wicker, of the Russian Telegraph Expedition, and Mr. Jerome, Secretary of Mr. Conway of the same, both of whom were distinguished officers of Signal Corps throughout the war. Besides these two gentlemen there are only two other members of the corps on the coast.
In the late war a signal party was always stationed on the highest available point on the battle-field, and by waving flags they could telegraph any desired messages, word for word, to other signal stations ten miles off. At night, when torches were used, these messages have been read forty miles away, with a powerful glass. The flag, or torch, is waved right, left, up and down, and each movement represents a letter of the alphabet, I suppose, inasmuch as any villainous combination of letters and syllables you can get up can be readily telegraphed in this way with a good deal of expedition. These gentlemen I speak of sent messages the other night with walking-sticks, with their hands, their fingers, their eyes and even their moustaches! It is a little too deep for me.
One sat on one side of a large room, and the other at the opposite side. I wrote a long sentence and gave it to Jerome—he made a few rapid passes with his right arm like a crazy orchestra leader, and Colonel Wicker called off the sentence word for word. I confess that I suspected there was collusion there. So I whispered my next telegram to Jerome—the passes were made as before, and Colonel Wicker read them without a balk. I selected from a book a sentence which was full of uncommon and unpronounceable foreign words, pointed it out to Colonel Wicker, and he telegraphed it across to Jerome without a blunder. Then I gave Jerome another telegram; he placed two fingers on his knees and raised up one and then the other for a while, and the Colonel read the message. I furnished the latter with the following written telegram:
"General Jackson was wounded at first fire."
He went through with a series of elaborate winks with his eyes, and that other signal-sharp repeated the sentence correctly. I wrote:
"Thirteen additional cases of cholera reported this morning."
The accomplished Colonel telegraphed it to his confederate by simply stroking his moustache. There must be a horrible imposition about this thing somewhere, but I cannot get at it. They say that when they are in lecture rooms and parlors whence they are not close enough to speak to each other, they telegraph their comment on the company with their fingers, on their moustaches, or by gently refreshing themselves with a fan.
The signal Corps was one of the most important arms of the military service in the late war. It saved many a battle to the Union that must otherwise have been lost. Yet many of the officers of the army did not believe in its efficiency, regarded it as an ornamental innovation, and bore it strong ill-will. At the battle of Winchester, the officer in command after General Shields was wounded, had pressing need of reinforcements. The reserve were in full view six miles away. The Acting General asked a signal officer if he could order up a brigade. He said he could. "Then do it," said the General; "but," said he, "to make everything sure, I will dispatch an orderly for the reinforcements." The signal officer set his flags waving, and telegraphed: "Send up a brigade on the double-quick." Before the orderly was a hundred yards off, the anxious General gazing through his field glass, saw a brigade wheel into the plain, peel their coats and knapsacks off and throw them down, and come sweeping across on the double-quick. "By G—. here they come!—send back the orderly," said the General—"but I didn't think it could be done."
[reprinted in the Golden Era, FEB. 18, 1866]
Territorial Enterprise, February 25-28, 1866
[This column has been partially reconstructed from the sketches that were later reprinted in the first edition of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches.]
FROM OUR RESIDENT CORRESPONDENT
SAN FRANCISCO, February 23.
The steamer Ajax returned from her pioneer trip to Honolulu yesterday about noon, bringing forty or fifty passengers and a large quantity of freight. She was fourteen days and four hours going down, and between eleven and twelve days coming back. Her crowd of invited guests had a delightful time at Honolulu visiting citizens and planters, dining out, driving here and there, attending parties and prospecting all localities of interest. The people neglected no opportunity of making the visit an agreeable one to their guests, and even his Majesty the King gave them a royal feast.
I was talking to one of the voyageurs a while ago, and he said that in most respects—in nearly all respects, in fact—the trip was a remarkably pleasant one, "but," said he, (and here he slowly shook his head and sighed as one who recalls a sorrowful reminiscence,) "I copper the down trip!" From what I can learn of the experiences of that stormy passage, I am satisfied that they all "copper" that portion of the excursion. The ship left San Francisco in the rain, and for twelve days the excursionists heaved and tossed in the midst of a terrific tempest. The first news that came back here said that the passengers on the Ajax had spent most of the down trip on their knees in prayer. Today their friends greeted them with a hearty handshake and then felt their knees to see if they were "calloused." I refer only to the gentlemen travelers, of course.
[The storm] tore her light spars and rigging all to shreds and splinters, upset all furniture that could be upset, and spilled passengers around and knocked them hither and thither with a perfect looseness. For forth-eight hours no table could be set, and every body had to eat as best they might under the circumstances. Most of the party went hungry, though, and attended to their praying. But there was one set of "seven-up" players who nailed a card table to the floor and stuck to their game through thick and thin. Captain Fretz, of the Bank of California, a man of great coolness and presence of mind, was of this party. One night the storm suddenly culminated in a climax of unparalleled fury; the vessel went down on her beam ends, and everything let go with a crash—passengers, tables, cards, bottles—every thing came clattering to the floor in a chaos of disorder and confusion. In a moment fifty sore distressed and pleading voices ejaculated, "O God! help us in our extremity!" and one voice rang out clear and sharp above the plaintive chorus and said, "Remember, boys, I played the tray for low!" It was one of the gentlemen I have mentioned who spoke. And the remark showed good presence of mind and an eye to business.
Lewis Leland, of the Occidental, was a passenger. There were some savage grizzly bears chained in cages on deck. One night, in the midst of a hurricane, which was accompanied by rain and thunder and lightning, Mr. Leland came up, on his way to bed. Just as he stepped into the pitchy darkness of the deck and reeled to the still more pitchy motion of the vessel, (bad,) the captain sang out hoarsely through his speaking-trumpet, "Bear a hand aft, there!" The words were sadly marred and jumbled by the roaring wind. Mr. Leland thought the captain said, "The bears are after your there!" and he "let go all holts" and went down into his boots. He murmured, "I knew how it was going to be—I just knew it from the start—I said all along that those bears would get loose some time; and now I'll be the first man that they'll snatch. Captain! captain!—can't hear me—storm roars so! O God! what a fate! I have avoided wild beasts all my life, and now to be eaten by a grizzly bear in the middle of the ocean, a thousand miles from land! Captain! O captain!—bless my soul, there's one of them—I've got to cut and run!" And he did cut and run, and smashed through the first stateroom he came to. A gentleman and his wife were in it. The gentleman exclaimed, "Who's that?" The refugee gasped out, "O great Scotland! those bears are loose, and just raising merry hell all over the ship!" and sank down exhausted. The gentleman sprang out of bed and locked the door, and prepared for a siege. After a while, no assault being made, a reconnoissance was made from the window and a vivid flash of lightning revealed a clear deck. Mr. Leland then made a dart for his own stateroom, gained it, locked himself in, and felt that his body's salvation was accomplished, and by little less than a miracle. The next day the subject of this memoir, though still very feeble and nervous, had the hardihood to make a joke upon his adventure. He said that when he found himself in so tight a place (as he thought) he didn't bear it with much fortitude, and when he found himself safe at last in his state-room, he regarded it as the bearest escape he had ever had in his life. He then went to bed, and did not get up again for nine days. This unquestionably bad joke cast a gloom over the whole ship's company, and no effort was sufficient to restore their wonted cheerfulness until the vessel reached her port, and other scenes erased it from their memories.
The Ajax is advertised to sail for Honolulu again on the 1st of March.
The splendid band of the old U. S. Second Artillery, so long under the late General DeRussey when he was at the head of the Engineer Corps of the United States and stationed at Fortress Monroe, kindly cherishing the memory of their beloved old commander, went out to South Park, last night, after the ceremonies and festivities of Washington's birthday were over, and serenaded Mrs. DeRussey and her family. It was a graceful and touching tribute, and showed how well the lads esteemed the old soldier who was always so proud of them. No music could have been imbued with more tender expression than they breathed into their first piece:
"Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?"
There is moving pathos in speech and eloquence sways the feelings with a mighty power, but music goes straight to the heart after all.
The first thing the Second Artillery did when they landed here from the East a month or two before the old General died, was to come out here with their band and serenade him. He was in tolerable health, then, and sat up in his parlor in uniform and listened to their martial music, the proudest man in San Francisco. Such marks of regard from "his boys" always touched him and gratified him.
OFF FOR THE SNOW BELT
Colonel Conway and his junior officers and assistants leave to-day in the steamer Active to resume operations in British Columbia on his division of the Russian Telegraph expedition. He will take a vast amount of wire and telegraphic traps of various kinds [remainder of this passage is missing].
This day, many years ago precisely, George Washington was born. How full of significance the thought! Especially to those among us who have had a similar experience, though subsequently; and still more especially to the young, who should take him for a model and faithfully try to be like him, undeterred by the frequency with which the same thing has been attempted by American youths before them and not satisfactorily accomplished. George Washington was the youngest of nine children, eight of whom were the offspring of his uncle and his aunt. As a boy he gave no promise of the greatness he was one day to achieve. He was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie. But then he never had any of those precious advantages which are within the reach of the humblest of the boys of the present day. Any boy can lie, now. I could lie before I could stand—yet this sort of sprightliness was so common in our family that little notice was taken of it. Young George appears to have had no sagacity whatever. It is related of him that he once chopped down his father's favorite cherry tree, and then didn't know enough to keep dark about it. He came near going to sea, once, as a midshipman; but when his mother represented to him that he must necessarily be absent when he was away from home, and that this must continue to be the case until he got back, the sad truth struck him so forcibly that he ordered his trunk ashore, and quietly but firmly refused to serve in the navy and fight the battles of his king so long as the effect of it would be to discommode his mother. The great rule of his life was, that procrastination was the thief of time, and that we should always do unto others. This is the golden rule. Therefore, he would never discommode his mother.
Young George Washington was actuated in all things, by the highest and purest principles of morality, justice and right. He was a model in every way worthy of the emulation of youth. Young George was always prompt and faithful in the discharge of every duty. It has been said of him, by the historian, that he was always on hand, like a thousand of brick. And well deserved was this noble compliment. The aggregate of the building material specified might have been largely increased—might have been doubled—even without doing full justice to these high qualities in the subject of this sketch. Indeed, it would hardly be possible to express in bricks the exceeding promptness and fidelity of young George Washington. His was a soul whose manifold excellencies were beyond the ken and computation of mathematics, and bricks are, at the least, but an inadequate vehicle for the conveyance of a comprehension of the moral sublimity of a nature so pure as his.
Young George W. was a surveyor in early life—a surveyor of an inland port—a sort of county surveyor; and under a commission from Gov. Dinwiddie, he set out to survey his way four hundred miles through a trackless forest, infested with Indians, to procure the liberation of some English prisoners. The historian says the Indians were the most depraved of their species, and did nothing but lay for white men, whom they killed for the sake of robbing them. Considering that white men only traveled through their country at the rate of one a year, they were probably unable to do what might be termed a land-office business in their line. They did not rob young G. W.; one savage made the attempt, but failed; he fired at the subject of this sketch from behind a tree, but the subject of this sketch immediately snaked him out from behind the tree and took him prisoner.
The long journey failed of success; the French would not give up the prisoners, and Wash went sadly back home again. A regiment was raised to go and make a rescue, and he took command of it. He caught the French out in the rain and tackled them with great intrepidity. He defeated them in ten minutes, and their commander handed in his checks. This was the battle of Great Meadows.
After this, a good while, George Washington became Commander-in-Chief of the American armies, and had an exceedingly dusty time of it all through the Revolution. But every now and then he turned a jack from the bottom and surprised the enemy. He kept up his lick for seven long years, and hazed the British from Harrisburg to Halifax—and America was free! He served two terms as President, and would have been President yet if he had lived—even so did the people honor the Father of his Country. Let the youth of America take his incomparable character for a model and try it one jolt, anyhow. Success is possible—let them remember that—success is possible, though there are chances against it.
I could continue this biography, with profit to the rising generation, but I shall have to drop the subject at present, because of other matters which must be attended to.
Territorial Enterprise, February 1866
[possibly written or published on February 25, 1866]
I arrived in the City of Saloons this morning at 3 o'clock, in company with several other disreputable characters, on board the good steamer Antelope, Captain Poole, commander. I know I am departing from usage in calling Sacramento the City of Saloons instead of the City of the Plains, but I have my justification—I have not found any plains, here, yet, but I have been in most of the saloons, and there are a good many of them. You can shut your eyes and march into the first door you come to and call for a drink, and the chances are that you will get it. And in a good many instances, after you have assuaged your thirst, you can lay down a twenty and remark that you "copper the ace," and you will find that facilities for coppering the ace are right there in the back room. In addition to the saloons, there are quite a number of mercantile houses and private dwellings. They have already got one capitol here, and will have another when they get it done. They will have fine dedicatory ceremonies when they get it done, but you will have time to prepare for that—you needn't rush down here right away by express. You can come as slow freight and arrive in time to get a good seat.
THE "HIGH GRADE" IMPROVEMENT
The houses in the principal thoroughfares here are set down about eight feet below the street level. This system has its advantages. First—It is unique. Secondly—It secures to the citizen a firm, dry street in high water, whereon to run his errands and do her shopping, and thus does away with the expensive and perilous canoe. Thirdly—It makes the first floors shady, very shady, and this is a great thing in a warm climate. Fourthly—It enables the inquiring stranger to rest his elbows on the second story window sill and look in and criticize the bedroom arrangements of the citizens. Fifthly—It benefits the plebeian second floor boarders-at the expense of the bloated aristocracy of the first—that is to say, it brings the plebeians down to the first floor and degrades the aristocrats to the cellar. Lastly—Some persons call it a priceless blessing because children who fall out of second story windows now, cannot break their necks as they formerly did—but that this can strictly be regarded in the light of a blessing, is, of course, open to grave argument.
But joking aside, the energy and the enterprise the Sacramentans have shown in making this expensive grade improvement and raising their houses up to its level is in every way creditable to them, and is a sufficient refutation of the slander so often leveled at them that they are discouraged by the floods, lack confidence in their ability to make their town a success, and are without energy. A lazy and hopeless population would hardly enter upon such costly experiments as these when there is so much high ground in the State which they could fly to if they chose.
BRIEF CLIMATE PARAGRAPH
This is the mildest, balmiest, pleasantest climate one can imagine. The evenings are especially delightful—neither too warm nor too cold. I wonder if it is always so?
I got more sleep this morning than I needed. When I got tired, very tired, walking around, and went to bed in room No. 121, Orleans Hotel, about sunrise, I asked the clerk to have me called at a quarter past 9 o'clock. The request was complied with, punctually. As I was about to roll out of bed I heard it raining. I said to myself, I cannot knock around town in this kind of weather, and so I may as well lie here and enjoy the rain. I am like everybody else in that I love to lie abed and listen to the soothing sound of pattering rain-drops, and muse upon old times and old scenes of by-gone days. While I was a happy, careless schoolboy again, (in imagination,) I dropped off to sleep. After a while I woke up—still raining. I said to myself, it will stop directly—I will dream again—there is time enough. Just as (in memory) I was caught by my mother clandestinely putting up some quince preserves in a rag to take to my little sweetheart at school, I dropped off to sleep again, to the soft music of the pattering rain. I woke up again, after a while. Still raining! I said. This will never do. I shall be so late that I shall get nothing done. I could dream no more; I was getting too impatient for that. I lay there and fidgeted for an hour and a half, listening with nervous anxiety to detect the least evidence of a disposition to "let up" on the part of the rain. But it was of no use. It rained on steadily, just the same. So, finally, I said: I can't stand this; I will go to the window and see if the clouds are breaking, at any rate. I looked up, and the sun was blazing overhead. I looked down—and then I "gritted my teeth" and said: "Oh, d__n a d __d landlord that would keep a d__d fountain in his back yard!"
After mature and unimpassioned deliberation, I am still of the opinion that that profanity was justifiable under the circumstances.
I TRY TO OUT "SASS" THE LANDLORD—AND FAIL
I got down stairs at ten minutes past 12, and went up to the land lord, who is a large, fine-looking man, with a chest on him which must have made him a most powerful man before it slid down, and said, "Is breakfast ready?"
"Is breakfast ready?" said he.
"Yes—is breakfast READY?"
"Not quite," he says, with the utmost urbanity, "not quite; you have arisen too early, my son, by a matter of eighteen hours as near as I can come at it."
Humph! I said to myself, these people go slow up here; it is a wonder to me that they ever get up at all.
"Ah, well," said I, "it don't matter—it don't matter. But, ah—perhaps you design to have lunch this week, some time?"
"Yes," he says, "I have designed all along to have lunch this week, and by a most happy coincidence you have arrived on the very day. Walk into the dining room."
As I walked forward I cast a glance of chagrin over my shoulder and observed, "Old Smarty from Mud Springs, I apprehend."
And he murmured, "Young Lunar Caustic from San Francisco, no doubt."
Well, let it pass. If I didn't make anything off that old man in the way of "sass," I cleaned out his lunch table, anyhow. I calculated to get ahead of him some way. And yet I don't know but the old scallawag came out pretty fair, after all. Because I only staid in his hotel twenty-four hours and ate one meal, and he charged me five dollars for it. If I were not just ready to start back to the bay, now, I believe I would go and tackle him once more. If I only had a fair chance, that old man is not any smarter than I am. (I will risk something that it makes him squirm every time I call him "that old man," in this letter. People who voted for General Washington don't like to be reminded that they are old.) But I like the old man, and I like his hotel too, barring the d------ barring the fountain I should say.
As I was saying, I took lunch, and then hurried out to attend to business—that is to say, I hurried out to look after Mr. John Paul's baggage. Mr. John Paul is the San Francisco correspondent of the Sacramento Union, and "goes fixed." I was down at the wharf when the Antelope was about to leave San Francisco, and Captain Poole came to me and said Mr. Paul was going up with him, and he knew by the way he talked that he was going to travel with a good deal of baggage, and it would be quite a favor if I would go along and help look after a portion of it. The Captain then requested Mr. Asa Nudd, and Lieutenant Elhs, and Mr. Bill Stephenson, treasurer of Maguire's Opera House, to keep an eye on portions of Mr. Paul's baggage, also. They cheerfully assented. And by and by Mr. Paul made his appearance, and brought his baggage with him, on a couple of drays. And it consisted of nothing in the world but a toy carpet-sack like a woman's reticule, and had a pair of socks and a tooth-brush in it. We saw in a moment that all that talk of Mr. Paul's had been merely for effect, and that there was really no use in all of us going to Sacramento to look after his baggage; but inasmuch as we had already shipped for the voyage, we concluded to go on. We liked Mr. Paul, and it was a pleasure to us to humor his harmless vanity about his little baggage. Therefore when he said to the chief mate, "Will you please to send some men to get that baggage aboard?" we proceeded to superintend the transportation with becoming ceremony. It was as gratifying to us as it was to Mr. Paul himself, when the second mate afterward reported that the boat was "down by the head" so that she wouldn't steer, and the Captain said, "It's that baggage, I suppose—move it aft." We had a very pleasant trip of it to Sacramento, and said nothing to disabuse the passengers minds when we found that Paul had disseminated the impression that he had three or four tons of baggage aboard. After we landed at Sacramento there was the infernalest rumbling and thundering of trunks on the main deck for two hours that can be imagined. Finally a passenger who could not sleep for the jarring and the noise, hailed Mr. Bill Stephenson and said he wondered what all the racket was about. Mr. Stephenson said, "It'll be over pretty soon, now—they've been getting that there John Paul's baggage ashore."
I have made this letter so long that I shall have to chop it in two at this point, and send you the remainder of it to-morrow.
Territorial Enterprise, October 30 or 31, 1866
[Enterprise Staff report on upcoming Twain lecture]
Tomorrow night our citizens will be afforded an opportunity to gratify their curiosity and offer a fitting testimonial to their fellow-townsman, Mark Twain, who will do up the Sandwich Islands at the Opera House on that occasion.
The enthusiasm with which his lecture was everywhere greeted is still ringing throughout California, and now that his foot is in his native heath, we expect to see the very mountains shake with a tempest of applause.
Our state can justly claim Mark Twain as its own peculiar production. It was while a resident here and associated with the Enterprise that he assumed the name of Mark Twain and developed that rich and inexhaustible vein of humor which has made the title famous. True he has since warmed his fancy in tropical climes and expanded his thought by ocean pilgrimage and heated his eloquence in volcanic fires; but all these rest upon the solid foundation which was originally laid in our native alkali and sagebrush.
From present appearances he will receive an ovation seldom if ever equalled in our city and it is pleasing to know that such an event will be equally gratifying to the audience and speaker.
Territorial Enterprise, November 1 or 2, 1866
[Enterprise Staff report on Mark Twain's lecture]
One of the largest and most fashionable audiences that ever graced the Opera House was in attendance last evening on the occasion of Mark Twain's lecture on the Sandwich Islands. The entire dress circle and the greater portion of the parquette were filled with ladies while all the available space for extra seats and standing room was occupied. It was a magnificent tribute to the lecturer from his old friends. Of the lecture itself we can only speak in general terms as its points are too numerous and varied to admit of special mention.
Combining the most valuable statistical and general information with passages of drollest humor, all delivered in the peculiar and inimitable style of the author in the lecture, it constitutes an entertainment of rare excellence and intelligence. The lecture will be delivered in the principal towns throughout the state, but we are unable at present to mention definitely any time or place.
In a day or two the entire programme will be arranged. Meanwhile our neighboring towns can well afford to wait patiently in anticipation of a rare treat.
Territorial Enterprise, November 4, 1866
The following characteristic card from Mark Twain is in reply to a general invitation of the residents of Carson extended to him to visit the State Capital and deliver his lecture on the Sandwich Islands:
CARD.
VIRGINIA, November 1.
His Excellency H. G. Blasdel, Governor, and Messrs. A. Helm, O. A. F. Gilbert, H. F. Rice and others:
Gentlemen: Your kind and cordial invitation to lecture before my old friends in Carson has reached me, and I hasten to thank you gratefully for this generous recognition—this generous toleration, I should say—of one who has shamefully deserted the high office of Governor of the Third House of Nevada and gone into the Missionary business, thus leaving you to the mercy of scheming politicians—an act which, but for your forgiving disposition, must have stamped my name with infamy.
I take a natural pride in being welcomed home by so long a list of old personal friends, and shall do my level best to please them, hoping at the same time that they will be more indulgent toward my shortcomings than they would feel called upon to be toward those of a stranger.
Kindly thanking you again, gentlemen, I gladly accept your invitation, and shall appear on the stage of the Carson Theatre on Saturday evening, November 3d, and disgorge a few lines and as much truth as I can pump out without damaging my constitution.
Yours sincerely,
MARK TWAIN.
Ex-Gov. Third House, and late Independent Missionary to the Sandwich Islands.
P.S.—I would have answered yesterday, but I was on the sick list, and I thought I had better wait a day and see whether I was going to get well or not.
M.T.
Territorial Enterprise, Sunday, November 11, 1866.]
[written after Twain was a victim of a practical joke robbery]
Last night I lectured in Gold Hill, on the Sandwich Islands. At ten o'clock I started on foot to Virginia, to meet a lot of personal friends who were going to set up all night with me and start me off in good shape for San Francisco in the morning. This social programme proved my downfall. But for it, I would have remained in Gold Hill. As we "raised the hill" and straightened up on the "Divide," a man just ahead of us (Mac, my agent, and myself), blew an ordinary policemen's whistle, and Mac said, "Thunder! this is an improvement—they didn't use to keep policemen on the Divide." I coincided. The infernal whistle was only a signal to you road agents. About half a minute afterwards, a small man emerged from some ambuscade or other and crowded close up to me. I was smoking and supposed he wanted a light. But this humorist instead of asking for a light, thrust a horrible six-shooter in my face and simply said, "Stand and deliver!" I said, "My son, your arguments are powerful—take what I have, but uncock that infamous pistol." The young man uncocked the pistol (but he requested three other gentlemen to present theirs at my head) and then he took all the money I had ($20 or $25), and my watch. Then he said to one of his party, "Beauregard, go through that man!"—meaning Mac—and the distinguished rebel did go through Mac. Then the little Captain said, "Stonewall Jackson, seat these men by the roadside, and hide yourself; if they move within five minutes, blow their brains out!" Stonewall said, "All right, sire." Then the party (six in number) started toward Virginia and disappeared.
Now, I want to say to you road agents as follows:
My watch was given to me by Judge Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters, and I value it above anything else I own. If you will send that to me (to the Enterprise office, or to any prominent man in San Francisco) you may keep the money and welcome. You know you got all the money Mac had—and Mac is an orphan—and besides, the money he had belonged to me.
Adieu, my romantic young friends.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, December 22, 1867
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER I.
WASHINGTON, December 4, 1867
EDS. ENTERPRISE:—To write "EDS. ENTERPRISE" seems a good deal like coming home again—a good deal like coming home again—but in a dream wherein your hand takes hold of the same old gate and opens it in the same old way, and you enter and find the homestead as you left it: flowers under window, shrubbery in the front yard, old bottles in the retiracy of the corners. But one never finds home just exactly as he saw it in a dream; and by the same token, although (as you will observe by the slashing way in which I have dashed off that "EDS. ENTERPRISE,") I open the gate as familiarly as ever. I suppose I won't be likely to find any of the other well-remembered ornaments about your front yard but the old bottles. That sounds unkind, may be, but behold, truth is stranger than fiction, and one should be just, before he is generous.
I have been here a matter of ten days, but I do not know much about the place yet. There is too much weather. There is too much of it, and yet that is not the principal trouble. It is the quality rather than the quantity of it that I complain of; and more than against its quantity and its quality combined am I embittered against its character. It is tricky, it is changeable, it is to the last degree unreliable. It has catered for a political atmosphere so long that it has come at last to be thoroughly imbued with the political nature. As politics go, so goes the weather. It trims to suit every phase of sentiment, and is always ready. To-day it is a Democrat, to-morrow a Radical, the next day neither one thing nor the other. If a Johnson man goes over to the other side, it rains; if a Radical deserts to the Administration, it snows; if New York goes Democratic, it blows—naturally enough; if Grant expresses an opinion between two whiffs of smoke, it spits a little sleet uneasily; if all is quiet on the Potomac of politics, one sees only the soft haze of Indian summer from the Capitol windows; if the President is quiet, the sun comes out; if he touches the tender gold market, it turns up cold and freezes out the speculators; if he hints at foreign troubles, it hails; if he threatens Congress, it thunders; if treason and impeachment are broached, lo, there is an earthquake!
If you are posted on politics, you are posted on the weather. I cannot manage either; when I go out with an umbrella, the sun shines; if I go without it, it rains; if I have my overcoat with me, I am bound to roast—if I haven't, I am bound to freeze. Some people like Washington weather. I don't. Some people admire mixed weather. I prefer to take mine "straight."
So I have hardly been anywhere. If you were to bet on a storm and "copper" an earthquake, and lost; and then bet on an earthquake and "coppered" the storm, and lost again, you would let the next deal go by, maybe. You would not want to back your judgment any more for the present. That is about the way I feel. I am waiting for my luck to change.
I have been to the Capitol, several times, to look at it—almost to worship it; for surely it must be the most exquisitely beautiful edifice that exists on earth to-day. True, there are many buildings that are grander, and statelier, and half a dozen times as large, but if there is one that is so symmetrical, so graceful, so fascinating to the eye, I have not heard of it—unquestionably I have not seen it. A man could no more get tired of looking at it than he could tire of sunset in the mountains or moonlight on the sea.
I have been within, among the law-makers, also. They look well—both houses. I was here fourteen years ago, and remember what I saw then, perfectly well. I saw in the House Mr. Douglas and a few other great men. The mass of the remainder seemed to be a mob of empty headed whipper-snappers that had only come to Congress to make incessant motions, propose eternal amendments, and rise to everlasting points of order. They glances at the galleries oftenor [sic] than they looked at the Speaker; they put their feet on their desks as if they were in a beer-mill; they made more racket than a rookery, and let on to know more than any body of men ever did know or ever could know by any possibility whatsoever.
But the House I find here now is composed chiefly of grave, dignified men beyond the middle age, and look worthy of their high position. General Banks is the handsomest member, perhaps. General Butler is the homeliest. In his comeliness, Banks has competitors. Some of the members embellish a desk with a book, occasionally, but not frequently. Many of them pay only questionable attention while the Chaplain is on duty, but they never catch flies while he is praying. I noticed that, particularly, and was deeply touched by it; I was gratified more than tongue can tell; for the sake of my country, I was proud of it.
The Senate is a fine body of men, and averages well in the matter of brains. Strangely enough, the two Nevada Senators are the handsomest men in the company—the handsomest men in Congress, indeed, for Governor Nye is handsomer than General Banks; and Stewart is handsomer than the balance of the tribe.
Which reminds me that Stewart has just introduced a bill for the founding of a national mining school. If it carries, in its present shape, it will be a most excellent thing for the whole mining community, from Pike's Peak to the Pacific, and from the northern gold fields clear down to Mexico. Because, it ultimately entirely removes the Government tax upon bullion. That tax foots up $300,000, now ($100,000 of it comes out of Nevada's pocket alone), and it must augment, year by year. It is proposed to devote all of next year's tax to the buildings, etc., for the school; after that (say 4 or 5 years), half the tax will be spent on the school and the other half invested in United States securities for the benefit of the school, until the fund shall be large enough to yield sufficient interest to carry on the institution without touching the principal. Then, the Government tax on bullion will be abolished altogether.
The mining school will be free to all. Assays will be made for anybody, at a cost of a few cents, instead of dollars. The mining knowledge of all countries will be gathered together here, tested, classified, and diffused through our mining communities by means of inspections of the mines and free lectures to the miners by the faculty of the college, etc. The Secretary of the Treasury thinks the expense of mining will be materially lessened and the yield of bullion vastly increased by means of such a school as Mr. Stewart has proposed. It is suggested that the institution be located somewhere in your vicinity, on the Truckee, on the line of the Pacific Railroad. Whether the measure will carry or not, no man can tell. That it should carry, every man on the "coast" will unquestionably desire.
The First Effects of the Message.
The President's Message is making a howl among the Republicans—serenity sits upon the brow of Democracy. The Republican Congressmen say it is insolent to Congress; the Democrats say it is a mild, sweet document, free from guile. But one thing is very sure: the message has weakened the President. Impeachment was dead, day before yesterday. It would rise up and make a strong fight to-day if it were pushed with energy and tact. But it won't be done, I suppose. I foresee that the weather is going to throw some double summersets, now, right away. It will keep up with these convulsions in politics or wear out the elements trying. I must stand by with parasols, umbrellas and overcoats until the weather is reconstructed.
Personal.
S. T. Gage of your Internal Revenue service, is here on business connected with his office. He is a little off color as to his overcoat, but his pantaloons are up to regulation. He looks well, and is attending strictly to business and behaving himself.
John Allman is here also, looking up business in the mail contract line.
I have seen your former Congressman, Harry Worthington. He dresses mighty well for a white man in these universal suffrage times. His home is at Omaha—Omaha the Sublime. When New York and other great States went Democratic, Omaha went handsomely Republican. They say it was because Harry was there. Burke is here, now, attending to business. He has contracts for feeding a tribe of Indians out there on the Plains. He has a great opportunity, now, to teach us what high, unselfish patriotism—and he knows it. He will do it. He will feed those Indians with his country's interest ever in his heart, and his worshipping eyes turned always toward her shrine—and when he gets done feeding them, behold not a devil of a redskin in all his gang will be in a condition to go on the warpath in the spring! Harry Worthington is a first rate fellow, and takes a joke kindly, and we all want to see him prosper. He is going to do well out of this thing. I feel certain of it. Of course he don't want it mentioned, outside of your own circle, but his main business here is to get one more tribe, because, the way he is averaging the rations now, the tribe he has got won't be likely to hold out long, and of course he wants something to fall back on. He thinks he will be perfectly safe if he can get another tribe.
There are plenty more Nevadians here. I will attend to them in my next.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, January 7, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER II.
(SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ENTERPRISE.)
WASHINGTON, December 16, 1867
J. ROSS BROWNE'S REPORT.
It is voluminous, and has remarks and statistics concerning all the mines of any importance—figures that will show at a glance what each has done, what it is doing, and what it has cost and is costing to do it; what the profits are, what the losses are, etc. It contains as good information as could be got concerning new districts and their prospects. To get this varied information and these manifold statistics Mr. Browne had to employ persons residing in the several mining localities to furnish them. These gentlemen have performed their duties pretty faithfully, but of course they have yielded to the natural mining instinct to glorify the leads of their part of the country with weighty adjectives; we were all prone to do that in our day and generation. They speak of "prodigious veins" and "magnificent deposits" and "wonderful richness," etc., and behold their tongues are touched with inspiration and they prophecy! They reveal the things that shall come to pass, with the easy confidence of Elishas newly invested with the enchanted mantle. They trench upon the jurisdiction of the Almighty, and disclose the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven to Congress with a comfortable indifference to consequences that could originate nowhere on earth save in the placid breast of an honest miner. I understand this thing—we all do, that have been miners. For all miners are, by nature and instinct, prophets.
We understand it, but Congress wouldn't. So it has been necessary to drive a pen straight through all these revelations of the things that are to come. The most shining prophecies are to be utterly extinguished. In truth, all the prophecies that are not manifestly authorized from on high, will be pitilessly expunged. Mr. Brown[e] wishes the report to be received with the utmost good faith by the world, and to bear upon its face the evidences that it is worthy of such a reception. Consequently it will not do to bring suspicion upon it with prophecies in this age of skepticism. The rich deposits or adjectives that occur all through the sub-reports will be expunged also, and for the same reason that the words of prophecy are condemned. No "puffs" will be allowed to remain, lest they impair the confidence of the public in the truthfulness of the book. Therefore, you can now understand that, voluminous as the work is, it must all be re-written, and thoroughly weeded of its defects. This is a vast labor, and much time and patience will have to be devoted to it. The book will not be ready for the press for some time yet. The reports from all the great mines—I mean statistics of their yield of ores in tons, and the result of the same in bullion, etc., will be brought up to about the present time, and the book be thereby made as complete as possible.
The moral of this long report—the verdict of it—may be summed up in a few sentences: Save in the great underground gravel channels, "placer" mining is finished—is dead. Nothing but deep mining—vein mining—will do now. The muscle mining of the pan and shovel must give place to critical science. Miners must adjourn from the exhausted hillsides to the chemist's laboratory and be educated to the higher grades of their profession. Therefore, the proposed National School of Mines is become a necessity. Such is the verdict.
PERSONAL.
Hovey is here. General Hovey of Nevada. He is a member of the Senate, I think. I recollect that he ran for that position.
Mr. Stowe is here, also—Stowe of Carson City—once Sergeant-At-Arms of the Legislature. The nation gets along better, now.
There are other Nevadians in Washington. Thomas D. Julien of Humboldt, John S. Mayhugh of Esmeralda (in Maryland just at present), George T. Terry of Austin, Robert M. Howland and wife are expected.
Julien is looking after his Indian affairs. He has claims. His prospects promise well.
S. T. Gage has gone to Ohio. He thinks of returning to Nevada overland. He desires that no mention shall be made of it.
Judge McCorkle of your city is here and will sail for the Pacific in the course of a week or two. He has been visiting his home in Ohio.
S. E. Huse of Gold Hill is here, also. He has been looking at lands in Virginia and Iowa, with a view to investing; likes Iowa best. He will return to Nevada very shortly, to stay a while.
J. M. Walker comes to Washington occasionally. He looks well, and is prosperous. I hear that he is speculating in lands and one thing or another in Virginia, and that he has bought him a homestead at Binghamton, New York, for which he paid $25,000.
Pat Hickey of the city of Virginia and other places in Nevada, was here the other night, so I am told. I am sorry I failed to see him. But I hear that he is flourishing, and, from what I can gather, he was feeling well. His toast was the same one ("Be kind to your friends," and he had fifty to drink it) that beat Beggs that snowy night that Beggs and I got the school report especially for the Virginia Union, and somehow it appeared in the ENTERPRISE in the most mysterious manner the next morning and failed to appear where it was intended to appear. But if it were the last act of my life I would affirm that it was through no connivance of mine. The scrub who had charge of the public school would not let me have the report for the ENTERPRISE, because it had said he was an ass, which was true, and if he had been half a man he would have been flattered by it. But he would give it to Beggs, because he had nothing against the Union particularly. I found Beggs at 8 o'clock in the evening. He had his little dark lantern. That looked badly. Because whenever Beggs got out his lantern there was going to be trouble. We went down and got the report, and, coming back through the driving snow, we met Pat Hickey, and went in and drank "Be kind to your friends." It took forty minutes to do it properly, and then Beggs proposed, himself, to go to the ENTERPRISE and leave a copy of the report, which was done. It was duly copied, and he took the original and started to go to the Union with it. At midnight, when we were going home, we passed McCluskey's and heard a familiar voice. We went in, and Beggs was standing on a table reading the manuscript school report by the light of his lantern to a crowd of mellow but singularly appreciative and enthusiastic Cornishmen from the Ophir nightshifts, who didn't understand a word of it, but seemed to like it all the better on that account. They cheered all the pauses, with the strictest impartiality. John Church entered at the same moment we did—looking angry, Beggs stopped, and smiled down upon Church his smile of naive suavity—a smile that was gilded all over with honest pride, with conscious merit—with triumph!—and said: "I ain't (e-uck!) I ain't to be depended on when I carry my lantern, ain't I! By G—, I've had this old report four hours!" And so he had. That was why the Union was obliged to go to press without it. Beggs was a good fellow; and no one can say that I ever intentionally helped him to get into trouble. I wish I could have seen Pat Hickey the other night. They say he had all Williards' Hotel responding to his, "Be kind to your friends" till well along toward day-break.
E. A. Pretois, formerly of Virginia and Sacramento, is Senator Stewart's private secretary, now.
Mr. Stewart made a speech in the Senate a day or two ago in reply to Garritt Davis of Kentucky. Davis's was a carefully prepared manuscript speech wherein he attempted to show that the tendency of legislation at present could have but one result if persisted in—the result of investing the negro with the power to rule over white men and dictate the course they should pursue. Stewart's reply was extemporaneous, and consequently had more fire in it, perhaps, than polish. The point it made was the manifestly strong one that one negro cannot rule or dictate to ten white men; and that as long as the two colors are divided in that proportion in the country, the devil raised up in Mr. Davis's prophetic visions could never amount to much of a devil practically. There was nothing about one negro that ten white men need to fear. The speech met with a flattering reception by the Senate.
Senator Nye and Stewart have both just introduced bills of great importance to Nevada. Nye's is declaratory of the purpose of the Nevada town site law passed by Congress early in 1867. Secretary Browning, although aware that that law was one which had been greatly desired by the citizens of Virginia, at least, did not feel at liberty to execute it while the law of 1864 remained unrepealed and must in some cases interfere with its operation. If passed, Governor Nye's bill will straighten the matter out.
Senator Stewart's bill gives Nevada the privilege of locating the public lands according to her wherever she pleases—on the sections along the railroad that alternate with those belonging to the railroad company if she chooses. It gives her the privilege of locating the lands donated to the Public Building Fund, and issuing scrip upon them at once. It also makes the salt springs and mines of Nevada the property of the State. If the bill should pass in its present shape it would bring some $50,000 or $60,000 into the State Treasury.
THE HOLIDAYS
Are approaching. Congress will adjourn on Friday for a couple of weeks. Washington will be deserted the next day. I shall help desert it. I suppose, of course, I shall stay in New York till the national wisdom congregates again. If I hear anything while I am gone I will report it to you.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, January 11, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER III.
(SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ENTERPRISE.)
WASHINGTON, December 20, 1867
Colonel Ely Parker, Chief of the Six Nations, and staff officer to General Grant, was to have been married last Tuesday morning to Miss Sacket, an accomplished girl of 17, highly connected, and worthy of the best man in the country. General Grant was to have given away the bride, and the wedding ceremony was to have taken place in great state at the Church of the Epiphany, whose parlor has a monopoly of all the marriages that pay. Truly it has been said, "Ye know not when the bridegroom cometh"—more particularly when the bridegroom don't come at all. And he didn't come in this instance—or, as General Grant gravely expressed it, he failed to qualify. The five foolish virgins that had oil in their lamps were no better off than the two hundred and fifty foolish cues that hadn't, for lamps, howsoever well they may be supplied with oil, cannot discover a bridegroom that is not present but on the contrary is far away with a conspiring and malignant Indian. The wedding party went swearing and sorrowing home, wondering what could have become of the Grand Sachem of the Six Nations?—what could keep him away at such a time?—what he could possibly mean by "such conduct as these." They wondered for full twenty-four hours, and then the defendant came to light—the lost bridegroom was found—the Prodigal Son rose up and returned to his own precinct.
He explained his absence. He said that after he had borrowed a shirt—I should say a scarf—from General Grant on Saturday evening, he saw some friends, and afterwards, an hour or two later, went off to take a walk alone. An Indian of his confederation met him and said he had important things to say to him; walked with him to a convenient room, gave him a glass of wine and opened the conversation. But almost immediately Colonel Parker felt strangely, and lay down on the bed. He remembered nothing that occurred after that, save that he awoke out of a deep sleep, apparently in the middle of a dark night—he does not know which night it was—and by his bedside, never flitting, still was sitting, still was sitting, that ghastly, grim and ancient Indian from the night's Plutonian shore—only he, and nothing more. Quoth the Indian, Nevermore. Then this ebon bird beguiling the Colonel's sad soul into smiling, by the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it bore, "Bird or fiend," he cried, upstarting, (wrathful to his heart's hot core). "What's the time of night, I wonder?—tell me that thou son of thunder, from the night's Plutonian shore. How long have I in dreams been soaring?—how long been wheezing, gagging, snoring?—how long in savage nightmares roaring, since I lay down before?" Quoth the buck,
"An hour or more. You've been sick and may be sicker, because of late you've stopped your liquor, a thing you've never done before; here's some stuff the doctor sent ye—of your folly quick repent ye—take it, Chief, and seek nepenthe—rememb'ring grief no more."
"Bird," the Colonel cried, upstarting. "Bird or fiend," he cried, upstarting. "Bird or fiend!" as if his soul in that one phrase he did outpour: "Pass that stuff the Doctor sent me—move the frame thy God hath lent thee—take thy form from off my door. Take thy beak from out my jug—go on take thy bust outside my door." Quoth the Choctaw, "Nevermore."
Colonel Parker took the medicine, and immediately the fatal drowsiness came upon him again. He fell asleep, and never woke again till Wednesday morning—a day after General Grant assembled himself at the church to assist at his nuptials. It may be all very funny, lightly considered, but seriously regarded it is sad enough. It has brought into unpleasant newspaper notoriety a soldier who has fought bravely and faithfully throughout the long war, and was honored with the confidence and esteem of the first General of our day; and it has also given the same unhappy notoriety to a modest, retiring young girl, and has caused her the extremest suffering. The bridegroom's is the easiest case, for whether he be blameless or not, he is a man and a soldier, and can bear untoward fortune and the gossip of idle tongues with soldierly fortitude.
Colonel Parker's friends are well satisfied that his community of Indians are at the bottom of the whole affair; that they are jealous of foreign marriage complications; that they wish him to wed with a woman of his own race, and that they conspired to stave off his marriage with the white girl and break off the match if possible. The Indian who drugged him was gone when he awoke the last time, and has not been seen since. General Grant has taken the matter into his own hands and will sift the mystery to the bottom. If it comes out straight, Colonel Parker will fare well; if it does not, it will be farewell to Colonel Parker.
A Voluminous Telegram.
A telegram for the Government, consisting of 6,480 words, was received here to-night from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. It is the full report of that body in favor of and urging the ratification of the Sandwich Islands treaty. I think its strongest argument is, that with such a treaty in force, the Government would have a fair pretext for resisting by military power, the occupation of the Islands by England or France. If we can't get the property, it is at least wise to see that they don't. We certainly cannot get it. The King will not sell; we shall not seize it of course. Its free use is indispensable to our Pacific commerce. Hence we should take care that that free use shall be secured to us. The reciprocity treaty blocks the game on all obstacles to this. Nothing else can.
I know of no objection to the treaty except that it will decrease our national revenue by $150,000 a year—but inasmuch as the Pacific coast has but to pay that, in the form of increased prices charged for sugar to cover the duties, perhaps the Government had better tax the coast people to that amount on something else and secure to itself the valuable freedom of the islands through the reciprocity treaty.
Still, it would be just like these Solons here to forget all judgment in the desire to save that trifle of revenue. They give $100,000,000 to the Pacific Railroad, and $500,000 a year to the China mail, and now it would be exceedingly like them to forget the Sandwich Islands are just as much a necessary part of the grand highway they are creating between New York and China as Damascus is a necessary part of the legitimate route from a sinful world to the devil. It would be like them. It would so accord with their policy of saving at the spigot while they lose at the bung.
Yesterday, the Senate shut off the stationery supplies of its members! That was the meanest thing, the smallest business, the cheapest fraud I ever heard of. I know nothing of it. I wrote an order for four reams of fancy foolscap and got a blind lunatic to sign Charles Sumner's name to it (no man can counterfeit the genuine signature unless there is something awful the matter with him), and went up to the Senate and presented it. They said it would not do. I asked if they meant to insinuate anything against the soundness of the signature. They said no; they could see by the general horribleness of it that some member of Congress wrote it, but that was not the idea—and then they told me of that poor little swindle of a "retrenchment." It is nothing but a blind—nothing but a miserable little ten thousand dollar blind to deceive the people with. Those parties are generating something—they are sitting—silent—spreading themselves—hatching. Under cover of that little dab of retrenchment which they have thrown into the people's eyes they are getting ready to steal about four hundred millions of dollars, and then you will hear them cackle. I suppose I shall have to go back to writing letters on old blotting paper again shortly.
The more I think of it the more indignant I become. Here some time ago we bought an iceberg for $7,000,000 and lately we bought a volcano and an infernal nest of earthquakes for $17,000,000, and now we are shutting off a dray-load of stationery and six bits worth of sugar revenues to get even again. Bother such "retrenchment!"
California Senator.
The news arrived to-day by telegraph that the California Legislature has elected Eugene Casserly to be United States Senator to succeed Hon. John Conness. He will succeed one of the pleasantest men, socially, and one of the best hearted that exists; and by the same token a man that has worked hard for the coast, done his duty faithfully, and accomplished all that any man could have done. Do you know what particular stripe of Democracy Mr. Casserly is variegated with? Had I better support him with the Administration, or had I better hoist out my paint and get ready to go on the warpath? But perhaps you fail to catch my drift. What I mean is, is his Democracy of the poetical stripe, as set forth in bombastic platforms, or is it of the practical stripe that looks to the most goods to the greatest number? In plain English, how is Casserly on stationery? For behold, even as a man is on stationery, so shall he be concerning the greater things of the covenant. Would it be agreeable to Casserly for me to collect his mileage for him, do you think?
For President.
Associate Justice Field of the Supreme Bench is widely talked of, latterly, as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States—an able man, a just one, and one whose judicial and political garments are clean—a man well fitted for the place. No man can tell what an hour may bring forth—especially if the politicians have leased that hour—but just at the present moment the Presidential contest bids far to take a particularly "sporting" shape—for verily is there not a "field" on the one side and a "chase" on the other? Now, therefore, where is the fox that shall fly the Chase, cross the Field in safety, and gain the cover of the White House?
Adjournment.
Congress adjourned yesterday. I don't know whether they have done anything or not. I don't think they have. However, let us not forget that they have "retrenched." They have passed the stationery resolution—they have eased up some on one thousand millions of debt—they have smitten the Goliath of gold with a pebble—they have saved the country. God will bless them. Let the new David bring the head of the monster to the foot of the throne, and go after more. I tremble to think they may abolish the franking privilege next.
The Ark has rested on Ararat. The most of the animals have gone away to New York and elsewhere. But I believe the Pacific delegation propose to remain here during the vacation and get ready for business—for stirring times are at hand.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, January 30, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER IV.
WASHINGTON, January 10, 1868
That is the polite term now. What are we coming to when language like that is freely launched at the great officers of the Government? Not in the street alone, and in private conversation, but, in a barely modified form, in the Senate Chamber of the United States. They almost speak in that way of the Secretary of the Treasury. The country seems to have become satisfied that his department is rotten with swindling and rascality, that at last even the Senate has partly awakened to the importance of doing something or saying something. It is a slow body, and timid. Andrew can scare it with a growl. All those Senators believe, and have believed for weeks, that through the improper and unlawful conduct of the Treasury officers, the Government has been swindled out of $200,000,000 a year, through whisky and cotton frauds, but they dared not say anything, until their silence at last began to breed the impression among the people that Congress was in the "ring" too, along with the Treasury! That has stirred them up a little and two or three Senators have lately made a sort of show of wanting to know something about these frauds. One charge against Mr. McCullouch is peculiar. Laws were passed in 1862, '63, and '64, providing for the sale of cotton and other confiscated property seized during the war, and establishing a Court of Claims for the examination of cases where it might be alleged that some of these seizures were unjust—a Court with power to restore such property as might be proven to have been taken by mistake from staunch Union men, etc. Under these laws sales amounting to $36,000,000 net were made. It is alleged now that $10,000,000 of this sum has been restored to parties claiming to have been Union men, and restored, too, on the individual responsibility of the Secretary of the Treasury, without any adjudication whatever by the proper tribunal, the Court of Claims. To prove this true, would be to prove a curious thing surely—that the Secretary, a mere citizen, like anybody else, has the presumption to put himself above the supreme of the land! He coolly overrides that law and serenely plans and executes as if there were no such law in existence! A feeble effort was made in the Senate, three weeks ago, to inquire into this matter, but many of the members hesitated to meddle with it, and Mr. Fessenden, with persistent solicitude, warred against the movement day after day. He argued that it was not worthwhile to trouble the Court of Claims with its own legitimate business, when the Secretary of the Treasury had all the necessary information in his possession and could transact it himself—albeit there was no law authorizing him to so transact it! Ours is a funny Government in some respects.
A dark mystery still hangs over that $200,000,000 per annum business. Also the Secretary's continual over-estimates of expenses and vast under-estimates of receipts, which have had the effect of inducing Congress to increase the burden of taxation enormously to meet the imaginary demands of his Department, have exasperated the people exceedingly. The Secretary's "contraction" system, at the time when the industrial interests of the country are not able to bear the increased pressure it entails, is regarded with high disfavor by all engaged in commerce and manufactures. Mr. Stewart, of Nevada, went into this war against the Secretary of the Treasury, yesterday, with more vim and spirit than any other Senator has yet ventured upon, and his speech is much commented upon in political circles, and applauded. In the course of it he read a letter from a Detroit manufacturer, which was ably written and bitingly statistical—a letter which showed by plain figures that a large amount of taxation now imposed upon our industrial interests could be easily removed and that its continuance is not warranted in any way by the necessities of the Treasury Department. The letter also says that a charge of falsification (in the matter of absurd and injurious estimates) could unquestionably be maintained against the Secretary; and further, that "in any other country, if the head of the Treasury should be so outrageously incorrect, he would be compelled by a deceived people to resign." Stewart's speech was upon the bill to suspend further reductions of the currency, a bill which is considered to be of the nature of a vote of censure and want of confidence in the Secretary of the Treasury. During the debate Senator Nye also made a few remarks, and as they give the effect of the Secretary's operations in a nutshell, I copy them:
I have a vague recollection of a law being passed authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury, as the compound interest notes became due, to issue three per cent. certificates, or securities of some kind, to supply the deficiency thus created. I was told in New York the other day that during the two months preceding the election there were $53,000,000 of compound interest notes retired, together with $8,000,000 of United States notes, making $61,000,000, and at the same time a circular was issued to the banks to keep good their reserve. The banks that had been holding those $53,000,000 had to get in legal tenders to supply their places. The effect of this was to contract the currency some $61,000,000 at once, which raised the price of money in New York from five to eight per cent., and in Chicago to as much as sixteen percent., and prevented the obtainment of the means for bringing forward the vast products of the West. That is what I was told.
Before they get through with this bill of censure it is likely that Congress will rouse up and shake off its sleepiness and make a row that will discover to the world whether there is any rascality in the Treasury Department or not, and if so, about how much.
The Worrell Sisters
Were still playing at the New York Theatre in New York when I was there spending the holidays the other day. I did not see them, but I heard the young men talk about them—the young men seem as if they are not going to get over the fascination those girls have inspired them with. Another "Worrell Brigade" is being found. If gossip is in order, I will mention that Sophy was to sail for Havana with her mother and a Mr. Lovell, about 10 days ago. Mr. Lovell is a bachelor, 45 and rich—but consumption has its grip upon him, and it is believed he cannot recover. His journey to Havana was undertaken for his health. He thinks the world of Sophy, and would like to marry her, but she will not consent, of course. Lovell has been kind to the family, however, and of service to them in every way that he could, and their appreciation of these has moved them to care for and assist him to their utmost upon this his last journey. It is said he has no heirs, and insists upon leaving his fortune to Sophy.
Old Curry
Is here—old Abe Curry. And he is gotten up "regardless." He is the observed of all observers. I think Curry is the best dressed man in Washington. He has a plug hat with a bell crown to it—it is of the latest Paris style, and has a rim that is curled up at the sides. It is the shiest hat in Washington. And he wears black broadcloth pants, with straps to them, while Marseilles vest, and a blue claw-hammer coat with a double row of brass buttons on it, like a Major General. His cravat is perfectly stunning; it looks like it might have come off the end of a rainbow. His moustache is turning out handsomely, and he swings a rattan stick and wears lemon-colored kid gloves. He also has a superb set of false teeth, but he has to carry them in his pocket most of the time, because he can't swear good when he has them in. He goes browsing around the President's and the departments trying to talk French—because he is playing himself for a foreign Duke, you know. N.B.—I may have exaggerated my old friend's costume and performances a little, but then this is the man that detained my baggage in Carson once and gave me that infamous account of the Hopkins massacre, and I can never, never forgive him for it. He says he is here to get seeds from the Patent Office for Tredway and Jim Sturtevant. A likely story. He wants to get another appropriation to put another layer of stone on that Mint, I guess. I expect I had better find out what Curry is about and keep an eye on him—he will be wanting to run this Government next.
Clagett has been here during the past few days, on Montana and Nevada business, visiting relatives, etc.
The Town-Site Bill
In the Senate on Thursday, Mr. Stewart's bill concerning town-sites in Nevada, which has for its object to afford a relief to Virginia and other Nevada towns which Secretary Browning said he could not afford himself the way the old law stood (I have spoken of this bill in a former letter), was taken up, and so amended as to make the operation of the law general upon all the lands of the Union, and in this shape it was ordered to be engrossed and filed for a third reading. There is little question that it will become a law.
MARK TWAIN
P.S. I lectured here last night.
Territorial Enterprise, February 18, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER V.
WASHINGTON, January 11, 1868.
THE POLITICAL STINK-POTS OPENED.
They are opened, and awful is the smell thereof! Millions of politicians have suddenly begun to prate, with unprecedented energy, even for their tribe, and they foul all the air with their corrupt and suffocating breath. It is all about reconstruction. The truth is, that the more Congress reconstructs, the more the South goes to pieces. But Congress is in for it, now, and goes bravely on, hoping at last to get the reconstruction bull where they can hold him. Every morning, after breakfast, Congress passes a brand-new Reconstruction Act; after luncheon they amend it and put some Constitution in it; when it is time to go to dinner, they repeal it, and get ready to start fresh in the morning. If they keep on stacking up talent on reconstruction as they have been doing, they will run out of material before they get their great mission accomplished. You see, they started in to build a good, substantial reconstruction house, but there were some sandy places under it which did not look well. They thought maybe they might not be as risky as they looked, however, and concluded to chance them. But it was not a good idea. The house was hardly built, before one corner began to sink a little, and they had to jackscrew it up and put in an amendment prop. Then another corner began to sink, and they had to put in a similar prop there. Next the chimney began to lean, and they had to prop that mighty quick with a powerful brace; right away the kitchen began to cave in and the gable end to bulge out, and immediately some more jackscrews and braces had to be called into use. It is a nice new house, but some part of it lets down every day, and has to be fixed—till at last we have the curious spectacle of a mansion bright with new paint and dazzling with gilding, looking bleary and bloated, limber and leaning and bulging in all directions, and with unpainted and unsightly spars and braces canted against it and straddling about every which way—an allegorical, elegant gentleman of the first water and most fashionable attire, drunk as a piper, subjugated, demoralized and gone in generally, reeling home on crutches enough for six! Such is the new house, and such the efforts made to save it. And of course it never rains but it pours—in the midst of all this vexation, along comes the Grand Jury, otherwise the Supreme Court, to examine it, and the owners and builders in fancy already hear the disastrous fiat: "Gentlemen, she won't do; she will have to come down; there is too much sand and not enough Constitution under her!"
I am not writing a political article; I am not trying to write a palatable article; I am merely writing the truth—simply photographing a straight-out fact. Thaddeus Stevens and many other prominent Republicans have said all along that the Reconstruction Acts were "outside the Constitution;" Congress itself has said it. Yet they still go on trying to patch up that old house, with that fatal defect in it, instead of wisely pulling it down and doing all over again and doing it right. The defect looked small at first, and Congress seems to have thought that it could not amount to a great deal—and yet, patch and repair and improve as they will, that little defect invariably obtrudes itself again and disarranges everything. It reminds me of a circumstance. That great Claflin house in New York, sold forty millions of dollars worth of goods in the year 1866. I visited their immense establishment in January '67, to see its wonders, and found the head bookkeeper in a sweat. I asked what the matter was. He said that for two terrible days he and his 48 sub-bookkeepers had been turning themselves gray with anxiety chasing a ten cent piece through a cart load of ledgers—there was a discrepancy of ten cents in the cash account for the year—the awful cash account wouldn't balance! I just said, indignantly, "Well that is about the smallest piece of business I ever heard of! Here, I'll give you ten cents myself. You and Claflin go to bed and get some rest!"
But he smiled a green, despairing, ghastly smile, and shook his head. He said that wasn't the idea. It wasn't the ten cents they cared for, but the terrible truth that that miserable trifle might stand for millions of dollars? Until that defect was hunted out and rectified, they couldn't tell whether they had lost millions or made them. "The cash books," he said, "must balance!"
It is just the idea with reconstruction. There is a trifling discrepancy somewhere, and nothing is safe about the building till it shall be rooted out. There is ten cents worth of Constitution lacking in it somewhere, and there will be no security, no salvation for it till the thing is rectified. There is no use trying to tinker it up—the builders must go straight through the edifice, and never rest till its accounts balance with the cashbook of the Constitution!
I wrote that speech for a Democratic member of Congress, but he couldn't pay me anything but whisky, and so we couldn't trade. I said I would rather confer it on a good Republican newspaper as a fair and honest exhibit of the Democratic side of the most exciting question before the nation, to the end that Republicans might have a chance to read both sides and thereby better inform themselves.
But Congress is worried. A decision rendered by the Supreme Court, rendered some time ago, seemed plainly to indicate that five of the Judges considered the Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional against three who believed the opposite. The famous McCardle case threatens to bring the constitutionality of those Acts to a test before the Court right away, and Congress to-day proposes to do what it can to circumvent the disaffected five, by passing a bill ordaining that the concurrence of six of the Judges shall be necessary to constitute a decision in all cases involving constitutional questions. But unhappily Congress did not make the Supreme Court, and doubtless it will transpire that it has about as much jurisdiction over its affairs as it has over the weather. The Court makes its own rules, and is entirely independent of Congress. Its custom is to decide by a majority vote, and if it chooses, will no doubt continue to do so. If McCardle gains his case, negro suffrage and the Reconstruction Acts will be dissipated into thin air for the present. No wonder Congress is troubled. It fears that if it can't fix things so as to enable three Judges to out vote five, it will have to go to work and build that Reconstruction House all over again, from cellar to roof. Isn't it a splendid sensation? The principal Republican papers are growling savagely at Congress for getting itself into this scrape by its innocent stupidity.
Republicans, both in and outside claim that though the Reconstruction Acts and the proposed bill to prescribe rules for the Judges are a little unconstitutional, they are necessities—the state of the country demands them; that if the rebels were admitted to power they would hang Union men upon any and every pretext, or upon none at all; that to admit them to power, unreconstructed and unrestrained, would be to acknowledge that the war for the Union was an iniquity, a crime. General Sheridan says he is interested in this business; if the war was wrong, he thinks he is a particularly bad murderer. I suppose he had a chance to be; he was in eighty-four battles, and had a hand in a good deal of killing. He says if he was in the right, he would like it if Congress would go ahead and so decide it; if he was in the wrong, and was only a murderer, he would like to know that, also. He is satisfied of one thing—that he cannot live under rebel rule; and thinks, from at least a military point of view, that the rebel conquered have no right to dictate to the victors—no right to say under what terms they will come in. Congressmen say that everything that stands in the way must go to the wall—if the Supreme Court obstructs the regeneration of rebeldom, it must go, too. This would be good enough reasoning, possibly, but for one thing: the President will veto the bill making rules for the Judges, and it can hardly be passed over his veto. And even if it were, the Court would simply annul it, and then, no doubt, go on and annul the Reconstruction Acts by the liberation of McCardle. A telegraphic report to-day says that General Meade has suspended the Governor and Treasurer of Georgia from office, and this has created great rejoicing among Republicans here. So the political cauldron boils. Let her boil.
It is believed that Secretary Stanton will be reinstated in the War Office within a few days, whether the President likes it or not. Congress is on its mettle now—Stanton, the President, Treasury frauds, reconstruction—it has a good deal of business on its hands, but it is fighting furiously at last. Even Wendell Phillips ought to be satisfied now. How the cauldron does boil. Let her boil.
It is the fashion, now, to write speeches. Congressman Brooks said at the Press Banquet, last night, that the day of eloquence is over in America—killed by newspapers, telegraphs, and phonographers. No man has a chance to carefully write out a speech for publication, now, after it has been delivered. It is forever too late—the short-handers have got it, the telegraph has flashed it to the ends of the earth, the daily press has petrified it into print with all its imperfections before the words were cold upon his lips. He said that Webster and Clay could not be orators, now—their crude extemporaneous efforts would appall them in print, and they would fall into the safer new fashion, and write cold, glittering, chastely worded sentences that could warm no listener into enthusiasm when he heard them.
Mr. Stewart has written, and written carefully, an elaborate speech upon the mining interests of the Pacific coast. It is by far the best and the ablest effort of the kind that ever has seen the light in this region. If he never does anything else to be proud of while he lives, this ought to be sufficient to satisfy him. It ought to be sufficient to kill him, too. For I never knew a man to do his constituents a great service, or do his whole duty by them honestly and well, that they didn't put him on the shelf and send some ass to represent them that was of no use whatever under God Almighty's Heaven but to get up and "blat" about niggers and politics and American flags and other bosh that he didn't know any more about than a bull knows about mathematics. California has shelved Conness, and served him right. He worked too hard for her interests—he was too faithful to his trust—he was too good and too tireless a servant.
Mr. Stewart is the only man that ever stood in either house of Congress that knows all about mines and mining—knows it from A to Zed—knows it in all its needs, in all its possibilities, in all its details. He knows what laws are wanted to nurture, and protect, and endow it with prosperity, and he knows how to frame them. He sees into his subject with a surer and a clearer vision than any man on this coast—it would be safe to say, or upon yours either. I was satisfied of this before. I know it now, after reading his speech. But it will do this for him—it will show his constituents that they have sent a man here who knows his business to a fraction, and is exactly the man they need here to keep Congress from eternally impoverishing them by passing absurd laws to cripple mining and disgust every man engaged in it, and then you will send some brainless idiot here—some quacking numskull—some bladder of wind that some browsing elephant, in the inscrutable providence of God, ought to step on and burst. That is what you will do. If I were in Nevada next fall I wouldn't want anything better than to take stump for Stewart and "norate" it to you. Can a man put a bill through the Congress like Stewart's that freed your mines from Government ownership and opened the markets of the world for their sale—dare a man to do so priceless a service as that for his people and ever hope to see the United States again? Not while republics are ungrateful, I reckon, and a clattering tongue with a piece of an idiot hung to it can be found in his place. You are hearing me toot my horn!
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, February 19, 1868
(SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ENTERPRISE)
[NUMBER VI.]
NEW YORK, January 20
I have run up here every now and then to get rid of the dullness of Washington; but I cannot tarry long, for I have to clear out again to keep from being crazed by the terrible activity of New York. They complain that New York is excessively dull, now, and so it must be, compared to the bewildering energy it displays in its busiest seasons—but even as it is now it is able to make provincial brains grow dizzy with its noise, and bustle, and excitement. It is a wonderful city. Two persons died last night of hunger, cold and exposure; they were people who could get nothing to do, and could not make a living begging. The bodies were displayed at the Morgue to-day, and among the idle spectators was a man who has nothing in life to accomplish but the spending of four hundred thousand dollars a year. I was in a tenement house yesterday which contained two hundred persons, all crowded together in little cramped chambers, where was lack of everything but dirt and rags; there were remnants of hats for window-panes; doors hung by one hinge; fragments of quilts and blankets, bestowed in corners, did duty as beds; there were a few battered pots and pans, but nothing to cook in them, and no fire to do it with, either; there was occasionally a broken chair and part of a table, but as a general thing these rooms were not so sumptuously furnished; there were small ridges of snow on some of the floors—it had blown in through cracks and broken windows; the human occupants were cadaverous, and pale, hollow-eyed and savage with hunger, or dumb with a misery that was next of kin to despair. One woman with five children (it is proper to call her a woman, I suppose, though she would have averaged very well as rags, all through), said she washed for a living formerly, but she got sick and lost her custom; then she peddled apples and oranges until a general financial crisis that prostrated all commerce and broke up many a staunch old firm reduced her to peanuts; but trouble still followed her; an investment of four dollars at the very top of the market, followed immediately by an unusual business depression, compelled a sacrifice of the whole venture and she went to protest. She retired from commerce, a bankrupt. She struggled on, doing what she could to make a livelihood by begging, but she was very nearly discouraged. For 24 hours she had not eaten. She swore to it. One of the philanthropists in our party advanced funds enough to set her up in business again.
There was want and suffering all about us. There was a man there—a poor decrepit starveling of 60—who had been the clown in a circus in his palmy days—had been royally tricked out in paint, and brilliant spangles, and ribbons and gold lace, instead of the gunny sack he wore about his shoulders now and the shredded latticework of rags that hung about his legs. He had been the admiration of the school-boys; had been the man of all men they envied most and most longed to be like. But nobody envied him now; nobody admired him; the day of his greatness was over. He mentioned it with feeling, and sighed when he spoke of it. He told how the audience used to applaud when he capered into the ring and made his bow; he said he was the "star" of the troupe, and his name alone on the bills was a sufficient guarantee for a full house. He compared himself with the "celebrated" clowns, Messrs. So-and-So, whom we had not heard of before, and pointed out wherein he had been superior to them. Then he piped out some execrable jokes in the old familiar clownish way (I was not aware before that they were so old), and told how boisterous the laughter and applause used to be. The fact is he had forgotten for the moment that he was a mendicant, and imagined himself a clown again, in the zenith of his glory. He even got so carried away with his happy reminiscences as to attempt his favorite comic song for us, but his poor reedy falsetto broke down and his splendid day-dream vanished. He was an unspangled mendicant again. He told how he came down gradually but surely from the dizzy height of his prosperity to be a magic-lantern exhibitor, then a door-keeper, then a Roman soldier in a theatre, then a mere "supe," afterwards a vendor of cheap soap and ballads, and finally a rag-picker and a searcher after old bones and broken bottles. He was hungry, but he was not thinking of that; he was cold, but he was not thinking of that, either; his friends were all gone, years ago, and it was plain that he had no home—but none of these things stood first in his mind. All he wanted was to shine once more in the ring, in glittering spangles, and get off some more of those infernal jokes, and hear the blessed music of applause, and then die. But we could not give him an engagement, as we had no circus, and so we left him to his want, his rags and his dreams.
There was a girl in that house, about fourteen years old, who supported her father and mother and two young sisters by her work. She sold newspapers about the streets in the daytime, and played the tambourine and collected the pennies for an organ grinder at night. She was prosperous, and full of ambition. She reveled in her gorgeous dreams, and dared to look forward to a day when she should rise to the dignity of peanuts, and have a regular stand on the corner. This girl had a good deal of human nature about her. Straightened as her circumstances were, she kept a Sunday dress—a dress that must have cost as much as three or four dollars, years ago, when it was new. She took it down from a nail and showed it to us. She had had a waterfall once, she said, but the rats got it. There was considerable human nature in some of those small children, too. They got out some rusty rag dolls—wretched affairs with arms pulled out, and features defaced, and bran oozing from their legs—they got these melancholy monstrosities out and flourished them about where we could admire them, but pretending all the while that they had no such end in view, and were even unconscious that those dolls were in any respect proper objects of admiration. I have seen other children go through the same fraudulent performance with costlier playthings, pretending all the while that they were not courting notice and commendation.
Ah, the want and suffering that we saw yesterday! We passed from the tenement house to a mansion up town where one of our party had a call to make, and there we saw human misery in its saddest form. Here was a poor devil living in a vast brownstone front, whose income had suddenly come toppling down from six thousand a month to four. He was consequently in deep distress, and all that he said was touched with melancholy. Trouble never comes singlehanded. One of his finest horses had gone lame, and his most precious dog was very sick and like to die. His champagne and his sherry did not suit his taste, and his tailor was so slow with his work as to drive him to the verge of distraction sometimes. This heart bowed down by weight of woe, wrought upon my sympathies as suffering never did before. And yet no man can fully appreciate misery like his until he has tried it. Unhappily, I had never tried it, and I was obliged to compassionate him only in a degree far inferior to the magnitude of his grief. The ex-clown suffered, but I could not see that he suffered as much as this man.
But this distressing subject suggests a fact. In this city, with its scores of millionaires, there are to-day a hundred thousand men out of employment. It is an item of threatening portent. Many apprehend bread riots, and certainly there is serious danger that they may occur. If this army of men had a leader, New York would be in an unenviable situation. It has been proposed in the Legislature to appropriate $500,000 to the relief of New York poor, but of course the thing is cried down by everybody—the money would never get further than the pockets of a gang of thieving politicians. They would represent the "poor" to the best of their ability, and there the State's charity would stop.
New York is always bustling and lively, but there are degrees in even its liveliness. In that net-work of great business streets that occupies the section between Broadway and the Brooklyn ferries, and the City Hall and Castle Garden, one may cross and recross the thoroughfares, now, with hardly a fear of being run over, and may make a reasonable progress along pavement still crowded, but not crammed. But a year ago it was so different. To attempt to cross one of those streets then, with its long array of massed and struggling vehicles, was to take your life in your own hands; and to get anywhere on foot along the sidewalks necessitated an exasperating elbow-fight for the whole distance you wished to go. They used to talk of dull times then. What do they think of it now?
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, February 27, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER VII.
WASHINGTON, January 30, 1868
More Westonism.
Sergeant Gilbert H. Bates of Wisconsin is the last candidate for pedestrian notoriety. He has made a bet that he will walk, alone, unarmed, without a cent in his pocket, and bearing aloft the American flag, through the late Southern Confederacy, from Vicksburg to Washington. He is already on his way, and the telegraph is noting his progress. The Mayor and a large portion of the population of Vicksburg ushered him out of that city with a grand demonstration. He proposes to sell photographs of himself at 25 cents apiece, all along his route, and convert the proceeds into a fund to be devoted to the aid and comfort of widows and orphans of soldiers who fought in the late war, irrespective of flag or politics. And then, I suppose, when he gets a good round sum together, for the widows and orphans, he will hang up his flag and go and have a champagne blow-out.
I don't believe in people who collect money for benevolent purposes and don't charge for it. I don't have full confidence in people who walk a thousand miles for the benefit of widows and orphans and don't get a cent for it. I question the uprightness of people who peddle their own photographs, anyhow, whether they carry flags or not. In my opinion a man might as well start his name with an initial and spell his middle name out and hope to be virtuous.
But this fellow will get more black eyes, down there among those unconstructed rebels than he can ever carry along with him without breaking his back. I expect to see him coming into Washington some day on one leg and with one eye out and an arm gone. He won't amount to more than an interesting relic by the time he gets here and then he will have to hire out for a sign for the Anatomical Museum. Those fellows down there have no sentiment in them. They won't buy his picture. They will be more likely to take his scalp.
Now the next ass that turns up will be wanting to carry a Confederate flag through the North, and wouldn't he have a cheerful time of it? What a pity it is that that insufferable fool, George Francis Train, did not think of that. He would have tried it, in a minute, and got hanged, and it would have been a blessing to the country. It would have transferred that tiresome gab of his to the other world, and from that time forward there never would have been any peace in hell any more. When the English found what a poor, clattering frog they had flattered with imprisonment, they were ashamed of themselves, and turned him loose. And ever since then he has been squandering his substance in sending bombastic telegrams over here about his suing the British crown for [pounds]500,000 (money enough to buy a sane man with); and about his protesting officially against this, that and the other thing; and about "Derby" threatening boastfully, but "trembling" (at such a sputtering bladder of gas as Train!); and about his going to "stump Ireland."
Was there ever such a world of egotism stuffed into one carcass before? Surely there is no room left in him for bowels. Do you know that that idiot is aspiring to the Presidency of the United States? He honestly is. He said in a farewell speech on shipboard, as he left New York—a speech slobbering adulation and nauseating buncombe over half a dozen Irishmen out of business, that in due time he would be the People's President. However, the same God that made George Francis Train made also the mosquitoes and the rats, and in His infinite wisdom He knows what He did it for. Human beings don't, though. Train established a newspaper in New York (the Revolution) to keep his notoriety alive while he wagged his ears in Europe. Last week, in New York, I saw six young girls walking up Broadway in single file, arrayed in showy uniform dresses of red merino, with white bodies, and on their heads they wore blue caps—red, white and blue, do you observe?—and each girl had a belt about her waist with "Revolution" painted on it, and had also a bundle of Revolution newspapers under her arm. Isn't that absurdity just like Train? I suppose that paper will advocate Female Suffrage, Free Love, Miscegenation, Burglary, Arson, Spiritualism, Southern Superiority, and general compounding with sin on earth and repudiation of damnation hereafter. When they speak contemptuously of worthless, fussy people in England they call them baggage. They have applied this happy epithet to Train. So our blowing, shrieking, ranting lightning express has degenerated into a poor, homely inconsequential baggage-Train after all.
Judge McCorkle.
They report that this homely old friend of mine—this ancient denizen of California and Nevada—the wrinkled, aged, knock-kneed, ringboned and spavined old war-horse of the Plains is to be married shortly to a handsome young Ohio widow worth Three Hundred Thousand Dollars. Well. What is the world coming to, anyhow? If any man had told me a week ago that any woman in her right mind and under 70 would be willing to marry that old fossil!—that old tunnel—that old dilapidated quartz mill—I would never, never have believed it. He is a splendid man, you know, but then he must be as much as 92 or 93 years old. He is one of my nearest personal friends, but what of that? I would remain a bachelor a century before I would marry such a rusty, used up old arastra as he is. I have always considered that I ought to fairly expect to marry about seventeen thousand dollars, but I think differently now. If McCorkle ranges at three hundred thousand in the market, I will raise my margin to about a million and a half.
It is on hand again. Congress has said it is going to boss this Government, in spite of everything and everybody, and it is keeping its word. It has held its grip now for more than a month, without ever flinching. And so it is forcing from the people that respect which pluck always inspires, whether it be displayed by one man or a multitude. It has never given up its impeachment scheme, but foiled in one attempt it straightway essays another. The new bill, just introduced into the Senate by Mr. Edmunds, of Vermont, proposes to get rid of the obnoxious President on easy terms. It simply provides that when a civil officer is arraigned before the Senate on articles of impeachment preferred by the House, said officer shall be suspended from service pending the examination of his case. The examination of Mr. Johnson's case, so arraigned would never take place at all. He would remain harmlessly suspended until his duly elected successor arrived at the White House on the 4th of next March. It is specified in the bill that the army, if necessary, shall enforce such suspension. No one can tell, of course, what this measure may result in, but it is possible that through it Congress may yet gain its point and tie the hands of the President.
Harry Worthington
Has been nominated for U. S. District Judge for Nebraska, and henceforth will cease to decimate the Indians with his short rations. But he performed good service for his country while he remained in the Indian feeding department of the Government. He started out to unfit a couple of tribes for the war-path, and I think he must have done it, for no man has ever heard of them since. Works like those are bound to receive their reward at the hands of a grateful nation. He is a Judge, now (or rather, I trust he soon will be), and can rest upon his Indian laurels, and grant injunctions and hang people. It is good to be a Judge. The New York papers say Harry Worthington used to be a U. S. Senator from California—but I guess that is a mistake, isn't it? But New York papers don't know everything.
And speaking of Western people, I will mention that C. H. Webb ("Inigo") arrived here for a short sojourn to-day. He is going to do up fashions and such matters for Harper's Bazaar and the Tribune, I hear. This town seems to me to be pretty well stocked with California newspaper men, and so is New York—and all at work, too, which is flattering, certainly, considering the number of idle pens there are. I am on the Tribune staff yet, and also on the regular staff of the New York Herald and likewise that of the Chicago Republican. I think the boys are all satisfied with their Eastern positions and with Eastern pay; and I am sure ought to be. They treat us houseless strangers well in the East. Thomas Nast, the clever artist of Harper's Weekly is exhibiting a collection of great caricatures of national subjects in New York and wants me to do the lecturing for his show. I would, if I hadn't so many irons in the fire. I would like it right well for a change, but then changes are risky. I must hunt around for a handsome Pacific coaster to take the berth—because I suppose it is personal loveliness Nast is after.
Mr. Hooper, delegate from Utah, is to have the seat in the House of Representatives contested by Mr. McGrorty. The papers in the case cover the whole ground of the legality of the government of that Territory as administered by the Mormons. This is said to furnish the first occasion for bringing the whole question of Mormon laws and authority properly before Congress. I suppose we may look for a general ventilation, now, of the happy civil and religious code which permits a man to marry a whole family, grandmother and all, if it is particularly fancy stock, or if he can't make up his mind which of the ladies he likes best.
Pardon Todds has been nominated for the post of Indian Agent of Utah. That is the homeliest of all the homely Puritan names I have stumbled on yet, except that of famous Praise-God Barebone. How could a man write an obituary on Pardon Todds, if he died, without making it intensely funny? That man will never survive his mission. The Indians will put up with a good deal, but they will never put up with an Agent with a name like that. Toddy, you are going to get scalped. That is what is in store for you.
MARK TWAIN.
[Related item that Mark Twain wrote for the New York Tribune on GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN.]
The New York Tribune, January 22, 1868
INFORMATION WANTED.
To the Editor of The Tribune.
SIR: If you can, I wish you would give me some information of a man by the name of George Francis Train. It is for an uncle of mine that I want it. My uncle has had a pretty hard time of it, and if any man does deserve sympathy, and if any man would appreciate that sympathy, it is he. He is in the decline of life, and he wants to be quiet; but you know he tried Walrussia, and the bears ousted him; and then he tried St. Thomas, and the earthquakes ousted him; and so he hung up his fiddle, so to speak, and concluded he would wait and look around awhile, till the Government bought some more property. And while he was waiting, somebody recommended him to hunt up this gentleman, Mr. Train. They said Mr. Train was a slow, quiet sort of a body, and had no isms or curious notions about him, and that he was going over to the old country to buy Ireland for those persons they call the Fenians. They said he was very popular with the English Government, and that if the English Government would sell to anybody, they would to Mr. Train. They said that if Mr. Train concluded to take it, my uncle have an excellent chance to buy into a quiet locality in Cork, or Tipperary, or one of those calm, religious regions there, by speaking to him early.
So my uncle went after Mr. Train, but he was building a couple of railroads out West, somewhere, and before my uncle got there he had finished those railroads and was making Democratic speeches in the East. It was a considerable disappointment, but my uncle always had a great idea of doing business with a slow, quiet man, and so he came East. But he came the last part of the journey in a canal-boat (it being his nature to prefer quiet and safety to speed), and so he missed that man again. Mr. Train had got the Democratic party reorganized and all straight, and was out in the middle of the Rocky Mountains clearing off a place and driving away the buffaloes, so that he could build a metropolis there. But my uncle went in an ox wagon, and he missed that man again. Mr. Train had finished that metropolis and paved it with the Nicolson pavement, and started a couple of daily newspapers, and was gone East again with another lady to lecture on female suffrage.
It was a little discouraging, but my relative rested about a week and started after him again. He caught him this time, because Mr. Train had sprained his ankle and was obliged to remain quiet until he could get the leg removed and a reliable patent wooden one put on in its place that could not sprain. So he mentioned his business to Mr. Train, and he replied:
"You are all right, Sir. Put your trust in me. I'll buy Ireland, and you shall have as good a chance as any man. I am going to sail right away. You will hear about me as soon as I touch the Emerald shores. I shall get out some advertisements and make my presence known. I make no pretensions, but you will see pretty soon that I shall be heartily welcomed there and promptly cared for."
Since that time my uncle has not heard of Mr. Train. He has confidence in him, but he thinks that maybe he is too quiet a man to make much of a stir, and has not been heard of on that account. But have you heard anything of Mr. Train? Do you know if he got out any advertisements? And do you know if they received him heartily there, and more especially if they took care of him? This last is the main thing with my relative. If they took care of Mr. Train, it is all he cares for. He has said to me repeatedly that all that he is afraid of is that he has been neglected and not taken care of. If he were to hear that Mr. Train is there, in a strange land, without any place to stay, it would nearly break his heart. If you could only inform us that Mr. Train is safe, and has been received hospitably, and has a good tranquil place to board in, suitable to a quiet man like him, it would be a great comfort to the old man.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, March 1, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER VIII.
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ENTERPRISE.]
WASHINGTON, February 5, 1868
Another man has arrived here who comes to get the berth of Postmaster of San Francisco. This makes thirty-seven. The new applicant is not posted in office-seeking; he has not had a ripe experience. He is a good enough man, and may get the place, but it will cost him more trouble and vexation than he is promising himself, no doubt. He says he can't see that there is anything to be done but get the President to appoint and the Senate to ratify. Certainly that is all, truly enough. It was all that was to be accomplished by the thirty-six. He says he means to show the President what the Pacific coast papers say about him, and he means also to tell him all about how the Post Office has heretofore been managed and how he would improve that management the moment he got into office. But he don't say he would swear by Andrew Johnson and labor for his behest alone—which is much more important. And he don't take into consideration that the moment he gets the President in his favor the Senate will be down on him for it, and that if he gains the Senate's affections first, the President will be down on him. He only proposes to stay here a week. He says he don't care anything about making an extended stay in Washington—he only wants to get the appointment, and look around the great public buildings a little, and then he is off.
They told him a story, yesterday, but I do not know whether he saw the point of it or not. It was a little story that has been related with great spirit many thousands of times to office-seekers and claim-hunters who were only going to tarry a few days in Washington. It was about
THE MAN WHO STOPPED AT GADSBY'S.
It was a long time ago—thirty long years ago—when Gadsby's was the great hotel. It was snowing. A gentleman in the very prime of life drove gallantly up to Gadsby's with a spanking coach-and-four. The servants ran out to put up his horses, but he said no, he was only going to stop an hour, and was going right on again; he only wished to get a little claim cashed at one of the Departments. And so he blanketed his horses and hitched them, and went away. A week after that he was still in Washington. He sold one of the horses. After a month or two had rolled by he sold another. He said he did not wish to part with the others, because he was going back home as soon as his claim was cashed. Another month or two elapsed, and he sold the carriage and bought a light two-horse buggy with a small part of the money. About four months after that, he sold one of the remaining horses; and after another month or so had gone by, he sold the buggy and bought a saddle. He said he could ride horseback well enough, considering that the roads were likely to be good enough for a week or two to come. But the lingering weeks dragged by, and finally he sold the saddle and concluded to ride bare-back. At last—at last—he sold the other horse, and said that when his claim settled he would walk. He is seventy years old, now, poor old man, and his hair is white, his clothes are threadbare, and his head is bowed with many troubles. But he says it is not for long—he is only waiting a little while to get his claim settled, and then he is going home to see his people again and be happy.
I think No. 37 had better tie his horses up at Gadsby's.
It is reported that Mrs. Lincoln, long threatened with insanity, has really fallen a victim to it at last. The information comes by private letters from Chicago. She is said to be living in a house which is empty of furniture, she having sold it all. She labors under the delusion that she is going to come to want, and she sells everything she can lay her hands on. She is under guard of two old men. It is to be hoped that now, at least, this most unfortunate woman will be spared the pitiless slanders that have assailed her ever since she first entered the White House, and which even the crushing affliction of the murder of her husband was only sufficient to check for a little while.
Can it be possible that she is deserted by her friends and left to the sole charge of the "two old men?"—she whose friendship was so precious and whose society was so coveted a few years ago, when a good word from her was half an aspiring man's ambition gained?
I was striding up Broadway, in the face of a driving snow storm, the other evening in New York, when a man seized me by the hand with a crushing grip and said: "How are you, Mark?" I said I was well enough—it was the weather that most invited solicitude. He said he was very, very glad to see me. I intimated that I was saturated with felicity to see him. But all the time I was wondering who the mischief the fellow was. He said he had always remembered me for saying a merciful word in print for him when he was being so sorely hunted by the press of San Francisco. I never recollected saying a merciful word for anybody, and so I was still in suspense. Finally he said he wished I would call and see him at his offices. ("Offices" sounded sumptuous, and I warmed to him.) He was dealing in steamships; that is, he was engaged in furnishing complements of passengers to them; any business I might happen to have with the great steamer lines he would be happy to conduct for me. I knew the chirping voice then; I remembered the complacent countenance; I recalled the cheerful spirit that never yet had been bowed down by any possible weight of woe; I recognized the royal presence that always, by a destiny, clad in the outward semblance of poverty, was yet always a millionaire within: Felix O'Byrne! Who else, in all the world, would be smiling so blithely out from a gallant costume in ruins and chirping about his offices and his steamships?
Nothing can crush Felix O'Byrne finally and conclusively. Truth and Felix O'Byrne crushed to earth will rise again. Thus there is a marked similarity between Truth and Felix O'Byrne. I hereby locate a discovery claim of four hundred feet on this fact. Felix arrives on the Pacific coast in poverty; shortly he is the honored contributor to Victoria newspapers and the guest of Governors. Next he turns up in San Francisco, poor and accused of a grave offense against the laws; he is wearing diamonds next, and wielding a mighty influence in politics. Crushed again—degraded, disgraced—he disappears from public life, and it is discovered that the notes he gave for clothing, and the baggage he left at first-class hotels, are equally fanciful as to value. Suspected by the police, worried by landlords of low boarding houses, snubbed at third-rate free lunches, he blooms out all at once in a bright, new uniform, as a lieutenant in the 8th California Volunteers. When the mystery of the transformation is solved, it transpires that poor, despised and shunned, the tireless energies of the man have been at work, steady and serenely as ever—and characteristically, their aim was high; let Felix's body be where it would, his soul was always in the clouds! It transpires that he has procured his soldierly position by means of a petition to the Governor, signed by a number of the foremost gentlemen of San Francisco! The confidence, the persistence, the effrontery, and the dazzling successes of this man were bound to provoke some admiration in any soul but an infinitesimally mean one. But the newspapers showed Felix up, immediately, and it was plain to be seen that he was hardly the man to augment the respectability of the military service. He had the glory of a public military trial, though, and the distinction of being the head and front of the chief sensation of San Francisco for nine days, in print, and the principal lion on the street when he went forth to show his uniform. Then he was dismissed, and forthwith sank, down, down, down—clear out of sight. He was out of sight a good while—and also out of mind. But not to stay. The first bubble that rose from the vasty depths of Fenianism brought Felix to the surface. He wrote; he lectured; he stumped the State; he aspired to lead the movement; and lo! in the fullness of time, he bloomed again—this time as high chief editor of the Irish People newspaper. His career was brief but gorgeous. The Fenians got after him, and so did his subscribers. His creditors assaulted him again. He was busted. The waves of oblivion swept over him once more. He ceased to be talked about or even remembered. He sailed for the East, glorified with a parting blast from all the newspapers. After many days we heard of him achieving a precarious living by adventurous ways—unknown, uncourted, poverty-stricken. But so surely as the sun rises out of the night, so surely Felix O'Byrne blazes up out of obscurity in his appointed seasons. The news came that he was gone to Ireland, a lordly commissioner, empowered to disburse three millions of dollars among the Fenians! Everybody said, Alas, for the Fenians! He was in the States again, when we heard of him next, with his periodical poverty upon him. And next he was stumping the State of New York for a great political organization, and spending its money with a lavish hand—for Felix was always free with money of his own, and just as free with it when it belongs to his friends. And afterwards we heard of him dining with the President of the United States and the great officers of the Government, a trusted adviser in the national policy. And next he was leaving his baggage behind him again at the hotels and disappointing landlords as to the quality of its contents. His next year's career was more damaging to his good name than any that had gone before, perhaps, but it is not necessary to give the particulars of it. He is in the mire of poverty once more, now, as to his body, but his regal soul dwells in "offices," and hath dealings with no meaner matters than the nation's great steamship lines. But be patient. The Phenix O'Byrne will rise from his ashes yet again, and perch upon the Temple of Fame! That restless brain of his, so prolific in invention, and those busy hands of his, so cunning in execution, will create new surprises for the public, and a new celebrity and prosperity for himself. What a mine of splendid talent is in this man! what industry, what hopefulness, what perseverance, what ingenuity! Felix would have been a power in the land if his rare intellectual forces had been under the guiding control of principle. The lack of that one quality is his ruin. If I had any principle to spare, I would give it to him as cheerfully as to any man, for I bear him no malice.
Senator Stewart made a long speech and a very able one on the vexed question of reconstruction, a couple of days ago. It is highly praised by Republicans. The whole speech was good, but one of the happiest points in it, perhaps, was toward its close, where he turned a favorite Democratic whine against that party and sang its own tune to it with a different style of words. I speak of that everlasting whine about "conciliating the South"—if there were not rather a properer call to conciliate the North! The North must suffer all the exasperating distresses of a war brought on by the South, yet stand by and see the fact that she can have anything to be conciliated about coolly ignored! I insert a paragraph from the speech:
Again we are appealed to to conciliate the South. What further concessions are we called upon to make? Have we not tried conciliation from the foundation of the Government? Have we not sacrificed justice and humanity to appease the vile passions, prejudice and tyranny of slaveholders long enough? Are not our statute books black with enactments to rivet the bonds of the slave? Are not the reports of the highest judicial tribunal disfigured with elaborate defenses of slaveholders' pretensions? Have we not submitted long enough to be slave-catchers for the South? Have we not bowed low enough in the dust in vain attempts to allay their royal displeasure? And after all this were we not required to make a sacrifice of life and property unparalleled in modern history to restrain the wrath of these haughty rebels, engendered only by the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States? When I reflect upon the crimes committed because of his first election, and when I reflect upon the manner of his death because of his second election, and the fearful results that have followed the commission of that crime, I sometimes feel that the power of conciliation was then exhausted.
Continuing the subject, the Senator launches the following pregnant paragraph at the conciliation-shrieking Democracy. It puts the matter altogether in a new light, and shows that the North has a little unsettled conciliation bill itself that needs liquidation:
But we did not stop at the death of Abraham Lincoln—we tried further measures of conciliation, and offered oblivion for the past and a full restoration in the Union on terms so liberal and magnanimous as to astonish the civilized world, and were again repulsed and defied. And still the Democratic party ask us to conciliate their rebel friends. They say it is impossible to harmonize the conflicting opinions in this country without conciliation. Let loyalty then be conciliated. Let something be done to soothe the bereaved and sorrow-stricken in the North. The passions of the human heart are not monopolized by those who sought to destroy the Government. Let the rebels make some atonement for the barbarities of Andersonville and Libby prison! Let them, at least give a pledge in the shape of a constitutional amendment that the widows and orphans of those who have fallen shall not be robbed of their pensions by repudiation of the Federal debt through the instrumentality of rebel votes! Let the world see by their conduct and bearing that they were not victorious in the war and do not propose to humiliate our soldiers or make loyalty odious. Let the rebel press cease to discharge its venom in vile abuse of everything sacred to justice and honor. When force is agitated let the strong be conciliated. When the President betrays his party and, as he tells us "deliberates much upon the very serious and important question" of resistance to the laws for the restoration of the Union, let the scarred veterans of Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, be conciliated. Let those conservatives who cry "keep the peace" conciliate an insulted and outraged people. Those who suppressed the rebellion will secure the fruits of victory—peaceably if they can—forcibly if they must. Let those who believe the people are actuated only by prejudice of race against race re-echo the rebel war cry of "negro equality," "negro supremacy," and bend the pregnant hinges of the knee to haughty rebels for office and power; but let them take warning that they will fall where Buchanan fell, that they will not only merit but receive the contempt of mankind.
Hon. Mr. Axtell, member of the House from California, has also placed himself on record upon reconstruction, in a brief speech a day or two ago, on the Democratic side of the question, and Senator Nye on the Republican.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, March 7, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER IX.
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ENTERPRISE.]
WASHINGTON, February, 1868
Right here in this heart and home and fountain-head of law—in this great factory where are forged those rules that create good order and compel virtue and honesty in the other communities of the land, rascality achieves its highest perfection. Here rewards are conferred for conniving at dishonesty, but never for exposing it. I know several cases that come under this head; persons who have lived here longer and are better acquainted, know of a great many. I meet a man in the Avenue, sometimes, whose history most residents of the city are acquainted with. He was a clerk of high grade in one of the Departments; but he was a stranger and had no rules of action for his guidance except some effete maxims of integrity picked up in Sunday school—that snare to the feet of the unsophisticated!—and some unpractical moral wisdom instilled into him by his mother, who meant well, poor soul, but whose teachings were morally bound to train up her boy for the poor-house. Well, nobody told this stranger how he ought to conduct himself, and so he went on following up those old maxims of his, and acting so strangely in consequence, that the other clerks began to whisper and nod, and exchange glances of commiseration—for they thought that his mind was not right—that his brain had been touched by sorrow, or hard fortune, or something. They observed that he never stole anything; by and by they noticed that people who came to bribe him went away with an expression of disappointment in their faces; finally it became apparent that he worked very hard, and performed his tasks well, and never "shirked." Then they grew a little afraid of him. They said he was very quiet and peaceable, but then there was no telling when a lunatic was going to get one of those spells on him and scalp somebody. Finally the young man caught the high grand sachem of a great bureau perpetrating a flagrant swindle on the Government! What did he do?—call for a division of the proceeds, like an intelligent being? No! He went, like an ignorant, besotted ass, and told the Secretary of the Department! The Secretary of the Department said he would look into the matter; and added, "By the way, what business is it of yours?" And the next thing the foolish young man knew, he found himself discharged and the intelligent sachem promoted. Then he went and told the Senators from the State all about it and asked them to get him another place, and they told him very properly that he had ruined himself, and that the official doors would all be closed against him now. He soon found out that that was the truth. He soon found out that you can't educate a boy in a Sunday school so as to make him useful to his country. That young man is idle to this day. Nobody has tried harder to get employment than he, but they all know his story; and they always refuse him. Everybody shuns him because everybody knows he is afflicted with a loathsome leprosy—the strange, foreign leprosy of honesty—and they are afraid they might catch it. There isn't any danger, maybe, but then they don't like to take any chances.
Why, no one would ever imagine the absurdities that imbecile was guilty of before he discovered what a mistake his education had been. When he found out that they admit bad women into private rooms in one of the Departments at all hours of the night he went and told people about it, as if he had discovered some great thing. He was always carrying around some old stale piece of news like that. And when he found out that in the basement of another Department they feed and lodge and pay salaries to 120 New York election sharps who do nothing in the world, and that their names are set down in the record books, not as Michael O'Flaherty, Dennis O'Flannigan, Patrick O'Dougherty, and so on, but always simply as "FIRE AND LIGHTS," he went and told that also. And when he learned that one of the heads of the Printing Bureau hires bindery girls with especial reference to their unchastity, and that it was proved by Government investigation and duly published in a book that he sometimes sleeps with two of them at a time and has the free run of his harem to choose from, and that he flourishes around Washington, now, the best dressed and gallantest officer the Government has, he even thought that trifle a matter of sufficient importance to run around and talk about. Why, when the Tice meter was covertly foisted upon the public by the Government, and every distiller in America peremptorily commanded to come forward and buy one at from $600 to $1,500, when a better machine could have been furnished for just half the money, he said he believed there was a ten million dollar swindle behind all that, and that certain high officials were privy to it and reaping a vast profit from it—which was no doubt true as gospel, but where is the wisdom in talking about these dangerous topics?
I stopped in at a fine boarding-house last night to see a friend, and the landlady came in to collect her bill. She mentioned the fact that she had two handsomely furnished apartments which she would like to rent to someone. I said I knew of several Senators and Congressmen who would be glad to have them. She said she would not venture to risk that kind of people! I thought she was jesting, but she was not. A gent of a Senator had called and engaged those rooms for him two months before he was to arrive—with the understanding that he was to occupy them during the whole session. He came, and said they were perfectly satisfactory. After a while he wanted some more furniture added—which was done, at a cost of two hundred dollars. He staid two months, said he was still perfectly satisfied with the apartments, and could have no desire to leave them, but for the fact that some friends had taken up their residence in another part of the town, and he wished to be near them—so he was going to move. He did not deny that the agent's contract was duly authorized, but he said, "Have you any writing to show for it?" She hadn't. He said, "Well!"—and left. The law does not permit members of Congress to be sued. So there was no redress. The breached contract had to remain breached.
She rented the rooms to a Territorial delegate, but refused to let him have them unless he would take them for the remainder of the session, because she had a chance at the moment to rent them to a gentleman for a month or two, and she would rather have a gentleman than a Congressman because Congressmen kept such late hours and burned so much fuel and gas. He occupied the rooms twenty-four hours, expressed himself entirely pleased with them, but had found lodgings which were cheaper and would do him as well. And he moved. He moved first, when nobody was watching, and said that afterward. He did not deny his contract either, but refused to fulfill it or give any redress. The law cannot touch the delegate. Isn't this a curious state of things? Isn't it refreshing to see men break laws so coolly whose sole business is law-making? I wonder if all the Congressmen are so unreliable? If they are, I think I could subscribe to this landlady's suggestive remark that it is pleasanter to have a "gentleman" around than a Congressman.
I said I would be glad to have her general opinion of Washington probity; and she said her opinion was that it did not exist in a very great degree. She believed that the whole city was polluted with peculation and all other forms of rascality—debauched and demoralized by the wholesale dishonesty that prevails in every single department of the Washington Government, great and small. She said that false weights were used in the market, the grocery stores, the butcher shops and all such places. The meat a butcher sells you for seven pounds can never be persuaded to weigh more than five and a half in your kitchen scales at home; a grocer's pound of butter usually weights only three-quarters in scales that are unconscious and have no motive to deceive. They paint rocks and add them to your coal; they put sand in your sugar; lime in your flour; water in your milk; turpentine in your whisky; clothespins in your sausages; turnips in your canned peaches; they will rather cheat you out of ten cents than make a dollar out of you by honest dealing. That was her opinion. What little I have seen of Washington in the short time I have been here, leads me to think it must be correct.
The Delegation.
Senator Nye is absent, temporarily. I see by the telegrams that he was to be one of the speakers at a grand Grant mass meeting at Cooper Institute, a night or two ago. Mr. Ashley is attending to his duties as usual in the House. Senator Stewart is working hard, on Nevada matters of various kinds, particularly, and on everything of importance that comes before the Senate, in a general way. He is about he hardest working man in Congress I believe. Mr. Stewart has just reported back from committee a bill to straighten out all public land entanglements in Nevada, which will place Nevada's lands in such a shape that she can handle them with facility instead of finding her hands constantly tied by disabling rulings of the Interior Department. Stewart's School of Mines has received high commendations from all persons interested in mining interests, and there appears to be no opposition to it of consequence in Congress. It is very likely to pass, shortly. Somebody got up a counter bill to establish a Bureau of Mines in Washington, instead, and put it under the control of that poor, decrepit, bald-headed, played-out, antediluvian Old Red Sandstone formation which they call the Smithsonian Institute. What the mischief would that drowsing old National Ass do with as live a thing as a mining interest? Just as usual, it would go after the "palezoic formation," and if it found that there wasn't any palezoic formation about first class mines, it wouldn't ever care a cent about those mines. It is a cussed old palezoic formation itself, and has no business going around her in its shroud among living men at this day of the world. Its Bureau of Mines died early.
Mines! The idea of the Smithsonian Institute meddling with mines; and with shafts and tunnels and whims; and with swarms of workmen; and with the stir and bustle and blasphemy of teamsters; and with steam engines and the clatter and crash of desperate forty-stamp mills! The idea of a toothless old grandmother going to war! Read what it is that this venerable Palezoic Formation is worrying itself about now—from its last annual report:
"QUESTIONS IN ISSUE—1. What classifications may be adopted for the discoveries made in Belgium and neighboring countries of objects anterior to the Carlovingian era?
"2. Is the ogival style to be considered as the natural and complete development of the Roman style?
"3. What is conclusively known respecting the different kinds of horseshoes found in Gallo-Roman mines, and the manner of using them?
"4. Should churches be made to front toward the east?
"5. To determine the age of objects in allex from their degree of elaboration."
If they gave the dreaming Institute supervision of our mines out there, it would spend the first twenty-five years prospecting for Gallo-Roman horseshoes, and the next twenty-five trying to find out how the Gallo-Romans of the rabbit-skin robe and the grasshopper diet used such jackass shoes as they might come across in abandoned shafts on the Divide. Let her stick to her palezoic formation. That is her best hold.
The question on the admission of Mr. Thomas, of Maryland, to a seat in the Senate, has been the main subject of debate for some time, now, next to reconstruction. Thomas was always a rebel in opinion and sympathy, but as he couldn't go into the field himself, he gave his son a hundred dollars and started him to the Confederacy to join its armies. These things will in all probability send him back to his constituents minus his Senatorial seat. Mr. Steward has made two good speeches on the question. An extract from his last will not be out of place here:
Mr. President, I do not wish to detain the Senate or to prolong this debate; but I desire to make a single remark. I wish to ask the Senate how this gentleman would appear if he were defending his property from a suit in the South for confiscation? They confiscated in the South the property of men who were loyal to this Government.
Not let me see where he would stand before a rebel Court in such a case; or before a rebel Congress, if he were applying there for admission to a seat. Suppose he had moved over there, and was elected to their Congress, and they had a rule preventing any one who had been faithful to this Government from taking a seat with them. What kind of a plea could he make then? Could he not remind them of the fact that when the war commenced he took his position with Jeff Davis, with Cobb, with Toombs, and the rest of them, that there was no power in this Government to sustain itself, and so declared in a letter in which he resigned an important office, so as to give his indorsement to the movement they were about to inaugurate! Could he not say, "I associated with your patriotic leaders; I was a friend in the darkest hour of the rebellion of Jefferson Davis; I, too, resigned a high office under the Government of the United States to give aid and countenance to your movement?" Could he not say that after the rebellion had been inaugurated, after he had resigned this high office, he went to Maryland and there associated with rebels; that he gave them his moral support; that he denied any sympathy or aid to the Union men of this State; that he refused even to vote under the Yankee Government; that he refused to take any of their oaths of loyalty; that he refused to recognize the late United States in any form? Could he not say further, "I do more than that. Being myself past the age to do military duty, I furnish my only son to aid you in gaining your independence; although poor, I gave him $100—all the money I could raise—to send him, my only son, to you to aid you in achieving your independence. Will you, therefore, take from me my property? Was I disloyal to you? Have I not aided you?" Would not the argument be answerable?
But it is said by the Senator from Pennsylvania that we must tolerate differences of opinion. Sir, there are some differences of opinion that we cannot tolerate and will not tolerate. We will not tolerate any man in the opinion that this Government has no power to maintain its own existence. We will not tolerate the opinion that the Union ought to be dissolved. We will not tolerate secession. We will not tolerate the opinion that secession is a constitution right. We fought against this doctrine, and we fought against those who acted upon it. The verdict of the war has established, if it has established any fact, that no such opinion shall exist in this country.
The Postmaster.
That candidate for the Postmastership in San Francisco I spoke of in my last, has "tied his horse up at Gadsby's." Well, I thought he would.
It is dead for good, now, I suppose. It promised so fairly, two months ago, that everybody boldly turned prophet and said it would certainly succeed. But it didn't. Nobody's prophecies concerning Washington matters ever come out right. Isaiah himself would be a failure here. Hon. Thad. Stevens, the bravest old ironclad in the Capitol, fought hard for impeachment, even when he saw that it could not succeed. He is not choice in his language when he speaks on this subject, concerning his fellow-committeemen and Congress generally. He simply says the whole tribe of them are "Damned Cowards." It is the finest word painting any Congressional topic has produced this session.
The Sandwich Islands Reciprocity treaty, having been reported back favorably from the Committee on Foreign Relations, remains now to be acted upon by the Senate. General McCook has visited every Senator and talked with him, and almost all of them have expressed themselves satisfied with the treaty and willing to vote for it. As he has done all he can possibly do for the treaty, and as he is necessarily tired of Washington by this time, General McCook proposes to leave for San Francisco and the Islands in the steamer of March 1.
Miscellaneous.
The man who is here contesting Hon. Mr. Hooper's seat as delegate from Utah, is a Mr. McGrorty, who was run for delegate as a practical joke. McGrorty got 105 votes, and Hooper got a little over 15,000. This small discrepancy don't worry McGrorty, however. He says the 15,000 would have voted for him but were afraid of the bishops of the church. The fact is, the contest will never come off. One hates to make a positive statement about Washington affairs, but I venture to make that one because: McGrorty did not serve a notice of contest on Hooper within 30 days after the election, stating the grounds of the contest. United States law makes this imperative. Congress will hardly go behind its own acts. Therefore, I have ventured to say that the contesting in Congress of this seat is a thing that will hardly get further than an inquiry by a committee and die.
Hay is somewhat cheaper than a week or two ago. It is now retailed at five cents per pound and is to be had by the wagon load in this city at about $75 or $80 per ton. Several loads of hay of an excellent quality arrived here yesterday from St. Clair's Station on the Overland route.—Territorial Enterprise.
In my time, hay items were a great moral stand-by. I thought you might make some use of this one. I have known Dan de Quille to follow a hay-wagon all over town, and write a new lie about it on every corner—and make twelve distinct items about the same wagon, and fetch it from every locality in the Territory of Nevada from which a hay-wagon could by any possibility hail from. The driver's name might be stated correctly enough, in the first one, to be Smith, but the eleven aliases that marched their disastrous course through the succeeding ones, infallibly caused that driver to be looked upon with the gravest suspicion forever after.
Firewood is at present rather scarce. It sells in this city at $25 per cord for Washoe, and $30 for nut pine. It is a little cheaper—so business men say—to buy of the Chinese wood peddlers.—Territorial Enterprise
In my time, also, when the morning inquest failed, and other matters were scarce, it was considered good jurisprudence to fall back on wood. Wood is a subject that is able to stir the souls of any community. Wood is a thing that can always be safely elaborated. If I had all the wood-piles of my conscience, that I stole from Daggett and Tom Fitch with no other object than that Dan might discourse learnedly to the public about the damnable quality of the wood that was being imposed upon an outraged public by the satraps of Washoe Valley, I would be a happier man than I am. I do not know what satraps is, and I do not suppose that Dan knew what satraps was, either, but he always considered it to be a crusher, anyway. He always regarded it as a word to be resorted to only in the extremest emergencies.
ROUGH.—Several large quartz wagons upset yesterday on the road leading from this city to Gold Hill, but we heard of no accident to life or limb nor serious damage to any of the wagons.—Territorial Enterprise.
I am just as well satisfied as I am of anything, that that disaster never occurred. In my time it was never looked upon as any trick at all to turn over a lot of quartz wagons on the Divide to fill out a local column with. To find a petrified man, or break a stranger's leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick's, were feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil ENTERPRISE office was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation and general destruction in those days.
These old ENTERPRISE fabrications about wood and hay and suffering quartz wagons, read more pleasantly to me, now, than any amount of poetry. And when I come across items about Jack Perry, and Birdsall, and Steve Gillis, and those other highway robbers who practice upon unoffending traveling showmen on the Divide, they are full of interest to me, especially if it appears that the parties have got into any trouble. I do not see their names often, now—which encourages me to think they have pretty much all got into the Penitentiary at last, maybe.
I was at a banquet given to the honorable "Society of Good Fellows," last night, and it was a particularly cheerful affair. I mention this subject more particularly, because I wish to introduce in this connection what I consider to be a genuine uncompromising and unmitigated "first-rate notice." Let the Washington Express be your model in matters of this kind hereafter. The question being on the fourth regular toast:
"All honor to woman, the sweetheart, the wife;
The delight of the fireside by night and by day.
Who never does anything wrong in her life,
Except when permitted to have her own way."
"To this toast the renowned humorist and writist, Mark Twain, responded and it is superfluous to say that while he stood upon the floor declaiming for the fair divinities, all that banqueting crew laid down with laughter. His sliding scene; his trials and tribulations; those he had paid for—and not; his valentine; his sublime inspirations and humorous deductions set the very table in a roar. He's a phunny fellow and no mistake, and blessed, indeed, were the G.F.'s with the honor of his company."
There isn't anything very mild about that, is there? I hadn't a just appreciation of how infernally funny I had been in that speech until I read that notice. I had an idea that the New York Herald and the Tribune had complimented me fully up to my deserts several times, but I guess not—I like the wild enthusiasm of the Express better.
It was a very, very jolly entertainment throughout. I observe one thing on this side that is as it should be. At such banquets as I have attended here and in New York, I noticed that among the regular toasts they always had a couple for "The Pacific Coast" and "The Press of the Pacific," and that they give them prominence. To the one last named Lord Fairfax of the New Orleans Picayune responded in the happiest terms last night.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, March 13, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER X.
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ENTERPRISE.]
WASHINGTON, February 22.
This birthday of Washington was historical before; it is doubly so now. Yesterday the news spread abroad over the town that the President had sent General Thomas to eject Secretary Stanton from the War Office and assume the duties of the post himself. It was an open defiance of Congress—a kingly contempt for long settled forms and customs—a reckless disregard of law itself! It was the first time, in the history of the nation, that the Chief Magistrate had presumed to dismiss a Cabinet officer without the consent of the Senate while that body was in season.
The excitement was intense, and it steadily augmented as night approached. Hotels and saloons were crowded with men, who moved restlessly about, talking vehemently and accompanying their words with emphatic gestures. The sidewalks were thronged with hurrying passengers, and everywhere the sound of trampling feet and a discord of angry voices was in the air. Old citizens remembered no night like this in Washington since Lincoln was assassinated.
Strangely enough, the men who should have been most concerned about the storm were the only souls that rode serenely above it. Mr. Seward and the President sat at a state dinner in the White House, cheery and talkative among distraught and pensive guests; General Grant was at the theatre; Stanton made his bed in the peaceful War Office, and General Thomas capered gaily among fantastic maskers at a carnival fandango! Meanwhile the tempest swept the continent on the wings of the telegraph.
The Senate sat at night, and multitudes flocked to the Capitol to stare and listen. The House resolved to make Saturday a working day for once, and both bodies decreed that for the first time since Washington's death Congress should transact business on the anniversary of his birthday.
This morning "impeachment" was in everybody's mouth; Thomas' arrest was discussed in the streets and in the hotels; Stanton was lauded by Republicans for sleeping in the War Office and holding the political fortress—and cursed by the Democrats; that Hon. Judd and Schenck watched with him till 3 A. M., and that Hon. Thayer remained all night, brought those gentlemen a fair share likewise, of the praise and the blame.
By 9 o'clock—full three hours before the sitting of Congress, long processions of men and women were wending their way toward the Capitol in the nipping winter air, and all vacant spaces about the doors were packed with people waiting to get in. When I reached there at noon, it was difficult to make one's way through the wide lobbies and passages, so great was the throng. There was not a vacant seat in the galleries, and all the doorways leading to them were full of tiptoeing men and women, with a swarm of anxious citizens at their backs, eagerly watching for such scanty crumbs of comfort as chance opportunities of glancing between their shoulders or under their arms. I went immediately to the reporters' gallery—it was about full, too, and excited doorkeepers and sentinels were challenging all comers and manfully resisting an assaulting party of men, women and children who were the fathers, brothers, wives, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, schoolmates, admirers of editors, correspondents, reporters, members of Congress, Cabinet officers and the President of the United States—and consequently they demanded to know why they couldn't go into the reporters' gallery! That was it—why couldn't they? Some people are unreasonable, and some don't know anything; these parties belong pretty exclusively to the one or the other of these classes. They were all—every one of them—going to have the doorkeeper discharged. They said so. [Surely such exceedingly influential people would not threaten what they could not perform.] But they did not get in. But others had got seats who were not strictly of the press, I suspect; twenty perhaps—among them several ladies. They were a good deal in the way, but they did not mind that. I was glad to see that it did not discommode them.
The scene within was spirited—it was unusual, too. The great galleries presented a sea of eager, animated faces; above these, more were massed in the many doorways; below, in the strong light, a few members walked nervously up and down, outside the rows of seats; a very few were writing—telegrams no doubt; the great majority had their heads together in groups and couples, talking earnestly; in every countenance strong feeling was depicted; a member from Maine was making a speech about a patent cooking stove, but never a soul was listening to him. Some said the stove business was gotten up by the Democrats to stave off impeachment; others said the Radicals got it up to gain time and give the Reconstruction Committee a chance to make up its report. Everybody waited impatiently, and watched the door sharply—they wanted to see that Committee come. By and by Mr. Paine entered and there was a buzz; but it was a disappointment—he only spoke a word to a colleague and went out again. The tiresome stove man finished. It was a relief to the galleries, who somehow seemed to look upon this trifling about cooking stoves as a fraud upon themselves, and a sort of affront, as well, thrust forward, as it was, at a time when any idiot ought to know that impeachment was the order of the day!
No committee yet. Something must be done. Motion to adjourn, "in honor of Washington." Amendment—to read Washington's Farewell Address. Both were voted down. Ayes and nays called on both, and the long, tedious, monotonous calling of names and answering followed. The vote was no—everybody knew what it would be before. Before the roll call was finished, Boutwell came in [sensation]; afterwards, at intervals, Bingham [sensation], Paine [sensation], several other committee men, and finally Thad. Stevens himself. [Super-extraordinary sensation!] The haggard, cadaverous old man dragged himself to his place and sat down. There was a soul in his sunken eyes, but otherwise he was a corpse that was ready for the shroud. He held his precious impeachment papers in his hand, signed at last! In the eleventh hour his coveted triumph had come. Richelieu was not nearer the grave, Richelieu was not stirred up by a sterner pride, when he came from his bed of death to crown himself with his final victory.
The buzzing and whispering died out, and an impressive silence reigned in its stead. The Speaker addressed the galleries in a clear voice that reached the farthest recesses of the house, and warned the great concourse that the slightest manifestation of approbation or disapprobation of anything about to be said, would be followed by the instant expulsion of the offending person from the galleries; he read the rules, at some length, upon the subject, and charged the Sergeant-at-Arms and his subordinates to perform their duty without hesitation or favor. Then Mr. Stevens rose up and in a voice which was feeble but yet distinctly audible because of the breathless stillness that hung over the great audience like a spell, he read the resolution that was to make plain the way for the impeachment of the President of the United States!
The words that foreshadowed so mighty an event sent a thrill through the assemblage, but there was no manifestation of the emotion save in the sudden lighting of their countenances. They ventured upon no applause, nor upon any expression of dissent. Mr. Brooks of New York took the floor, and in a frenzied speech protested against impeachment, and threatened civil war if the measure carried. Mr. Bingham made an able speech in favor of the movement. The ball was fairly opened now, and speech followed speech from 2 in the afternoon till almost midnight. During all that time the galleries were filled with people, and their excited interest showed no symptoms of abatement. The House adjourned to meet at 10 A. M. on Monday, instead of at noon. It has been a tremendous day. The nation has seen few that were so filled with ominous signs and bodings of disaster.
When it was moved to-day to read Washington's Farewell Address, Mr. Ingersoll inquired of a neighbor if it would not be more appropriate to read Andrew Johnson's Farewell Address! In this connection I will remark that the following was picked up in one of the lobbies. It was entitled
"ANDREW JOHNSON'S FAREWELL ADDRESS.
"Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the State some damage, and they know it;
No more of that:—I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; some things extenuate,
But set down naught in malice; then must you speak
Of one that ruled not wisely nor too well;
Of one, easily jealous, and, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme, did
Like the base Judean, throw a pearl away,
Richer than all his tribe!"
How the Delegations
From the Pacific coast will stand on impeachment, no man can tell till Monday. You know as well as I, that the Oregon delegation will be likely to favor it; that the Nevada and California Senators will be likely to favor it; that Ashley and Higby in the House will be likely to favor it, and Johnson and Axtell be apt to oppose. But these gentlemen cannot be seen to-night, and it would be hard to guess what effect the flood of telegrams may have that will roll in upon us tomorrow from all parts of the country.
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, April 7, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.
NUMBER XI.
WASHINGTON, March 20, 1868
Dwinelle's curious resolution concerning Senator Stewart's proposed mining school has reached here—and will be laid before Congress and in all human probability will be tabled there. It is a funny document, take it as you will. It has two clauses in it that are especially entertaining, and would be still more so if they were set to music. One of them proposes to exclude all foreigners from the school—which proposition is narrow enough in policy, and ungenerous enough, withal, to have been resurrected from the dark ages. We that have benefitted so much from the labors and discoveries of Europe's men of science; we that have to send to her so often for teachers; we that are as welcome in her great mining schools as her own citizens, and are freely according every privilege which they enjoy and upon the same terms, ought to be ashamed of so selfish, so poor-spirited a measure as this. The Freiburg school is full of Americans. They will not be pleased to learn how America proposes to show her appreciation of open-handed German hospitality. Measures like Dwinelle's are not the things that made the Californian name a synonym for liberality and generosity.
The other clause I have spoken of proposes to divide the revenue from the mines among a number of States and let them endow with it as many mining departments in as many colleges. The idea is threadbare and old. The Japanese astrologer, Prof. Blake, who knows so much more than it is lawful for any one man to know, is here, now, trying to get the revenues from the mining States conferred upon Columbia College, for the establishing of a mining department in that institution.
Two hundred and eighty other colleges are begging for the same revenues for the same purpose—and Dwinelle comes in at this late day with the same old impracticable idea. Why, even the poor purblind, broken-winded, Old Red Sandstone palezoic saurian, the Smithsonian Institute, has awakened from its ancient dream of Roman horseshoes, Grecian funeral processions, and pre-Adamite ferns and turnips, and it wants the revenues to endow a Mining Bureau with! And why shouldn't the old drowser have its Mining Bureau to fossilize along with its mastodon jaw-teeth, its Egyptian mummies, its pickled Indians and its Agricultural Department that never raises anything? Why shouldn't it have it and so save some old century plant of science from starvation by giving him the professorship? No greater good would be done by Dwinelle's diffusive process.
Dwinelle should have gotten up something original, anyhow. Even the intelligent contrabands are ahead of him in this thing.
A negro in a Mississippi Convention wants the mining revenues to establish a Mining Bureau in his district school with, and has been making speeches on the subject. He says they have no mine, but they can build one for purposes of practical instruction, as the Czar has done in St. Petersburg. He says his shaft would be full of water most of the time, on account of the ground being swampy, but then mines have to have pumps anyhow, cannot be complete without them, and where would be the use of pumps if there were no water to pump? How like are the ideas of wise men! This fellow wants to exclude whites from the school! He is no more liberal with American whites than Dwinelle is with foreigners.
They want a mining department in New Jersey. They haven't any mines either. They want it in Indiana, in Florida and the icebergs of Maine (I suppose there are icebergs in Maine—I have never been there). They want it in Texas, and next the Indians and the Chinamen will be clamoring for it, no doubt.
If this little revenue of a quarter of a million is to be divided up and frittered away as proposed by the resolution of Dwinelle, let the Mississippi contrabands have a share to "build a mine" with. Surely a quarter of a million dollars ought to accomplish more good when divided up among a quarter of a million colleges than it could when concentrated in one school. The Smithsonian Institute makes a strong appeal in its usual lucid style, but I can only give an extract, wherein it shows its peculiar competency in the matter of—God only knows what—reducing silver ores, maybe. Read:
"It has already been remarked, that in these bypodendrous, the disurion of the laminar cantoid is preceded by the formation of a quadrilateral hexahedron, which is converted into super-palezoic spherules; now the same is the case in the disruption of all the other laminar dioramics, just as in the constricted unduloid, until the rupture of equilibrium occurs and thus therefore makes the welkin ring."
Well, I should say so. I always had that same idea myself, but some how I never could express it, you know. I knew just as well as I knew anything, that it would fetch the welkin if I ever could get at it right, but then the hexahedron palezoic cantenoids were always too many for me. For good moral, unexciting light literature for the home circle, commend me to the official documents of the Smithsonian Institute.
Such unpracticable schemes as those proposed in the California resolutions obstruct and delay legislation and accomplish no good. It would be much better to write Congressmen and suggest amendments to pending bills then clog their way with memorials which must be discussed in Congress and valuable time thereby lost.
A Good Job in Danger.
The firm of Kellogg, Hueston & Co., assayors, of San Francisco, have been endeavoring to get an ingeniously worded bill through Congress to give them the monopoly of assaying and refining for the Branch Mint and take that service entirely out [of] the hands of the Mint. The prodigious job occupies small room in the bill, and is crushed into seeming insignificance by a great display of other matters of pretended importance, but it will probably fail. A large amount of lobbying has been done in its favor, but some prominent New York Californian firms have protested so strongly against the measure that there is every reason to believe it will be killed. It is thought that the committee will report in favor of taking the assaying and refining of gold and silver bullion away from the Mint and giving it to assayers generally. Whether this will improve matters or not, remains to be seen. It is hardly likely that it will.
Another One.
The Goat Island scheme of the Western Pacific Railroad Company looks dubious. It promises to fail in the House. It proposes to give the company a portion of Yerba Buena Island for a depot, with the condition that in time of war the Government may take and occupy the premises and the buildings as long as may be necessary, and pay the company such sum as shall be fair and reasonable for such use and occupation. The House Committee are not disposed to report the measure favorably.
Governmental Blasting.
"On ye fifth day of November
Guy Fawkes he did aspire
To blow up Kings and Parlement
Wi' dreadful gun powdire."
And four days ago, as every one believed, a modern Guy Fawkes aspired to blow up Capitol and Congress wi' dreadful glycerine. But so far he has not succeeded. The news that 180 pounds of glycerine had been stolen in New York and was doubtless then under the foundations of the Capitol, set Washington in a flutter. It was enough glycerine to blow up the United States, let alone the Capitol. Sir Christopher Wren shook the massive walls and towers of Old St. Paul's to "pi" with 18 pounds of blasting powder. Then who would be willing to be in the District of Columbia when 180 pounds of nitro-glycerine were touched off? I sat at my window, 500 yards from the Capitol, all day, and waited for the gorgeous show. In fancy I could see the vast dome shot suddenly toward the zenith, like a giant's helmet, and a chaos of shattered columns, tiles and capitals whizzing after it with here and there a Senator going end over end, among the fragments, the half of a Representative gaining on a Supreme Judge with his legs stove up, a gallery full of "niggers" sailing toward the sun, mutilated lobbyists whistling aloft like rockets, but still hitched to chairmen of committees by the buttonhole process, and a gallery of reporters chasing the general wreck through the air, serene in the contemplation of so sublime an item!
But the exhibition did not come off—postponed on account of the weather, maybe. Visitors to the Capitol that day fidgeted around uneasily for a few minutes and then left the building; and it was observed that when they walked through the lower corridors, they walked very fast. Congressmen looked uncomfortable; their speeches were rambling and disjointed, and the usual squabble over adjournment was omitted. There was some excuse for a scare. There are men in Washington who would blow up the Capitol fast enough if they could achieve an illustrious name, like Booth, by doing it and be worshipped as Booth is worshipped. All they want is the nitro-glycerine and the opportunity. A newspaper hint that the glycerine telegram was an advertising dodge, helped to destroy belief in the blasting conspiracy, and the fact that several days have elapsed without disaster, has about finished it.
A few days ago, everybody was entirely satisfied that the President would be impeached and removed with all possible dispatch. To-day nobody has a settled opinion about the matter. The Democrats do not howl about impeachment much now, a fact that awakens suspicion. Maybe they are satisfied that to martyr the President would make a vast amount of Democratic capital for the next election. Martyrdom is the coveted thing, now, by everybody. The Republicans show a disposition to quit talking about the impeaching of a President on stern principle for a contemptuous violation of law and his oath of office; they show a disposition to drop the high moral ground that such a precedent must not be sent down to hamper posterity, and they already openly talk about the "impolicy" of impeaching. It would be curious to hear a Court talking of the "impolicy" of convicting a man for murder in the first degree. This everlasting compelling of honesty, morality, justice and the law to bend the knee to policy, is the rottenest thing in a republican form of government. It is cowardly, degraded and mischievous; and in its own good time it will bring destruction upon this broad-shouldered fabric of ours. I believe the Prince of Darkness could start a branch hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it), and carry it on unimpeached by the Congress of the United States, even though the Constitution were bristling with articles forbidding hells in this country. And if there were moneyed offices in it, Congress would take stock in the concern, too, and in less than three weeks Fessenden and Washburne would fill it full of their poor relations. What a rotten, rotten, and unspeakable nasty concern this nest of departments is, with its brainless battalions of Congressional poor-relation-clerks and their book-keeping, pencil-sharpening strumpets.
In Abeyance.
M. H. Farley's confirmation as Surveyor General of California is still in abeyance in the Senate. He comes well recommended, but latterly the Senate has been thinking more of impeachment than Executive sessions.
If Ross Browne could rush his Ministership to China before the Senate right away, he might secure a confirmation; but if the matter is delayed till Mr. Burlingame arrives there will be chances against him. Mr. B.'s voice will have great weight, and his late letter to the State Department evidences that he has a man to suggest for the place—Dr. Wells, no doubt, the distinguished Secretary to the China mission.
The gentleman who came here to get the San Francisco Postmastership still "keeps his horse tied up at Gadsby's." I took a vast amount of trouble to secure that horse in that position for the future, because I thought Upton was to have the Postmastership; but it seems the President not only promised the gentleman I requested to go to him that he would cancel the horse-man's appointment, but with aggravated generosity said he believed he would not appoint anybody at all for the present. That was drawing it unnecessarily fine. I think I must go and have a "Talk with the President" myself, like "J.B.S." and "Mack," and those other newspaper correspondents.
Later.
I, even I, have had a most important "Talk with the President"—this evening at the general reception. I said:
"How is your health, Mr. President?" And he said:
"It cannot be of any particular consequence to you, young man. I keep a doctor."
How do you think that will be likely to affect the political complexion of the times? It will complicate things some, won't it?
MARK TWAIN.
Territorial Enterprise, April 24, 1868
[written by Enterprise Staff]
MARK TWAIN
This celebrated humorist, after having visited the Holy Land and all the principal cities of the old world, will again once more press his foot upon his native sagebrush this morning. We received the following telegram from him last night dated at Coburn's: "I am doing well, having crossed one divide without getting robbed anyway. Mark Twain."
Owing to the dissatisfaction of many in regard to the smallness of the hall [Athletic Hall], in which it was at first proposed that Mark should lecture, arrangements have been made by which the Opera House is secured for this Monday and Tuesday nights: the Webb sisters having very kindly given their consent to release the house to him for those two nights. This arrangement having been made, he will not lecture on Saturday night as was advertised—he will have enough to do for three or four days to shake hands and swap yarns with his old friends. The box office will open on Monday from 10 o'clock A.M. till 4 o'clock P.M. when seats may be secured for both nights.
Territorial Enterprise, late April 1868
[written by Enterprise Staff]
Mark Twain we have a right to claim as a Washoe humorist, and claiming him let us not fail to do what we can to encourage him by showing him that we appreciate his efforts to amuse and instruct us. He comes back to us after many wanderings by sea and land in foreign countries, with his mind and portfolio enriched with choice collections of fact and fancy gleaned in places holy and not holy. He is a living budget of not the jokes of all nations but of jokes upon all nations, suggested by their peculiarities of manners, customs, and appearance. We predict for him the most crowded and brilliant audience of the season. All who have ever seen or heard of Mark Twain and his genius as a brilliant descriptive writer, wit, and humorist—and who has not?—will desire to go with him aboard the Quaker City, carpet bag in hand, and gaze on the sleek faces and heads of the pious pilgrims to the Holy Land, all as yet unafflicted with the wilting nausea of sea-sickness, and looking forward with godly and courageous eyes toward the sacred soil and cities of the country in which scriptures were born; all will wish to accompany Mark to Palestine and ramble with him among the musty old palaces, churches, and tombs—in short, all will wish to follow him wherever he goes. As his followers will be many, let those who do not desire to be left behind on the voyage go early tomorrow and secure seats for the through trip.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 7, 1864
John Richardson, whose taste for a cigar must be inordinate, gratified it on Saturday night last by forcing his way into a tobacconist's on Broadway, near Kearny street, and helping himself to fourteen hundred "smokes." In his hurry, however, he did not select the best, as the stolen tobacco was only valued at fifty dollars. He was congratulating himself last evening in a saloon on Dupont street, in having secured weeds for himself and all his friends, when lo! a Rose bloomed before his eyes, and he wilted. The scent of that flower of detectives was too strong even for the aroma of the stolen cigars. Richardson was conveyed to the station-house, where a kit of neat burglar's tools was found on his person. He is now reposing his limbs on an asphaltum floor—a bed hard as the ways of unrighteousness.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 11, 1864
ANOTHER CHAPTER IN THE MARKS FAMILY HISTORY
Samuel Marks had Dora Marks and Henry Wood before the Police Court yesterday, charged with assault and battery. The plaintiff said that Dora and Henry came into his shop, on Washington street, last Tuesday, and, without saying a word as to how they came there, knocked him into a senseless condition by blows on his head. Henry testified that he saw the fair Dora enter Samuel's shop, and shortly after he heard a clatter as if heaven and earth were bumping together, and running down to Samuel's doorway, and standing by the door-sill because he had no right to enter the premises, he saw Samuel hit the lamb-like Dora a slap on the sconce with a tailor's press board, and instantly after a huge pair of shears came flying at him. Before he could dodge them, they partially scalped his cranium, causing a plentiful flow of the ruby, and he thought that he had better prospect in other diggings, not so dangerous, and left. The meek and war-worn Dora sat like a penitent Magdalen, and had nary word to say, and the austere decision of the Judge was that the respective defendants, Henry and Dora, do appear in that Court this day, and receive sentence for their crimes.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 15, 1864
PETTY POLICE COURT TRANSACTIONS
It is surprising to notice what trifling, picayune cases are frequently brought before the Police Judge by parties who conceive that their honor has been attacked, a gross outrage committed on their person or reputation, and they must have justice "though the heavens fall." Distinguished counsel are employed, witnesses are summoned and made to dance attendance to the successive steps of the complaints, and the patience of the Judge and Reporters is severely tested by the time occupied in their investigation which, after a close examination of witnesses, cross-questioning by the counsel, and perhaps some brilliant peroration at the close, with the especial injunction to the Court that it were better that ten guilty men should escape punishment rather than one innocent (one eye obliquely winking to their client) person should suffer; with a long breath of satisfaction that the agony is over about a hair pulling case, a lost spoon or a broken window, the Judge dismisses the case, and, (if we must say it) the lawyers pocket their fees, and the client pockets his or her indignation that the defendant escaped the punishment which to their view was so richly deserved. Thus, yesterday, William Towerick, a deaf old man, complained that a woman struck him with a basket, on Mission street. The good looking German interpreter almost woke up the dead in his efforts to shout in the plaintiff's auricular appendage the respective questions propounded by counsel, but had eventually to give it up as a bad job and let the old lady the plaintiff's wife, try. Case dismissed. Then comes another complainant with a long chapter of grievances against one Rosa Bustamente, who didn't like her little poodle dog. Bad words from both parties and a flower pot thrown at somebody, bursting five panes of glass valued at twenty-five cents each. Court considered that plaintiff and defendant stood on nearly equal footing, and ordered the case dismissed.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 23, 1864
At five minutes to nine o'clock last night, San Francisco was favored by another earthquake. There were three distinct shocks, two of which were very heavy, and appeared to have been done on purpose, but the third did not amount to much. Heretofore our earthquakes—as all old citizens experienced in this sort of thing will recollect—have been distinguished by a soothing kind of undulating motion, like the roll of waves on the sea, but we are happy to state that they are shaking her up from below now. The shocks last night came straight up from that direction; and it is sad to reflect, in these spiritual times, that they might possibly have been freighted with urgent messages from some of our departed friends. The suggestion is worthy a moment's serious reflection, at any rate.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 25, 1864
If one tire of the drudgeries and scenes of the city, and would breathe the fresh air of the sea, let him take the cars and omnibuses, or, better still, a buggy and pleasant steed, and, ere the sea breeze sets in, glide out to the Cliff House. We tried it a day or two since. Out along the railroad track, by the pleasant homes of our citizens, where architecture begins to put off its swaddling clothes, and assume form and style, grace and beauty, by the neat gardens with their green shrubbery and laughing flowers, out where were once sand hills and sand-valleys, now streets and homesteads. If you would doubly enjoy pure air, first pass along by Mission Street Bridge, the Golgotha of Butcherville, and wind along through the alleys where stand the whiskey mills and grunt the piggeries of "Uncle Jim." Breathe and inhale deeply ere you reach this castle of Udolpho, and then hold your breath as long as possible, for Arabia is a long way thence, and the balm of a thousand flowers is not for sale in that locality. Then away you go over paved, or planked, or Macadamized roads, out to the cities of the dead, pass between Lone Mountain and Calvary, and make a straight due west course for the ocean. Along the way are many things to please and entertain, especially if an intelligent chaperon accompany you. Your eye will travel over in every direction the vast territory which Swain, Weaver & Co. desire to fence in, the little homesteads by the way, Dr. Rowell's arena castle, and Zeke Wilson's Bleak House in the sand. Splendid road, ocean air that swells the lungs and strengthens the limbs. Then there's the Cliff House, perched on the very brink of the ocean, like a castle by the Rhine, with countless sea-lions rolling their unwieldy bulks on the rocks within rifle-shot, or plunging into and sculling about in the foaming waters. Steamers and sailing craft are passing, wild fowl scream, and sea-lions growl and bark, the waves roll into breakers, foam and spray, for five miles along the beach, beautiful and grand, and one feels as if at sea with no rolling motion nor sea-sickness, and the appetite is whetted by the drive and the breeze, the ocean's presence wins you into a happy frame, and you can eat one of the best dinners with the hungry relish of an ostrich. Go to the Cliff House. Go ere the winds get too fresh, and if you like, you may come back by Mountain Lake and the Presidio, overlook the Fort, and bow to the Stars and Stripes as you pass.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 25, 1864
CHARGE AGAINST A POLICE OFFICER
William H. Winans made a complaint in the Police Court, yesterday, against Officer Forner, for assault and battery. From the testimony it appeared that Forner had had an arrest of two persons and then delivered them to the care of another officer. While the latter officer was taking the men to the Station house, the plaintiff went up to one of the prisoners to speak to him concerning his bail, when, as he alleges, Forner took him by the collar, pushed him away, and struck him. The Judge remarked that officers must not go beyond the law in the discharge of their duties. It was not unfrequently the case that they displayed abundant zeal concerning arrests that were wholly unjustifiable, alluding more particularly to their making arrests without a warrant, on the mere say-so of outside parties. They must either be an actual witness of the offence or make an arrest by a warrant specially issued for the purpose. After Forner had delivered his prisoners to another officer his control over them ceased, and he had no right to exercise the conduct alleged against him, and it should require him to appear to-day for sentence.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 28, 1864
Lewis P. Ward prefers the following charges against Officer Forner, and Judge Shepheard has issued subpoenas for the witnesses: Using unnecessary violence in making an arrest; making the arrest without authority, (without a warrant and merely upon the say-so of an interested party); maltreating two private citizens where there was no call for such conduct on his part; and being off his beat and drinking in the "Flag" Saloon, when he should have been at his post. The Board of Police Commissioners will take the matter into consideration on Thursday afternoon at two o'clock. These charges are of a grave character, and will receive the strict examination to which their importance entitles them.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 28, 1864
MISSIONARIES WANTED FOR SAN FRANCISCO
We do not like it, as far as we have got. We shall probably not fall so deeply in love with reporting for a San Francisco paper as to make it impossible ever to wean us from it. There is a powerful saving-clause for us in the fact that the conservators of public information—the persons whose positions afford them opportunities not enjoyed by others to keep themselves posted concerning the important events of the city's daily life—do not appear to know anything. At the offices and places of business we have visited in search of information, we have got it in just the same shape every time, with a promptness and uniformity which is startling, perhaps, but not gratifying. They all answer and say unto you, "I don't know." We do not mind that, so much, but we do object to a man's parading his ignorance with an air of overbearing egotism which shows you that he is proud of it. True merit is modest, and why should not true ignorance be? In most cases, the head of the concern is not at home; but then why not pay better wages and leave men at the counter who would not be above knowing something? Judging by the frills they put on—the sad but infallible accompaniment of forty dollars a year and found—these fellows are satisfied they are not paid enough to make it an object to know what is going on around them, or to state that their crop of information has failed, this century, without doing it with an exaggeration of dignity altogether disproportioned to the importance of the thing. In Washoe, if a man don't know anything, he will at least go on and tell you what he don't know, so that you can publish it in case you do not stumble upon something of more vital interest to the community, in the course of the day. If a similar course were pursued here, we might always have something to write about—and occasionally a column or so left over for next day's issue, perhaps.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 29, 1864
Lena Kahn, otherwise known as Mother Kahn, or the Kahn of Tartary, who is famous in this community for her infatuated partiality for the Police Court as a place of recreation, was on hand there again yesterday morning. She was mixed up in a triangular row, the sides of the triangle being Mr. Oppenheim, Mrs. Oppenheim, and herself. It appeared from the evidence that she formed the base of the triangle—which is to say, she was at the bottom of the row, and struck the first blow. Moses Levi, being sworn, said he was in the neighborhood, and heard Mrs. Oppenheim scream; knew it was her by the vicious expression she always threw into her screams; saw the defendant (her husband) go into the Tartar's house and gobble up the partner of his bosom and his business, and rescue her from the jaws of destruction (meaning Mrs. Kahn,) and bring her forth to sport once more amid the _____. At this point the lawyer turned off Mr. Levi's gas, which seemed to be degenerating into poetry, and asked him what his occupation was? The Levite said he drove an express wagon. The lawyer—with that sensitiveness to the slightest infringement of the truth, which is so becoming to the profession—inquired severely if he did not sometimes drive the horse also! The wretched witness, thus detected before the multitude in his deep-laid and subtle prevarication, hung his head in silence. His evidence could no longer be respected, and he moved away from the stand with the consciousness written upon his countenance of how fearful a thing it is to trifle with the scruples of a lawyer. Mrs. Oppenheim next came forward and gave a portion of her testimony in damaged English, and the balance in dark and mysterious German. In the English glimpses of her story it was discernible that she had innocently trespassed upon the domain of the Khan, and had been rudely seized upon in such a manner as to make her arm turn blue, (she turned up her sleeve and showed the Judge,) and the bruise had grown worse since that day, until at last it was tinged with a ghastly green, (she turned up her sleeve again for impartial judicial inspection,) and instantly after receiving this affront, so humiliating to one of gentle blood, she had been set upon without cause or provocation, and thrown upon the floor and "licked." This last expression possessed a charm for Mrs. Oppenheim, that no persuasion of Judge or lawyers could induce her to forego, even for the sake of bringing her wrongs into a stronger light, so long as those wrongs, in such an event, must be portrayed in language less pleasant to her ear. She said the Khan had licked her, and she stuck to it and reiterated with unflinching firmness. Becoming confused by repeated assaults from the lawyers in the way of badgering questions, which her wavering senses could no longer comprehend, she relapsed at last into hopeless German again, and retired within the lines. Mr. Oppenheim then came forward and remained under fire for fifteen minutes, during which time he made it as plain as the disabled condition of his English would permit him to do, that he was not in anywise to blame, at any rate; that his wife went out after a warrant for the arrest of the Kahn; that she stopped to "make it up" with the Kahn, and the redoubtable Kahn tackled her; that he was dry-nursing the baby at the time, and when he heard his wife scream, he suspected, with a sagacity which did him credit, that she wouldn't have "hollered 'dout dere vas someding de matter;" therefore he piled the child up in a corner remote from danger, and moved upon the works of the Tartar; she had waltzed into the wife and finished her, and was already on picket duty, waiting for the husband, and when he came she smacked him over the head a couple of times with the deadly bludgeon she uses to elevate linen to the clothes-line with; and then, stimulated by this encouragement, he started to the Police Office to get out a warrant for the arrest of the victorious army, but the victorious army, always on the alert, was there ahead of him, and he now stood in the presence of the Court in the humiliating position of a man who had aspired to be plaintiff, but overcome by strategy, had sunk to the grade of defendant. At this point his mind wandered, his vivacious tongue grew thick with mushy German syllables, and the last of the Oppenheims sank to rest at the feet of justice. We had done less than our duty had we allowed this most important trial—freighted, as it was, with matters of the last importance to every member of this community, and every conscientious, law-abiding man and woman upon whom the sun of civilization shines to-day—to be given to the world in the columns, with no more elaboration than the customary "Benjamin Oppenheim, assault and battery, dismissed; Lena Oppenheim and Fredrika Kahn, held to answer." We thought, at first, of starting in that way, under the head of "Police Court," but a second glance at the case showed us that it was one of a most serious and extraordinary nature, and ought to be put in such a shape that the public could give to it that grave and deliberate consideration which its magnitude entitled it to.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 1, 1864
An old two-story, sheet-iron, pioneer, fire-proof house, got loose from her moorings last night, and drifted down Sutter street, toward Montgomery. We are not informed as to where she came from or where she was going to—she had halted near Montgomery street, and appeared to be studying about it. If one might judge from the expression that hung about her dilapidated front and desolate window, she was thoroughly demoralized when she stopped there, and sorry she ever started. Is there no law against houses loafing around the public streets at midnight?
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 1, 1864
The pupils of the Public Schools assembled in strong force at the Metropolitan Theatre yesterday afternoon, to rehearse their portion of the Fourth of July ceremonies. The dress-circle was a swarming hive of small boys in an advanced state of holiday jollity, and the parquet was filled with young girls impatient for the performance to begin. There were but fourteen benches left vacant in the pit, and three in the dress circle. At the call to order by Mr. Elliott, a solemn silence succeeded the buzzing that had prevailed all over the house. He announced that one School was still absent, but it was too late to wait for its arrival. The pupils, led by the orchestra, then sang a beautiful chant—"The Lord's Prayer"—the girls doing the best service, the boys taking only a moderate amount of interest in it. However, the boys came out strong on the next chorus—"The Battle Cry of Freedom." Without prompting, the voices of the children broke forth with one accord the moment the orchestra had finished playing the symphony, which was pretty good proof that the pupils of all the Schools are accustomed to strict discipline. The next song—"The Union"—was sung with thrilling effect, and was entered into by both boys and girls, with a spirit which showed that it was a favorite with them. It deserved to be, for it had more music in it than any tune which had preceded it. "Oh, Wrap the Flag Around Me, Boys," was sung by the girls, and the boys joined in the chorus. It is a lugubrious ditty, and sadness oozed from its every pore. There was a pardonable lack of enthusiasm evinced in its execution. "America" (applause from the boys) was sung next, with extraordinary vim. The exercises were closed with this hymn, and the Schools then left the theatre and departed for home. Just as the rear rank was passing out at the door, the missing School—the lost tribe—came filing down the street, moved two abreast into the theatre without halting, and took possession of the stage. It proved to be the Rincon School, so distinguished for the numerous promotions from its ranks to the High School. The large stage was almost filled by the newcomers, and had they arrived sooner there would not have been a vacant seat in the house. The lost tribe rehearsed the songs in regular order, just as their predecessors had done, and did it in an entirely creditable manner, after which they marched in procession up Montgomery to Market street. Even if everything else fails on the Fourth, we are satisfied that the Public Schools can be depended on to carry out their part of the programme faithfully and in the best possible style. The Schools will assemble at the Metropolitan Theatre about noon on the Fourth, where, in addition to their singing, the following exercises may be expected: Music, by the band; Prayer, by the Rev. Mr. Kittredge; Reading of the Declaration of Independence, by W. H. L. Barnes; Poem, by Mr. Bowman; Oration, by the Rev. H. W. Bellows.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 1, 1864
We conversed yesterday with a stranger, who had suffered from a game familiar to some San Franciscans, but unknown in his section of the country. He was going home late at night, when a sociable young man, standing alone on the sidewalk, bade him good evening in a friendly way, and asked him to take a drink, with a fascination of manner which he could not resist. They went into Johnson's saloon, on Pike street, but instead of paying promptly for the drinks, the sociable young man proposed to throw the dice for them, which was done, and the stranger who was a merchant, from the country, lost. Euchre was then proposed, and two disinterested spectators, entirely unknown to the sociable young man—as he said—were invited to join the game, and did so. Shortly afterwards, good hands were discovered to be plenty around the board, and it was proposed to bet on them, and turn the game into poker. The merchant held four kings, and he called a ten dollar bet; but the luck that sociable young man had was astonishing—he held four aces! This made the merchant suspicious—he says and it was a pity his sagacity was not still more extraordinary—it was a pity it did not warn him that it was time to quit that crowd. But it had no such effect; the sociable man showed him a check on Wells, Fargo &; Co., and he thought it was safe to "stake" him; therefore he staked his friend, and continued to stake him, and his friend played and lost, and continued to play and lose, until one hundred and ninety dollars were gone, and he nothing more left wherewith to stake him. The merchant complained to the Police, yesterday, and officer McCormick hunted up the destroyer of his peace and the buster of his fortune, and arrested him. He gave his name as Wellington, but the Police have known him well heretofore as "Injun Ned;" he told the merchant his name was J. G. Whittaker. Wellington Whittaker deserves to be severely punished, but perhaps the merchant ought to be allowed to go free, as this was his first offence in being so criminally green.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 1, 1864
Lewis P. Ward brought several charges against Policeman Forner, yesterday, before the Board of Police Commissioners. One was for maltreating two citizens who were not under arrest, and whom he had no business to lay his hands on anyhow. This charge was summarily dismissed; the offence involved being one of no consequence, as anyone can see. Still, the Board might have thought the officer sufficiently punished for it already in the Police Court, where he was fined five dollars, which he paid in green-backs, if he is a loyal man. The second charge was for arresting a man without any authority for doing it. This was also dismissed—for good and sufficient reasons, maybe—but anyhow it was dismissed. The third charge against Officer Forner was for being off his beat when he should have been on it, instead of drinking in the "Flag" saloon. Several witnesses substantiated this charge, and we are informed that no evidence was produced against it. The Commissioners took it into consideration, and will render a decision in the matter shortly, perhaps.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 4, 1864
The only drawback there is to the following original novelette, is, that it contains nothing but truth, and must, therefore, be void of interest for readers of sensational fiction. The gentleman who stated the case to us said there was a moral to it, but up to the present moment we have not been able to find it. There is nothing moral about it. Chapter I.—About a year ago, a German in the States sent his wife to California to prepare the way, and get things fixed up ready for him. Chapter II.—She did it. She fixed things up, considerably. She fell in with a German who had been sent out here by his wife to prepare the way for her. Chapter III.—These two fixed everything up in such a way for their partners at home, that they could not fail to find it interesting to them whenever they might choose to arrive. The man borrowed all the money the woman had, and went into business, and the two lived happily and sinfully together for a season. Chapter IV.—Grand Tableau. The man's wife arrived unexpectedly in the Golden Age, and busted out the whole arrangement. Chapter V.—Now at this day the fallen heroine of this history is stricken with grief and refuses to be comforted; she has been cruelly turned out of the house by the usurping, lawful wife, and set adrift upon the wide, wide world, without a rudder. But she doesn't mind that so much, because she never had any rudder, anyhow. The noble maiden does mind being adrift, though, rudder or no rudder, because she has never been used to it. And so, all the day sits she sadly in the highway, weeping and blowing her nose, and slinging the result on the startled passers-by, and careless whether she lives or dies, now that her bruised heart can never know aught but sorrow anymore. Last Chapter.—She cannot go to law to get her property back, because her sensitive nature revolts at the thought of giving publicity to her melancholy story. Neither can she return to her old home and fall at the feet of the husband of her early love, praying him to forgive, and bless and board her again, as he was wont to do in happier days; because when her destroyer shook her, behold he shook her without a cent. Now what is she to do? She wants to know. We have stated the case, and the thrilling original novelette is finished, and is not to be continued. But as to the moral, a rare chance is here offered the public to sift around and find it. We failed, in consequence of the very immoral character of the whole proceeding. Perhaps the best moral would be for the woman to go to work with renewed energy, and fix things, and get ready over again for her husband.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 6, 1864
GRAND PROCESSION, FIREWORKS, ETC.—In point of magnificence, enthusiasm, crowds, noise, wind and dust, the Fourth was the most remarkable day San Francisco has ever seen. The National salute fired at daylight, by the California Guard, awoke the city, and by eight o'clock in the morning the sidewalks of all the principal streets were packed with men, women and children, and remained so until far into the afternoon. All able-bodied citizens were abroad, all cripples with one sound leg and a crutch and all invalids who were not ticketed for eternity on that particular day. The whole city was swathed in a waving drapery of flags—scarcely a house could be found which lacked this kind of decoration. The effect was exceedingly lively and beautiful. Of course Montgomery street excelled in this species of embellishment. To the spectator beholding it from any point above Pacific street, it was no longer a street of compactly built houses, but simply a quivering cloud of gaudy red and white stripes, which shut out from view almost everything but itself. Some houses were broken out all over with flags, like small-pox patients; among these were Brannan's Building, the Occidental Hotel and the Lick House, which displayed flags at every window.
THE PROCESSION.—The chief feature of the day was the great Procession, of course, and to the strategic ability and the tireless energy and industry of Grand Marshal Sheldon, San Francisco is indebted for the completeness and well ordered character of the splendid spectacle. He performed the great work assigned him in a manner which entitles him to the very highest credit.
Toward ten o'clock the streets began to be thronged with platoons, companies and regiments of schools, soldiers, benevolent associations, etc., swarming from every point of the compass, and marching with music and banners toward the general rendezvous, like the gathering hosts of a mighty army. By eleven the Procession was formed and began to move, and in half an hour it was drifting past Portsmouth Square, rank after rank, and column after column, in seemingly countless numbers. Afterwards (on level ground) it was an hour and twenty minutes in passing a given point; coming down hill, through Washington street, the time was an hour and five minutes; therefore the Procession must have been two miles long at any rate, unless those composing it were remarkably slow walkers; many adjudged it to be over two and a half miles in length.
GRAND MARSHAL AND AIDS.—The Grand Marshal, in purple sash, studded with stars, led the van, attended by thirteen Aids, in white and gold...
The military presented a fine appearance, with their handsome uniforms and brightly burnished arms. They were sufficiently numerous to occupy thirteen minutes in passing a given point.
A squad of twelve or fifteen little drummer boys, in uniform, accompanying the Sixth Regiment, attracted a good deal of attention.
In the military part of the procession, borne by the First Regiment, was a stained and ragged flag, pierced by nine bullet-holes and one bayonet-thrust, received at the bloody battle of Ball's Bluff. It was carried by Corporal Wise, who fought under it there.
CIVIL DEPARTMENT.—The civil department of the Procession was headed by carriages containing the President, Orator, Chaplain, Poet, and Reader of the Day, foreign Consuls, and foreign and domestic naval and military guests, in splendid uniforms, as a general thing. Following these came State, city and county officers, also in carriages.
The Society of California Pioneers and the Eureka Typographical Union were followed by a number of tradesmen's wagons, tastefully ornamented and bearing appropriate mottoes and devices.
The San Francisco Fire Department came next, headed by Chief Engineer Scannell and his Aides...
The Butchers' Union Association came next, headed by a wagon containing a huge living buffalo, and followed by several gaily caparisoned fat cattle; following these was a soldierly platoon of infantry butchers, armed with cleavers, who were observed to obey the solitary command to "Shoulder arms!" with military precision and promptness. They were followed by about twenty open wagons, filled with members of the fraternity. One of these wagons bore the motto, "We Kill to Cure!"
After a glue factory wagon, bearing the motto, "We stick fast to the Union," came seven more butchers' wagons, followed by a fine array of mounted butchers, riding three abreast. The uniform of the fraternity was check shirts and black pantaloons, and it was distinguished in the civil department of the Procession for its exceeding neatness.
The Cartmen's Union Association, riding two abreast, in blue shirts and black pants—a stalwart, fine looking body of men, came next in the Procession, and rode with the Draymen and Teamsters' Associations. A fine regiment or so of cavalry might be constructed out of these materials.
SCHOOLS.—One of the most notable features of the great Procession was the public schools. The boys are all accustomed to military discipline, and they marched along with the order and decorum of old soldiers. Each school had its uniform, its own private music, and its multitude of flags and banners, and in the matter of numbers and general magnificence they did not fall much behind the Army of California at the other end of the Procession. There were twelve schools in the ranks...
Some of the mottoes inscribed upon the banners borne by the School children were as follows: "Knowledge is Power;" a globe, with the device, "We move the World;" "Children of the Union;" "We are Coming, Father Abraham;" "Our Public Schools, the Lever that moves the World—Give us more Leverage!" The Mason Street School carried silken banners, upon which were painted the arms of all the States. The boys of Rincon School, three hundred in number, were dressed in a sort of naval uniform, (two gold bands around their caps, and a gold stripe down the leg of their pants,) and each boy carried a flag. The girls of the Rincon School, numbering three hundred also, left the School in eight large furniture cars, but we saw only a few of these cars in the Procession. A pretty little girl in the first car was gorgeously costumed as the Goddess of Liberty. A beautiful banner, presented to the School early in the morning, was carried by the girls, and bore the suggestive inscription, "Our Country's Hope," (in case she becomes depopulated by the war, probably.)
BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES.—In uniform, and carrying flags and banners, were a long array of Benevolent and Protective Associations...
After these followed numberless carriages, containing citizens, and in their wake came the rear guard of citizens on foot, which finished up the almost interminable Procession.
AT THE THEATRE.—After marching through the several streets marked down for it in the programme, the Procession filed down Montgomery street, and disbanded in the vicinity of the Metropolitan Theatre, where the concluding ceremonies of the celebration were to take place.
The Schools were admitted to the theatre first, and a sufficient number were taken from the multitude of citizens outside to fill up the room left vacant—which was not much, of course. The place was so densely packed that we could not find comfortable standing or breathing room, and left, taking it for granted that the following programme would be carried out all the same, and just as well as if we remained:
National Airs by the Bands.
Chant, the Lord's Prayer, by the Children of the Public Schools.
Prayer, by the Rev. Mr. Kittredge.
Reading of the Declaration of Independence, by W. H. L. Barnes, Esq.
"The Battle-Cry of Freedom," by the Children of the Public Schools.
Poem, by J. F. Bowman.
"The Union," by Children of the Public Schools.
Oration, by the Rev. H. W. Bellows.
"O wrap the flag around me, boys," by Children.
"America," by the Children.
Benediction.
THE FIREWORKS.—The huge framework for the pyrotechnic display was set up at the corner of Fifth and Harrison streets, and by the time the first rocket was discharged, every vacant foot of ground for many a square around was closely crowded with people. There could not have been less than fifteen thousand persons stretching their necks in that vicinity for a glimpse of the show, and certainly not more than thirteen thousand of them failed to see it. The spot was so well chosen, on such nice level ground, that if your stature were six feet one, a trifling dwarf with a plug hat on could step before you and shut you out from the exhibition, as if you were stricken with a sudden blindness. Carriages, which no man might hope to see through, were apt to drive along and stop just ahead of you, at the most interesting moment, and if you changed your position men would obstruct your vision by climbing on each others' shoulders. The grand discharges of rockets, however, and their bursting spray of many-colored sparks, were visible to all, after they had reached a tremendous altitude, and these gave pleasure and brought solace to many a sorrowing heart behind many an untransparent vehicle. Still we know that the fireworks on the night of the Fourth, mottoes, temples, stars, triangles, Catherine wheels, towers, pyramids, and, in fact, every department of the exhibition, formed by far the most magnificent spectacle of the kind ever witnessed on the Pacific coast. The reason why we know it is, that that infamous, endless, Irish giant, at Gilbert's Museum, stood exactly in front of us the whole evening, and he said so, and a terrific cannonade of fire crackers, kept up all night long, finished the festivities of this memorable Fourth of July in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 8, 1864
As a general thing, when we visit the City Prison late at night, we find one or two drunken vagabonds raving and cursing in the cells, and sending out a pestilent odor of bad whiskey with every execration. Last night the case was different. Mrs. Ann Holland was there, very drunk, and very musical; her gin was passing off in steaming gas, to the tune of "I'll hang my harp on a willow tree," and she appeared to be enjoying it considerably. The effect was very cheerful in a place so accustomed to powerful swearing and mute wretchedness. Mrs. Holland's music was touchingly plaintive and beautiful, too; but then it smelled bad.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 8, 1864
Isaac Hingman has been bigamized. He was arrested for it yesterday, by Officer W. P. Brown, on a complaint sworn to by his most recent wife, that he has a much more former wife now living in another part of the State. The wife that makes the complaint, and who drew a blank, in the eye of the law, in the husband lottery, married the prisoner on the 24th of June, in this city. A man is not allowed to have a wife lying around loose in every county of California, as Isaac may possibly find to his cost before he gets through with this case. He might as well make up his mind to shed one of these women.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 8,1864
We have mentioned elsewhere in our present issue the arrest of Isaac Hingman, on a charge of bigamy. The woman he married last, went to the station-house last night to see him. She says she worked for two years in lager beer cellars here, and, during that time, had saved six hundred and fifty dollars. Hingman got this from her. He said he was going down on the Colorado to open a Saloon, and she was to go with him. They were to leave to-day on a schooner, and he took her stove, her beds and bedding, and all her clothing, and put them on board the vessel. He told her he had been living with a woman at Auburn, and he would have to send her some money in order to get rid of her and her three children. The new wife gave him one hundred and thirty dollars for this purpose, and he went off and telegraphed his Auburn family to come down and go to the Colorado with him instead. The duped beer girl got the answering dispatch sent by the Auburn wife, in which she acceded to the proposal, and said she would arrive by the boat last night. Sergeant Evrard, of the Police, saw the dispatch. The woman said Hingman told her, in the station-house, that the lucky Auburn woman was his lawful wife. Officer Evrard sent a policeman, disguised, to wait for the up-country wife at the Sheba Saloon, last night, and find out what he could from her affecting the case. The story of the illegal wife is plausible, and if it is true, Mr. Hingman ought to be severely dealt with. But not too severely—we go in for moderation in all things, and, considering all the circumstances of this case, it might be a questionable application of power to do more than hang him. To hang him a little while—say thirty or forty minutes—ought to be about the fair thing, though. He wants to marry too many people; and he needs treatment that will tend to check this propensity.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 9, 1864
The ingenuity of the Chinese is beyond calculation. It is asserted that they have no words or expressions signifying abstract right or wrong. They appreciate "good" and "bad," but it is only in reference to business, to finance, to trade, etc. Whatever is successful is good; whatever fails is bad. So they are not conscience-bound in planning and perfecting ingenious contrivances for avoiding the tariff on opium, which is pretty heavy. The attempted swindles appear to have been mostly, or altogether, attempted by the Coolie passengers—the Chinese merchants, either from honorable motives or from policy, having dealt honestly with the Government. But the passengers have reached the brains of rascality itself, to find means for importing their delicious drug without paying the duties. To do this has called into action the inventive genius of brains equal in this respect to any that ever lodged on the top end of humanity. They have, doubtless, for years smuggled opium into this port continuously. The officers of Customs at length got on their track, and the traffic has become unprofitable to the Coolies, however well it has been paying the officials through the seizures made. The opium has been found concealed in double jars and brass eggs, as heretofore described, brought ashore in bands around the body, and by various other modes. The latest dodge detected was sausages, Bolognas, as it were, filled with opium; and yesterday we saw a tin can, with a false bottom about one third the distance from the base, the lower third of the can filled with opium, the rest with oil. John himself will have to be opened next—he is undoubtedly full of it.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 9, 1864
While we were lounging in the City Jail yesterday afternoon, Officer Cook brought in a little girl, not more than seven or eight years old, whom he had arrested for stealing twenty-five dollars from a man in an auction-room the day before. She gave her name as Amelia Brown Wascus, and seemed to be a half breed Indian or negro—probably the latter, if one may judge by the kind of taste she displayed in laying out the stolen money, for she had spent a portion of it in the purchase of a toy hand organ with limited accomplishments, and those of a marked contraband tint—the same being indexed on the back of the plaything as "Buffalo Gals," and "My Pretty Yaller Gals." She had expended about fifteen dollars for various trinkets, and the balance of the money had been recovered by Officer Cook from the child's mother. Amelia cried bitterly all the time she was in the station-house, but she said nothing, and appealed for no compassion save in the pleading eloquence of her tears. She was taken to the Industrial School, and her accomplice—for it seems she had one of about her own age and sex will follow her if she can be found
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 9, 1864
Judges Field and Hoffman were occupied all day yesterday in hearing evidence in the case of Captain Josiah N. Knowles, of the ship Charger, indicted for manslaughter, in not stopping to pick up a sailor named Swansea, who fell from the royal yard arm of that ship, on the 1st of last April, during a voyage from Boston to San Francisco. From the testimony, it would appear that there was a heavy sea on at the time, and a stiff breeze blowing, and consequently it would not have been safe to send a boat after the man, while at the same time it would have been useless to shorten sail and put the ship about, because of the great length of time that would necessarily be consumed in the operation. Swansea fell one hundred and twenty feet, and one witness—the second officer of the ship thought he struck the "main channels" in his descent, and was a dead man when he reached the water. The Charger was on a quick trip, and was making over ten knots an hour at the time of the accident. The evidence was almost completed yesterday, and the arguments of counsel will be commenced to-day.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 9, 1864
BURGLARY—THE BURGLAR CAUGHT IN THE ACT
A bold robbery was attempted, last evening, in the second story of the premises owned by Janson, Bond & Co., corner of Battery and Pine streets, occupied as a fancy goods importing house, but which, owing to the vigilance of one of the clerks who slept in the store, and the promptitude of Special Officer Sweeney in answering his alarm, was frustrated. About half-past eleven, as the clerk was about retiring, he heard a suspicious noise and raised the cry of "Watch!" Officer Sweeney immediately ran in the direction, and met a man running hastily away. He asked him what the matter was, and he replied "Somebody has lost a watch round the corner." Sweeney ordered him to stop; in reply he made a desperate lunge at the officer with a bowie knife. Sweeney then struck him over the head with his night lantern and brought him to reason. He was then taken to the station-house, where, on being searched, four gold watches, three revolvers, a bowie knife, and two bunches of gold rings were found on his person. He stated his name as William Johnson, and further that he had accomplices, and the name of one was McCarty. Officers Minson and Greenwood then repaired to the scene of the attempted robbery and thoroughly searched the place. They found on the sidewalk, just under the window, where it had been let down by Johnson to his confederates, a bag containing fifteen pistols, five bowie-knives and two pairs of bullet moulds. Up to a late hour last evening, the accomplices of Johnson had not been captured. A box containing four hundred dollars in silver escaped the notice of the robbers. It is probable this gang is the same that were concerned in the recent attempted safe robberies. It is somewhat significant, taken in connection with matters transpiring in the interior of the State, that the purpose of these scoundrels seemed to be to get hold of all the arms they could, comparatively ignoring some valuable jewelry, and other articles, of which they might have possessed themselves.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 10, 1864
The old original Auburn wife of the bigamist Hingman, arrived by the boat night before last, but her whereabouts were not discovered until last night, when she was found in one of the up-town hotels, with her three children, and subpoenaed to appear as a witness in the impending trial of her husband for bigamy.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 12, 1864
Captain Douglass and Watchman Hager boarded the ship Clara Morse, on Sunday morning, the moment she arrived, and captured nineteen Chinese girls, who had been stolen and brought from Hongkong to San Francisco to be sold. They were a choice lot, and estimated to be worth from one hundred and fifty to four hundred dollars apiece in this market. They are shut up for safe-keeping for the present, and we went and took a look at them yesterday; some of them are almost good-looking, and none of them are pitted with small pox—a circumstance which we have observed is very rare among China women. There were even small children among them—one or two not two years old, perhaps, but the ages of the majority ranged from fourteen to twenty. We would suggest, just here that the room where these unfortunates are confined is rather too close for good health—and besides, the more fresh air that blows on a Chinaman, the better he smells. The heads of the various Chinese Companies here have entered into a combination to break up this importation of Chinese prostitutes, and they are countenanced and supported in their work by Chief Burke and Judge Shepheard. Now-a-days, before a ship gets her cables out, the Police board her, seize the girls and shut them up, under guard, and they are sent back to China as soon as opportunity offers, at the expense of the Chinese Companies, who also send an agent along to hunt up the families from whom the poor creatures have been stolen, and restore to them their lost darlings again. Our Chinese fellow citizens seem to be acquiring a few good Christian instincts, at any rate.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 12, 1864
The bigamy case came up in the Police Court yesterday morning, and Judge Shepheard dismissed it, because the charge could not be substantiated, inasmuch as the only witnesses to be had were the two alleged wives of the defendant—or rather, only one, the ephemeral lager-beer wife as the old original wife, the first location, or the discovery claim on the matrimonial lead, could not be compelled to testify against her husband, and thereby also knock the props from under her own good name and her eternal piece of mind. The injured and deserted relocation now proposes to have Hingman arrested again and tried on a charge of assault and battery. This unfortunate woman seems to have been very badly treated, and it is to be hoped she may get some little soothing satisfaction out of her assault and battery charge to reconcile her to her failure in the bigamy matter.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 12, 1864
The case of Captain Knowles, late of the ship Charger, indicted for manslaughter, in not attempting to rescue a sailor, named Swansea, who had fallen overboard, was ably argued by Messrs. Hall McAllister and the District Attorney, yesterday, and a verdict returned by the jury of "Not guilty as charged in the indictment." The jury were charged that if they had any doubt of the man's having been alive after he struck the water, to give the prisoner the benefit of the doubt. That little doubt saved Captain Knowles, as, in the opinion of at least one member of the jury, he was guilty of a criminal indifference as to the fate of his lost sailor. He seized the wheel after the steersman had begun to put the ship about, put her on her course again, and then coolly marched down to finish his breakfast. He did not even throw over a chicken-coop for the poor fellow to rest upon while he watched the disappearing ship with his despairing eyes. The prisoner has been discharged from custody, and the witnesses also, who have been drearily awaiting the trial of the case, in prison, for the past two months.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 12, 1864
If there is anything more absurd than the general average of Police Court testimony, we do not know what it is. Witnesses stand up here, every day, and swear to the most extravagant propositions with an easy indifference to consequences in the next world that is altogether refreshing. Yesterday—under oath—a witness said that while he was holding the prisoner at the bar so that he could not break loose, the prisoner "pushed my wife with his hand—so—tried to push her over and kill her!" There was no evidence to show that the prisoner had anything against the woman, or was bothering himself about anything but his scuffle with her husband. Yet the witness surmised that he had the purpose hidden away in his mind somewhere to take her life, and he stood right up to the rack and swore to it; and swore also that he tried to turn this noble Dutchwoman into a corpse, by the simple act of pushing her over. That same woman might be pushed over the Yo Semite Falls without being killed by it, although it stands to reason that if she struck fair and bounced, it would probably shake her up some.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 14, 1864
Yesterday morning, a horse and cart were carelessly left unhitched and unwatched in Dupont street. The horse, being of the Spanish persuasion and not to be depended on, finally got tired standing idle, and ran away. He ran into Berry street, ran half a square and upset the cart, and fell, helplessly entangled in the harness. The vehicle was somewhat damaged, but two or three new wheels, some fresh sides, and a new bottom, will make it all right again. Considering the fact that little short narrow Berry street contains as many small children as all the balance of San Francisco put together, it is strange the frantic horse did not hash up a dozen or two of them in his reckless career. They all escaped, however, by the singular accident of being out of the way at the time, and they visited the wreck in countless swarms, after the disaster, and examined it with unspeakable satisfaction. The driver is a man of extraordinary intellect and mature judgment—he set his cart on its legs again as well as he could, and then whipped his horse until it was easy to see that the poor brute began to comprehend that something was up, though it is questionable whether he has yet cyphered out what that something was, or not. The driver, as we said before, was not in his wagon at the time of the accident, which accounts for the misfortune of his not being hurt in the least.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 14, 1864
Anna Jakes, drunk and disorderly, but excessively cheerful, made her first appearance in the City Prison last night, and made the dreary vaults ring with music. It was of the distorted, hifalutin kind, and she evidently considered herself an opera sharp of some consequence. Her idea was that "Whee-heeping sad and lo-honely" was not calculated to bring this cruel war to a close shortly, and she delivered herself of that idea under many difficulties; because, in the first place, Mary Kane, an old offender, was cursing like a trooper in a neighboring cell; and secondly, a man in another apartment who wanted to sleep, and who did not admire anybody's music, and especially Anna Jakes', kept inquiring, "Will you dry up that infernal yowling, you heifer?"—swinging a hefty oath at her occasionally—and so the cruel war music was so fused and blended with blasphemy in a higher key, and discouraging comments in a lower, that the pleasurable effect of it was destroyed, and the argument and the moral utterly lost. Anna finally fell to singing and dancing both, with a spirit that promised to last till morning, and Mary Kane and the weary man got disgusted and withdrew from the contest. Anna Jakes says she is a highly respectable young married lady, with a husband in the Boise country; that she has been sumptuously reared and expensively educated; that her impulses are good and her instincts refined; that she taught school a long time in the city of New York, and is an accomplished musician; and finally, that her sister got married last Sunday night, and she got drunk to do honor to the occasion—and with a persistency that is a credit to one of such small experience, she has been on a terrific bender ever since. She will probably let herself out on the cruel war for Judge Shepheard, in the Police Court, this morning.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 14, 1864
INSPECTION OF THE FORTIFICATIONS
Yesterday, General McDowell, accompanied by his Staff and many military officers, officials and civilians, made a tour of inspection of the harbor defences about the Bay of San Francisco. Many gentlemen had been invited to be of the party, and many answered by their presence. Besides Major General McDowell and Staff, were Brigadier General Wright and Staff, Brigadier-General Mason, Captain Van Vost, Provost Marshal, and other officers of the Army; Commander Woodworth of the Navy; Governor Low and suite; Mr. Redding, Secretary of State; Judges Field and Hoffman, of the U.S. Court; the Collector of the Port, Colonel James; Mr. Farwell, Naval officer; Dr. McLean, Surveyor of the Port; Captain Chenery, Navy Agent; Mayor Coon; Postmaster Perkins; Hon. Mr. Benton, Judge Lake, General Allen, General Carpenter, Wm. T. Coleman, and many other citizens whose names are not just now recollected, and several members of the Press, last but not least, always around where items are to be picked up, shells to be exploded, or corks to be drawn. A little after nine o'clock the "Goliah" left Broadway wharf with her precious freight. We could not help reflecting, should she blow up or sink, what a suit with bright buttons Neptune might wear, and how Army, Navy, Executive, Judiciary, Customs, Municipal and Civil Services would suffer. Away went the pleasant company, steaming down the Bay towards Fort Point. The company—those not before acquainted—were introduced to General McDowell, and each and all seemed delighted with his frank and genial manner, his quietly social disposition, his soldierly appearance and bearing, and the facility with which he at once put every one at ease.
FORT POINT.—At the Fort he was received with his appropriate salute. The different parts of the fortifications were inspected by the General and his guests. To the eye of a civilian, the works and their warlike appliances appeared formidable and in excellent condition for service. There was but one exception. From the barbette, some shell practice was had, the target being on the opposite shore, at Lime Point. But the fuses proved imperfect, the shells exploding almost immediately upon starting on their journey. This of course will be at once remedied. After the shelling, the troops were drawn up within the Fort and were reviewed by General McDowell and Governor Low; the Band playing appropriate music. The officer of the day in command of the troops, is a gentleman who won his commission by meritorious service in eleven battles at the East. We regret that we have not his name. The party then returned to the steamer and started across the Bay towards that famous spot of which all have heard not a little for years past—
LIME POINT.—The steamer ran close along the northern shore for a considerable distance, allowing an excellent opportunity for judging of the superior qualities the formation affords for a strong fortification. It can readily be transformed into a second Gibraltar. The position is needed by Government, which should take it, and leave the consideration of pay to the future. Next the steamer was headed up the Bay, and the company invited below to partake of a lunch. That this interesting incident was all that could be desired will appear evident by saying that it was prepared at the "Occidental," and that Leland himself was present to see that chicken salad and champagne were properly dispensed. Soon the steamer reached the wharf at
ANGELS' ISLAND.—Here another salute greeted the General, who, with his guests, inspected the fortifications there fast growing into formidable proportions and condition. The little valley lying between the Point at the entrance of Raccoon Straits, on which is a battery destined to guard that passage, and the high point to the south, where there is another new work, nearly ready for use, bears the appearance of a pleasant little village, with white houses and fixings, indicative of officers' families, soldiers' barracks, and domestic life. From this abode of the Angels the company proceeded through Raccoon Straits—beautiful sheet of water—around Angels' Island, and as they were passing the eastern end, all of a sudden found themselves saluted by scores of white handkerchiefs on shore, which was answered in kind, and with splendid music by the fine band of the Ninth infantry. A picnic party were on shore, and gave this very pleasing incident to the excursion. Passing the Point, the company had an opportunity to view the preparations for the battery there, apparently nearly ready for mounting its guns and then steamed across, and landed at
ALCATRACES, under a thundering salute from the southern batteries. A general examination of the whole Island and its defences followed; then a partaking of the hospitalities of Capt. Winder, Commandant of the Post, and shell practice from the northwestern battery. The shells here were in better condition, and the practice more satisfactory. The reported number of guns on the Island now, and to be, differs, ranging from ninety to one hundred and eighty. The exact number is not material. There are enough to knock any fleet that can ever come within reach into splinters. Leaving Alcatraces, after an inspection of the forces there, with another salute, the steamer's prow was pointed toward Yerba Buena Island—a look was had, while passing, at the positions yet to be fortified—and she passed up the Bay to the mouth of Mission Creek, past the Aquila—of which ship some of our readers have heard occasionally—and then back along the city front, the band playing national and other airs, to Broadway wharf, the place of starting. The General knows whether the inspection was satisfactory in a military light. We do not. But it may be said that the trip was exceedingly pleasant and satisfactory to all the guests of the gallant soldier to whose courtesy they were indebted for the delightful excursion.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 16, 1864
Yesterday noon, Sansome street was witness of one of those feats so common to New York city, among the butcher boys, of racing through the public streets. The driver of Clark's furniture and Express wagon and some other Expressman, getting their mettle up as to the relative speed of their respective plugs, let out, both laying on the whip plentifully, until they overtook Crosky's grocery wagon, which Clark's vehicle (No. 2,859) unceremoniously knocked into "pi," landing driver, groceries and other Sundries in the street. These outrages are becoming too frequent in our thickly-populated streets, and need the strict attention of our city authorities. Eye-witnesses to this race at full speed up the railroad track, freely expressed themselves that if any ladies or children had been unfortunate enough to be on the street at the time, nothing could have saved them from being ridden down.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 16, 1864
On Thursday evening, officers John Conway and King had their attention attracted by the crying of a child at the Catholic Orphan Asylum door; where, upon examination, they discovered an infant, apparently but a few days old, wrapped up in a shawl. It was delivered to the care of the benevolent Sisters at the Institution. It appeared to be a good enough baby—nothing the matter with it—and it has been unaccountable to all who have heard of the circumstance, what the owner wanted to throw it away for.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 16, 1864
And he fetched his things with him.—John Smith was brought into the city prison last night, by Officers Conway and Minson, so limbered up with whiskey that you might have hung him on a fence like a wet shirt. His battered slouch-hat was jammed down over his eyes like an extinguisher; his shirt-bosom (which was not clean, at all,) was spread open, displaying his hair trunk beneath; his coat was old, and short waisted, and fringed at the edges, and exploded at the elbows like a blooming cotton-boll, and its collar was turned up, so that one could see by the darker color it exposed, that the garment had known better days, when it was not so yellow, and sunburnt, and freckled with grease spots, as it was now; it might have hung about its owner symmetrically and gracefully, too, in those days, but now it had a general hitch upward, in the back, as if it were climbing him; his pantaloons were of coarse duck, very much soiled, and as full of wrinkles as if they had been made of pickled tripe; his boots were not blacked, and they probably never had been; the subject's face was that of a man of forty, with the sun of an invincible good nature shining dimly through the cloud of dirt that enveloped it. The officers held John up in a warped and tangled attitude, like a pair of tongs struck by lightning, and searched him, and the result was as follows: Two slabs of old cheese; a double handful of various kinds of crackers; seven peaches; a box of lip salve, bearing marks of great age; an onion; two dollars and sixty-five cents, in two purses, (the odd money being considered as circumstantial evidence that the defendant had been drinking beer at a five-cent house; ) a soiled handkerchief; a fine-tooth comb; also one of coarser pattern; a cucumber pickle, in an imperfect state of preservation; a leather string; an eye-glass, such as prospectors use; one buckskin glove; a printed ballad, "Call me pet names;" an apple; part of a dried herring; a copy of the Boston Weekly Journal, and copies of several San Francisco papers; and in each and every pocket he had two or three chunks of tobacco, and also one in his mouth of such remarkable size as to render his articulation confused and uncertain. We have purposely given this prisoner a fictitious name, out of the consideration we feel for him as a man of noble literary instincts, suffering under temporary misfortune. He said he always read the papers before he got drunk; go thou and do likewise. Our literary friend gathered up his grocery store and staggered contentedly into a cell; but if there is any virtue in the boasted power of the press, he shall stagger out again to-day, a free man.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 17, 1864
A visit to the County Prison, in Broadway above Kearny street, will satisfy almost any reasonable person that there are worse hardships in life than being immured in those walls. It is a substantial-looking place, but not a particularly dreary one, being as neat and clean as a parlor in its every department. There are two long rows of cells on the main floor—thirty-one, altogether—disposed on each side of an alley-way, built of the best quality of brick, imported from Boston, and laid in cement, which is so hard that a nail could not be driven into it; each cell has a thick iron door with a wicket in its centre for the admission of air and light, and a narrow aperture in the opposite wall for the same purpose; these cells are just about the size and have the general appearance of a gentleman's state room on a steamboat, but are rather more comfortable than those dens are sometimes; a two-story bunk, a slop-bucket and a sort of table are the principal furniture; the walls inside are white-washed, and the floors kept neat and clean by frequent scrubbing; on Wednesdays and Saturdays the prisoners are provided with buckets of water for general bathing and clothes-washing purposes, and they are required to keep themselves and their premises clean at all times; on Tuesdays and Fridays they clean up their cells and scrub the floors thereof. In one of these rows of cells it is pitch dark when the doors are shut, but in the other row it is very light when the wickets are open. From the number of books and newspapers lying on the bunks, it is easy to believe that a vast amount of reading is done in the County Prison; and smoking too, we presume, because, although the rules forbid the introduction of spirituous liquors, wine, or beer into the jail, nothing is said about tobacco. Most of the occupants of the light cells were lying on the bunks reading, and some of those in the dark ones were standing up at the wickets similarly employed. "Sick Jimmy," or James Rodgers, who was found guilty of manslaughter a day or two ago, in killing Foster, has been permitted by Sheriff Davis to occupy one of the light cells, on account of his ill health. He says his quarters would be immensely comfortable if one didn't mind the irksomeness of the confinement. We could hear the prisoners laughing and talking in the cells, but they are prohibited from making much noise or talking from one cell to another. There are three iron cells standing isolated in the yard, in which a batch of Chinamen wear the time away in smoking opium two hours a day and sleeping the other twenty-two. The kitchen department is roomy and neat, and the heavy tragedy work in it is done by "trusties," or prisoners detailed from time to time for that duty. Up stairs are the cells for women; two of these are dark, iron cells, for females confined for high crimes. The others are simply well lighted and ventilated wooden rooms, such as the better class of citizens over in Washoe used to occupy a few years ago, when the common people lived in tents. There is nothing gorgeous about these wooden cells, but plenty of light and whitewashing make them look altogether cheerful. Mesdames O'Reefe, McCarty, Mary Holt and "Gentle Julia," (Julia Jennings,) are the most noted ladies in this department. Prison-keeper Clark says the quiet, smiling, pious looking Mrs. McCarty is just the boss thief of San Francisco, and the misnamed "Gentle Julia" is harder to manage, and gives him more trouble than all the balance of the tribe put together. She uses "awful" language, and a good deal of it, the same being against the rule. Mrs. McCarty dresses neatly, reclines languidly on a striped mattress, smiles sweetly at vacancy, and labors at her "crochet-work" with the serene indifference of a princess. The four ladies we have mentioned are unquestionably stuck after the County Prison; they reside there most of the time, coming out occasionally for a week to steal something, or get on a bender, and going back again as soon as they can prove that they have accomplished their mission. A lady warden will shortly be placed in charge of the women's department here, in accordance with an act of the last Legislature, and we feel able to predict that Gentle Julia will make it mighty warm for her. Most of the cells, above and below, are occupied, and it is proposed to put another story on the jail at no distant day. We have no suggestions to report concerning the County Jail. We are of the opinion that it is all right, and doing well.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 17, 1864
INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE FOR STOCKTON
Officer Forner arrested and brought into the City Prison, at noon yesterday, a wanderer named Patrick O'Hara, who had been sleeping in the sand-hills all night and tramping dreamily about the wharves all day, with a bag containing nearly seven hundred dollars in gold sticking suggestively out of his coat pocket. He looked a little wild out of his eyes, and did not talk or act as if he knew exactly what he was about. He objected to staying in the Jail, and he was averse to leaving it without his money, and so he was locked up for the present safety and well-being of both. He begged hard for his worshipped treasure, and there were pathos and moving eloquence in the poor fellow's story of the weary months of toil and privation it had cost him to gather it together. He said he had been working for a Mr. Woodworth on a ranch near Petaluma, and they set two men to watching him, and when he found it out he wouldn't stay there any longer, but packed up and came down here on the boat night before last. He also said they had given him an order on Mr. Woodworth here for forty dollars, for a month's work, but when he got on the boat he found it was dated "1833," and he threw it overboard. He brought a carpet-sack with him, and left it at some hotel, but he can't find the place again. He says he wants to go and stay a while with some priest—and if he can get a chance of that kind, he had better take it and keep away from the wharves and the sand-hills; otherwise somebody will "go through him" the first thing he knows.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 17, 1864
Two children, a boy fourteen years old, and his sister, aged sixteen, were brought before the Police Court yesterday, charged with stealing, but the hearing of the case, although begun, was not finished. Judge Shepheard, whose official dealing with ancient criminals has not yet hardened his heart against the promptings of pity for misguided youth, said he would examine the prisoners at his chambers, to the end that he might only sentence them to the Industrial School if it were possible, and thus save them from the shame and the lasting stigma of imprisonment in a felon's cell for their crime. He said there was crime enough in the land, without driving children to its commission by heaping infamy and disgrace upon them for their first transgression of the law. He was right: it is better to save than to destroy, and that justice is most righteous which is tempered by mercy.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 19, 1864
Mrs. Catherine Moran was arraigned before Judge Cowles yesterday, on a charge of assault with an axe upon Mrs. Eliza Markee, with intent to do bodily injury. A physician testified that there were contused wounds on plaintiff's head, and also a cut through the scalp, which bled profusely. The fuss was all about a child, and that is the strangest part about it—as if, in a city so crowded with them as San Francisco, it were worth while to be particular as to the fate of a child or two. However, mothers appear to go more by instinct than political economy in matters of this kind. Mrs. Markee testified that she heard war going on among the children, and she rushed down into the yard and found her Johnny sitting on the stoop, building a toy wagon, and Mrs. Moran standing over him with an axe, threatening to split his head open. She asked the defendant not to split her Johnny. The defendant at once turned upon her, threatening to kill her, and struck her two or three times with the axe, when she, the plaintiff, grabbed the defendant by the arms and prevented her from scalping her entirely. Blood was flowing profusely. Mr. Killdig described the fight pretty much as the plaintiff had done, and said he parted, or tried to part the combatants, and that he called upon Mr. Moran to assist him, but that neutral power said the women had been sour a good while—let them fight it out. Another witness substantiated the main features of the foregoing testimony, and said the warriors were all covered with blood, and the children of both, to the number of many dozens, had fled in disorder and taken refuge under the house, crying, and saying their mothers were killing each other. Mrs. Murphy, for the defence, testified as follows: "I was coomun along, an' Misses Moran says to me, says she, this is the red wood stick she tried to take me life wid, or wan o' thim other sticks, Missis Murphy, dear, an' says I, Missis Moran, dairlin',"—Here she was shut off, merely because the Court did not care about knowing what Mrs. Moran told her about the fight, and consequently we have nothing further of this important witness's testimony to offer. The case was continued. Seriously, instead of a mere ordinary she-fight, this is a fuss of some consequence, and should not be lightly dealt with. It was an earnest attempt at manslaughter—or woman-slaughter, at any rate, which is nearly as bad.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 19, 1864
In the Fourth District Court, yesterday, an order was granted to the plaintiff in the suit of J. J. Robbins vs. Real del Monte Gold and Silver Mining Company et al., requiring the defendants to show cause why they should not be enjoined from selling stock for the collection of an assessment levied for the purpose of further improving their mine. It appears that stockholders are becoming dissatisfied with the management of the concern, and want to see the end of assessments for "further improvements." It is an idea entertained by some inconsiderate persons, that a mine should at some period of the world's history begin to pay its own expenses. Rolling into prosperity on the wheels of assessments may do for a while, but there's a time when dividends should relieve the drain on the individual's private resources, and he looks forward expectantly, but "hope deferred maketh the heart sick," etc.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 20, 1864
Alman Glasby, (or Gillespie,) one of the Placerville stage-robbers, was brought up from San Jose yesterday by Sheriff Van Eaton, and lodged in the station house until the Sacramento boat left. He was captured at Hall's Tavern, between San Jose and the New Almaden mines, after a severe fight, on the night that the Sheriff's party killed his two comrades. He confesses that he belonged to an organized band of robbers, under the command of Ingram, who held a Captain's commission in the Confederate army, signed by Jeff. Davis, and says they were armed and equipped by Secessionists throughout the State, among whom he mentioned several who are well known in Santa Clara county, and two in this city. He says he is only nineteen years old; but to a disinterested spectator he looks older by two or three years.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 21, 1864
Mollie Livingston and two friends of hers, Terese and Jessie, none of whom are of at all doubtful reputation, cast aside their superfluous clothing and engaged in a splendid triangular fist fight in Spofford Alley about seven o'clock yesterday evening. It was a shiftless row, however, without aim or object, and for this reason officers Evrard and McCormick broke it up and confined the parties to it in the City Prison. It originated in whiskey.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 21, 1864
As foolish a thing as a man can do is to steal anything while officer Rose is in town. A Mrs. Ashley, who lives in Bush between Powell and Mason streets, was robbed of a gold belt-buckle, some silver spoons, etc., on Saturday, the 9th, and yesterday she laid the matter before one of our Police officers, who told her to find officer Rose and give him charge of the matter. She found him, but she was too late for her information to be of any use—he had already recovered the stolen property and tracked the thief to his den also. It is said he follows people by the foot-prints they make on the brick pavements.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 22, 1864
When we contracted to report for this newspaper, the important matter of two earthquakes a month was not considered in the salary. There shall be no mistake of that kind in the next contract, though. Last night, at twenty minutes to eleven, the regular semi-monthly earthquake, due the night before, arrived twenty-four hours behind time, but it made up for the delay in uncommon and altogether unnecessary energy and enthusiasm. The first effort was so gentle as to move the inexperienced stranger to the expression of contempt and brave but very bad jokes; but the second was calculated to move him out of his boots, unless they fitted him neatly. Up in the third story of this building the sensation we experienced was as if we had been sent for and were mighty anxious to go. The house seemed to waltz from side to side with a quick motion, suggestive of sifting corn meal through a sieve; afterward it rocked grandly to and fro like a prodigious cradle, and in the meantime several persons started downstairs to see if there were anybody in the street so timid as to be frightened at a mere earthquake. The third shock was not important, as compared with the stunner that had just preceded it. That second shock drove people out of the theatres by dozens. At the Metropolitan, we are told that Franks, the comedian, had just come on the stage, (they were playing the "Ticket-of-Leave Man,") and was about to express the unbounded faith he had in May; he paused until the jarring had subsided, and then improved and added force to the text by exclaiming, "It will take more than an earthquake to shake my faith in that woman!" And in that, Franks achieved a sublime triumph over the elements, for he "brought the house down," and the earthquake couldn't. From the time the shocks commenced last night, until the windows had stopped rattling, a minute and a half had elapsed.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 22, 1864
We are pleased to hear of the prosperous condition of the Dashaway Society. Their ranks, we are assured, are constantly filling up. The draught with them is working well, causing many to volunteer. The bounty they receive is sobriety, respect and health, and the blessings of families. We will not attribute all these new recruitings to the high tariff, and the difficulty of obtaining any decent whiskey. But some who join give this as their reason. They fear strychnine more than inebriation. They find it impossible to exhaust all the tarantula juice in the country, as they have been endeavoring to do for a long while, in hopes to get at some decent "rum" after all the tangle-leg should have been swallowed, and so conclude to save tariff on liquors and life by coming square up to the hydrant. Their return to original innocence and primitive bibations will be gladly welcomed. Water is a forgiving friend. After years of estrangement it meets the depraved taste with the same friendship as before. Water bears no enmity. But it must be a strange meeting—water pure and the tongues of some of our solid drinkers of Bourbon and its dishonest relations. Alkali water to the innocent mouths of cattle from the waters of the Mississippi could not seem stranger nor more disagreeable at first. But it will come around right at last. Success to the tariff and the Dashaways.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 22, 1864
A SCENE AT THE POLICE COURT—THE HOSTILITY OF COLOR
A long file of applicants, perhaps seventy-five or eighty, passed in review before the Police Commissioners yesterday afternoon, anxious to be employed by the city in Snatching drunks, burglars, petty larcenors, wife-whippers, and all offenders generally, under the authority of a star on the left breast. One of the candidates—a fine, burly specimen of an Emeralder—leaned negligently against the door-post, speculating on his chances of being "passed," and at the same time whiffing industriously at an old dhudeen, blackened by a thousand smokes. He was smoking thus thoughtfully when a contraband passed him, conveying a message to some official in the Court.
"There goes another applicant," said a wag at his elbow.
"What?" asked the smoker.
"A darkey looking for a sit on the Police," was the reply.
"An' do they give nagurs a chance on the Polis?"
"Of course."
"Then, be J-s," said Pat, knocking the ashes out of his pipe and stowing it away, "I'm out of the ring; I wouldn't demane mesilf padrowling o'nights with a nagur."
He gave one glance at the innocent and unsuspecting darkey, and left the place in disgust.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 22, 1864
All of a sudden, we have imbibed a most extravagant respect for Grand Juries. Judge Cowles fined a man two hundred and fifty dollars, yesterday, and sentenced him to five days imprisonment in the County Jail, for cherishing a sentiment of the opposite character. Otto Keating was summoned before the Grand Jury for the May term, and refused to answer one or two of the questions asked him. Judge Cowles hauled him up for contempt, but let him go without punishment. He was again called for by the Grand Jury, when he answered the questions he had declined to answer before, but refused to answer some new ones that were asked him. The punishment we have mentioned was the result. The great popularity of Judge Cowles with the people of San Francisco rests upon two rare judicial traits, which are strongly developed in his character, viz: The quality of mercy, with the quality of discerning where it is proper to exercise it; and the quality of fearlessly administering red-hot penalties that make a transgressor fairly waltz, when he deserves it. An innocent man is safe enough in the County Court, but if he is guilty, he ought always to do what he honestly can to get a change of venue.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 22, 1864
Rev. H. H. Kavanaugh, represented as a Bishop of the M. E. Church South, whose home until quite recently has been in Georgia, but who for some time past has been travelling around in this part of the State organizing Churches and preaching the Gospel as the M. E. Church South understand it, to many congregations of Rebel sympathizers, was on Monday arrested by Captain Jackson, United States Marshal for the Southern District of this State. The arrest was made at Black's ranch, Salt Spring Valley, Calaveras county, whilst the Bishop was holding a camp-meeting. By the Reverend gentleman's request, he was granted his parole until he could preach a sermon, on promise to report himself at this city yesterday for passage on the San Francisco steamer, which he did accordingly. We cannot state the precise charges on which he was arrested.
Getting military information is about the slowest business we ever undertook. We clipped the above paragraph from the Stockton Independent at eleven o'clock yesterday morning, and went skirmishing among the "chief captains," as the Bible modestly terms Brigadier Generals, in search of further information, from that time until half past seven o'clock in the evening, before we got it. We will engage to find out who wrote the "Junius Letters" in less time than that, if we have a mind to turn our attention to it. We started to the Provost Marshal's office, but met another reporter, who said: "I suppose I know where you're going, but it's no use—just come from there—military etiquette and all that, you know—those fellows are mum—won't tell anything about it—damn!" We sought General McDowell, but he had gone to Oakland. In the course of the afternoon we visited all kinds of headquarters and places, and called on General Mason, Colonel Drum, General Van Bokkelen, Leland of the Occidental, Chief Burke, Keating, Emperor Norton, and everybody else that would be likely to know the Government's business, and knowing it, be willing to impart the coveted information for a consideration such as the wealthy fraternity of reporters are always prepared to promise. We did finally get it, from a high official source, and without any charge whatever—but then the satisfaction of the thing was all sapped out of it by exquisite "touches on the raw"—which means, hints that military matters were not proper subjects to branch out on in the popular sensational way so palatable to the people, and mild but extremely forcible suggestions about the unhappy fate that has overtaken fellows who ventured to experiment on "contraband news." We shall not go beyond the proper limits, if we fully appreciate those suggestions, and we think we do. We were told that we might say the military authorities, hearing where the Bishop had come from, (and may be what he was about—we will just "chance" that notion for a "flyer,") did send Captain Jackson to simply ask the Bishop to come down to San Francisco; (he didn't arrest the Bishop, at all—but most anybody would have come on a nice little invitation like that, without waiting for the formal compliment of an arrest: another excessively smart suggestion of ours, and we do hope it isn't contraband;) the Captain only requested the Bishop to come down here and explain to the authorities what he was up to; and he did—he arrived here night before last—and explained it in writing, and that document and the Bishop have been taken under advisement, (and we think we were told a decision had been arrived at, and that it was not public property just yet—but we are not sure, and we had rather not take any chances on this part of the business.) We do know, however, that the Bishop and his document are still under advisement as far as the public are concerned, and we would further advise the public not to get in a sweat about it, but to hold their grip patiently until it is proper for them to know all about the matter. This is all we know concerning the Bishop and his explanation, and if we have branched out too much and shed something that trenches upon that infernal "contraband" rule, we want to go home.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 23, 1864
Yesterday, in the Police Court, George Lambertson and Ralph Doyle, one a full-grown man and the other a boy of fourteen, pleaded guilty to the charge of exhibiting obscene pictures. Officers Lees, Evrard and Rose, some time since, got on the track of a regular system of prostituting young girls, which was being carried on by a number of men and boys who had banded themselves together for the purpose, and their efforts have resulted in the arrest of the two persons above named, and the unearthing of two more of the boys and two or three men, who are probably all captured by this time. The name of one of the men is Emile Buffandeau; two of the boys are Harry Fenton and George Ayres. The men made use of the boys to decoy the girls to their rooms, where their ruin was effected. These rooms were well stocked with obscene books and pictures. The officers say that the further they probe the matter the more astounding are the developments, and the more widespread the operations of this infamous association are discovered to be. The names of some fifteen of these debauched girls have already been ascertained, and others are suspected of properly belonging on the list. Some of them are members of families of high respectability, and the balance, as young Doyle phrases it, are "baldheaded," that is, unbonneted street girls. The ages of the lot vary from ten or twelve to fifteen. Ralph Doyle says that he and the other two boys, Ayres and Fenton, were "confidants," but that he knows of no "gang," nor confederation of men and boys together, in the wretched business. He is aware, however, that a large number of men and boys and young girls are in the habit of visiting each other's rooms, but on their own individual responsibility only, he thinks. He says the girls showed him the obscene pictures, instead of his being guilty of that sort of conduct with them, and he is further of the opinion that they have done the seducing in most of the other cases, as they did in his. He is a fine, handsome, manly little fellow, uses excellent language, and his bearing is quiet and perfectly well-bred. He tells his story the same way every time, and we believe he tells the truth. All his revelations, however, will not do to print. The boys concerned in this extraordinary affair will be sent to the Industrial School, as they are all very young, and it is to be hoped that the law will be stretched to its utmost tension for the punishment of the men...Since the above was in type, we have learned that the terrible developments detailed above, were brought to light through the energy and industry of the master of one of the Schools. He had ascertained the names and addresses of a great number of men and boys not mentioned in this article, who were implicated in these villainous transactions, and was in a fair way of securing their apprehension, but the premature disclosure of the facts and their publication in the evening papers, it is feared, will put the scoundrels on their guard, and prevent their capture. Furthermore, according to our latest information, there are thirty names of debauched young girls on the list. The man Lambertson, by whom a poor orphan girl of fifteen has become enceinte, has made over to her, in the hope of escaping the penitentiary, such property as he owned in the city. We are also very glad to learn, from the best authority, that Ralph Doyle, so far from being a leader among the miscreants, as has been said of him, was the most innocent in the party, and that it is not in his nature to do an unworthy action when left to the guidance of his own good instincts.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 23, 1864
A few days ago, L. Kahn bought ten thousand cigars from a man named Cohen, promising to pay twenty dollars per thousand in gold for them on delivery. He had them taken and left in a cellar, and told the plaintiff to call in an hour or so afterwards and get his money. When the man called, according to appointment, Kahn was absent and so were the cigars; and finally, when he did succeed in corralling his debtor, the fellow tendered green-backs in payment of his bill. The result was a charge preferred in the Police Court against Kahn, for obtaining goods under false pretences. After a patient hearing of the case, Judge Shepheard said he would send it up to the County Court (placing defendant under one thousand dollars' bonds,) and if they felt there as he did, Kahn would certainly be punished for the crime he had been charged with, or perhaps even for grand larceny, which was the real spirit of the offence. He said Kahn's conduct was based in fraud, and carried out in fraud; there was fraud in its conception and fraud in its execution; and he considered the man as guilty as the occupant of any jail in the country. The counsel for defendant said if there was any fraud in the matter, it probably lay in the issuance of the green-backs in the first place. Judge Shepheard said, "I am aware that you are a Union man, Sir, but notwithstanding that, I will permit no more such language as that to be used in this Court; and I will punish any man who repeats the offences here, for contempt, or imprison him for treason, for I regard it as nothing more nor less than treason. It is your duty and mine, Sir, to uphold the Government and forbear to question the righteousness of its acts." The lawyer protested his innocence of any intention to commit the chiefest among crimes, and quiet was restored again.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 23, 1864
Night before last, Miss Margaret McQuinn complained to Captain Lees that she had been raped by the driver of hack No. 28, and officer Blitz, whose duty it is to attend to the followers of that occupation, was deputed to ferret out the criminal and arrest him, which he did. The man's name is Barney Gillan. The woman is large and strongly built, and about thirty years of age. From her story—all of which it is not by any means necessary to publish—it would seem that she is supernaturally green. She says she arrived here from Manchester, New Hampshire, last Monday, in the Constitution, and since then three different hackmen have endeavored to entrap her. Day before yesterday, Gillan, under pretence of hunting a situation as a servant for her among some respectable families in the country with whom he represented himself as being very popular, took her to some out-of-the-way den kept by a Frenchman, near the Mission, and ruined her by force, as above stated. She returned to town with him, and then excused herself and went and laid the matter before the detective department. There is a charge of this kind brought against some hackman or other about once every five or six months, and it is fully time an example were made that would forever put a stop to such villainy on their part. Gillan has been admitted to bail in the sum of one thousand dollars.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 24, 1864
We chronicle the usual visitations of justice upon those persons whose errors are venial, and the result of an unfortunate appetite, or temper, always with a feeling of regret that the well-being of society demands inflexibly a judgment "according to the law and the testimony." We can compassionate the man whose domestic troubles, or business reverses, drive him to drink frenzy from the bowl, or who, in a momentary heat, retaliates on wanton injury, or insult, or errs through ignorance; but there are instances where the only regret is that the power of the Judge to punish is limited to a penalty not at all commensurate with the magnitude of the offence. In the case of George Lambertson, who was arrested for infamous demoralizing practices with young school girls, and who pleaded guilty in the Police Court, Judge Shepheard inflicted upon the miscreant the heaviest penalty prescribed by the law for his crime. Lambertson receives a term of three months in the County Jail, and a fine of five hundred dollars, (which fine will extend the term of imprisonment until the full amount is served out, at the rate of two dollars per day, in addition to the three months aforesaid,) is a part of the penalty.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 26, 1864
At the next meeting of the Board of Supervisors, Mr. Cummings, member from the Tenth District, will introduce an ordinance requiring all drivers of hacks, as well as hack-owners, to take out license, to the end that the eternal dodging of responsibility by that class of the community may be checkmated. One plan of extorting money from passengers, which is followed by hackmen under the present loose system, might be frustrated, perhaps, by Mr. Cummings' proposed bill. The plan we refer to is this: A stranger takes a hack at the steamboat landing, and makes a bargain for his transportation to a hotel; on the road, the driver's confederate takes the reins, delivers the passenger at the hotel, and charges him double, swearing he knows nothing of the previous contract. We were under the impression that the owner of the hack was responsible in cases of illegal charging, but those whose business it is to know, tell us it is not so. It ought to be, at any rate. It doesn't even require horse-sense to know that much. And while the subject is before the Board, an ordinance is to be framed requiring the hackmen around Portsmouth Square to stay where they belong, and not collect in squads, obstructing the sidewalks, and making a general nuisance of themselves. So far, Signor Blitz, and the Police Court, and the Board of Supervisors, all put together, have not been able to keep the hackmen straight. One of the fraternity, Barney Gillan, is up to-day for committing a rape on a defenceless young woman, thirty-five years of age, and they will probably make him sweat for it.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 30, 1864
For several days a vagrant two story frame house has been wandering listlessly about Commercial street, above this office, and she has finally stopped in the middle of the thoroughfare, and is staring dejectedly towards Montgomery street, as if she would like to go down there, but really don't feel equal to the exertion. We wish they would trot her along and leave the street open; she is an impassable obstruction and an intolerable nuisance where she stands now. If they set her up there to be looked at, it is all right; but we have looked at her as much as we want to, and are anxious for her to move along; we are not stuck after her any.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 30, 1864
This faded relic of gentility—or, rather, this washed-out relic, for every tint of that description is gone—was brought to the station-house yesterday, in the arms of Officers Marsh and Ball, in a state of beastly intoxication. She cursed the Union and lauded the Confederacy for half an hour, and then she cast up part of her dinner; during the succeeding half hour, or perhaps it might have been three-quarters, she continued to curse the Federal Union and belch fuming and offensive blessings upon the Southern Confederacy, and then she cast up the balance of her dinner. She seemed much relieved. She so expressed herself. She observed to the prison-keeper, and casually to such as were standing around, although strangers to her, that she didn't care a d—n. She said it in that tone of quiet cheerfulness and contentment, which marks the troubled spirit at peace again after its stormy season of unrest. So they tackled her once more, and jammed her into the "dark cell," and locked her up. To such of her friends as gentle love for her may inspire with agonized suspense on her account, we would say: Banish your foreboding fears, for she's safe.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 30, 1864
Barney Gillan, the hackman against whom a charge of rape was preferred some days since, had an examination yesterday before Judge Shepheard. At first the tears and apparent distress of the victim of the alleged outrage, while occupying the witness's stand, were calculated to move the hearts of those present and unacquainted with the facts; but as the examination progressed the matter began to assume a very questionable phase, and it was soon apparent that if there had been any rape committed at all, it was of a very modified type. True, the lady did enter her protest, and had a notion to halloo, when Gillan was about taking undue liberties with her; but she sought a refuge and assuaged her grief that night at the Portsmouth Hotel, in the embraces of a benevolent person with whom she had met for the first time that day. He protected her injured innocence until seven o'clock the next morning, when she sallied forth to seek another protector. The case was discharged
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 30, 1864
The bark Yankee arrived from Honolulu yesterday, bringing another hundred barrels of molasses to Rev. H. W. Bellows, contributed by Captain Makee, and to be sold for the benefit of the Sanitary Fund. We noticed a like donation from the same distant patriot a day or two ago, which was sold here and netted upwards of twelve hundred dollars to the fund. Captain Makee's sugar plantation, on one of the Hawaiian Islands, whence this molasses comes, is rather extensive. He has seven hundred acres of cane growing, and this area will be increased during the next few months to nine hundred or a thousand acres. There is no water on the plantation, and irrigation has to be resorted to. Even the water required for the steam engine and other purposes in the manufacture of sugar, has to be brought from a spring on a mountain, three miles distant, through iron pipes; yet, so rich is the land that six tons of sugar have been made on a single acre, and the average is about three tons. At his own mill, Captain Makee manufactures from eight thousand to ten thousand pounds of sugar a day. During the present year, his plantation has been very successful, and promises to produce the largest amount of sugar yet obtained from any one estate in the Hawaiian Islands. Its product will probably realize, at present rates, this year, over one hundred thousand dollars; and, altogether, its chances, in a business point of view, may be regarded as rather a "deader thing" than Gould & Curry. The estate is expected to yield over two million pounds of sugar next year. Captain Makee has invented a "molasses pan" and a "double cane cart," which are spoken of as great triumphs of Yankee genius.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 31, 1864
That melancholy old frame house that has been loafing around Commercial street for the past week, got disgusted at the notice we gave her in the last issue of the CALL, and drifted off into some other part of the city yesterday. It is pleasing to our vanity to imagine that if it had not been for our sagacity in divining her hellish designs, and our fearless exposure of them, she would have been down on Montgomery street to-day, playing herself for a hotel. As it is, she has folded her tents like the Arabs, and quietly stolen away, behind several yoke of oxen.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 31, 1864
The lamented Lazarus departed this life about a year ago, and from that time until recently poor Bummer has mourned the loss of his faithful friend in solitude, scorning the sympathy and companionship of his race with that stately reserve and exclusiveness which has always distinguished him since he became a citizen of San Francisco. But, for several weeks past, we have observed a vagrant black puppy has taken up with him, and attends him in his promenades, bums with him at the restaurants, and watches over his slumbers as unremittingly as did the sainted Lazarus of other days. Whether that puppy really feels an unselfish affection for Bummer, or whether he is actuated by unworthy motives, and goes with him merely to ring in on the eating houses through his popularity at such establishments, or whether he is one of those fawning sycophants that fasten upon the world's heroes in order that they may be glorified by the reflected light of greatness, we can not yet determine. We only know that he hangs around Bummer, and snarls at intruders upon his repose, and looks proud and happy when the old dog condescends to notice him. He ventures upon no puppyish levity in the presence of his prince, and essays no unbecoming familiarity, but in all respects conducts himself with the respectful decorum which such a puppy so situated should display. Consequently, in time, he may grow into high favor.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 31, 1864
On Friday morning, Catherine Leary, who lives in Waverley Place, got up and found all the doors in her house open, and a silk dress worth seventy-five dollars missing, and also an alarm clock, said to be worth ten dollars; but we beg to be left unmolested in the opinion that it isn't worth six bits, if it didn't know enough to give the alarm when the house was full of thieves. Officer Rose, of the Detective Police, recovered the silk dress yesterday, and the imbecile clock, and also the Chinaman who is supposed to have committed the burglary. Hoping the accused may prove innocent, we prefer not to blast his reputation by publishing his name yet, which is Ah Chum.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 31, 1864
Yesterday afternoon, the Deputy Collector, Auditor, and fifteen other Custom House officers sent in their resignations, assigning as a reason for doing so, that with green-backs at the present rates, (forty cents,) their wages were less than those received by day laborers, and being inadequate to defray the expense of living, they were compelled to resign. Custom House salaries are not very heavy, even when paid in gold. We are informed that the Collector telegraphed to Washington at once concerning the matter.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 31, 1864
Work on the Camanche is progressing rapidly. The foreman observed yesterday, with the air of a man who is satisfied his listener is an uncommonly intelligent man, and knows all about things, that the "garboard streak" had been up some time. It is not possible to conceive the satisfaction we derived from that information. She must be all right now, isn't she? One of those gunboats is generally all right when she has her "garboard streak" up, perhaps. Such has been our experience. It is limited, but that is of no real consequence, probably. We looked around a little, and noticed that there was another streak up, also, running fore-and-aft, and several streaks running crossways, and enough old iron lying around to make as many more streaks as they want, if it holds out. It was excessively cheerful and gratifying. The public may rest easy—work on the Camanche is streaking along with extraordinary velocity.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 2, 1864
All day yesterday the cars were carrying colored people of all shades and tints, and of all sizes and both sexes, out to Hayes' Park, to celebrate the anniversary of the emancipation of their race in England's West Indian possessions years ago. They rode the fiery untamed steeds that are kept for equestrian duty in the grounds; they practised pistol shooting, but abstained from destroying the targets; they swung; they promenaded among the shrubbery; they filled themselves up with beer and sandwiches—all just as the thing is done there by white folks—and they essayed to dance, but the effort was not a brilliant success. It was interesting to look at, though. For languid, slow-moving, pretentious, impressive, solemn, and excessively high-toned and aristocratic dancing, commend us to the disenthralled North American negro, when there is no restraint upon his natural propensity to put on airs. White folks of the upper stratum of society pretend to walk through quadrilles, in a stately way, but these saddle-colored young ladies can discount them in the slow-movement evidence of high gentility. They don't know much about dancing, but they "let on" magnificently, as if the mazes of a quadrille were their native element, and they move serenely through it and tangle it hopelessly and inextricably, with an unctuous satisfaction that is surpassingly pleasant to witness. By the middle of the afternoon about two hundred darkies were assembled at the Park; or rather, to be precise, there was not much "darky" about it, either; for if the prevailing lightness of tint was worth anything as evidence, the noble miscegenationist had been skirmishing considerably among them in days gone by. It was expected that the colored race would come out strong in the matter of numbers (and otherwise) in the evening, when a grand ball was to be given and last all night.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 2, 1864
If ever you want to find Ellen Quinn, or Gentle Julia, or Mary Holt, or Haidee Leonard, or Annie Berry, please call at the County Jail, upstairs. Mary Holt has spent most of her time there for the past fourteen years, it is said, and the most inexperienced of this company of choice spirits (gin) has sojourned there chiefly for the last three years. Mary Holt has just enlisted again for the County Jail for fifty days, and next time she comes out she will probably enlist for the war. Following is the record of service of these old soldiers for the past twelve months: Out of the 365 days, Ellen Quinn spent 240 in the County Jail; Gentle Julia, 210 in the station house and County Jail together; Mary Holt, 190 in the County Jail alone; Haidee Leonard, 106 in the County Jail; Annie Berry, 111 in the County Jail. The balance of the year these fellows have spent in the stationhouse, for the most part, for they suffer arrest and confinement there three times, with about two days imprisonment for each arrest, before they can pass muster and get into the County Jail. The veteran Mary Holt commenced fighting the prisons in 1849 or '50.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 2, 1864
Last Saturday, eleven inspectors in the barge office of the Custom House received a call from the Poll tax Collector, and they tendered their indebtedness in the kind of money their salaries are paid in—green-backs. The Collector said he was not allowed to take anything but coin, and the inspectors said they would suffer imprisonment before they would pay in anything but green-backs. The soundness of this position will be appreciated when you come to reflect that they only get four dollars a day, anyhow, and when that sum is mashed into green-backs at present rates, it only amounts to about a dollar and a half a day. Now, estimating their actual living expenses at a dollar and forty-five cents a day—and it cannot fall below that while they continue to eat anything—how long would it take one of those inspectors to pay this oppressive Poll-tax in coin out of the clear profits of his labor? Why, it would take two months and three weeks, as nearly as you could come at it; as the amount of the tax is four dollars.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 3, 1864
Last night, a young man by the name of John Ferguson went to the drug store of Mr. Riley, on the corner of Mission and Second streets, and asked for strychnine, as he said, to kill a dog. He got ten grains. He went into Mission street, took the poison, and was soon met by a friend, to whom he said that he was sick, had taken poison, and was dying. A doctor was called at once, who administered mustard and warm water, which caused nausea and vomiting, which relieved him by freeing the stomach of the poison. Hopes are entertained of his recovery. The cause of this attempt upon his own life is said to be depression from loss of employment and pecuniary difficulties.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 3, 1864
"How's stocks this morning?" "Movement in 'Buckeye.'" This little characteristic salutation, a few days since, prefaced a breach of the peace on Montgomery street, thus: Mr. Green, who is learned in the matter of stocks, was authorized to purchase fifty shares of "Buckeye" at four dollars and a half. Mr. Jazinski, also talented in the same line, had a quantity for sale at five dollars, the same having previously been purchased by his principal at twenty-one dollars, showing conclusively that stocks are sometimes up and at other times very much down. Mr. G., the author of the second remark in the above brief dialogue, said he would see whether his principal would give five dollars, and departed for that purpose. Mr. J. waited expectantly for a long time, say a matter of several hours, but in the interval saw G. a number of times and was by him informed that the person who wanted the stock was for the time being distinctly invisible to the naked eye. During this invisibility, "Buckeye" depreciates, and the seller becoming impatient, at last insists that Mr. Green should take the stock at five dollars, himself, without reference to his principal, laying down the proposition that the latter gentleman had inaugurated the transaction in the character of principal himself, and that he held him for it. Mr. Green took issue on this point, and declared that there had been no purchase. Mr. J. said there had—Mr. G. said there hadn't. The mutual contradiction grew positive, with expletives and profane adjectives, amounting to a mutual impeachment of veracity, upon which Mr. Green smote the countenance of the other broker, thereby breaking up the negotiations and breaking the peace at the same time. A blow at sea may be a breeze, a gale or a tempest, but a blow on land is very likely to be an assault and battery. Of this latter kind was the blow given by Mr. Green, and in consequence thereof he was yesterday ordered by Judge Shepheard to appear this morning for sentence.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 3, 1864
MORE STAGE ROBBERS AND THEIR CONFEDERATES CAPTURED
Under-Sheriff Hall, of Santa Clara county, and Messrs. Hume and Van Eaton, Under and Deputy Sheriffs of El Dorado county, arrived from San Jose by the cars, yesterday evening, with the following splendid haul of Placerville stage robbers, captured by them in the vicinity of San Jose, early yesterday morning: Henry Jarbo, George Cross, J. A. Robinson, Wallace Clendening, Joseph Gamble, Joseph Jordan, Thomas Freer, James Freer, John Ingraham, Gately and Hodges—eleven. Sheriff Hall also brought down another of the robber gang named Wilson, whom he caught a week ago. He has been upon the track of all these men, and has been "spotting" them for the past three months. The confession of young Glasby confirmed his suspicions concerning them. The prisoners are farmers, for the most part, and resided round about San Jose; they are all Constitutional Democrats. They are not all charged with having taken part in the stage robbery, but some of them did, and the others were members of the robber organization, and accessories to the robbery before and after the fact. The organization dates back to the first of May, and the process of forming it was under way a good while before that. Its object was to raise men for the Confederate service, and they were to furnish themselves with equipments and supplies by guerrilla practice on the highway. Its ramifications are supposed to be very extensive, and they are known to have received aid and comfort from many prominent citizens. Some of the men arrested are well-to-do farmers. We are told by a resident of Santa Clara county that the prisoner Robinson is a brother-in-law of the editor of the Stockton Democratic organ, the Beacon. It is not known whether the men recruited for the Confederate service were to do duty only in this State, or elsewhere. The headquarters of the gang were at the house of a man named Hodges, who lives in the mountains east of San Jose. The six who robbed Wells, Fargo and Co's stage, started from Hodges'. Under-Sheriff Hall arrested this man at the "Willows," near San Jose, early yesterday morning, where he had unsuspectingly come on business. Two of the prisoners in this new haul are believed to have taken a hand in the late robbery of Langton's Express. Grant, Baker, and Captain Ingram, of the gang, have escaped, and left for parts unknown. Baker and Ingram were kept in hiding for a day or two by one Green Duff at his house near San Jose, and the latter furnished Baker a horse to escape on. Mr. Hall arrested a man at Duff's house, yesterday morning. The man is a good Constitutional Democrat. The rumor prevalent here yesterday, that there was a terrific fight in San Jose the night before, with the stage robbers, was groundless; there was no fight. Colonel Jackson telegraphed for one thousand rounds of ball cartridge yesterday morning—in order to be prepared for an emergency, perhaps, in case one should arise—and the militia of San Jose were called together the night before and provided with a signal for the same purpose; they went further than was required, and lay on their arms in anticipation of trouble. Out of these ominous circumstances the rumor we have spoken of probably grew. Sheriff Hall also brought up with him last night three State prisoners, viz: Henry Hoffman, Charles Buford and Antonio Leiva, all sentenced for one year for grand larceny; he will take them to San Quentin to-day, and the El Dorado officers will depart with the Secesh stage robbers on the Sacramento boat this evening. No blood was spilled in arresting the robber gang. One posse of men under Sheriff Hall, and another under officers Hume and Van Eaton, left San Jose before daylight yesterday morning, and travelled in different directions; the former made six of the arrests, and the latter five.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 3, 1864
DEMOCRATIC MEETING AT HAYES' PARK
The Democratic Indignation Meeting at Hayes' Park, last evening, amounted to a very short row of small potatoes, with few in the hill. The whole number present certainly did not exceed four hundred, of whom at least one-half were Union men, or supporters of the Administration, drawn thither by curiosity and the cars. The meeting was called to order by Col. Phelps. Vociferous calls for Beriah Brown brought him to the platform, and he delivered himself of a few remarks substantially as follows:
Gentlemen:—We have assembled here to-night as American citizens—(Great noise in the hall here, and the speaker's voice was inaudible for several moments.) We meet here to offer no opposition to the Government; but we meet here to discuss, the question of our rights as citizens. We ask for no rights but what each individual is entitled to; to do as we would be done by under all circumstances—at the same time we do not propose to surrender our rights as American citizens. (Applause.)This, I understand, is the object of the meeting. The first business, gentlemen, is to hear the report of the Committee appointed to draft resolutions.
The following resolutions were then handed Mr. Brown, who had previously been appointed Chairman of the meeting, which were as follows. (We omit giving the preamble at length, as it all amounted simply to a renewal of fidelity to the Constitutions of the State and United States, and a declaration of intention to maintain the laws and yield a willing support to all just and legally constituted authorities in the administration thereof, etc.; and to the best of our ability to support whatever good citizens may rightfully do, to maintain domestic peace and promote general welfare. That they demand nothing but a uniform and faithful administration of the laws, and no privilege but what is clearly and indisputably guaranteed by the Constitutions of our Government. It also declared that where there is no law there is no freedom, and contained the usual declaiming against the abridgment of the freedom of speech and the press.)
Resolved, That we regard with alarm all exercise of power by the United States Government, or its agents, not specifically delegated to that Government, and in derogation of the reserved rights of States, and in abridgment of the constitutional guarantees to the people, as tending to central despotism and the subjugation of popular liberty.
Resolved, That, whenever through fear of spies or informers, or the power of military commanders to arrest and imprison American citizens, they shall be deterred from peaceably assembling together and freely expressing their approval or disapproval of measures of public policy, the point is reached beyond which submission merges the free man into a slave.
Resolved, That the spotless reputation of Bishop Kavanaugh, and the well-known patriotism and devotion of Charles L. Weller, to the Constitution and the Union, justify the belief that the arrest of these gentlemen was procured by the perjury of mercenary spies and informers, or by persons actuated solely by personal malice, and we can but express the sentiments of all honorable men in denouncing the employment of those degraded wretches, an offence to civilization, and a disgrace to humanity.
After the passage of the resolutions, the band discoursed a National air.
Dr. Wozencraft was then introduced by the chairman. His speech was simply a rehash of all the whinings and hypocrisy of Copperheads since the conflict began. He had much to say about the imminence of our danger of becoming involved in scenes such as are now being witnessed in the Southern States, from a determination on the part of large numbers to resist with force the arbitrary and unconstitutional measures that were being inaugurated in our midst. "The record of the Democratic party is but a record of the Nation's power and glory; while that of the Abolition party is a record of her shame and disintegration." He said there are but two parties—the Democratic party, whose mission is to sustain the Union, and the Abolition party, which is seeking to destroy it. There is no hope for Union, peace and prosperity, only through a Conservative Democratic Administration. The North was unanimous in their opposition to the idea of Secession. To the support of the Government in suppressing the Rebellion, there was not a dissenting voice until the war was made one of subjugation, abolition and confiscation. Democrats were law-abiding and constitutional people, and the present supporters of the Administration are the Secessionists. Jeff. Davis and his followers are simply their allies in the work of destroying the Government. The speaker predicted that "so soon as we get control of the Federal Government, which by the help of God we hope to do at the coming election, they (the Republicans) will declare that the Pacific States will withdraw and form themselves into a separate Republic." Here he read an extract from a speech of Mr. Seward's, and continued for about twenty minutes in the usual strain of his ilk.
At the close of his speech the band made more music. After which, Zach. Montgomery, of Marysville, appeared on the stand. He commenced by saying that he would speak from the record, (thereby meaning that he would read his speech from a manuscript, which he did.) They had assembled there to consider how they should preserve the liberties of the people of California, and avert the horrors of civil war. Then followed the inevitable tirade against the measures of the Administration and its appointed agents, for suppressing treason and taking seditious persons into custody. He said that there is no use to try to disguise the fact that there is danger of civil war in this State, and intimated that a certain party, chafing under the discipline of Abraham Lincoln, was on the verge of outbreak, and the smothered volcano might burst out at any moment, and that we were nearer the scenes which our brethren in the older States were now witnessing than many might imagine. There were but two roads before us; the one leads to civil war, the other to peace. He declared in so many words that the Administration were determinedly pursuing the former road. Its acts were all in direct violation of the Constitution, and every blow struck at that instrument only drove us deeper into the danger of civil war and its attendant horrors. He spoke, as did Wozencraft, like a man who was in the secret of an organization existing in our midst, with the sole object of resisting by force and arms, all disciplinary, police or administrative measures which, in their estimation, might be deemed unconstitutional or oppressive; and they are to be the judges. Like the other speakers, he also referred to them in terms which might, without much distortion, be construed into an approval of their patriotic purpose. The speaker dwelt at great length on this danger, hidden from unprivileged eyes, and ready to create a storm—a general disruption in our very midst—ere we were aware of the least danger. In a word, if General McDowell arrests any more noisy and treasonable babblers, or insidious enemies to the Government, why we may look out for guns and a fight.
Mr. Montgomery's enunciation was very impassioned, and he seemed extremely fearful that the infatuation of the Administration would yet inevitably, and at no distant period, transfer to our own California all the horrors of the Eastern battle-fields. In conclusion, he conjured all, both Republicans and Democrats, to respect and obey the Constitution and the laws under it, as the only means of averting the terrible catastrophe, to the brink of which we have been brought; the only pacificator of that secret element, that is now only resting in a temporary lull, while preparing for the great and sudden effort which is to follow the next persistent attempt of the administrative authorities to enforce an "arbitrary measure."
After a little music to soften down the lion which Montgomery had roused, (within himself,) Tod Robinson was presented, and with all the blandishments of an adept at honey-fugling, he proceeded to tell the people of the wrongs they were suffering at the hands of the present Administration. He also knows something of their hidden danger, this secret-steel trap which is to catch all infernal Abolitionists and send them to perdition without benefit of clergy. He prefaced his speech by stating the fact that he was born under the behests of freedom, and held no right nor privilege by the tenure of any man's will. A recapitulation of his speech would fall on the ear much like the repetition for the thousandth time of an old thread bare story. Every Californian knows Tod Robinson by heart, and nobody believes anything he says. We left while he was speaking, in company with a good Democrat, who said he wasn't "going to listen to such a d—d rascal as Tod Robinson." Though he rather favored some of the other speakers, he couldn't go Tod Robinson. So we all departed, and the meeting shortly after broke up, with the close of Robinson's speech.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 4, 1864
The young man, John Ferguson, whose attempt to poison himself by strychnine we recorded in yesterday morning's CALL, is beyond danger. This gratifying result is due to the exertions of Dr. De Castro, who was summoned after the first-called physician had abandoned the case and declared recovery impossible. The Doctor remained with the patient until the effects of the poison had been completely subdued. Ferguson, we understand, is a moulder by trade, and was lately in the employ of Ira P. Rankin. He lost his situation through no fault of his own; but simply because, with others of his craft, he asked an advance of fifty cents per day on his wages to meet increased expenses of living. For this presumption he was thrown out of employment, and it weighed upon his spirits to the extent of suicide. With some money-getters fifty cents have more importance than many lives.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 4, 1864
Last Saturday morning, a man named Cheesman, proprietor of a fruit store at the corner of Market and Second streets, purchased quantities of fruit from different dealers, and in the afternoon, after taking an inventory of his wares, sold out his whole establishment for one thousand dollars. In order to avert suspicion, he paid a month's advance on his room rent on Friday, and conducted himself in all respects as if he had made up his mind to remain in San Francisco a century. However, notwithstanding his subtle diplomacy, his creditors began to suspect him of an intention to defraud them, and when the places which knew him once got to knowing him no more, shortly they grew alarmed and fell to searching for him. They sought him from Saturday night until Tuesday, and finally found him. He began to play himself for an honest man, at once, and declared his willingness to pay his debts. They took him to Justice Cornwall's office, and made him disgorge the money he had with him, seven hundred and fifty dollars, after which, by authority of a writ served for that purpose, they submitted him to a rigid examination. The seven hundred and fifty dollars was deposited in Court; he went there yesterday morning, with his lawyer, and tried to substitute green-backs for the amount, but the Judge refused to permit it, and said it must remain as it was, for distribution among the creditors. Suits have been commenced against Cheesman by those who loved him and trusted him, and got burnt at it. They do not love him so much now. He owes about twelve hundred dollars for fruit, and six hundred dollars borrowed money. His indebtedness for fruit is distributed among a large number of dealers, in bills ranging from three dollars up to two hundred and thirty dollars.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 4, 1864
Secretary Chase's private offices at Washington are fitted with Axminster carpets, gilded ceilings, velvet furniture, and other luxurious surroundings which go to hedge about a Cabinet Minister with a dignity quite appalling to the unaccustomed outsider.
Five minutes after a Custom House clerk had read this item, and with the recollection of it still upon him, he was paid his monthly salary in greenbacks, and the consequence was he lost his temper, and became profane to a degree approaching lunacy.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 5, 1864
SOLDIER MURDERED BY A MONOMANIAC
ESCAPE AND SUBSEQUENT ARREST OF THE MURDERER
Just before three o'clock yesterday morning, a soldier named Simon Kennedy, while under the influence of a temporary hallucination, killed a fellow-soldier named Fitzgerald, who was confined in the guard-house with him, at Black Point, by stabbing the unfortunate man twelve or fifteen times with a bayonet. The shrieks of the struggling victim attracted the attention of the sentinel, who opened the door, when the murderer rushed out and escaped in the darkness, followed by three or four terrified prisoners. Captain Winder turned out his whole force to pursue Kennedy, but they found neither him nor any trace of him, save a bloody towel under the bank near the Bensley Water Works, where he had evidently washed the blood from his clothing. About seven o'clock a soldier arrived here with a message from Capt. Winder to Chief Burke, announcing the murder, and the latter left at once for Black Point, after giving orders for half a dozen members of the Police force to mount and follow him. He also requested Captain Van Vost, of the Provost Department, to detail an equal number of mounted men, to aid in the search for Kennedy, which request was promptly complied with. Arrived at Black Point, the Chief procured a description of Kennedy, and acquainted himself with his habits and antecedents. He was told that the man was a lunatic, but from the fact of his having wit enough about him to guard against detection by washing himself, it was evident that he was not stupidly mad, at any rate. Further inquiries elicited the information that Kennedy had requested several times, lately, to be taken to Father Cotter, in Vallejo street, and had once been there, a day or two ago, in charge of a soldier. The Chief thought it possible that he might have gone there after his escape, and sent officers Clark and Hoyt to ascertain if such were the case. The surmise proved correct, and Father Cotter was at once relieved of his dangerous guest—and dangerous enough he was, too, as he still had his bayonet with him, bloody and bent by the murderous thrusts inflicted with it upon the body of Fitzgerald. The best information concerning this tragedy goes to show that Kennedy is a sane man upon all subjects except one—that of hanging. He is quiet and sensible enough until halters and scaffolds are mentioned, and then he becomes a madman. Some of the causes of this are recent, and some date far back in the past. He is an extraordinary swimmer, and it is said he once swam the Mississippi at a point where it was more than a mile and a half wide, and his bare head being exposed so long to the burning rays of the sun, the strength and vigor of his brain were impaired by it, and at intervals since then he has seemed a little flighty. He enlisted in Davis street, here, and was sent with his company to Alcatraz, where they remained some time, and were finally transferred to Black Point. While at Alcatraz, Kennedy was swimming in the Bay with a comrade, upon one occasion, when the latter was seized with cramps and was drowned. The men used to tell Kennedy he murdered his comrade, and that he would be hanged for it; they kept it up until finally the poor wretch got to brooding over the fate predicted for him until he began to suspect his brother soldiers of an intention to hang him. He went twice to his Captain for protection against them. A day or two ago, at Black Point, the soldiers pestered him again about his chances of being hanged, and he says the Captain put him in the guard-house for safe keeping. The supposition is that during the night the horrors came upon him that his fellow-prisoners were going to hang him, and he seized the bayonet and fought desperately to save himself. Kennedy told us what he knew about the murder, but his statements were confused, and he said he did not recollect much about it. He only knew that three or four men came in the guard-house to hang him, and said they were going to do it at once; one of them seized and tried to choke him, and he snatched a bayonet from the wall, where it was hanging above a dark-colored cap, and struck out wildly with it in self-defence. He was not certain whether he hit anybody, but he thought he did. Afterward, he said it was likely he took the bayonet away from the man who was trying to choke him—and then he showed wounds on his hands, as if he had a vague notion that they were evidence of how he came into possession of the weapon. His person and his clothing were as black as a coal heaver's; he said he changed his clothes on his way to town, and left his uniform lying in the road. If he did, the latter was not found. When speaking of the murder, Kennedy gazes upon the visitor with a fixed, vacant stare, and looks like a man who is absorbed in trying to recollect something. The body of Fitzgerald lay at the Coroner's office yesterday; the breast, shoulders, stomach, hip and arms were covered with little triangular red spots, where the bayonet had entered. The inquest will be held to-day, so we were informed. The murderer and his victim were both members of Company D, Third Artillery. Fitzgerald was a married man; his widow resides in this city. Since the above was written, a soldier in the regular army has informed us how the bayonet happened to be in the guard-house within reach of a prisoner popularly considered to be insane. He says Captain Mears makes his prisoners do guard duty, and after they are relieved, their instructions are to take their muskets to the guard-room and clean them during confinement. He further says the members of Fitzgerald's Company are incensed at this conduct of permitting deadly weapons to be carried within reach of the lunatic imprisoned with their comrade. He says that when a prisoner does guard duty, it is usual for a noncommissioned officer to go with him and see that he cleans his musket at the quarters, and leaves it there, and then takes him back to be locked into the guard-house, unarmed. The soldier says Kennedy first attacked a man named McDonald, with the bayonet, and then assaulted Fitzgerald, who was asleep at the time. When he attacked McDonald, he first put his hand on his breast and asked him if he had a heart, and where it was situated, and then, without waiting for the desired information, made a stab at him. It was a wretched piece of business to let a deadly weapon be taken into a guard room where a man in Kennedy's condition was confined, and unmilitary people yesterday were wondering that weapons should be placed within reach of prisoners under any circumstances.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 6, 1864
ANOTHER OBSCENE PICTURE KNAVE CAPTURED—HE SOLICITS THE CUSTOM OF SCHOOL GIRLS
A scoundrel named George R. Powers has been detected in the obscene book trade and captured. He has been carrying on the trade after a fashion of his own. Over the signature of "Mrs. Amelia Barstow," he writes chatty, familiar letters to young girls in the California seminaries, soliciting patronage for his infamous books and pictures. He made a mistake, though, when he addressed the following epistle to a school girl of fourteen years of age, for her home teachings had not been of a character to enable her to appreciate it, and she sent it at once to her father. From him it passed to Judge Coon, who handed it to Chief Burke to be disposed of. The Chief took a lively enough interest in the matter to take officer Hess from his regular duties in the Police Court and keep him on the track of Mrs. Barstow for a week and a half, with Officer Pike to assist him. We suppress the name of the young lady and that of the school she belongs to, of course:
San Francisco July 21st, 1864.
MISS ______:—I have just received from New York a large number of the most delightful books you can imagine. To refined young ladies of an amorous temperament, they are "just the thing." For five dollars sent to me through the Post Office, in two separate enclosures of two dollars and a half each, I will forward you two different volumes, each containing five tinted engravings. Accompanying the package will also be a beautiful life photograph, entitled "* * * * * * *." The strictest secrecy will be observed, which may be heightened by your transmitting a fictitious address, in case you reply to
MRS. AMELIA BARSTOW.
(We suppress the title of dear Amelia's "life photograph," as being somewhat too suggestive.—REPORTER.)
Officer Hess suggested the policy of writing an answer to Amelia's note, and getting it sent through the Post Office to her, as coming from the young girl she had addressed. He framed the following note, putting in punctuation marks with great liberality where they did not belong, and leaving them out where they did, and mimicking school-girl simplicity of phraseology, and proneness to tautology, with great ingenuity. The Chief having approved of it, a lady copied it in the microscopic chirography of sweet fourteen, and it was ready for mailing, as set forth here below. We suppress the girl's name, and that of the Post Office:
* * * * *, July 27, 1864.
MRS. AMELIA BARSTOW—Dear Madame:—I received your letter which you sent on the 21st of this month and I am glad, for I have been wishing for something nice to read for a long time. Father has not given me much money this month and I cannot send this time the amount you say; but if you will send me one book by sending two dollars and a half, please write and tell me so, and by return mail I will send it. A number of the girls in my class wants some books also, and if you will send one book for two dollars and a half some four or five others will send for some also. Please direct to Charles Harris for if directed to a Miss or Mrs. some of the teachers may get the letter.
Yours truly, * * * * * *
The letter was put into the hands of Postmaster Perkins, who at once entered into the work of entrapping the miserable Mrs. Barstow with as much alacrity and earnestness as if the insulted girl had been his own child. He enclosed the decoy letter in a department envelop to the Post master of ____, with instructions to postmark and send it back through the mail to Mrs. Amelia Barstow at once. He also instructed the Post Office clerks to give Officer Hess and his assistant every facility for corralling the masculine miscreant who was doubtless passing himself for a woman in his nefarious correspondence; (no female had ever applied for letters under the name of Mrs. Amelia Barstow.) The decoy letter came back in due time, and was taken out by Mr. Powers while Mr. Hess was absent at lunch, but the clerk who officiates in the ladies' department at the Post Office took such a minute mental photograph of him, that the officer had no difficulty in following after and detecting his man in the street, from the description given of him. After walking around town for some time, Powers finally opened the letter, read it, and replaced it in his pocket. Hess entered into conversation with him, and in answer to certain questions, the fellow said he had no appointment to meet Mrs. Barstow at any particular place—expected to stumble on her in the street; said he had no particular occupation; was in the habit of taking her letters from the Post Office for her. It took him but a short time to discover that he was in the hands of an officer, and then his replies became decidedly non-committal. Hess asked him if he wrote the letter signed "Mrs. Aurelia Barstow." Powers said, "If I were to say I did, what would be done with me? what could you make out of it?" When asked if Mrs. Barstow would come and clear him of suspicion if she knew he was about to suffer for an offence committed by her, he caught at the idea, and said she would; the thoughtless numskull even eagerly wrote her a note, which the officer was to deliver to her after accomplishing the hopeless task of finding her. That act furnished the officer all the information he lacked, and enabled him to "rest his case," but it ruined the unthinking Powers—for behold, the first words of the note, "MRS. AMELIA BARSTOW," were a perfect facsimile of the name signed to the letter to the school-girl, and fully convicted him of being the writer of it. Powers will be tried this morning for offering to sell obscene pictures, and perhaps for opening other people's letters, and the chances are that he will be severely dealt with. He deserves it, for any one acquainted with the impressible nature of young girls, shut out from the world and doomed to irksome and monotonous school-life, knows the heightened charm and excitement they find in amusements that are contraband and have to be secured by risky evasions of the rules, and is also aware that a whole school might be corrupted by the circulation among them of a single volume of the lecherous trash dealt in by Mr. Powers.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 6, 1864
Last evening, in the absence of Coroner Sheldon, Justice Tobin held an inquest at the office of the Coroner, to inquire into the facts connected with the death of James Fitzgerald, private in Company D, Third Artillery, who was killed by a fellow-soldier named Kennedy, at Black Point, early on the morning of Thursday, the 3d instant. Three witnesses were examined who were on the spot at the time. The facts were substantially as stated in yesterday's Call, except that not so much was said about his insanity. A simple statement of the facts adduced on the inquest would be about as follows: About half-past one o'clock on Thursday morning, Fitzgerald was placed in the guard-house, Kennedy having been there for some time previous. Fitzgerald being without his blankets, Kennedy told him to come and share his. Deceased, however, went and laid down on the floor. The room was almost perfectly dark. About two o'clock in the morning, Fitzgerald got up and went to where one Michael Condol (also under guard) was lying, and whispered in his ear, telling him to turn over, he wanted to feel him; at the same time, he drew his hand across Condol's throat. Condol told him to go to his own bunk. Kennedy then placed his hand on Condol's breast, and raised something over him which in the darkness Condol took to be a dagger; he seized it and discovered that it was a bayonet. A struggle commenced, in which Kennedy succeeded in planting a thrust into Condol's arm. He cried out that he was stabbed, and called for a light, but the inmates of the room had become panic-stricken and crowded off to the corners. In the struggle with Kennedy, Condol kicked him, forcing him over towards the wall. He fell on Fitzgerald (deceased) and commenced stabbing him. Deceased cried out, "I'm murdered." The corporal outside hearing the noise, rushed to the guard-room, and as he opened the door, Kennedy and two other prisoners forced their way out, throwing him down on the ground. He went in with a light and saw deceased lying on the floor in a dying condition. He had twelve wounds on the body and four on the head. Of four of those on the body, penetrating the heart, lungs, liver, stomach, and large and small intestines, either one would have produced death; the rest were flesh wounds. One of the fatal wounds was made on the thigh, severing the femoral artery. Kennedy was generally considered a sensible and harmless man, though he seemed rather disposed to shun his comrades. On one occasion, about a month since, while at Alcatraz, he expressed an apprehension that he was going to be hanged. On one or two other occasions he made "curious remarks." The day prior to the killing he broke out of the guard-house and ran down to Captain Winder's quarters. He said he wanted to see a clergyman, and must go to town. He was not generally considered insane, though he had curious ways, and the Corporal said he did not think he was altogether right. It was about half past three o'clock in the morning when Fitzgerald died. Deceased was a native of Limerick, Ireland, and aged about thirty-six years.
The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the facts.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 7, 1864
There is a nice little breeze between the practitioners who were called on in the case of Ferguson, said to have taken strychnia, lately, to end his life, but was prevented by Dr. De Castro. Dr. Elliott, as a cloud of witnesses state, was first called, and gave up the case, saying "he (the patient) was a dead boy;" in other words, recovery was hopeless. De Castro was then called, and as the same witnesses state, found the unhappy Ferguson in the throes of death. He emeticized, purged and pumped him, till the poison had no show, and felt a little justifiable pride at his success. Now, Dr. Elliott says he was not poisoned at all; that the druggist, when the patient applied for the noxious drug, "to kill a dog," suspected his design, and gave him some comparatively harmless preparation—piperine, or something of that sort—and that De Castro was humbugged. He furnishes an analysis from Chemist Dickey, of the drug said to be furnished by the apothecary, in proof. De Castro thinks the fact that the man was swollen fearfully, and almost lifeless when he saw him, and also the druggist Riley's statement that he did furnish the deadly article, and marked it "strychnia—poison, ten grains," proof more convincing on his side. Thus the matter stands. Who can decide when Doctors disagree?
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 7, 1864
Yesterday at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, Emanuel Lopus, barber, of room No. 23, Mead House, wrote to the idol of his soul that he loved her better than all else beside; that unto him the day was dark, the sun seemed swathed in shadows, when she was not by; that he was going to take the life that God had given him, and enclosed she would please find one lock of hair, the same being his. He then took a teaspoonful of laudanum in a gallon of gin, and lay down to die. That is one version of it. Another is, that he really took an honest dose of laudanum, and was really anxious to put his light out; so much so, indeed, that after Dr. Murphy had come, resolved to pump the poison from his stomach or pump his heart out in the attempt, and after he had comfortably succeeded in the first mentioned proposition, this desperate French barber rose up and tried to whip the surgeon for saving his life, and defeating his fearful purpose, and wasting his laudanum. Another version is, that he went to his friend Jullien, in the barber shop under the Mead House, and told him to smash into his trunk after he had breathed his last and shed his immortal soul, and take from it his professional soap, and his lather-brush and his razors, and keep them forever to remember him by, for he was going this time without reserve. This was a touching allusion to his repeated assertions, made at divers and sundry times during the past few years, that he was going off immediately and commit suicide. Jullien paid no attention to him, thinking he was only drunk, as usual, and that his better judgment would prompt him to substitute his regular gin at the last moment, instead of the deadlier poison. But on going to No. 23 an hour afterwards, he found the wretched Lopus in a heavy stupor, and all unconscious of the things of earth, and the junk-bottle and the laudanum phial on the bureau. We have endeavored to move the sympathy of the public in behalf of this poor Lopus, and we have done it from no selfish motive, and in no hope of reward, but only out of the commiseration we feel for one who has been suffering in solitude while the careless world around him was absorbed in the pursuit of life's foolish pleasures, heedless whether he lived or died. If we have succeeded—if we have caused one sympathetic tear to flow from the tender eye of pity, we desire no richer recompense. They took Lopus to the station-house yesterday afternoon, and from thence he was transferred to the French Hospital. We learn that he is getting along first-rate, now.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 7, 1864
Lucy Adler was arrested and locked up in the city prison last night, for petty larceny—stealing shoes, ribbons, and small traps of all kinds exposed for sale in shops. She brought her weeping boy with her—a lad of nine years, perhaps—and they were followed by a large concourse of men and boys, whose curiosity was excited to the highest pitch to know "what was up with the old woman," as they expressed it. The officers, and also the merchants, say this woman will travel through a dozen small stores during the afternoon, and go home and "clean up" a perfect junk-shop as a result of her labors. She cabbages every light article of merchandise she can get her claws on. She always has her small boy with her and if she is caught in a theft, the boy comes the sympathy dodge, and pumps tears and jerks sobs until the pity of the shopman is moved, and his parent released. The boy is always on hand, and if an officer snatches the woman she pulls the metaphorical string that turns on the boy's sympathetic shower bath, and he is all tears and lamentations in a moment. At any rate, this is what they say of the cunning pair.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 9, 1864
If you have got a house, keep your eye on it, these times, for there is no knowing what moment it will go tramping around town. We meet these dissatisfied shanties every day marching boldly through the public streets on stilts and rollers, or standing thoughtfully in front of gin shops, or halting in quiet alleys and peering round corners, with a human curiosity, out of one eye, or one window if you please, upon the dizzy whirl and roar of commerce in the thoroughfare beyond. The houses have been taking something lately that is moving them a good deal. It is very mysterious, and past accounting for, but it cannot be helped. We have just been informed that an unknown house—two stories, with a kitchen—has stopped before Shark alley, in Merchant street, and seems to be calculating the chances of being able to scrouge through it into Washington street, and thus save the trouble of going around. We hardly think she can, and we had rather she would not try it; we should be sorry to see her get herself fast in that crevice, which is the newspaper reporter's shortest cut to the station house and the courts. Without wishing to be meddlesome or officious, we would like to suggest that she would find it very comfortable and nice going round by Montgomery street, and plenty of room. Besides, there is nothing to be seen in Shark alley, if she is only on a little pleasure excursion.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 9, 1864
The vagrant house we have elsewhere alluded to as prowling around Merchant street, near Shark alley—we mean Dunbar alley—finally started to go around by Montgomery street, but at the first move fell over and mashed in some windows and broke down a new awning attached to the house adjoining the "Ivy Green" saloon.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 9, 1864
Mr. Powers, who was arrested the other day for writing to young girls in the seminaries over the signature of "Mrs. Amelia Barstow," and soliciting their custom in the obscene picture line, has escaped and gone into hiding. He went in charge of officer Bowen to confer with his "attorney" (or his confederate?) and while closeted with that individual, jumped out of a second-story window—so much so that when Bowen went after him to take him back, he was nowhere visible to the naked eye. Mr. Powers tried the same game on officer Hesse, when he was first arrested, but it failed; Hesse preferred that all private interviews should be held in his presence. Playing the extreme confidence game with officers is very old, and very well understood by most of them. Count Bowen among the latter class hereafter. The aforesaid "counsel" will be arrested to-day for complicity in the escape of the prisoner.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 10, 1864
A runaway buggy (at any rate the horse attached to it was running away and the buggy was taking a good deal of interest in it,) came into collision with a dray, yesterday, in Montgomery street, and the dray was not damaged any to speak of. The buggy was; the hub was mashed clear out of one wheel, and another wheel was turned inside out—so that it "dished" the wrong way. The cripple was entirely new, and belonged to Duff and Covert, California street. In meeting a dray, or a heavy truck wagon, buggies should always turn out to one side, being safer than to go between it.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 10, 1864
THE MURDERER KENNEDY—A QUESTION OF JURISDICTION
Judge Shepheard said yesterday, with reference to the case of Kennedy, the soldier who killed a fellow soldier at Black Point on Thursday last, that he would hold over the examination for three days, to give the military authorities an opportunity of making a formal demand of the prisoner, to be tried by a Court Martial, a claim to the exclusive jurisdiction over the case having been heretofore signified by them. We are assured, however, that the military authorities do not desire to take the case out of the hands of the civil authorities. And besides, two serious obstacles might be interposed as against such a jurisdiction. In the first place the prisoner is evidently insane, and was so at the time the murder was committed; Fitzgerald being, it is reported, the third victim to his terrible fits; and there is no provision of our laws, authorizing a Military Court to act as a commission de inquirendo. And in the next place, there is a question about the title of the United States Government to the property at Black Point, the title to which is now being litigated, which fact might so affect it as a military reservation as to throw a strong shade of doubt over the supremacy of the military law within those particular limits.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 10, 1864
When the Branch Mint was established in this city, it was upon the calculation that its annual coinage would amount to about five millions. Upon that supposition, its organization as to number of officials, accommodation, and the pay of the employees, was fixed. Although the coinage has about quadrupled what was calculated upon, neither accommodations, employes nor compensation have been increased. On the contrary, the pay is now in green-backs instead of gold, and the payment often delayed, as at present, for four months, through inefficiency on the part of some one in Washington. However, Congress made an appropriation at its last session for a new Mint here, and we hope that something may come of it different from the present miserable kennel called a Mint, and that something may also be done for the relief of the unpaid men and women who perform the labors of the institution. Herewith we give a synopsis of the business done by the Branch Mint in this city for the last twelve months. It will be seen that, instead of five, the coinage has been nearly twenty millions:
FISCAL YEAR 1863-4.
Gold—$19,068,400.00
Silver—468,409.00
[Total] $19,536,809.00
FISCAL YEAR 1862-3.
Gold—$17,510,960.00
Silver—1,040,638.68
[Total]—$18,551,598.68
Gain of 1863-4 over 1862-3—$ 985,210.32
Loss of Silver, $572,229.68. Gain of Gold, $1,557,440.00.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 10, 1864
The names of those concerned in it are suppressed, and it is a matter of no consequence anyhow, but the foundation of the fight is of interest to some, as showing how the business of intelligence offices is some times conducted, in evasion of the law, but not in violation of it. The statute says that the keeper of the office must, in return for the money received from his customer, give him a receipt, in which the nature of the service rendered must be specified. This is done in this wise: "Received of John Doe, two dollars and fifty cents, for services rendered in procuring him a situation as stable-boy." That is according to law, and if John Doe goes to the stable and is refused the situation, he can make the intelligence man refund his money. But the latter takes no such chances. To the receipt he adds the following postscript, which blocks the game on the stable-boy, in spite of the statute: "If you are denied the situation, your money will be refunded upon the presentation here of a written statement of the fact of the refusal by the parties so refusing." The "parties" will not trouble themselves with writing communications for stable-boys and servant girls to intelligence office keepers, and without the ceremonious "written statement," the noble dealer in occupations will not disgorge. He sticks to his contract. The result of this practice is, that every day the District Attorney is besieged by frantic chambermaids and blasphemous cooks and wood choppers, seeking redress for the wrongs they have suffered at the hands of the intelligence office keepers; but they go away without it. The law is a wonderful machine, and few there be that understand it; they say it does not cover the case we have spoken of, at all. This having been ascertained by a victim, yesterday, he went back to his chuckling spoiler and whaled him.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 11, 1864
AN ACCUMULATION OF COPPERHEADS
CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRACY AND SECESSION AFFILIATIONS—THE SAME OLD TALK OF TYRANNY AND RESISTANCE
Last evening some fifty persons, perhaps, chiefly of the Copperhead persuasion, assembled in the "Democratic Club Room," on the corner of Stockton and Filbert streets, for the purpose of effervescing a little. "Conservative Democratic" imaginations pictured it a grand rally of persecuted and hunted down patriots. A rational person saw nothing there but aberrated beings, hugging the bugbear of martyrdom and iterating the formula laid down by the secret agents of Jeff. Davis' Government. We do not propose to give a detailed report of their proceedings; it wouldn't pay. One speech is a type of the whole. It is only Secession and Treason, modified in expression according to the rational caution and shrewdness of the speaker. Mr. Brown, the inevitable Beriah, was there, of course, and of course he spoke; but as he holds the leading string of "conservatism" in this vicinity, the practice of extreme caution has at length almost perfected the faculty of couching treason in loyal phrases, or at least evading, with consummate tact, the danger of crimination.
MR. BROWN'S SPEECH.—Mr. Brown said that he did not feel able to make, at that time, an effort proportioned to the importance of the occasion, for all his energies were spent in fighting their battles. He didn't go there to make a speech, but "to look into their (Copperhead) faces, to receive the assurance that Democracy was not dead." Upon which equivocal announcement of the party's vitality, there was a stamping of feet by several indiscreet persons. Discriminating ones saw therein a confession that Copperheads were sickly hereabouts, and look sad, like mourners at a funeral. The speaker proceeded, with faultless attitude and gesticulation and a countenance beaming with the light that is supposed to foreshadow posthumous glories of the immolated hero, to state that he couldn't argue with his opponents in the present conflict; there was no issue; if there was he couldn't see it; didn't know how to frame an argument. Doubtless Alcatraz frowning just in sight of his position, bothered his powers of composition. Syntax gives botheration, when the soul of the rhetoric is to be something that must not be expressed, for fear of disastrous consequences. All the old issues, he went on to say, were gone, the conditions that formerly divided the parties and kept up the bonfires of party strife, and there was now but a single question; one which admitted of no argument; a question of brute force; whether we had a Government, or were the subjects of despotism. Then came in the inevitable stereotyped hobby of "inalienable rights," referring specifically to a number of the propositions of the Declaration of Independence. He pointed the "Conservative element" to their melancholy state of discomfiture, and told them there was but one thing left for them to do; that was to adhere to their principles, associate, organize and—protest. They could do nothing more; there was no argument. Then Beriah put a strong case. He asked them: What if they should get up some morning and find one of their number mysteriously missing; one whom they loved, and to whom they had been used to looking for counsel; and the next morning another should be gone in like manner; and another and another, and so on indefinitely, without warning, and no one knew whither or for what end they were taken away; they would feel badly, they would gather in groups, with pallor in their countenances, and bated breath, and bite their lips with vexation. They would want to know what had become of those loved ones. It would arouse the feelings and impulses of every Copperhead in the community. At this juncture Mr. Lincoln suffered at Beriah's hands a comparison which we have not room to give in full; said many things savoring strongly of what opens the gates of Alcatraz, and meekly observed that what he was then uttering might deprive him of his liberties; verifying the old adage of "A guilty conscience," etc. He said that the Administration asked them to surrender their liberties for a time, to preserve the Government; he wanted to know what a Government was worth without liberty, (Applause,) and more of the same sort. The people of the United States were then damagingly compared to Turks. Mr. Brown warned them to beware of surrendering their liberties. "Liberties once surrendered could only be recovered at a bloody sacrifice; the price of liberty won from tyranny is the blood of the patriot." As for his part, he didn't propose to surrender; their liberties should only be surrendered with their lives.
Beriah entertained his "small but appreciative" audience for about thirty minutes, in which he adroitly exhibited the virtues of resistance to the arbitrary measures of the Administration, all of whose measures were arbitrary; and yielded the floor.
A resolution was then adopted by the meeting, which as adopted, proposed to instruct the delegates from the Second District to the County Committee to take steps to have our citizens protected from military arrests, to apply to the Governor to give us the protection of the civil law of the State.
A second set of resolutions were then presented, which were somewhat rich. They conjured all good Democrats to withdraw their support and patronage from all newspapers that were inimical to their policy, and to exert their influence against the influence of such papers, generally; the Morning Call, Alta, and Bulletin, specifically. Then followed a resolution holding up Messrs. Towne & Bacon to the scorn and contempt of all good Copperheads, and advising them to steer clear of their printing establishment, as "adverse to Democratic money," because they, the said Towne & Bacon, had proscribed good "Union-loving Democrats."
We were in hopes that the resolutions would have passed in that shape, but the glare of inconsistency hurt Mr. Brown's eyes, and he hoped the adoption of those resolutions would be deferred until the phraseology could be altered so as to preserve the spirit and intent, but have the appearance of inconsistency hid in more subtle "verbiage." The idea did not at first penetrate the copper-coated intellects of the "Club," but Beriah must be right, so they assented, and hypocrisy is to be added to inconsistency, for their stomachs to receive.
The President of the Club then observed that some people had denied that there were any speakers among them—thereby intimating that so far the assertion had not been negatived, which made Beriah think that Copperheads were unappreciative and stupid, for hadn't he just sat down? And to prove the contrary, he called upon a man named Kirtland to give them a little more of the same he had favored them with before.
After a little hesitation, Kirtland stepped forth, and there was
A SECCESSIONIST edifying the Club with the same he had told them before. We did intend to report his speech, and took some notes, but, before proceeding far, he openly avowed himself a Southerner, with Southern feelings, and entertaining a Southern view of the question, and we paused. His speech was rampant, unmeaning, superficial rant not even worthy the name of sophistry. Had it emanated from a Northern man, who had any influence to fear, it would have consigned its author to Alcatraz. But, as it was only the impotent ravings of one who knew where a display of heroism would be safe, neither the speech nor the speaker challenge attention. This man was followed by a Mr. Farrel, whom we did not remain to hear.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 12, 1864
Night before last, a stick six or seven feet long, attached to an exploded rocket of large size came crashing down through the zinc roof of a tenement in Milton Place, Bush street, between Dupont and Kearny, passed through a cloth ceiling, and fetched up on the floor alongside of a gentleman's bed, with a smash like the disruption of a china shop. We have been told by a person with whom we are not acquainted, and of whose reliability we have now no opportunity of satisfying ourselves, as he has gone to his residence, which is situated on the San Jose road at some distance from the city, that when the rocket tore up the splinters around the bed, the gentleman got up. The person also said that he went out—adding after some deliberation, and with the air of a man who has made up his mind that what he is about to say can be substantiated if necessary, that "he went out quick." This person also said that after the gentleman went out quick, he ran—and then with a great show of disinterestedness, he ventured upon the conjecture that he was running yet. He hastened to modify this rash conjecture, however, by observing that he had no particular reason for suspecting that the gentleman was running yet—it was only a notion of his, and just flashed on him, like. He then hitched up his team, which he observed parenthetically that he wished they belonged to him, but they didn't and immediately drove away in the direction of his country seat. The tenement is there yet, though, with the hole through the zinc roof. The tenement is the property of ex-Supervisor Hinckley, and some of the best educated men in the city consider that the hole is also, because it is on his premises. It is a very good hole. If it could be taken from the roof just in the shape it is now, it would be a nice thing to show at the Mechanics' Fair; any man who would make a pun under circumstances like these, and suggest that it be turned over to the Christian Commission Fair on account of its holy nature, might think himself smart, but would the people—the plodding, thinking, intelligent masses—would these respect him? Far be it. Doubtless. What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue. The foregoing facts are written to prepare the reader for the announcement that the stick, with the same exploded rocket attached, may be seen at the hall of the Board of Supervisors. It has remained there to this day. The man who set it off, and hung on to it, and went up with it, has not come down yet. The people who live in Milton Place are expecting him, all the time. They have moved their families, and got out of the way, so as to give him a good show when he drops. They have said, but without insisting on it, that if it would be all the same to him, they would rather he would fall in the alley. This would mash him up a good deal, likely, and scatter him around some, but they think they could scrape him up and hold an inquest on him, and inform his parents. The Board of Supervisors will probably pass an ordinance directing that missiles of the dangerous nature of rockets shall henceforth be fired in the direction of the Bay, so as to guard against accidents to life and property.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 13, 1864
A pile of miscellaneous articles was found heaped up at a late hour last night away down somewhere in Harrison street, which attracted the notice of numbers of passers-by, and divers attempts were made to analyze the same without effect, for the reason that no one could tell where to begin, or which was on top. Two Special Policemen dropped in just then and solved the difficulty, showing a clean inventory of one horse, one buggy, two men and an indefinite amount of liquor. The liquor couldn't be got at to be gauged, consequently the proof of it couldn't be told; the men, though, were good proof that the liquor was there, for they were as drunk as Bacchus and his brother. A fight had been on hand somewhere, and one of the men had been close to it, for his face was painted up in various hues, sky-blue and crimson being prominent. The order of the buggy was inverted, and the horse beyond a realizing sense of his condition. The men went with some noise to the station-house, and the animal, with attachments, being set to rights, ambled off to a livery stable on Kearny street.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 13, 1864
"WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR
A whole bevy of those funny-looking animals that totter through the Street labelled "Chinese Women," had been invited to call upon Judge Shepheard yesterday morning, when they would hear something to their disadvantage. These Taepings were charged with tappings, and as they didn't appear, the Judge charged them for it, and much bail was forfeited. There were about a dozen cases. The offence is simply a conventional sign of invitation to persons passing, to walk in, and grows out of the characteristic hospitality of that class of persons.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 16, 1864
Yesterday morning, Rufus Temple was examined before Judge Shepheard on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences, and acquitted. We are disposed to make a specific and more extended reference to this matter than its importance would seem to demand, from the fact that Mr. Temple is said to be an honest, industrious young man, who has been placed in an unfavorable light before the public by being arraigned in a Court of Justice on a criminal charge. The testimony, which signally failed to sustain the charge, went simply to show that the defendant, who follows the trade of a caulker, had been employed by Mr. Vice (the prosecuting witness) to do some extra work on the steamer Nina Tilden; that Temple presented a bill of thirty dollars to Mr. V. for this work, which was for some reason refused, upon which the bill was presented to Mr. Tilden, the owner or one of the owners of the vessel, who remarked, in substance, that he was not the proper person to pay such bills, but, as he did not wish any claims to stand against the vessel, he would pay it, which he did, taking Mr. Temple's receipt there for. Upon learning the fact of the payment, Mr. Vice saw the city prosecutor, and a verified complaint was made, embodying the averment that Temple had represented to Mr. Tilden that he was sent to him (Tilden) with a verbal order from affiant for the payment of the bill. Mr. Tilden, who was a witness for the prosecution, denied, on his oath, that Temple had made any such representation, and that fact being the gist of the offence, the prosecution was at once abandoned. We cannot but speak in terms of the strongest condemnation of the reprehensible manner in which parties very frequently come into the Police Court, under the sanction of the Prosecuting Attorney. With all of perjury except the technical animus, they seek to wield this tribunal as a mollifier of their personal feelings, as if it were instituted as a general dispenser of the lex talionis. It is indeed a fortunate thing for the community that we have just such a man as Judge Shepheard on the bench, where discrimination and decision are so much required.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 17, 1864
SCHOOL DIRECTOR POPE AND THE CALL
At the meeting of the Board of Education last evening, Mr. Pope complained that he had been misrepresented by the reporter for the Call, as well as by the Secretary of the Board in his minutes, in the statements of his resolution introduced at the last meeting, on the subject of the participation by the pupils of the different Schools in the exercises of the Freedman's Concert. Mr. Pope says that his resolution was not to require the Grammar class, that had declined to participate on that occasion, to do so against their will, but to inform the members of that class that if they did so decline, they would be required to continue their usual daily exercises in School. If this was Mr. Pope's statement, he may have the benefit of it, though the fact that both the reporter and the Secretary of the Board, who are both presumed to be, and really are close listeners to the proceedings of the body, should understand the Director exactly alike, and fall into the same identical error, is, to say the least, a very extraordinary coincidence. Whatever may have been the exact phraseology of the gentleman's motion, the evident intention of the measure and the disposition of more than one member of the Board was certainly expressed in our report and the Secretary's minutes. However, as we entertain no feelings of hostility toward any member of the Board, we, in our own individual reportorial capacity, will concede, retract or admit anything in the world, "for the sake of the argument," and to keep peace in the family. But understand we don't mean it all, nor near it.
THE SAN FRANCISCO MORNING CALL, AUGUST 16, 1864
A man fell off his own dray—or rather it was a large truck-wagon—in Davis street, yesterday, and the fore wheels passed over his body. A bystander stopped the horses and they backed the same wheels over the man's body a second time; after which he crawled out, jumped on the wagon, muttered something about being "tired of sich d—d foolishness," and drove off before a surgeon could arrive to amputate him!
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 18, 1864
DARING ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE A PAWNBROKER IN BROAD DAYLIGHT!
THE WOUNDS PROBABLY FATAL!—EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS' WORTH OF DIAMONDS AND WATCHES STOLEN!
Yesterday afternoon about half past two o'clock, a pawnbroker named Meyer, whose establishment is in Commercial street, below Kearny, went out and left his son Henry, a youth of eighteen or twenty, perhaps, to attend to the business during his absence. Upon returning, half an hour later, he found pools of blood here and there, a knife and double-barrelled shot gun on the floor—the latter weapon parted from its stock—several trays of watches, diamonds and various kinds of jewelry gone, the doors of the safe open, its drawers pulled out and despoiled of their contents—disorder visible everywhere, but his son nowhere to be seen! Hearing a faint groan, he ran into the back room, and there in the gloom he discerned his boy, lying on the floor and weltering in blood. Now, after reading the above, the public will know exactly as much about this ghastly mystery as the Police know—as anybody knows, except the murderer himself. So far as heard from, nobody was seen to enter the store during Mr. Meyer's absence, and nobody was seen to leave. The assassin did his work between half-past two and three o'clock in the afternoon, in the busiest portion of one of the busiest thoroughfares of the city, and departed unseen, and left no sign by which his identity may hereafter be established. Up to the present writing the boy has only groaned in pain and is speechless. We reached the spot a few minutes after the tragedy was discovered, and found the street in front blockaded by a crowd of men staring at the premises in blank fascination, and entering, found another crowd composed of policemen, doctors, detectives, and reporters, engaged as such people are usually engaged upon such occasions. The boy's body and his bunk were deluged in blood, and efforts were being made to relieve his sufferings. There was apparently but one wound upon him, and that had been inflicted on the back of his head, behind his right ear. The skull was indented as if by a slung-shot. Probably neither the knife nor the gun found upon the floor were used in the assault. Near one of the windows in the front office closely curtained against observation from the street—was a pool of gouted blood, as large as a chair-seat; and the blow was given there, no doubt, for from that spot a roadway was marked in the dust of the floor to the extreme end of the back room where the body was found, showing that after he was knocked senseless, the robbers must have dragged him to that spot, to guard against his attracting attention by making an outcry. Mr. Meyer says the valuables carried off by the daring perpetrators of the outrage, are worth about eight thousand dollars. A man came in while we were present, and told Capt. Lees that about the time he saw the crowd running toward Commercial street, he met a man in Kearny street, running as if destruction were at his heels; that he broke frantically through a blockade of wagons, carriages, and a funeral procession, sped on his way and was out of sight in a moment; that he was thick set, about five feet seven or eight inches in stature, wore dark clothing, a black slouch hat, and had a sort of narrow goatee; that he had improvised a sack out of an old calico dress, the neck of which sack he grasped in his hand, and had the surplus calico wrapped round his arm; the appearance of the said sack was as if it might have a hat-full of eggs in it—two dozen, or thereabouts, you might say. Five minutes after the conclusion of the narrative, we observed the man who saw all this, speeding up town in a buggy with a detective. At the Chief's office, fifteen minutes after the discovery of the bloody catastrophe, Mr. Burke's campaign commenced, and he was dictating orders to a small army of Policemen, with a decision and rapidity commensurate with the urgency of the occasion: You, and you, and you, go to the Stockton and Sacramento boats and arrest every Chinaman and every suspicious white man that tries to go on board; you, and you, go to the San Jose Railroad—same order; you go to the stable and order two fleet horses to be saddled and sent here instantly; you, and you, and you, go to the heads of the Chinese Companies and tell them to detain every suspicious Chinaman they see, and send me word; I'll be responsible." And so on, and so forth, until squads of Policemen were scattering abroad through every portion of the city, and closing every prominent avenue of escape from it. An affair like this makes hurrying times in the Police Department. After all, the wonder is that an enterprise like this robbery and attempted assassination has not previously been essayed in Mr. Meyer's and other pawnbroking establishments. They are not frequented by customers in the day-time, and the glass doors and windows are rendered untransparent by thick coats of paint, and also by curtains that are always closed, so that nothing that transpires within can be seen from the street. One or two active men could enter such a place at night, gag the occupants, turn the gas nearly out, and take their own time about robbing the concern, for customers would not be apt to molest an establishment through whose shaded windows no light appeared.
Up to eleven o'clock last night, young Meyer was still irrational, although he had spoken incoherently several times of matters foreign to the misfortune that had befallen him. We have this from Dr. Murphy, his physician, who saw him at that hour. The Doctor says the wound was evidently inflicted with a slung-shot. Its form is an egg-shaped indentation at the base of the brain. There are also the distinct marks of four fingers and a thumb on the throat, made by the left hand of the man who assaulted him. (Whose left hand among ye will fit those marks?) The patient can only swallow with great difficulty, on account of the fearful choking he received, and the consequent swelling and soreness of the glands of the throat. He suffers chiefly, however, from the pressing of the indented skull upon the brain. His condition improves a little all the time, and, although the chances are nearly all against his recovery, still that result is regarded as comfortably within the margin of possibility. Unless he comes to his senses, it will be next to impossible ever to establish the guilt of any man suspected of this crime. An ordinary deed of blood excites only a passing interest in San Francisco, but to show how much a little mystery enhances the importance of such an occurrence, we will mention that at no time, from three o'clock in the afternoon, yesterday, until midnight, was there a moment when there was not a crowd in front of Meyer's store, gazing at its darkened windows and closed and guarded doors. During the afternoon and night, several white men were arrested about town on suspicion, and seventy-two Chinamen were detained from leaving on the boats until after the hour for sailing. The right man is doubtless at large yet, however.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 19, 1864
To-day the Ning-Yong Company will finish furnishing and decorating the new Josh house, or place of worship, built by them in Broadway, between Dupont and Kearny streets, and to-morrow they will begin their unchristian devotions in it. The building is a handsome brick edifice, two stories high on Broadway, and three on the alley in the rear; both fronts are of pressed brick. A small army of workmen were busily engaged yesterday, in putting on the finishing touches of the embellishments. The throne of the immortal Josh is at the head of the hall in the third story, within a sort of alcove of elaborately carved and gilded woodwork, representing human figures and birds and beasts of all degrees of hideousness. Josh himself is as ugly a monster as can be found outside of China. He is in a sitting posture, is of about middle stature, but excessively fat; his garments are flowing and ample, garnished with a few small circlets of looking-glass, to represent jewels, and streaked and striped, daubed from head to foot, with paints of the liveliest colors. A long strand of black horsehair sprouts from each corner of his upper lip, another from the centre of his chin, and one from just forward of each ear. He wears an open-work crown, which gleams with gold leaf. His rotund face is painted a glaring red, and the general expression of this fat and happy god is as if he had eaten too much rice and rats for dinner, and would like his belt loosened if he only had the energy to do it. In front of the throne hangs a chandelier of Chinese manufacture, with a wilderness of glass drops and curved candle supports about it; but it is not as elegant and graceful as the American article. Under it, in a heavy frame-work, a big church bell is hung, also of Chinese workmanship; it is carved and daubed with many-colored paint all over. In front of the bell, three long tables are ranged, the fronts of two of which display a perfect maze-work of carving. The principal one shows, behind a glass front, several hundred splendidly gilded figures of kings on thrones, and bowing and smirking attendants, and horses on the rampage. The figures in this huge carved picture stand out in bold relief from the background, but they are not stuck on. The whole concern is worked out of a single broad slab of timber, and only the cunning hand of a Chinaman could have wrought it. Over the forward table is suspended a sort of shield, of indescribable shape, whose face is marked in compartments like a coat of arms, and in each of these is another nightmare of burnished and distorted human figures. The ceiling of this room, and both sides of it, are adorned with great sign boards, (they look like that to a content Christian, at any rate,) bearing immense Chinese letters or characters, sometimes raised from the surface of the wood and sometimes cut into it, and sometimes these letters being painted a bright red or green, and the grand expanse of sign board blazing with gold-leaf, or vice versa. These signs are presents to the Church from other companies, and they bear the names of those corporations, and possibly some extravagant Chinese moral or other, though if the latter was the case we failed to prove it by Ah Wae, our urbane and intelligent interpreter. Up and down the room, on both sides, are ranged alternate chairs and tables, made of the same hard, close-grained black wood used in the carved tables above mentioned; devout pagans lean their elbows on these little side tables, and swill tea while they worship Josh. Now, humble and unpretending Christian as we are, there was something infinitely comfortable and touching to us in this gentle mingling together of piety and breakfast. They have a large painted drum, and a pig or two, in this temple. How would it strike you, now, to stand at one end of this room with ranks of repentant Chinamen extending down either side before you, sipping purifying tea, and all about and above them a gorgeous cloud of glaring colors and dazzling gold and tinsel, with the bell tolling, and the drums thundering, and the gongs clanging, and portly, blushing old Josh in the distance, smiling upon it all, in his imbecile way, from out his splendid canopy? Nice perhaps? In the second story there are more painted emblems and symbols than we could describe in a week. In the first story are six long white slats (in a sort of vault) split into one hundred and fifty divisions, each like the keys of a piano, and this affair is the death-register of the Ning-Yong Company. When a man dies, his name, age, his native place in China, and the place of his death in this country, are inscribed on one of these keys, and the record is always preserved. Ah Wae tells us that the Ning-Yong Company numbers eighteen or twenty thousand persons on this coast, now, and has numbered as high as twenty-eight thousand. Ah Wae speaks good English, and is the outside business man of the tribe—that is, he transacts matters with us barbarians. He will occupy rooms and offices in the temple, as will also the great Wy Gah, the ineffable High Priest of the temple, and Sing Song, or President of the Ning-Yong Company. The names of the temple, inscribed over its doors, are, "Ning Yong Chu Oh," and "Ning Yong Wae Quong;" both mean the same thing, but one is more refined and elegant, and is suited to a higher and more cultivated class of Chinese than the other—though to our notion they appear pretty much the same thing, as far as facility of comprehending them is concerned. To-morrow the temple will be opened, and all save Chinese will be excluded from it until about the 5th of September, when white folks will be free to visit it, due notice having first been given in the newspapers, and a general invitation extended to the public.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 19, 1864
Since the recent extraordinary expose of the concerns of the Grass Silver Mining Valley Company, by which Stockholders discovered, to their grief and dismay, that figures could lie as to what became of some of their assessments, and could also be ominously reticent as to what went with the balance, people have begun to discuss the possibility of inventing a plan by which they may be advised, from time to time, of the manner in which their money is being expended by officers of mining companies, to the end that they may seasonably check any tendency towards undue extravagance or dishonest expenditures that may manifest itself, instead of being compelled to wait a year or two in ignorance and suspense, to find at last that they have been bankrupted to no purpose. And it is time their creative talents were at work in this direction. The longer they sleep the dread sleep of the Grass Valley, the more terrible will be the awakening from it. Money is being squandered with a recklessness that knows no limit—that had a beginning, but seemingly hath no end, save a beggarly minority of dividend-paying companies—and after these years of expectation and this waste of capital, what account of stewardship has been rendered unto the flayed stock holder? What does he know about the disposition that has been made of his money? What brighter promise has he now than in any by-gone time that he is not to go on hopelessly paying assessments and wondering what becomes of them, until Gabriel sounds his trumpet? The Hale & Norcross officers decide to sink a shaft. They levy forty thousand dollars. Next month they have a mighty good notion to go lower, and they levy a twenty thousand dollar assessment. Next month, the novelty of sinking the shaft has about worn off, and they think it would be nice to drift a while—twenty thousand dollars. The following month it occurs to them it would be so funny to pump a little—and they buy a forty thousand dollar pump. Thus it goes on for months and months, but the Hale & Norcross sends us no bullion, though most of the time there is an encouraging rumor afloat that they are "right in the casing!" Take the Chollar Company, for instance. It seems easy on its children just now, but who does not remember its regular old monotonous assessment anthem? "Sixty dollars a foot! sixty dollars a foot! sixty dollars a foot!" month in and month out, till the persecuted stockholder howled again. The same way with the Best & Belcher, and the same way with three-fourths of the mines on the main lead, from Cedar Hill to Silver City. We could scarcely name them all in a single article, but we have given a specimen or so by which the balance may be measured. And what has gone with the money? We pause (a year or two) for a reply. Now, in some of the States, all banks are compelled to publish a monthly statement of their affairs. Why not make the big mining companies do the same thing? It would make some of them fearfully sick at first, but they would feel all the better for it in the long-run. The Legislature is not in session, and a law to this effect cannot now be passed; but if one company dare voluntarily to set the example, the balance would follow by pressure of circumstances. But that first bold company does not exist, perhaps; if it does, a grateful community will be glad to hear from it. Where is it? Let it come forward and offer itself as the sacrificial scape-goat to bear the sins of its fellows into the wilderness.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 20, 1864
This accomplished old gin-barrel came out of the County Jail early in the morning three days ago, and was promptly in the station-house, drunk as a loon, before the middle of the day. She got out the next day, but was in again before night. She got out the following morning, but yesterday noon she was back again, with her noble heart preserved in spirits, as usual. Having a full cargo aboard by this time, she will probably clear for her native land in the County Jail to-day.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 20, 1864
Yesterday afternoon a Commission was engaged in the United States District Court room, taking testimony in the criminal proceedings instituted against Luther Hopkins, Master of the American ship Carlisle, for brutally treating Andrew Anderson, one of the ship's crew. The affidavit of the prosecuting witness states that on the 2d April, 1864, Captain Hopkins cruelly beat him with a belaying pin, while he was sick, inflicting serious injuries on him; and also, on the 27th April, Anderson being still sick Hopkins, the defendant, beat him on the head with a belaying pin; and again, on the 27th June, still being an invalid, he was beaten with a heavy, knotted rope, more than twenty blows, by the Captain of the vessel, who also caused him to be bitten by a dog. Poor Jack seeks redress and protection in a United States Court. When the Captain marshals his subordinates, from first officer down to forty-ninth cook, all dependent on him for the tenure of their dignities, they will with one voice swear they never saw the Captain do any such thing—blind as bats—while the poor victim felt it sensibly, and his quaking comrades in the forecastle saw it distinctly enough. It would be a hard thing should a Captain be punished for merely killing a sailor or two, as a matter of pastime.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 21, 1864
The New Chinese Temple in Broadway—the "Ning Yong Wae Quong" of the Ning Yong Company, was dedicated to the mighty Josh night before last, with a general looseness in the way of beating of drums, clanging of gongs and burning of yellow paper, commensurate with the high importance of the occasion. In the presence of the great idol, the other day, our cultivated friend, Ah Wae, informed us that the old original Josh (of whom the image was only an imitation, a substitute vested with power to act for the absent God, and bless Chinamen or damn them, according to the best of his judgment,) lived in ancient times on the Mountain of Wong Chu, was seventeen feet high, and wielded a club that weighed two tons; that he died two thousand five hundred years ago, but that he is all right yet in the Celestial Kingdom, and can come on earth, or appear anywhere he pleases, at a moment's notice, and that he could come down here and cave our head in with his club if he wanted to. We hope he don't want to. Ah Wae told us all that, and we deliver it to the public just as we got it, advising all to receive it with caution and not bet on its truthfulness until after mature reflection and deliberation. As far as we are concerned, we don't believe it, for all it sounds so plausible.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 21, 1864
MINING COMPANIES' ACCOUNTS.—The Morning Call of yesterday has a lively article on Mining Companies, suggesting that Mining Trustees should publish quarterly statements of Expenditures and Receipts, concluding with: "The Legislature is not in session, and a law to this effect cannot now be passed; but if one Company dare voluntarily to set the example, the balance would follow by pressure of circumstances. But that first bold Company does not exist, perhaps; if it does, a grateful community will be glad to hear from it. Where is it? Let it come forward and offer itself as the sacrificial scape-goat to bear the sins of its fellows into the wilderness."
In answer to this the officers of the Daniel Webster Mining Company, located in Devil's Gate District, Nevada Territory, have requested us to inform the shareholders and others who have purchased stock in this Company at high prices, that a complete exhibit of the Company's affairs will be made public in the Argus on Saturday next. This Company, in consequence of a couple of shareholders in Nevada Territory, (legal gentlemen at that,) paying their previous assessments in green-backs, has been the first to levy an assessment payable in currency. We believe, however, they will be the first "who dare" to make public their accounts. We hope the Coso will be the next to follow suit, as a correspondent of ours, in Sacramento, (whose letter appears under the appropriate heading,) seems anxious to learn what has become of the forty three thousand two hundred dollars collected by this Company for assessments the last year.—(S. F. Argus, Saturday.)
So there are company officers who are bold enough, fair enough, true enough to the interests entrusted to their keeping, to let stockholders, as well as all who may chance to become so, know the character of their stewardship, and whose records are white enough to bear inspection. We had not believed it, and we are glad that a Mining Company worthy of the name of Daniel Webster existed to save to us the remnant of our faith in the uprightness of these dumb and inscrutable institutions. We have nothing to fear now; all that was wanting was someone to take the lead. Other Companies will see that this monthly or quarterly exhibit of their affairs is nothing but a simple act of justice to their stockholders and to others who may desire to become so. They will also see that it is policy to let the public know where invested money will be judiciously used and strictly accounted for; and, our word for it, Companies that dare to show their books, will soon fall into line and adopt the system of published periodical statements. In time it will become a custom, and custom is more binding, more impregnable, and more exacting than any law that was ever framed. In that day the Coso will be heard from; and so will Companies in Virginia, which sport vast and gorgeously-painted shaft and machinery houses, with costly and beautiful green chicken-cocks on the roof, which are able to tell how the wind blows, yet are savagely ignorant concerning dividends. So will other Companies come out and say what it cost to build their duck ponds; so will still others tell their stockholders why they paid sixty thousand dollars for machinery worth about half the money; another that we have in our eye will show what they did with an expensive lot of timbers, when they haven't got enough in their mine to shingle a chicken-coop with; and yet others will let us know if they are still "in the casing," and why they levy a forty-thousand-dollar assessment every six weeks to run a drift with. Secretaries, Superintendents, and Boards of Trustees, that don't like the prospect, had better resign. The public have got precious little confidence in the present lot, and the public will back this assertion we are making in its name. Stockholders are very tired of being at the mercy of omnipotent and invisible officers, and are ripe for the inauguration of a safer and more sensible state of things. And when it is inaugurated, mining property will thrive again, and not before. Confidence is the mainstay of every class of commercial enterprise.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 23, 1864
In consequence of the warm, close atmosphere which smothered the city at two o'clock yesterday afternoon, everybody expected to be shaken out of their boots by an earthquake before night, but up to the hour of our going to press the supernatural bootjack had not arrived yet. That is just what makes it so unhealthy—the earthquakes are getting so irregular. When a community get used to a thing, they suffer when they have to go without it. However, the trouble cannot be remedied; we know of nothing that will answer as a substitute for one of those convulsions—to an unmarried man.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 23, 1864
One of those singular freaks of Nature which, by reference to the dictionary, we find described as "the water or the descent of water that falls in drops from the clouds—shower," occurred here yesterday, and kept the community in a state of pleasant astonishment for the space of several hours. They would not have been astonished at an earthquake, though. Thus it will be observed that nothing accustoms one to a thing so readily as getting used to it. You will always notice that, in America. We were thinking this refreshing rain would make everybody happy. Not so the cows. An agricultural sharp informs us that yesterday's rain was a misfortune to California—that it will kill the dry grass upon which the cattle now subsist, and also the young grass upon which they were calculating to subsist hereafter. We know nothing what ever about the matter, but we do know that if what this gentleman says is strictly true, the inevitable deduction is that the cattle are out of luck. We stand to that.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 23, 1864
Being duly provided with passes, through the courtesy of our cultivated barbaric friend, Ah Wae, outside business-agent of the Ning Yong Company, we visited the new Chinese Temple again yesterday, in company with several friends. After suffocating in the smoke of burning punk and josh lights, and the infernal odors of opium and all kinds of edibles cooked in an unchristian manner, until we were becoming imbued with Buddhism and beginning to lose our nationality, and imbibe, unasked, Chinese instincts, we finally found Ah Wae, who roused us from our lethargy and saved us to our religion and our country by merely breathing the old, touching words, so simple and yet so impressive, and withal so familiar to those whose blessed privilege it has been to be reared in the midst of a lofty and humanizing civilization: "How do, gentlemen—take a drink?" By the magic of that one phrase, our noble American instincts were spirited back to us again, in all their pristine beauty and glory. The polished cabinet of wines and liquors stood on a table in one of the gorgeous halls of the temple, and behold, an American, with those same noble instincts of his race, had been worshipping there before us—Mr. Stiggers, of the Alta. His photograph lay there, the countenance subdued by accustomed wine, and reposing upon it appeared that same old smile of serene and ineffable imbecility which has so endeared it to all whose happiness it has been to look upon it. That apparition filled us with forebodings. They proved to be well founded. A sad Chinaman—the sanctified bar-keeper of the temple—threw open the cabinet with a sigh, exposed the array of empty decanters, sighed again, murmured "Bymbye, Stiggins been here," and burst into tears. No one with any feeling would have tortured the poor pagan for further explanations when manifestly none were needed, and we turned away in silence, and dropped a sympathetic tear in a fragrant rat-pie which had just been brought in to be set before the great god Josh. The temple is thoroughly fitted up now, and is resplendent with tinsel and all descriptions of finery. The house and its embellishments cost about eighty thousand dollars. About the 5th of September it will be thrown open for public inspection, and will be well worth visiting. There is a band of tapestry extending around a council-room in the second story, which is beautifully embroidered in a variety of intricate designs wrought in bird's feathers, and gold and silver thread and silk fibres of all colors. It cost a hundred and fifty dollars a yard, and was made by hand. The temple was dedicated last Friday night, and since then priests and musicians have kept up the ceremonies with noisy and unflagging zeal. The priests march backward and forward, reciting prayers or something in a droning, sing-song way, varied by discordant screeches somewhat like the cawing of crows, and they kneel down, and get up and spin around, and march again, and still the infernal racket of gongs, drums and fiddles, goes on with its hideous accompaniment, and still the spectator grows more and more smothered and dizzy in the close atmosphere of punk-smoke and opium-fumes. On a divan in one hall, two priests, clad in royal robes of figured blue silk, and crimson skull caps, lay smoking opium, and had kept it up until they looked as drunk and spongy as the photograph of the mild and beneficent Stiggers. One of them was a high aristocrat and a distinguished man among the Chinamen, being no less a personage than the chief priest of the temple, and "Sing-Song" or President of the great Ning-Yong Company. His finger-nails are actually longer than the fingers they adorn, and one of them is twisted in spirals like a cork screw. There was one room half full of priests, all fine, dignified, intelligent looking men like Ah Wae, and all dressed in long blue silk robes, and blue and red topped skull caps, with broad brims turned up all round like wash-basins. The new temple is ablaze with gilded ornamentation, and those who are fond of that sort of thing would do well to stand ready to accept the forthcoming public invitation.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 23,1864
INEXPLICABLE NEWS FROM SAN JOSE
We have before us a letter from an intelligent correspondent, dated "Sarrozay, (San Jose?) Last Sunday;" we had previously ordered this correspondent to drop us a line, in case anything unusual should happen in San Jose during the period of his sojourn there. Now that we have got his chatty letter, however, we prefer, for reasons of our own, to make extracts from it, instead of publishing it in full. Considering the expense we were at in sending a special correspondent so far, we are sorry to be obliged to entertain such a preference. The very first paragraph in this blurred and scrawling letter pictured our friend's condition, and filled us with humiliation. It was abhorrent to us to think that we, who had so well earned and so proudly borne the appellation of "M. T., The Moral Phenomenon," should live to have such a letter addressed to us. It begins thus:
"Mr. Mark Twain—Sir: Sarrozay's beauriful place. Flowers—or maybe it's me—smells delishs—like sp-sp-sp(ic! )irits turpentine. Hiccups again. Don' mind them had 'em three days."
As we remarked before, it is very humiliating. So is the next paragraph:
"Full of newsper men—reporters. One from Alta, one from Flag, one from Bulletin, two from MORRING CALL, one from Sacramento Union, one from Carson Independent. And all drunk—all drunk but me. By Georshe! I'm stonished."
The next paragraph is still worse:
"Been out to Leland of the Occidental, and Livingston in the Warrum Springs, and Steve, with four buggies and a horse, which is a sp splennid place splennid place."
Here follow compliments to Nolan, Conductor of the morning train, for his kindness in allowing the writer to ride on the engine, where he could have "room to enjoy himself strong, you know," and to the Engineer for his generosity in stopping at nearly every station to give people a "chance to come on board, you understand." Then his wandering thoughts turn again affectionately to "Sarrozay" and its wonders:
"Sarrozay's lovely place. Shade trees all down both sides street, and in the middle and elsewhere, and gardens—second street back of Connental Hotel. With a new church in a tall scaffolding—I watched her an hour, but can't understand it. I don' see how they got her in—I don' see how they goin' to get her out. Corralled for good, praps. Hic! Them hiccups again. Comes from s-sociating with drunken beasts."
Our special next indulges in some maudlin felicity over the prospect of riding back to the city in the night on the back of the fire-breathing locomotive, and this suggests to his mind a song which he remembers to have heard somewhere. That is all he remembers about it, though, for the finer details of its language appear to have caved into a sort of general chaos among his recollections. The bawr stood on the burring dock, Whence all but him had f-flowed—f-floored—f-fled—
The f-flumes that lit the rattle's back
Sh-shone round him o'er the shed—
"I dono what's the marrer withat song. It don't appear to have any sense in it, somehow—but she used to be abou the fines' f-fusion—"
Soothing slumber overtook the worn and weary pilgrim at this point, doubtless, and the world may never know what beautiful thought it met upon the threshold and drove back within the portals of his brain, to perish in forgetfulness. After this effort, we trust the public will bear with us if we allow our special correspondent to rest from his exhausting labors for a season—a long season—say a year or two.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 23, 1864
CAMANCHE ITEMS—SANITARY CONTRIBUTIONS
Business is progressing in lively style at the Monitor Yard. Some two hundred and seventy-five hands, including about fifty boys, swarm in and about the progressing hull, and all appear to work with a will, under the keen superintending eye of Mr. Ryan and his able assistants. On Saturday evening, after the men had struck work, they were invited to assist at a grand flag-raising. A tall tapering pole was planted, amid general enthusiasm, and a splendid American ensign hoisted to the truck with cheers to its constellated glories and toasts for its ultimate triumph. Mr. J. W. Willard, the gentleman who attends to the contribution-box placed at the entrance gate, for aid to the Sanitary Commission Fund, informs us that visitors contribute their two bits with cheerfulness; in many instances coin of larger denomination are dropped, and change refused to be taken. On Sunday, a general visiting time, the amount contributed was two hundred and seventy-three dollars; and yesterday the box received from fifty to sixty dollars. The "Monitor Box" promises a good source.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 24, 1864
All that Mr. Stiggers, of the Alta, has to say about his monstrous conduct in the Ning-Yong Temple, day before yesterday, in drinking up all the liquors in the establishment, and breaking the heart of the wretched Chinaman in whose charge they were placed—a crushing exposure of which we conceived it our duty to publish yesterday—is the following: "We found a general festival, a sort of Celestial free and easy, going on, on arrival, and were waited on in the most polite manner by Ah Wee, who, although a young man, is thoroughly well educated, very intelligent, and speaks English quite fluently. With him we took a glass of wine and a cigar before the high altar, and with a general shaking hands all around, our part of the ceremonies was concluded." That is the coolest piece of effrontery we have met with in many a day. He "concluded his part of the ceremonies by taking a glass of wine and a cigar." We should think a man who had acted as Mr. Stiggers did upon that occasion, would feel like keeping perfectly quiet about it. Such flippant gayety of language ill becomes him, under the circumstances. We are prepared, now, to look upon the most flagrant departures from propriety, on the part of that misguided young creature, without astonishment. We would not even be surprised if his unnatural instincts were to prompt him to come back at us this morning, and attempt to exonerate himself, in his feeble way, from the damning charge we have fastened upon him of gobbling up all the sacred whiskey belonging to those poor uneducated Chinamen, and otherwise strewing his path with destruction and devastation, and leaving nothing but tears and lamentation, and starvation and misery, behind him. We should not even be surprised if he were to say hard things about us, and expect people to believe them. He may possibly tremble and be silent, but it would not be like him, if he did.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 24, 1864
A gloom pervaded the Police Court, as the sable visages of Mary Wilkinson and Maria Brooks, with their cloud of witnesses, entered within its consecrated walls, each to prosecute and defend respectively in counter charges of assault and battery. The cases were consolidated, and crimination and recrimination ruled the hour. Mary said she was a meek-hearted Christian, who loved her enemies, including Maria, and had prayed for her on the very morning of the day when the latter threw a pail of water and a rock against her. Maria said she didn't throw; that she wasn't a Christian herself, and that Mary had the very devil in her. The case would always have remained in doubt, but Mrs. Hammond overshadowed the Court, and flashed defiance at counsel, from her eyes, while indignation and eloquence burst from her heaving bosom, like the long pent up fires of a volcano, whenever any one presumed to intimate that her statement might be improved in point of credibility, by a slight explanation. Even the gravity of the Court was somewhat disturbed when three hundred weight of black majesty, hauteur, and conscious virtue, rolled on to the witness stand, like the fore quarter of a sunburnt whale, a living embodiment of Desdemona, Othello, Jupiter, Josh, and Jewhilikens. She appeared as counsel for Maria Brooks, and scornfully repudiated the relationship, when citizen Sam Platt, Esq. prefaced his interrogation with the endearing, "Aunty." "I'm not your Aunty," she roared. "I'm Mrs. Hammond," upon which the citizen S. P., Esq., repeated his assurances of distinguished regard, and caved a little. Mrs. Hammond rolled off the stand, and out of the Court room, like the fragment of a thunder cloud, leaving the "congregation," as she called it, in convulsions. Mary Brooks and Maria Wilkinson were both convicted of assault and battery, and ordered to appear for sentence.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 24, 1864
George Johnson yesterday had his room-mate, M. Fink, arrested for stealing one hundred and fourteen dollars from him. Johnson says Fink is an old friend of his, and came to him three months ago and said he had no money, could get no work to do, and had no place to sleep; he had previously been tending bar at the Mazurka Saloon. Johnson has shared his bed with him, and paid his washing and board bills from that time until a few weeks ago, when the fellow got a situation of some kind on one of the steamers. He still continued to share Johnson's room, in the Wells Building, corner of Clay and Montgomery streets, however, when in port. Johnson left him in bed yesterday morning, early, and when he returned, he missed his money and his friend—the former from the bureau drawer and the latter from the bed. We consider that this only confirms what we have always said—namely, that the heart of man is desperately wicked.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 24, 1864
Yesterday, F. L. Post, Property Clerk of the Police Department, paid over the fourth and fifth instalments of the monthly contributions of the Police force to the Sanitary Fund, amounting, in the aggregate, to a fraction under five hundred dollars. This makes a total of two thousand five hundred and sixty-four dollars, in gold, received by the Sanitary Commission from the same source since the beginning of the present year, and speaks volumes for the liberality and patriotism of our Police. Chief Burke contributes fifteen dollars monthly; officer Cook, twelve dollars and a half; officer Hesse, twelve dollars; Captains Lees and Baker, ten dollars each, and none of the members of the force less than five dollars. These donations are purely voluntary. While upon this subject, we would mention that R. G. Sneath, Treasurer of the Sanitary Committee, designs having a beautiful certificate engraved, suitable for framing as a parlor ornament, and one of these will be filled out and presented to each person who contributes ten dollars for the relief of the sick and wounded soldiers of the Union.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 25, 1864
METROPOLITAN.—"Mazeppa" was performed last evening, in the presence of about two thousand people. The personation of the Tartar Prince was assumed by the manageress herself—Mrs. Emily Jordan. The part involves some rather risky horsemanship, and, considering the sultriness of the weather, a refreshing scantiness of clothing, which, perhaps, had not the least to do with causing the presence of the crowd. We suppose, as Mrs. Malaprop says, "comparisons are odorous," but we must give Jordan the credit of doing the "runs" in better style than Menken. The general performance of the role had not the dash and abandon of that many-named woman, but the equestrian portion was decidedly superior; and it surprises us to learn that the actress, up to the time of consenting to play the part, had been entirely unfamiliar with equestrianism. We must, therefore, add to her merit of gracefulness, the quality of courage, moral and physical. It would make the spectacle more generally effective, if greater attention were paid to other parts of it than that assigned to Mazeppa. The scenery and appointments are very well indeed; but the cast is miserably defective. The people act with a hesitation and timidity that lead one to believe they expected the "wild" horse to break loose from his halterings behind the scenes, and distribute a few kicks among them, which, by the way, not a few of the supers richly deserve. Some of the combats were ridiculous, and were openly derided by the audience. Mr. Phelps, who deserves every credit for his untiring industry and ability as a stage manager, had better get those gay swordsmen together and drill them thoroughly. "Mazeppa" will be repeated to-night, and every night this week until further notice.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 25, 1864
The great Union Hall, in Howard street, yesterday afternoon, was swarming with a busy hive of ladies and artisans, hurrying up the decorations and working against time in the effort to get all things in readiness for the great Fair in behalf of the Christian Commission, which was to begin in the evening. The chaos of flags, evergreens, frame work, timbers, etc., was already beginning to take upon itself outlines of grace and forms of beauty, under the deft handling of the ladies and their assistants. A charming floral temple stands in the centre of the Hall; it is octagonal in shape, is composed of a cluster of evergreen arches which come together at the top like the rafters of a dome, and are surmounted by an eagle—not a live one. The bases upon which these arches rest, form counters, whereon are displayed baskets of fresh flowers for sale; one or two larger bouquets among them are perfect miracles of beauty. A succession of ample arches, swathed in evergreens and draped with flags and embellished with various designs, extends entirely around the sides of the hall; under these are miniature shops, in which the loveliest possible clerks will stand and dispose of all manner of wares at ruinously moderate prices, considering the object to which the profits are to be applied. There is one arch which bears this motto: "Santa Clara's Offering to the Soldiers," and under it were five handsome young ladies and two pretty glass work-baskets laden with fresh flowers—a most extraordinary offering to an army of wounded soldiers, it occurred to us. Over other alcoves were such mottoes as "God is Our Trust;" "M. E. Churches;" "In hoc signo vinces," surmounted by a stately cross; "Union is Strength," etc. No. 1 of these alcoves will be occupied by ladies from Oakland; No. 2, by Miss Baker and her School, of this city; No. 3, by members of Dr. Wadsworth's and Dr. Anderson's Churches, (Presbyterian;) No. 4 is erected by Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians of Santa Clara; No. 5, by the United Methodists of San Francisco; No. 6, by the Congregationalists; No. 7, by the Episcopalians; No. 8, by members of Mr. Kittredge's congregation; No. 9 and 10, by the Baptists. At the left of the stage, under a splendor of silken flags, the smallest and fairest of hands will dispense some of the most useful and useless things to be found in the Fair—cigars and soap. (That sentence does not seem to sound right, somehow, but there is no time now to skirmish around it and find out what is the matter with it.) At the other corner of the stage is the Christian soda fountain. At the right of the entrance door they were building a "moss covered well" around an old oaken bucket which is to be filled with lemonade; (why not bay rum, or Jamaica rum, or something of that kind?) This is "Jacob's Well," and will be carried on exclusively by Rachel, in the costume of her day. On the left of the entrance is a cool, dripping grotto, built by some counterfeiter of Nature, out of pasteboard rocks; the effect is heightened by pendant sprays of Spanish moss, and a stuffed duck sitting placidly on a shelf in the grotto, renders the deception complete. No duck could look more complacent or more perfectly satisfied with his condition, or more natural, or more like a genuine stuffed duck than he does. It was hard to resist the temptation to squeeze his shelf, to see if he would squawk. One of the reception rooms was filled with fine oil paintings, loaned by the artists and picture dealers of the city.
THE OPENING.—By half-past eight in the evening, Union Hall was pretty well crowded with gentlemen and ladies, and the handsome decorations of the place showed to all the better advantage by contrast with the shifting panorama of life and light by which they were surrounded. The famous Presidio Band opened the ceremonies with superb music, after which the Rev. Mr. Blane, pastor of the Howard street Methodist Church, offered up a fervent prayer for the success of this effort in behalf of the Christian Commission. Mayor Coon was then introduced, and delivered an earnest and eloquent address in which he set forth the objects had in view by the Commission, and urged the importance of extending to it a generous aid and encouragement. W. H. L. Barnes, Esq., followed in a stirring speech of some length, which was well received. The several speakers labored under great disadvantage because of the immense space it was necessary to fill with their voices, and the noise and confusion consequent on such a vast gathering of people, but a fraction of whom were seated, and who were too impatient to stand still many minutes together. After a short interval, a fragile young man appeared suddenly in the centre of the stage, dazzled the audience for a single second, like a spark, and went out. Previous to going out, however, he whispered something, and immediately afterward the "Euterpeans," who have so often delighted our citizens with their music, stepped upon the stage and sang a beautiful quartette about The Flag. During the course of the evening, Mrs. Grotjan sang twice, as did also Mrs. Tourney. The singers found it as hard work to sing in such a place as the speakers did to talk. Great credit is due the Presidio Band, the Euterpeans and the two ladies, for volunteering their services last evening without compensation. To-night the grand feature will be a series of beautiful tableaux, in which the most lovely young ladies and gentlemen in the city will appear. Charles Alper's Band have volunteered for this evening, and there will doubtless be some fine vocal music in addition.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 26, 1864
"When wine is in, wit is out." So remarked Judge Shepheard yesterday morning, when J. F. Dolan offered intoxication as an excuse for belching treason—and by the way, speaking of Judge Shepheard, it is every day becoming more and more apparent that in his incumbency, the people have got the right man in the right place. The Judge further observed that when a man is under the influence of liquor, being too bold and independent for caution, he is very likely to let out his real sentiments, and that although this Dolan pretends to be a loyal man when sober, he had no confidence in the profession of loyalty in a man who, when intoxicated, would heap curses on every thing pertaining to the Union cause, declare himself a strong Jeff. Davis man, wish for the destruction of the Union army, and that he was in the Southern army with a musket on his shoulder, as did Dolan. Mr. Riley, in whose saloon Dolan began his disloyal manifestation, and who is evidently a thorough-going Union man, created a sensation in the Court room while testifying, very decidedly in his favor, by giving forcible expression to his feelings on the subject. Dolan had gone up to his counter and called for a Jeff. Davis drink: he wanted none other than a Jeff. Davis drink. Mr. R. told him he'd be d—d if any body could get a Jeff. Davis drink in his house, and incontinently turned him out, telling him at the same time that but for the fact of his being drunk, he would give him a d—d thrashing. Dolan, notwithstanding his good loyalty when sober, was held in the sum of one thousand dollars to appear at the County Court. A little loyal when sober, and intensely disloyal when the tongue strings are loosened by liquor—and such are Copperheads.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 26, 1864
During the examination of Dolan, yesterday, for uttering treasonable language, when Mr. Lawrence, Dolan's counsel, proposed to offer evidence to prove that the defendant was not a disloyal man when sober, Mr. Louderback, the young Prosecuting Attorney of the Police Court, happily observed that it would be like proving a man's piety as an excuse in a prosecution for using profane and obscene language. The defence was squarely met, and waived the excuse.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 27, 1864
In a court in Minna street, between First and Second, they keep a puppy tied up which is insignificant as to size, but formidable as to yelp. We are unable to sleep after nine o'clock in the morning on account of it. Sometimes the subject of these remarks begins at three in the morning and yowls straight ahead for a week. We have lain awake many mornings out of pure distress on account of that puppy—because we know that if he does not break himself of that habit it will kill him; it is bound to do it—we have known thousands and thousands of cases like it. But it is easily cured. Give the creature a double handful of strychnine, dissolved in a quart of Prussic acid, and it will soo—oothe him down and make him as quiet and docile as a dried herring. The remedy is not expensive, and is at least worthy of a trial, even for the novelty of the thing.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 27, 1864
The success of the Fair of the Christian Commission is no longer conjectural—it is a demonstrated fact. The receipts of the opening night were over eleven hundred dollars, those of the second, eighteen hundred dollars, and as there was a considerable larger crowd in attendance last evening than upon either of the former occasions, it is fair to presume that the receipts amounted to at least two thousand dollars—making a total, up to the present time, of about five thousand dollars. It is proposed to continue the Fair almost a fortnight longer, and inasmuch as its popularity is steadily increasing, it requires no gift of prophecy to enable one to pronounce it a grand success in advance. The prince of Bands—the Presidio—volunteered again last evening, and delighted the audience with its superb music. There was vocal music, also, of the highest degree of excellence. The first in order was a cavatina, by Mrs. Gleason; followed by a ballad, "Brightest Angel," by Mrs. Shattucx; grand aria from "Maritana," by Mr. John Gregg, of the Italian opera; "Who will care for Mother now?" ballad, by Miss Mowry; "Heart Bowed Down by Weight of Woe," from opera of "The Bohemian Girl," by John Gregg. These several musical gems were well received and highly appreciated. This evening the tableaux will be resumed, as follows: 1. Landing of the Pilgrims; 2. Crinoline Avenged; 3. Statuary; 4. Execution of Lady Jane Grey; 5. Winning the Gloves; 6. Statuary—Fair Rosamond and Queen Eleanor. The tableaux the other evening were got ten up in fine taste and gave great satisfaction, albeit while the one representing The Queen of Sheba at the Court of King Solomon, was before the house, the effect was unduly heightened by an assistant in citizen's dress rushing bald headed into Court, before he discovered that the curtain was still up. The Court betrayed surprise; and so would the original Solomon, if the same man, in the same modern costume, had ever appeared so unexpectedly before him. The intrusion was not premeditated; the gentleman was very deaf—so deaf, indeed, that he could not see that the curtain had not yet been lowered. We forbear to urge anyone to go to the Fair, to-night, for the chances are that there will be people enough there to strain the sides of the building a little, anyhow.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 27, 1864
ARREST OF ANOTHER OF THE ROBBING GANG
Sheriff Adams learned a few days ago (says the San Jose Patriot, of the 24th,) that a man named R. F. Hall, a farmer and stock raiser living on the Salinas, fifteen miles south of San Juan, was an accessory before the fact in the robbing of the Los Angeles stages. That it was at his (Hall's) house the robbers were harbored, and that he lent them a gun and hatchet, with a full knowledge of their felonious purpose. These facts coming to the mind of the Sheriff, he dispatched Under Sheriff Hall last week to make the arrest, which he succeeded in doing without difficulty, on Friday last. The Under Sheriff found R. F. Hall at home, upon his ranch, took him to Monterey, and surrendered him to the authorities of that county. The Under Sheriff states that Hall is an intelligent man, and a well-to-do stock-raiser, having six hundred head of cattle, a wife and three children. We learn that after long conversations with both Hall and his wife, the Under Sheriff obtained a good deal of information in regard to the combination of robbing gangs, and finding the officer acquainted with Hall's complicity with the robbers, a confession of the facts was obtained from him. Hall, like all others engaged in these schemes of robbing, is a Secessionist, and both he and his wife admitted that all connected with the band were bound to each other by horrid oaths to revenge any punishment inflicted on them.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 30, 1864
ENTHUSIASTIC HARD-MONEY DEMONSTRATION
The era of our prosperity is about to dawn on us. If it don't it had orter. The jingle of coin will still be heard in our pockets and tills. It's all right. The Hard Money Association held an adjourned meeting at the Police Courtroom last night, for the express purpose of considering dollars. The meeting was an adjourned one. It staid adjourned. It wasn't anything else. The room was dimly lighted. It looked like the Hall of Eolis. Silently sat some ten or a dozen of the galvanized protectors of our prosperity. They looked for all the world like an infernal council in conclave. They were dumb; but what great plans for the suppression of the green-backed dragon were born in that silence still remains hid in the arcana of the mysterious cabal. They said nothing, they did nothing. Like fixed statues they sat, all wrapped in contemplation of their mighty scheme. They didn't adjourn, for from the first it was an adjourned meeting, and it staid adjourned. Soon they all left—parted quietly, mysteriously, awfully. The lights were turned out, and—nothing more. Money is still hard.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 30, 1864
The Chinese in this State are becoming civilized to a fearful extent. One of them was arrested the other day, in the act of preparing for a grand railroad disaster on the Sacramento Valley Railroad. If these people continue to imbibe American ideas of progress, they will be turning their attention to highway robbery, and other enlightened pursuits. They are industrious.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 31, 1864
That industrious wild "Shiner" with his heavy brass machine for testing the strength of human muscles, is around again, in his original swallow-tail gray coat. That same wanderer, coat and machine, have been ceaselessly on the move throughout California and Washoe, for a year or more, and still they look none the worse for wear. And still the generous proposition goeth up from the wanderer's lips, in the by-places and upon the corners of the street: "Wan pull for a bit, jintlemen, an' anny man that pulls eighteen hundher' pounds can thry it over agin widout expinse." And still the wanderer seeketh the eighteen hundred pounder up and down in the earth, and findeth him not; and still the public strive for that gratis pull, and still they are disappointed—still do they fall short of the terms by a matter of half a ton or so. Go your ways, and give the ubiquitous "Shiner" a chance to find the man upon whom it is his mission upon earth to confer the blessing of a second pull "widout expinse."
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 31, 1864
"Gentle Julia," who spends eleven months of each year in the County Jail, on an average, bit a joint clear off one of the fingers of Joanna O'Hara, (an old offender—chicken thief,) in the "dark cell" in the station-house yesterday. The other women confined there say that is the way Gentle Julia always fights.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 31, 1864
STRONG AS SAMPSON AND MEEK AS MOSES
Ellen Clark and Peter Connarty were up yesterday, charged with an assault and battery committed on Dr. S. S. Foster, gymnast and athlete, at Callahan's building, on Dupont street. The Doctor says he was assailed by these persons without any provocation on his part, and suffered at their hands divers indignities and abuses, but being under a vow made some years since never to strike any one thereafter, no matter what might be the aggravation, he quietly dropped his cane, folded his hands, and submitted. King Solomon says, "It is the glory of a man to pass by an offence." Behold what a glorious fellow Dr. Foster must be; he declared that although no three men in the profession can handle him, yet if a person were to spit in his face he would not resent it. That's a high order of Christian meekness and forbearance—a sublime instance. Other witnesses, however, tell a story less creditable to this prodigy of physical and moral firmness, and as they were about equally balanced in the weight of their testimony, the Doctor was allowed time to procure some preponderating evidence. So the case was held over until to-day.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 1, 1864
THE COSMOPOLITAN HOTEL BESIEGED
As a proof that it is good policy to advertise, and that nothing that appears in a newspaper is left unread, we will state that the mere mention in yesterday's papers that the Cosmopolitan Hotel would be thrown open for public inspection, caused that place to be besieged at an early hour yesterday evening, by some thirty thousand men, women and children; and the chances are that more than as many more had read the invitation, but were obliged to forego the pleasure of accepting it. By eight o'clock, the broad halls and stairways of the building, from cellar to roof, were densely crowded, with people of all ages, sexes, characters, and conditions in life; and a similar army were collected in the street outside, unable to gain admission—there was no room for them. The lowest estimate we heard of the number of persons who passed into the Hotel was twenty thousand, and the highest sixty thousand; so we split the difference, and call it thirty thousand. And among this vast assemblage of refined gentlemen, elegant ladies, and tender children, was mixed a lot of thieves, ruffians, and vandals. They stole everything they could get their hands on—silverware from the dining room, handkerchiefs from gentlemen, veils and victorines from ladies, and even gobbled up sheets, shirts, and pillow-cases in the laundry, and made off with them. They wantonly destroyed costly parlor ornaments, and pulled down and trampled under foot the handsome lace curtains of some of the windows. They "went through" Mr. Henning's room, and left him not even a sock or a boot. (We observed, a day or two ago, that he had a bushel and a half of the latter article stacked up at the foot of his bed.) The masses, wedged together in the halls and on the staircases, grew hot and angry, and smashed each other over the head with canes, and punched each other in the face with their fists, and to stop the thieving and save loss to helpless visitors, and get rid of the pickpockets, the gas had to be turned off in some parts of the house. At ten o'clock, when we were there, there was a constant stream of people passing out of the hotel, and other streams pouring towards it from every direction, to be disappointed in their hopes of seeing the wonders within it, for the proprietors having already suffered to the extent of several thousands of dollars in thefts and damages to furniture, were unwilling to admit decent people any longer, for fear of another invasion of rascals among them. Another grand rush was expected to follow the letting out of the theatres. The Cosmopolitan still stands, however, and to-day it opens for good, and for the accommodation of all of them that do eat and sleep, and have the wherewithal to pay for it.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 1, 1864
Before disbanding for a fortnight's furlough, the boys connected with Rincon School had a grand dress parade, yesterday. They are classed into regular military companies, and officered as follows, by boys chosen from their own ranks: Company A, Captain John Welch; B, Captain John Warren; C, Captain Henry Tucker; D, Captain William Thompson; E, Captain Robinson; F, Captain Charles Redman; G, Captain Cyrus Myers; H, Captain Henry Tabor. Companies I and J have no regularly elected officers, we are told. The drummers of the regiment are two youngsters named Douglas Williams and John Seaborn, and their talent for making a noise amounts almost to inspiration. Both are first class drummers. The Rincon boys have been carefully drilled in military exercises for a year, now, and have acquired a proficiency which is astonishing. They go through with the most elaborate manoeuvres without hesitating and without making a mistake; to execute every order promptly and perfectly has become second nature to them, and requires no more reflection than it does to a practised boarder to go to dinner when he hears the gong ring. The word "drill" is the proper one—those boys' legs and arms have been drilled into a comprehension of those orders so that they execute them mechanically, even though the restless mind may be thinking of anything else in the world at the moment. Professor Robinson has been the military instructor of the Rincon Regiment for several months past. The School exercises, earlier in the day, were very interesting, and consisted of dialogues, declamations, vocal and instrumental music, calisthenics, etc. "The Humors of the Draft," a sort of comedy, illustrative of the shifts to which unwarlike patriots are put in order to compass exemption, was well played by a number of the School boys, and was received with shouts of laughter. Douglas Williams played, on his drum, a solo which would have been a happy accompaniment to one of our choicest earthquakes. A young girl sang that lugubrious ditty, "Wrap the Flag around me, Boys," and the extraordinary purity and sweetness of her voice actually made pleasant music of it, impossible as such a thing might seem to any one acquainted with that marvellous piece of composition. The Principal, Mr. Pelton's, heir, an American sovereign of eight Summers and no Winters at all, since his life has been passed here where it has pleased the Almighty to omit that season, gave a recitation in French, and one in German; and from the touching pathos and expression which he threw into the latter, and the liquid richness of his accent, we are satisfied the subject was a noble one and wrought in beautiful language, but we could not testify unqualifiedly, in this respect, without access to a translation. The Rincon School was mustered out of service, yesterday evening, for the term of two weeks.
California and Nevada Territory are flooded with distressed looking abortions done in oil, in watercolors, in crayon, in lithography, in photography, in sugar, in plaster, in marble, in wax, and in every substance that is malleable or chiselable, or that can be marked on, or scratched on, or painted on, or which by its nature can be compelled to lend itself to a relentless and unholy persecution and distortion of the features of the great and good man who is gone from our midst—Rev. Thomas Starr King. We do not believe these misguided artistic lunatics meant to confuse the lineaments, and finally destroy and drive out from our memories the cherished image of our lost orator, but just the contrary. We believe their motive was good, but we know their execution was atrocious. We look upon these blank, monotonous, over-fed and sleepy-looking pictures, and ask, with Dr. Bellows, "Where was the seat of this man's royalty?" But we ask in vain of these wretched counterfeits. There is no more life or expression in them than you may find in the soggy, upturned face of a pickled infant, dangling by the neck in a glass jar among the trophies of a doctor's back office, any day. But there is one perfect portrait of Mr. King extant, with all the tenderness and goodness of his nature, and all the power and grandeur of his intellect drawn to the surface, as it were, and stamped upon the features with matchless skill. This picture is in the possession of Dr. Bellows, and is the only one we have seen in which we could discover no substantial ground for fault finding. It is a life-size outline photograph, elaborately wrought out and finished in crayon by Mrs. Frances Molineux Gibson, of this city, and has been presented by her to Rev. Dr. Bellows, to be sold for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission. It will probably be exhibited for a while at the Mechanics' Fair, after which it will be disposed of, as above mentioned. Dr. Bellows desires to keep it, and will do so if bids for it do not take altogether too high a flight.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 1, 1864
MR. MASSETT'S LECTURE—"DRIFTING ABOUT."—The printer having by mistake announced in the big bills the entertainment of Mr. Massett for last night, this is to say that to-night is the occasion when he will drift before his audience, spread his sail to the popular breeze, and make the waves ripple with prose, poetry, humor and song, imitation, incident and story. There is enough of variety to please the most exacting, fun enough for the most funny, humor for the gay, pathos for the serious, and whims for the eccentric. He will do a greater variety of things than any other man ever attempted before an audience in one night, and brevity will be united with the variety. As the entertainment is announced as for "one night only," those who would hear and see Massett, should go to-night.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 1, 1864
One of our new policemen was lying exceedingly low in a Chinese alley the other night, for the purpose of surprising a loafer who was in the habit of stealing the bread of a butcher, the butcher thinking it was not meet that he should do so. While lying prone on the ground, the officer was discovered by a vigilant Chinaman, Ah Wah. The former feigned obliviousness. The benevolent Chinaman shook the prostrate form, but meeting with no response, decided that the ghost of the policeman had gone to another beat, and concluded to administer on his estate. John took an inventory. Item, one pistol, when suddenly the officer sprung to his feet and took John. He was brought before Judge Shepheard yesterday morning, charged with petty larceny. His counsel, Mr. Zabriskie, said that any innocent person might go through a man's pockets under similar circumstances. The argument was overpowering, and Ah Wah was discharged.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 2, 1864
The stern, practical appearance which the great array of machinery and all manner of industrial implements has heretofore given to the Pavilion is being softened and relieved, now, by a pleasant sprinkling of fresh flowers and beautiful pictures; and by the time the Art halls are fully dressed with paintings, and the central tower with blooming plants, and the fountain below filled with limpid water, and the thousand lights a-blaze above a mass of people in ceaseless motion, the place will look as vivacious and charming as it now looks tumbled and shapeless. And while on this flight, it is proper to state that in the east wing of the Pavilion, Mr. Beers will have an excellent and commodious restaurant, where visitors can obtain anything or everything they may choose to eat or drink, and in quantities to suit the capacities of all stomachs. How naturally doth the cultivated human mind ascend from art and horticultural to hash and hominy!
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 2, 1864
A fat, chubby infant, about two years old, was found by the police yesterday evening, lying fast asleep in the middle of Folsom street, between Sixth and Seventh, and in dangerous proximity to the railroad track. We saw the cheerful youngster in the city jail last night, sitting contentedly in the arms of a negro man who is employed about the establishment. He had been taking another sleep by the stove in the jail kitchen. Possibly the following description of the waif may be recognized by some distressed mother who did not rest well last night: A fat face, serious countenance; considerable dignity of bearing; flaxen hair; eyes dark bluish gray, (by gaslight, at least;) a little soiled red jacket; brown frock, with pinkish squares on it half an inch across; kid gaiter shoes and red-striped stockings; evidently admires his legs, and answers "Dah-dah" to each and all questions, with strict impartiality. Anyone having lost an offspring of the above description can get it again by proving property and paying for this advertisement.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 3, 1864
The Grass Valley National, of Tuesday evening, tells a story of a Chinaman named Ah Sin, who committed suicide in a very civilized way, impelled thereto by an enlightened motive. Ah Sin loved to smoke opium. He had, it may be supposed, a quantity of his favorite drug, but lacked a pipe. In an evil hour, when suffering for the want of a smoke, he chanced upon a pipe "worth four bits or a dollar," and incontinently gobbled it up. At least that was the charge made against him by some other Chinamen, who were so angry with him for thus disgracing the national character for honesty, that they could not take time to starve the culprit to death in the usual manner, but undertook to beat him to death. A Policeman rescued him from the hands of the executioners, and for safety placed him in the calaboose. John called for his pipe and his opium bag, took a farewell smoke, and then taking his sash, a dirty silk one, from his waist, hung himself with it, with a great deal of difficulty and determination. The Policeman discovered him dead when he went in to give him his regular tea. He was in a kneeling position, from which it may be inferred that he died while saying his prayers to Josh.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 3, 1864
Visitors to the Mechanics' Fair, to-day, should examine carefully the pretty and ingenious Labyrinth Garden, in miniature, gotten up by Mr. Frank Staeglich, and situated near the Floral Tower. It is easy to see your way into it, and the paths are very straight, but to see your way out again is the impossible feature of the thing. Although this garden, with its endless complication of drives and avenues, is only about as large as an ordinary lunch table, the grass plats, flower-beds, and rows of microscopic trees, with which it is luxuriously embellished, are all alive and growing. There are within the garden one hundred and twenty-five perfect trees, from one to three inches high, belonging to many different species of California's lordliest forest monarchs, among which are the giant redwood and several kinds of pines. The long rows of lilliputian shrubs which inclose the garden are vigorous young cedar trees, and there are three thousand of them.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 3, 1864
The child which we mentioned yesterday as having been found asleep in the middle of Folsom street by the Police, and taken to the City Jail, has been called for, collected and carried away by its father. It knew its father in a moment, and we believe that is considered to be a severe test of smartness in a child.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 4, 1864
This sterling literary weekly has changed hands, both in the matter of proprietorship and editorial management. Mr. Webb has sold the paper to Captain Ogden, a gentleman of fine literary attainments, an able writer, and the possessor of a happy bank account—three qualifications which, in the lump, cannot fail to insure the continued success of the Californian. Mr. Frank Brett Hart will assume the editorship of the paper. Some of the most exquisite productions which have appeared in its pages emanated from his pen, and are worthy to take rank among even Dickens' best sketches. Taking all things in consideration, if the Californian dies now, it must be by the same process that resurrected Lazarus, which we are proud to be able to state was a miracle. After faithfully laboring night and day for about four months, and publishing fifteen numbers of the best paper in its particular department ever issued on this coast, Mr. Webb will now go and rest a while on the shores of Lake Tahoe. He has chosen to rest himself by fishing, and he is wise; for the fish in Lake Tahoe are not troublesome; they will let a man rest there till he rots, and never inflict upon him the fatigue of putting on a fresh bait. "Inigo" has our kindest wishes for his present and future happiness, though, rot or no rot.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 4, 1864
The grand feature at the Bay View Park yesterday, was the hurdle race. There were three competitors, and the winner was Wilson's circus horse, "Sam." Sam has lain quiet through all the pacings and trottings and runnings, and consented to be counted out, but this hurdle business was just his strong suit, and he stepped forward promptly when it was proposed. There was a much faster horse (Conflict) in the list, but what is natural talent to cultivation?—Sam was educated in a circus, and understood his business; Conflict would pass him under way, trip and turn a double summerset over the next hurdle, and while he was picking himself up, the accomplished Sam would sail gracefully over the hurdle and slabber past his adversary with the easy indifference of conscious superiority. Conflict made the fastest time, but he fooled away too many summersets on the hurdles. The proverb saith that he that jumpeth fences with ye circus horse will aye come to grief.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 4, 1864
California may branch out and become a great silk manufacturing State some day, when it becomes known that her facilities for doing so are much superior to those of most other lands. Mr. Louis Prevost, of San Jose, who has a lot of silk worm eggs and cocoons on exhibition at the Mechanics' Fair, says that in Europe the greater portion of every crop of silkworms get diseased and die, but in this climate they all live and come to maturity—it is impossible for them to become diseased. He also says that here, it is but little trouble, and requires small care and attention to raise silk worms, and that in his department of labor, one man here can perform the work of eight in Europe, and do it with comparative ease. Mr. Prevost gets no opportunity to manufacture California silks, because the demand for his silkworm eggs is so great from foreign countries, and the prices paid him so liberal, that he finds it more profitable to lay the eggs and ship them off than to keep them and hatch them. As fast as the worms produce them, he sends them to Italy, and comes as near filling all orders from there as he can, at twelve dollars an ounce (containing forty thousand eggs.) He has an order from Mexico, now, for five hundred ounces, but he is unable to fill it. They say that a silkworm ranch is one of the few kinds of property in this world that never fail to pay. Let Californians make a note of it, and act upon it.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 4, 1864
The examination of Simon Lewis, the pawnbroker, charged with exacting usurious interest, was concluded yesterday, in the Police Court. The testimony for the prosecution presents this state of facts: Adolph Warner took a watch, with chain attached, to the shop of the pawnbroker and pledged it for forty dollars, but did not receive the ticket which the law requires pawnbrokers to give in all cases to the person pledging an article, containing a description of the article, number of the pawn, and date of the transaction, signed by the broker. When Warner's wife discovered that he had left the watch with Lewis, without taking a ticket, she went herself for it, and received from the broker two tickets, one for the watch and one for the chain, purporting to evidence two separate loans of twenty dollars each, instead of one entire loan of forty dollars. The law prohibits pawnbrokers from taking a greater amount of interest than four per cent on sums over twenty dollars; but on sums of twenty dollars, and under, they are in the habit of charging ten per cent. The prosecution claims that his was but one loan, but that defendant had bifurcated the pledge so as to reduce the sums to within the limit upon which the high rates are charged, and thus compelled him to pay ten, instead of four per cent. The case looked badly for the pawnbroker; but when his own books were introduced in evidence, with his own clerk to explain them, of course Lewis would be exculpated, at least in the eye of the law; that is to say, he would—and he did—escape through a mere doubt—a doubt in law, but nowhere else. Lewis had the manufacturing of all the record and documentary evidence himself, and he would have been a more stupid knave than is generally to be found among pawn brokers, if he had not made it to suit his side of the case in the event of a future controversy about it. From the contradictory character of the evidence, the Judge could not convict the defendant, but he delivered a short and pointed homily on the subject of honesty, as the best policy, and gave notice that he would be somewhat rigorous in future complaints of that sort.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 4, 1864
A most wretched criminal was brought into the Police Court yesterday morning, on a charge of petty larceny. He stands between three and four feet in his shoes, and has arrived at the age of ten years. His name does not appear on the register, so the world must remain in ignorance of that. He is an orphan who has been provided with a home in a respectable family of this city, and is charged with having taken some chips and sticks from about Dr. Toland's fine new building, which it is supposed he uses in kindling the fires for the family he lives with. The person whose vigilance discovered grounds for suspecting this fatherless and motherless boy of the horrible crime, is a carpenter who works at the building. The county is indebted to him. The little fellow came into Court under a strong guard. He was terrified almost out of his senses, and looked as if he expected the Judge to order his head to be chopped off at once. The matter, if entertained at all, will be heard on Monday, and in the mean time the little boy will anticipate worlds of misery. It is a matter of wonder to some that a deliberate attempt to send an indefinite number of souls to Davy Jones' locker, by one who occupies a prominent position, escapes Judicial scrutiny, while the whole force conservatorial is hot foot in the chase after some little ragged shaver, some fledgling of St. Giles, unkempt and uncared for, who flits from corner to corner, and from hole to hole, as if fleeing from his own shadow. But such persons don't understand conservatorial policy. Let the hoary headed sinners go, they can get no worse, and soon will die off, but look sharply after the young crop. The old trunk will decay after a while and fall before the tempest, but the sapling must be hewn down.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 6, 1864
The large oil painting in the picture store under the Russ House, of the "Blind Fiddler," is the work of a very promising California artist, Mr. William Mulligan, of Healdsburg, formerly of St. Louis, Mo. In the main, both the conception and execution are good, but the latter is faulty in some of the minor details. Dr. Bellows has a smaller picture, however, by the same artist, which betrays the presence of genius of a high order in the hand that limned it. The subject is a dying drummer boy, half sitting, half reclining, upon the battle field, with his body partly propped upon his broken drum, and his left arm hanging languidly over it. Near him lie his cap and his drum-sticks—unheeded, discarded, useless to him forever more. The dash of blood upon his shirt, the dreamy, away-at home look upon the features, the careless, resigned expression of the nerveless arm, tell the story. The colors in the picture are not gaudy enough to suit the popular taste, perhaps, but they represent nature truthfully, which is better. Mr. Mulligan has demonstrated in every work his hands have wrought, that he is an artist of more than common ability, and he deserves a generous encouragement. One or two of his pictures will probably be exhibited at the Mechanics' Fair now being held in this city.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 6, 1864
An amorous old sinner, named John Fine, went to the North Beach bath-house on Sunday for a swim. Owing to the number of pounds he weighed, he was forced to wade—his weight being considerably over several stone he couldn't swim, for who ever heard of stones swimming. In order to make up the deficit of fun, he went to the partition that screens the ladies' department, and peeped through a crevice. Mr. Ills, the proprietor of the establishment, witnessed the untoward scrutiny, and ordered him away; but life's charms riveted Fine to the spot, and he heeded not the Ills, when his person suffered under the weight of another stone. The proprietor sent a projectile which struck him in the face, near the left eye. Astronomically speaking, Fine saw stars, but didn't think it a fine sight. He left at once and prosecuted Ills. Yesterday Mr. Ills was fined five dollars for assault and battery.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 6, 1864
Resident Physician Raymond, Visiting Physician Geary, and Matron Weeks, of the City and County Hospital, were all summarily bundled out of office, last night, by the Board of Supervisors, for alleged official neglect, indifference, indolence, and general "dry rot" produced by long continuance in office, and apparent security in the possession of their places. Notice was given of a motion to reconsider this action, and in the meantime the two doctors and the matron were, by resolution, to retain their offices until their successors were appointed.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 6, 1864
Some witless practical joker made a false entry, a few days ago, on a slate kept at the dead-house for the information of the public, concerning dead bodies found, deaths by accident, etc. The Alta, Bulletin, and Flag, administered a deserved rebuke to the Coroner's understrappers, for permitting the entry to remain there, and pass into the newspapers and mislead the public, and for this reason the slate has been removed from the office. Now it is too late in the day for such men as these to presume to deny to the public, information which belongs to them, and which they have a right to demand, merely to gratify a ridiculous spite against two or three reporters. It is a matter of no consequence to reporters whether the slate is kept there or not; but it is a matter of consequence to the public at large, who are the real injured parties when the newspapers are denied the opportunity of conveying it to them. If the Coroner permits his servants to close the door against reporters, many a man may lose a friend in the Bay, or by assassination, or suicide, and never hear of it, or know anything about it; in that case, the public and their servant, the Coroner, are the victims, not the reporter. Coroner Sheldon needs not to be told that he is a public officer; that his doings, and those of his underlings at the coffin-shop, belong to the people; that the public do not recognize his right or theirs to suppress the transactions of his department of the public service; and, finally, that the people will not see the propriety of the affairs of his office being hidden from them, in order that the small-potato malice of his employees against two or three newspaper reporters may be gratified. Those employees have always shown a strong disinclination to tell a reporter anything about their ghastly share in the Coroner's business, and it was easy to see that they longed for some excuse to abolish that slate. Their motive for such conduct did not concern reporters, but it might interest the public and the Coroner if they would explain it. Those official corpse-planters always put on as many airs as if the public and their master, the Coroner, belonged to them, and they had a right to do as they pleased with both. They told us yesterday that their Coronial affairs should henceforth be a sealed book, and they would give us no information. As if they—a lot of forty-dollar understrappers—had authority to proclaim that the affairs of a public office like the Coroner's should be kept secret from the people, whose minions they are! If the credit of that office suffers from their impertinence, who is the victim, Mr. Sheldon or the reporters? We cannot suffer greatly, for we never succeeded in getting any information out of one of those fellows yet. You see the dead-cart leaving the place, and ask one of them where it is bound, and without looking up from his newspaper, he grunts, lazily, and says, "Stiff," meaning that it is going inquest of the corpse of some poor creature whose earthly troubles are over. You ask one of them a dozen questions calculated to throw more light upon a meagre entry in the slate, and he invariably answers, "Don't know"—as if the grand end and aim of his poor existence was not to know anything, and to come as near accomplishing his mission as his opportunities would permit. They would vote for General Jackson at the "Bodysnatchers' Retreat," but for the misfortune that they "don't know" such a person ever existed. What do you suppose the people would ever know about how their interests were being attended to if the employees in all public offices were such unmitigated ignoramuses as these? One of these fellows said to us yesterday, "We have taken away the slate; we are not going to give you any more information; the reporters have got too sharp—by George, they know more'n we do!" God help the reporter that don't! It is as fervent a prayer as ever welled up from the bottom of our heart. Now, a reporter can start any day, and travel through the whole of the long list of employees in the public offices in this city, and in not a solitary instance will he find any difficulty in getting any information which the public have a right to know, until he arrives at the inquest office of the Coroner. There all knowledge concerning the dead who die in mysterious ways and mysterious places, and who may have friends and relatives near at hand who would give the world and all its wealth for even the poor consolation of knowing their fate, is denied us. Who are the sufferers by this contemptible contumacy—we or the hundred thousand citizens of San Francisco? The responsibility of this state of things rests with the Coroner, and it is only right and just that he should amend it.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 7, 1864
The Ladies' Fair of the Christian Commission will close positively tomorrow evening; to-night and to morrow night there will be a sale or two at auction, but the ladies wish it distinctly understood that there will be no general auction of articles left on hand at the close of the Fair. They consider that when half a dollar may be the means of saving a soldier's life, they have no right to fritter away donations at a sacrifice. They have already reduced prices to cost, and in some instances even below cost, and if the articles cannot be sold at these rates, they will be retained and contributed to swell the resources of the Christian Commission in other portions of the State. They have a stove, a set of furs, several fine cakes, and a few other articles of value, which they are anxious to dispose of before the Fair closes; those who desire to purchase will please make a note of it. About the middle of the Hall, on the east side, Mrs. Alvord has, in a glass case, several bouquets, done in wax by Mrs. Selim Woodworth, wife of the commander of the U.S. ship Narragansett, which are to be given to the lady who polls the largest vote for them; it costs something to vote in that ward, and the money thus collected is to be forwarded directly to the wounded soldiers. The largest of these bouquets is an exquisite work of art and will bear the closest inspection. The silver vases containing the smaller bouquets, were donated by Mrs. Alvord. Near at hand, the last named lady has a rare set of books which she has contributed, and which are also to be voted for, and will be presented to the pastor who shall be in the majority. Pay your poll-tax and deposit your ballot. It has occurred to us just at this moment, that if any of the barefooted Disciples, travelling according to their custom "without purse or scrip," should return to Earth, and happen into the Fair, they couldn't vote, could they? Consequently, it is risky, charging for votes, isn't it? Manifestly.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 7, 1864
EXPLOSION OF THE STEAMER WASHOE'S BOILERS—SUPPOSED KILLED, ONE HUNDRED—WOUNDED AND MISSING, SEVENTY FIVE—SEVERAL SAN FRANCISCANS AMONG THE NUMBER—ATTENTION PAID BY THE SACRAMENTANS TO THE WOUNDED—THE CAUSE OF THE CALAMITY—SCENES AND INCIDENTS—ETC., ETC.
We compile an account of this terrible disaster from dispatches published in the evening papers. The explosion of the boilers of the Washoe took place at ten o'clock, at a point just above the Hog's Back, about ten miles above Rio Vista, on her up-trip on Monday night. One of the boilers collapsed a flue, and, it is said, made a clean sweep aft, going overboard through the stern of the boat. The cause of this dreadful calamity, according to D. M. Anderson, the engineer, (who died at the Sacramento hospital just after he made the statement,) was rotten iron in the boiler. At the time of the explosion there were one hundred and twenty-five pounds pressure on the boiler, with two cocks of solid water. The engine was high pressure. The upper works of the boat aft were completely shattered, some portions of them, with the state rooms being blown overboard. The boat had passed the Hog's Back about four or five minutes before the explosion. She was about twenty yards off the left bank at the time, and the whole steering gear being destroyed, she took a sheer and ran ashore, her bow providentially touching a tree, to which those not injured fastened the boat. Had she not run ashore, almost everybody on board would have been lost, as they could not steer the wreck, and they had no boats, the steamer sinking gradually astern. The boat was set on fire in three places, which added to the horror of the scene. The fire, however, was put out by the few who were uninjured. The Chrysopolis was a long way ahead, and knew nothing of the matter. The Antelope being behind, came up and took off the wounded and a large number of the dead, and brought the first news of the sad affair to Sacramento.
MEASURES FOR RELIEF OF THE WOUNDED, AND TAKING OFF THE DEAD.
On the arrival of the Antelope at Sacramento, about half-past five o'clock yesterday morning, with the terrible news, the alarm-bells of the city were rung, and the Howard Association turned out to attend to the wounded the steamer had brought up. The scene for the three hours that elapsed before the Antelope reached the steamer Washoe is described as most horrible. All who were alive had been taken ashore, but there was no shelter for them. Those of the wounded who were able to move sought shelter in the sand and brush, groaning and screaming with pain. One man, who was scalded from head to foot, got ashore, and in a nude state stood and screamed for help, but would not allow any covering to be put on him. A woman in a similar condition was brought up on the Antelope. The steamer carried only the wounded to Sacramento. A large number of the slightly wounded, who could walk or ride, were taken to the rooms of the Howard Association. The Association hired the Vernon House for a hospital for the sufferers. On board of the Antelope the scene was a most dreadful one. Her entire upper cabin, with the exception of the passage-ways, was covered with mattresses, on which the injured were lying, sixty-three in number. Others were in the ladies' cabin, and still others in the dining-room. Four are reported to have died on the way up, and at the time of landing others were gasping their last on the levee. At the Vernon House the Howard Association have a large number of members, who, with a large force of ladies, are doing all that can be done for the sufferers. The Association also has a committee out collecting, who have so far met with good success. Immediately on the arrival of the Antelope, the steamer Visalia fired up and went down to the wreck to bring the bodies of the dead left there by the A., and also such others as may be recovered while she is there.
[approximately 1,200 words listing dead and wounded has been omitted.]
Flags were at half mast yesterday, on the Masonic Temple and most of the engine houses, and on a number of private buildings in Sacramento. The entire medical fraternity were in attendance on the sufferers, as well as the clergy of all denominations.
The opinion is now that the total dead will exceed ninety, if not one hundred.
Too much praise cannot be awarded the members of the Howard Association, who almost to a man were engaged in behalf of the sufferers after the arrival of the Antelope. A large number of ladies were in constant attendance also at the Vernon House, doing all that they could do to alleviate pain. The collections in Sacramento have been quite liberal.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 8, 1864
The regular semi-monthly earthquake arrived at ten minutes to ten o'clock, yesterday morning. Thirty six hours ahead of time. It is supposed it was sent earlier, to shake up the Democratic State Convention, but if this was the case, the calculation was awkwardly made, for it fell short by about two hours. The Convention did not meet until noon. Either the earthquake or the Convention, or both combined, made the atmosphere mighty dense and sulphurous all day. If it was the Democrats alone, they do not smell good, and it certainly cannot be healthy to have them around.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 8, 1864
The ladies should examine some of those rare specimens of embroidery on exhibition at the Mechanics' Fair. Among the finest is a tapestry picture of a royal party in a barge—names "unbeknowns" to us—by W. S. Canan, of Healdsburgh; a large portrait of G. Washington, by Mrs. Chapman Yates, of San Jose; and a cat and a pile of kittens, by Mrs. Juliana Bayer. We do not like the expression of the old cat's countenance, but the kittens are faultless—especially the blind brown one on the right. So perfectly true to nature are those young cats, that it is easy to see that every school-boy who comes along is seized with an earnest desire to drown them.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 8, 1864
Captain Kidd, of the ill-fated steamer Washoe, has been accused, according to telegraphic reports from Sacramento, of ungenerous and unfeeling conduct, in remaining with the wreck of his boat after the explosion, instead of accompanying the maimed and dying sufferers by the catastrophe to Sacramento. In defence of himself, he says he was satisfied that the wounded would be as well and kindly cared for on the Antelope as if he were present himself, and that he thought the most humane course for him to pursue would be to stay behind with some of his men and search among the ruins of his boat for helpless victims, and rescue them before they became submerged by the gradually sinking vessel; he believed some of the scalded and frantic victims had wandered into the woods, and he wished to find them also. He says that his course was prompted by no selfish or heartless motive, but he acted as his conscience told him was for the best. We heartily believe it, and we should be sorry to believe less of any man with a human soul in his body. His search resulted in the finding of five corpses after the Antelope left, and these he sent up on the small steamer which visited the wreck on the following day. However, he need not distress himself about the strictures of a few thoughtless men, for that class of people would have blamed him just as cordially no matter what course he had pursued. Whether one or more flues collapsed, or whether one or more boilers exploded, or whether the cause of the accident was that too much steam was being carried, or that the iron was defective or the workmanship bad, are all questions which must remain unsolved until the Washoe is raised. At present, and so far as anything that is actually known about the matter goes, one of these conjectures is just as plausible as another. Captain Kidd thinks the cause lay in the inefficient workmanship of the boilermakers. The surviving engineer says he looked at the steam-gauge scarcely two minutes before the explosion, and it indicated 114 pounds to the square inch (she was allowed to carry 140;) he tried the steam cocks at the same time, and found two of them full of water. The boat carried 120 to 125 pounds of steam from San Francisco to Benicia, and from here to where the accident occurred, it was customary to carry less, as the water grew shoaler, because, as every boatman knows, a steamer cannot make as good time, or steer as well, in shoal water with a full head of steam as she can with less; from Rio Vista to Freeport, it was customary to carry about 110, and above Freeport about 70 pounds of steam. The Chrysopolis was far ahead, and had not been seen for more than half an hour; and since the last collision Captain Kidd had given orders that the Washoe should be kept behind the line boats and out of danger; he was making no effort to gain upon the Chrysopolis, and had no expectation of seeing her again below Sacramento. Gass & Lombard, of Sacramento, contracted to build boilers for the Washoe which would stand a pressure of 225 pounds, and secure the inspector's permission to carry 150; Captain Kidd appointed Mr. Foster, one of the best engineers on the coast, to stay at the boiler works and personally superintend the work. The workmanship was bad; the boilers leaked in streams around the flues, and the Inspector would only allow a certificate for 113 pounds of steam. The boat made seven trips, but the leaks did not close up, as was expected. Gass & Lombard then contracted with boiler makers here to take out the flues and make the boilers over again, so that they would stand 140 pounds—Captain Kidd relinquishing 10 pounds from the original contract. It was done, at a cost of $7,000—about what a new set would have cost—and after a cold water test of 210 pounds, the Inspector cheerfully gave permission to carry 140. With a margin like this, the boilers could hardly have exploded under a pressure of 114 pounds unless the workmanship was in some sort defective, or the severe test applied by the Inspector had overstrained the boilers; or unless, perhaps, a rivet or so might have been started on some previous trip, under a heavier head of steam, and this source of weakness had increased in magnitude until it finally culminated in a general let-go under a smaller head of steam. The sinking of the boat is attributed to the breaking off of the feed pipes which supply the boilers with water, and which extend through the bottom of the boat; and as the wreck settled and careened, a larger volume of water poured in through the open ash ports forward of the fire doors. The boat sank very gradually, and had not settled entirely until nearly three hours had elapsed. But as we said in the first place, the real cause of this dreadful calamity cannot be ascertained until the wreck is raised and the machinery exposed to view. Captain Kidd leaves to-day with the necessary apparatus for raising his boat, and Mr. Owens, who built her, will accompany him and superintend the work. It will be several months, however, before the Washoe will be in a condition to resume her trips. Captain Kidd says he would raise the boat, anyhow, to satisfy himself as to the cause of the accident, even if he never meant to run her again. Capt. Kidd feels the late calamity as deeply as anyone could, and as anyone not utterly heartless, must. That his impulses are kind and generous all will acknowledge who remember that he kept his boat running night and day, in time of the flood, and brought to this city hundreds of sufferers by that misfortune, without one cent of charge for passage, beds or food.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 8, 1864
C. L. Weller, Chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee, called the Convention to order yesterday noon, at Turn-Verein Hall. He observed, in the opening speech, that it was the most important Democratic Convention which had met since the adoption of the Federal Constitution, inasmuch as upon it would devolve to decide whether our liberties were to be preserved or destroyed. Beriah Brown was chosen temporary Chairman, and temporary Secretaries and a Sergeant-at-Arms were also appointed. A Committee on Credentials was appointed, consisting of one Delegate from each county. A Committee on Permanent Organization was chosen in the same manner. The Convention then adjourned until three P.M.
Afternoon Session.—As soon as the Convention met, the work of forming the Committees on Credentials and Permanent Organization was begun, when the discovery was shortly made that Chas. L. Weller and Beriah Brown held proxies for the San Diego and Shasta delegations respectively. This riled Coffroth, of Sacramento, and expelled from his system a two hours' speech which had probably been festering there all day, on account of the evident disposition of the San Francisco delegation to rule the roost. He gave it to them hot and strong, and accused them of gobbling up everything else they could get their hands on. He was bitter on the San Francisco boys. Weller replied that he did not conceive himself guilty of any very heinous crime, in being the recipient of a proxy, and reminded the Convention, in a general way, that he had always been a good and consistent Democrat, and had suffered martyrdom for the cause. Coffroth hit him back; said he was ready to bring flowers and lay them at the feet of any who had actually suffered martyrdom, and then ungenerously insinuated that he "didn't see it." He couldn't recognize a martyr in a man whose misfortunes were all aces in a deal for a Congressional nomination, perhaps. So the afternoon was wasted in wrangling, and actual work cannot begin in the Convention until to-day. Downey, Weller and McKewen are the most prominent aspirants for the nomination in this District, and Coffroth in the Middle District, as we are informed by a chaste and reliable Copperhead. The permanent officers of the Convention are as follows: Chairman, J. W. Mandeville, of Tuolumne; Secretaries, John D. Goodwin, of Plumas, T. L. Thompson, of Sonoma, and Barclay Henley, of San Francisco. A Committee on Resolutions, consisting of five members, was appointed. They are to report to-day.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 9, 1864
We would call the attention of all persons interested in mines and mining machinery, to several bars of copper and galena, which are exposed to view on a table in front of the hot-air engine in the Mechanics' Fair. The bar modestly marked "galena," contains more silver than anything else, and was smelted from ordinary ore in Mrs. Hall's famous smelting furnace, by her daughter. The time occupied by the young lady in the production of this bar was only twenty minutes, and the materials used were a bushel of ore and a bushel of charcoal. By this process every particle of metal can be extracted from ore and saved, in less time and at smaller expense than the same ore could be roasted preparatory to crushing in a quartz mill. Copper ore can be reduced with the same facility and at the same slight expense. The furnace is a combination of principles long known to the votaries of science, but the "Condenser" attached to it is an entirely new invention, and the credit of originating it belongs to Mrs. Hall alone. It is a large drum, which sits upon the flue of the furnace, and into which all the smoke passes; a shower bath from above thoroughly washes this smoke, and the metallic particles which would otherwise float away upon the atmosphere are thus arrested and precipitated to the bottom of the drum. By this means, all the metal in the ore is saved, which is an achievement not hitherto compassed by any of our reduction machinery. Mrs. Hall's invention has been patented, and in a letter from the Department at Washington she was assured that there was no piece of mechanism gotten up for similar purposes, in the Patent Office, which could at all compete with this invention of hers. Let all who have the mining interest of California at heart, bestow upon Mrs. Hall's smelting apparatus the attention its importance deserves.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 9, 1864
Messrs. Barry & Patten collected over a hundred dollars yesterday, at their saloon in Montgomery street, for the sufferers by the explosion on the steamer Washoe. It will be forwarded to the officers of the Howard Association at Sacramento. An earnest and extended movement in this direction would produce enough money in a single day to secure to those poor flayed and mangled creatures every comfort and attention they may stand in need of, and it is proper that Sacramento should be liberally assisted in her humane work of ministering to their wants. Who will set the ball in motion? We have seen twenty thousand dollars collected in a short time in the noble little city of Memphis, Tennessee, for a similar purpose, years ago. If money is wanted by the unfortunates now suffering at Sacramento, San Francisco will respond promptly and with a will.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 9, 1864
That a thing cannot be all black and all white at the same time, is as self evident as that two objects can not occupy the same space at the same time, and when a man makes a statement under the solemn sanction of an oath, the implication is that what he utters is a fact, the verity of which is not to be questioned. Notwithstanding witnesses are so often warned of the nature of an oath, and the consequences of perjury, yet it is a daily occurrence in the Police Court for men and women to mount the witness stand and swear to statements diametrically opposite. Swearing positively—leaving mere impressions out of the question—on the one hand that the horse was as black as night, and on the other that he was white as the driven snow. Two men have a fight, and a prosecution for assault and battery ensues. Each party comes up prepared to prove respectively and positively the guilt and innocence of the party accused. A swears point blank that B chased him a square and knocked him down, and exhibits wounds and blood to corroborate his statements. B brings a witness or two who saw the whole affair, from probably a distant standpoint, and he testifies that nothing connected with the fight could have escaped his observation, and that it was A who chased B a square and knocked him down, and between these two solemn statements the Court has to decide. How can he do it. It is an impossibility, and thus many a culprit escapes punishment. There was a case in point Tuesday morning. A German named Rosenbaum prosecuted another German named Levy, for running into his wagon and breaking an axletree. He swore that he kept as far over to the right hand side of the street as a hole in the planking would permit, stopped his wagon when he saw the impending collision, and warned Levy off. Notwithstanding, Levy drove his vehicle against his wheel, breaking the axle, so as to require a new one which would cost twenty-five dollars. He stated also that Levy had been trying to injure him in that way for a long while. Levy brought a witness who swore that between Rosenbaum's wagon and the hole in the street, there was room for a wagon or two to pass; that Rosenbaum challenged the collision, and that it was unavoidable on the part of Levy; that instead of stopping his wagon, the prosecuting witness drove ahead at a trot until the wagons became entangled, and that no damage whatever was done to Rosenbaum. On the whole, that instead of Levy running into Rosenbaum's wagon, Rosenbaum intentionally brought about the collision for the purpose of recovering damages off of Levy. The case was stronger than we have stated it, and the Judge could do nothing but dismiss the matter. That there was perjury on one side, was apparent. Yet this is but the history of one-half the cases that are adjudicated in the Police Court. There should be examples made of some of these reckless swearers. It would probably have a wholesome effect.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 9, 1864
DEMOCRATIC RATIFICATION MEETING
Several hundred men and boys of all political colors, were gathered at the Plaza last evening to see the sky rockets, look at the pictures and hear the music and speeches. It was expected, of course, that all the apostles and prophets, saints and martyrs of the peace makers and the Constitution preservers would display themselves, no matter how diverse in their different shades of Democratic conservatism, as the exponents of the party that is now vaunting its determination to wreak a terrible retribution on the members and supporters of the present Administration, under the leadership of George B. McClellan. While the speakers were concentrating their thoughts for the grand effort before them, the lights were suddenly extinguished and darkness became visible. The accident was ominous. Soon, however, all was ablaze again, and the work of the evening begun. Colonel Hayne was chosen to preside over the meeting. A very moderate and carefully guarded inaugural embodied his appreciation of the honor thus conferred on him, and his views in regard to the conduct and results of the forthcoming campaign. He had always been a Democrat and a thorough Union man, opposed to dismemberment under any circumstances whatever. He defined the policy of the Democratic party, and expressed his belief that the salvation of the country lay through the Democratic party. Colonel H. was disposed to be charitable towards his opponents, and, on the whole, showed that parental solicitude and the good example of Republican politicians have not been entirely lost on him. After the Chairman had closed his remarks, the Hon. H. P. Barbour of Tuolumne was presented to the meeting. He spoke of the humiliation of the party, during the while past, but congratulated himself and his audience that the genius of civil liberty had rolled away the stone from the tomb, and the Democratic party had come forth. He abhorred the man whose argument is vituperation and epithets in a political discussion. He challenged an impeachment of his Unionism or his patriotism; deprecated this fratricidal war; arraigned the Administration for nullification and negro equality; pointed to a Democratic Administration as the only hope for the restoration of the unity of the nation and the Government; declared his confidence in the issue of the campaign, and exhorted the party to unity of action, asking no quarter, but to fight under the motto of "victory or death." He considered himself better than a negro any day.
Mr. Doyle, one of the Electors for the State at large, delivered a short address. His effort was rather feeble, characterized by moderation entirely unnatural to Democratic speakers. The whole substance of his speech was, that after trying Mr. Lincoln's Administration for three and a half years, the nation were satisfied that to continue it would only be to sink the country inextricably in ruin. A man is needed at the head of affairs who combines the elements of civilian and soldier; who knows exactly the right thing to do and the right time to do it in. McClellan is the man. The mind of the speaker lit for a moment on the Monroe Doctrine, and finally eliminated through his organs of speech in feeble tones, the expression of a desire to vote for a competent man.
Mr. Wm. T. Coleman responded to a call in a speech made up of a little glorification, followed by the usual expressions of confidence in the result of the party, vindicating his own loyalty, and pointing to McClellan as the man who is to restore our primal fraternity. Mr. C. said he was not a sycophantic Peace man—a clamorer for peace on any terms, whatever. He wanted to see a pacification between the States as speedily as possible, but one based only upon honorable terms.
After Mr. Coleman closed, a Mr. Hamilton was introduced, and was the first speaker of the evening to cross the bounds of moderation. Before he exhibited his positive sympathy for the South, we had begun to think that the discreet caution or sober temper of the declaimers would afford but such slight grounds for criticism, beyond their usual arrogations, and their reflections upon the war policy of the Administration. We have not space to give even an epitomized report of any of the speeches, but suffice it to say that Hamilton with the growing vehemence of his nervous temperament, declaimed immoderately against the Administration; asked the people if they were prepared to respond to its bloody mandates; declared that but for the fact that they saw relief in an approaching election day, the opponents of the Administration would have resisted with blood, and that those who attempted to carry out its measures would long ere this have been in their graves. The speaker grew more virulent as he progressed, and sounds of dissatisfaction were heard from different persons on the stand. His speech was not well received. Hamilton has certainly mistaken his party—he can't vote for McClellan; he'd better go and get a situation in Jeff. Davis' cabinet. His speech was the regular old stereotyped Radical Copperhead tirade—not even excepting the attack on ministers of the gospel.
In appropriate order, followed next C. L. Weller. His first remark was a fling at General McDowell, referring to Bull Run. He is troubled with Alcatraz on the brain. He inflicted upon his hearers that exaggerated woe of his morbid imagination, which he glories in parading on every possible occasion, and with which he ardently hopes to create a current of sympathy and devotion which will carry him irresistibly to high political preferment.
We left Mr. Weller alternating between General McDowell and the Chicago nominee. His chief idea in approving the nomination of General McClellan seemed to be that he could now rant, vituperate and administer such counsel as he saw fit, and yet vindicate his loyalty by drawing on General McClellan's well known patriotism and constancy to the Union.
During one stage of the meeting, two speakers divided the attention of the crowd. W. D. Sawyer, Esq., had been called upon by some who were too remote to hear the speakers on the stand, and he addressed them from the west side of the Plaza.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 10, 1864
RACE FOR THE OCCIDENTAL HOTEL PREMIUM
The best trotting race of the season came off at Bay View Park yesterday afternoon, for the Occidental Hotel premium of three hundred dollars. The competitors for it were a stallion "Kentucky Hunter," entered by H. Fish; gr. stallion "Captain Hanford," entered by Charles H. Shear; and a stallion "George M. Patchen, Jr.," entered by W. Hendrickson. These are set down in the bills as the three fastest stallions on this Coast. On the first heat "Hunter" came in a length ahead of "Patchen," and "Hanford" brought up the rear. Time, 2:38. The next heat was as closely contested as the first; "Patchen" was first, and "Hunter" and "Hanford" neck-and-neck to within two hundred yards of the Judges' stand, when "Hunter" roused himself and dashed up to the score a couple of lengths ahead of "Patchen." However, it was pronounced a dead heat, because "Hunter" had broken into a run once or twice in going around the track. Time, 2:411/2. "Hanford" led for a considerable portion of the last half mile, and all thought he would win the heat. The second heat proper was a handsome race, and was won by "Hunter," again. Time, 2:43. "Hanford" came out third best. "Hunter" won the third heat also, leading "Patchen" about two lengths. Time, 2 :40. The first premium, of two hundred and fifty dollars, was awarded to "Kentucky Hunter," and the second, of fifty dollars, to "George M. Patchen." There was a large crowd present, and the race created unusual interest; considerable money changed hands, but we did not bring any of it away. Previous to the Occidental contest, a tandem race came off for a purse of one hundred and twenty-five dollars, mile heats, best 3 in 5. "Spot" and "Latham," driven by Mr. Covey, and "Rainbow" and "Sorrell Charley," driven by Mr. Ferguson, ran. Before the first half mile post was reached, Ferguson's team ran away, and Covey's trotted around leisurely and won the purse. The runaways flew around the race track three or four times, at break neck speed, and fears were entertained that some of this break-neck would finally fall to Ferguson's share, as his strength soon ebbed away, and he no longer attempted to hold his fiery untamed Menkens, but only did what he could to make them stay on the track, and keep them from climbing the fence. Every time they dashed by the excited crowd at the stand, a few frantic attempts would be made to grab them, but with indifferent success; it is no use to snatch at a cannon ball—a man must stand before it if he wants to stop it. One man seized the lead horse, and was whisked under the wheels in an instant. His head was split open a little, but Dr. Woodward stitched the wound together, and the sufferer was able to report for duty in half an hour. Mr. Ferguson's horses should be taught to economize their speed; they wasted enough of it in that one dash, yesterday, to win every race this season, if judiciously distributed among them. The only Christian way to go out to Bay View, is to travel in one of the Occidental coaches, behind four Flora Temples, and with their master-spirit, Porter, on the box, and a crowd inside and out, consisting of moral young men and cocktails. Mr. Leland should be along, to keep the portable hotel. The principal attraction at Bay View to-day will be a ten-mile race, single heat. Four entries have been made—"Fillmore," "Gentleman George," Grissom's mare, and another beast, whose name has escaped our memory. To-morrow the great equestrienne race, for the Russ House premium of silver service, valued at three hundred dollars, will come off. Thirteen ladies have already entered their names for the skirmish.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 10, 1864
The soldier boys, Perry and Rines, in charge of the Sanitary Cheese and Silver Bar, at the Mechanics' Fair, have been presented with several curiosities, which they have added to the greater attractions in their pagoda. One is an ancient tea pot, two hundred, or two thousand years old, or along there, somewhere—at any rate, it is very old—which was given to the boys by a lady in whose family it had been preserved for several generations. Another is a wine-glass which was taken from one of the ships in Boston harbor just after our exasperated forefathers had thrown her cargo of tea overboard. The young lady who presented this relic, received it from her grandfather, who took it from the vessel with his own hands. And still another is an old half dollar, made in the second die ever cast in America. It was presented to Rines, and he has given it to the Sanitary Fund, and has it on exhibition. It is worth twenty-five cents to see the Sanitary cheese and the other curiosities, but it is worth double the money to hear the orator, Rines, deliver his spirited and entertaining discourse concerning them. The man who exhibits the lions and tigers in the menagerie isn't a circumstance to him. We could print an extract or so from his speech, but we do not think it would be exactly fair to spoil its attractiveness in this way. Go and hear it yourself. A lady gave a dollar, a day or two ago, for the privilege of lifting the silver bar, but she miscalculated her strength somewhat, and failed to carry out her design. The bar weighs nearly two hundred pounds, and her lifting capacity wouldn't reach. The privilege is still open, however, to others of the sex.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 10, 1864
Mr. O. C. Wheeler, Secretary of the California Branch of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, has furnished us a neat little volume entitled "The Philanthropic Results of the War in America," from which we learn that since the war began, the American people have not only paid for its prosecution by enormous taxes, but have voluntarily contributed, toward caring for the wounded, etc., the immense sum of $212,274,259.45! That was up to February, 1864; the figure must reach at least $250,000,000 by this time. This was not all given to the Sanitary Fund, of course, but to the hundred different departments of charity created by the war. How much of it came from California? The two hundredth part, say. Only that—and yet ours is one of the greatest States in the Union. Therefore, let her not complain, yet awhile, that the calls upon her in behalf of the Sanitary Fund are too heavy, but rather let her move steadily along, as she is now doing, in her aid to that charity, and continue to do it henceforward as cheerfully as she has done it heretofore. Deposit your spare quarters on the big cheese at the Mechanics' Fair. It is the contribution of two whole hearted brothers, and it is worth twenty-five cents to look upon such a monument of kindly Christian charity. After that cheese has gone the rounds of the States and collected a quarter of a million for the Sanitary Fund, it will be cut up in New York and sold by the slice. What will California bid for the first slice?
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 11, 1864
ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF A DETECTIVE OFFICER
Officer Rose, one of the coolest, shrewdest members of the detective force, was dispatched to Belmont, on the San Jose Railroad, by Chief Burke, on Friday morning, to arrest a suspected criminal named James Charles Mortimer, reported to be in hiding there; he was to find satisfactory proofs of the man's guilt, first, and then make the arrest; (his crime is to be kept a secret, as yet.) Arrived at Belmont, Rose got the proofs that he wanted, from a woman with whom Mortimer had been living, and from her he also obtained a clue of his hiding place, and captured his man. He then went to Santa Clara with his prisoner, in search of further evidence, and the two repaired to a secluded spot a mile and a half from the town, at nine o'clock on Friday night, to get some stolen property which Mortimer said he had buried there. The prisoner watched his opportunity while the officer's back was turned for a moment, or while he was digging for the hidden treasure, and knocked him down by striking him in the back of the head with a stone; he then took the officer's knife from his pocket and cut his throat with it, severing the windpipe half in two; next he thrust the blade into his throat and twisted it round; then, to make the murder sure, he took Rose's revolver and struck him across the forehead with it, inflicting a ghastly wound. Considering his victim finished by this time, he returned to Santa Clara, rifled the officer's valise, paid for a check through to San Francisco on the freight train, but jumped off the cars near Belmont Station, while they were running slowly, and has not since been heard of. Rose lay insensible for some time, but woke up at last, stunned and confused by the blows he had received, and feeble from his loss of blood, and in this condition he crawled a long distance, and finally reached the house of a Mr. Trenneth, about midnight, where he was properly cared for, and from whence he was removed to Santa Clara yesterday. It was at first supposed he could not survive his injuries, but he grew better rapidly and constantly, and now no fears are entertained that he will die. A man of his nerve and resolution requires more than one fatal wound to kill him. He was brought home to the city on the evening train yesterday. This man Mortimer (he has a dozen aliases,) half murdered a man named Conrad Pfister, in Dupont street, one night, and robbed him of nearly a thousand dollars, and for this highway robbery and attempted assassination our lenient Court of Assizes, as usual, only gave him a year in the State Prison. For the same offence, in the interior of the State, he would have gotten years at least, and been considered a favorite of Fortune at that. But you seldom find a longer sentence than one or two years on our Assize records. Mortimer is one of the worst men known to the Police. He paid his fare to San Mateo, in the morning train, about six weeks ago and then tried to slip by and go on to Belmont, but was detected by Mr. Nolan, the conductor, who put him ashore, and had a rough time accomplishing it. Mortimer swore he would remember the treatment he had received, and kill Nolan for it the first opportunity he got. Charles James Mortimer's photograph is No. 64 in the Rogue's Gallery at the office of the Chief of Police, and the countenance is not a prepossessing one. Accompanying the picture is this description of him, written some time ago: "Native of Maine; occupation, farmer; age, 23 years and 6 months; height, 5 feet 6 inches; weight, 160 pounds; hair, light; eyes, blue; complexion, light; full face, red cheeks, good looking; has a crucifix, with lighted candles, three pierced with arrows, on his right fore arm, printed in red and black ink, and on his left arm the letters C. J. M.; also, on one arm, the name of Flinn." Captain Lees, and a posse of Policemen, were sent down to Belmont by special train, yesterday, and have scattered in different directions in search of the missing criminal. He will be captured, if it takes the department ten years to accomplish it.
Since the above was in type, Mr. Rose has made the following statement: He was walking along with Mortimer, halfway between San Jose and Santa Clara, on the way to the buried property, when the prisoner suddenly jumped to one side, seized a stone and knocked him down with it, as above stated, and stabbed him in the neck, swearing he would "finish" him. Thinking him "finished," he went away, but returned in the course of ten minutes, to satisfy himself. Standing behind Rose, as he lay on the ground, he exclaimed, in a disguised voice, "Hallo, my friend, what are you doing there? Anything the matter? If you're ailing, my farm-house is close by." The stratagem was successful; Rose was deceived, and raised his head, when the fellow remarked, "Oh, so you're not dead yet! I was afraid so; you've hunted me out, my man, and you can't live"—and he drew Rose's revolver and struck him three powerful blows, two back of the left ear, one on top of the head, and several about the forehead. Before taking his final farewell of his victim, Mortimer robbed him of his knife, revolver, and forty dollars in money. Chief Burke wishes us to extend his warmest thanks to the citizens living near the scene of the outrage, for the assistance rendered by them to Officer Rose, and especially to the members of Mr. Trenneth's family, who sat up with the wounded man all night, and did everything they could for his relief, and furnished him with blankets and bedding to use during his transportation on the cars; also, to Conductor Nolan and other officers of the Railroad, for their kindness in making every arrangement in their power for Mr. Rose's comfort, on his passage to the city. Rose was doing only tolerably well at last accounts, and was flighty at intervals.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 13, 1864
SAD ACCIDENT—DEATH OF JEROME RICE
On Wednesday evening last, while Jerome Rice, the well-known auctioneer, of this city, and Rowland B. Gardner, one of his clerks, were on their way to the Warm Springs, near Santa Clara, they lost their way in the hills north of Vallejo Mills, and the night being somewhat dark, they drove over an embankment twenty feet high. Mr. Rice fell upon his head, and the force of the concussion crushed in the base of his skull and fractured his collar bone, a fragment of which pierced one of his lungs. Mr. Gardner's left thigh was broken, and his body considerably bruised. Mr. Rice groaned in pain and muttered incoherent words at intervals, but was never conscious up to the hour of his death, which occurred at two o'clock yesterday morning, nearly three days and a half after the accident. All Wednesday night, and all Thursday and Thursday night, through the blistering sun, and the cold, benumbing air of evening, the two men lay side by side and suffered inconceivable tortures from hunger and burning thirst and the sharp pain of their stiffening wounds; and Gardner spent the lonely hours in calling for the help that never came, for himself and his insensible companion, until he could no longer speak for hoarseness and exhaustion. Think of the raging fires in a throat subjected to such exercise as this, when no water had moistened it for a day and two nights! On Friday morning Mr. Gardner began his terrible journey in search of assistance, and for two days and nights, without food or water, he crawled backwards, by the aid of his hands, in a half sitting, half reclining posture, and dragging his broken leg. Every movement must have caused him exquisite agony; the anguish of such a march cannot even be imagined. And the distance accomplished in those forty-eight hours of suffering was only half a mile. On Sunday morning he reached the vicinity of a field and attracted the attention of a man at work in it, and the two unfortunate men were soon conveyed to a neighboring house, and kindly cared for. When they went after Mr. Rice, one of the carriage horses had long since wandered away; but "Roanoke," an old favorite and the property of Mr. Rice, was found keeping faithful watch over his prostrate master, and gazing upon his face. The noble brute had never deserted his post for three days and a half—hunger and thirst had failed to drive him from his allegiance. If at any time, during the two days his comrade was absent from his side, the unfortunate man awoke from his delirium and realized that he was desolate and alone, and far from human help, it must have been some relief to his tortured mind, in that fleeting moment of consciousness—some balm to his aching wounds, some sense of friendly companionship to him in his loneliness—to see the eyes of his faithful horse looking down into his own, in mute sympathy for his distress. Mr. Rice's head, face and body were swollen in an extraordinary degree, and blackened and blistered by the fervent heat of the sun. After lingering in misery for so many hours, death at last put an end to his sufferings at two o'clock yesterday morning. His wife and family, who have been enduring for four years all the privations and misfortunes that war could entail upon them in a section of Texas desolated alternately by both contending parties, and whom he had not seen and scarcely ever heard from during that time, will arrive here from Boston, (to which port they lately escaped,) day after to-morrow, on the steamer Golden City. After the long separation and the hardships that have fallen to their life, it is cruel now to dash down the cup of happiness when it had almost touched their very lips. Who, among all the brave men that shall read this sad chapter of disasters, could carry, with firm nerve, the bitter tidings to the unsuspecting widow and her orphans, and uncoffin before them a mutilated corpse in place of the loving husband and father they are yearning to embrace? Mr. Gardner is at Centreville, under medical treatment, but the remains of Mr. Rice will be brought to the city and kept until the arrival of the steamer, so that the stricken family may have the sad consolation of looking upon them before they are consigned to the grave.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 13, 1864
The work at the Camanche goes vigorously on, and is being rapidly pushed towards completion. The scattering holes that were left in the bottom of the hull when the bulk of the riveting was done, have now all been reached by moving shores and supporting timbers. The outside tier of timbers running fore and aft, which is to receive the armor, is now put on from the bow back a distance of some forty or fifty feet on each side, and begins to give one a tolerable idea of her great strength and power of resisting the shots of an enemy. Much progress has also been made in the last few days in placing the machinery of the engine, and for turning the turret. The thorough manner in which all the work connected with the Camanche is done must be apparent to anyone who makes frequent visits to it. The vigilant eyes of Mr. Ryan, one of the contractors, who is also the superintendent of the work, are everywhere and see everything. The foremen of the different divisions of the work are indefatigable in their efforts to have the labor performed in the most perfect manner. The receipts at the gates, for the Sanitary Fund, for the week ending Saturday, will reach nearly five hundred dollars. A large number of our citizens visited the Camanche on Sunday.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 15, 1864
There is nothing in the Mechanics' Fair more ingenious or pleasanter to look at than the Skating Pond, and neither is there anything about the Pavilion which is half so hard to find, unless it be the wretched school-boy who stealthily rings Dexter's excellent but distracting door gong, and then melts suddenly away under the neighboring billiard tables, and is seen no more in life. But the Skating Pond is really easy to find when you have intelligent directions by which to guide yourself. From the main entrance, you go straight to the floral tower, and glance off at an angle of forty-five degrees to the left and forwards; preserve the direction thus secured until you reach the wall of the building, and your object is attained. The Skating Pond sits on a table in a neat parlor, and if you would have one like it, you should line the inside of a wash-tub with mirrors, have the bottom peopled with male and female dolls in skating attitude, and arrange it so that it will turn around rapidly; you will observe that the little figures will be multiplied in the mirrors into countless multitudes of hurrying and skurrying skaters, growing smaller and smaller and more and more crowded together, as far as the eye can reach into the limitless distance; and if your dolls are dressed in as perfect good taste, and appropriate colors, and are arranged in as faultless skating postures as are these of which we are speaking, you cannot fail to be delighted with the liveliness, the unlimited variety and the magnificence of the scene, and if you are anything of a skater yourself, you must infallibly become inoculated with the dash and spirit and rushing excitement of it. Put your eyes down to the rim of the tub (this one is handsome enough for a drawing room,) and look far away into the mirrors, and you may see thousands and thousands of men and women swiftly passing and repassing each other, over a stretching sea of ice that apparently has no more limit than space itself. It is a beautiful work of art, and the more one looks at it the more he is pleased with it. Mrs. Nathaniel Holland, the lady who has charge of it, invented and constructed it herself.
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 15, 1864
They do say that when rogues fall out, honest men get their dues. Messrs. Vogel and Isaacs, of the County Hospital, have fallen out. The seeming insinuation in the remark is the fruit solely of unworthy suspicion in the prejudiced mind of the reader. Isadore Isaacs, who for years has had the lucrative job of repairing all the windows that chanced to get broken in the Hospital, a day or two ago procured the arrest of Vogel, an employee of his, for using improper language to Mrs. Isaacs. Vogel said at the time, that if the charge against him was prosecuted, he would retaliate upon Isaacs and others connected with the Hospital by throwing open to the public gaze such a three years' history of corruption and swindling in that institution as would set San Francisco dizzy with amazement. To make his threat good, he went yesterday to Officer Lindheimer and Detective Officer Watkin, and complained that for the past three years his boss, Isaacs, had been in the constant habit of charging in his bills against the County, double and treble the amount of glass actually put into the Hospital windows by him, and that he did it with the Resident Physician, Dr. Raymond's, connivance and consent, and that when the Doctor heard of Vogel's threatened expose he offered him twenty dollars to keep quiet. Vogel says that whenever Isaacs put in ten panes of glass, he always charged the City for thirty; for thirty panes, he charged seventy five, or such a matter, in his bills, and so on and so forth; thus managing, by naturally quick talents and close attention to business, to make a good thing out of an unpromising contract, with no capital save a gift in the way of slinging a multiplication table which amounted almost to inspiration. Mr. Vogel says he will prove that in three years the officers of the Hospital paid Isaacs thirteen hundred dollars for repaired windows, but he does not know how much the City and County paid to those officers in the same time for the same work—a remark of Mr. Vogel's which savors of an insinuation. According to a judgment of men and their manners under circumstances where crime and their direct or indirect implication in it is concerned, sharpened by his long experience as a detective, Officer Watkin is satisfied that Vogel knows a vast deal about the hidden mysteries of the conduct of the Hospital, but he seems in doubt about the policy of unveiling them all in a heap. Upon the complaint made by Vogel, Chief Burke had Isaacs arrested, and upon the examination of the case to-day, comprehensive developments may be looked for. Considering the important nature of the case, however, Judge Shepheard should not have allowed Isaacs his liberty on fifty or sixty dollars' worth of green-backs—one hundred and fifty dollars in shinplasters. Now, how much credence is to be given to the statements of Vogel, who is smarting under a sense of injury, we are not prepared to say; but at the same time, if there are two departments of service in the Hospital that are not the subject of suspicion in the minds of taxpayers, we do not know it.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 15, 1864
San Francisco beats the world for novelties; but the inventive faculties of her people are exercised on a specialty. We don't care much about creating things other countries can supply us with. We have on hand a vast quantity of a certain kind of material and we must work it up, and we do work it up often to an alarming pitch. Controversy is our forte. Californians can raise more legal questions and do the wager of combat in more ways than have been eliminated from the arcana of civil and military jurisprudence since Justinian wrote or Agamemnon fought. Suits—why we haven't names for half of them. A man has a spite at his neighbor—and what man or man's wife hasn't—and he forthwith prosecutes him in the Police Court, for having onions for breakfast, under some ordinance or statutory provision having about as much relation to the case as the title page of Webster's Dictionary. And then, there's an array of witnesses who are well posted in everything else except the matter in controversy. And indefatigable attorneys enlighten the Court by drawing from the witnesses the whole detailed history of the last century. And then again we are in doubt about some little matter of personal or public convenience, and slap goes somebody into Court under duress of a warrant. If we want to determine the age of a child who has grown out of our knowledge, we commence a prosecution at once against someone else with children, and elicit from witnesses enough chronological information to fill a whole encyclopedia, to prove that our child of a doubtful age was contemporary with the children of defendant, and thus approximate to the period of nativity sought for. A settlement of mutual accounts is arrived at by a prosecution for obtaining goods or money under false pretenses. Partnership affairs are elucidated in a prosecution for grand larceny. A burglary simply indicates that a creditor called at the house of his debtor the night before market morning, to collect a small bill. We have nothing but a civil code. A portion of our laws are criminal in name only. We have no law for crime. Cut, slosh around with pistols and dirk knives as you will, and the worst that comes of it is a petty charge of carrying concealed weapons; and murder is but an aggravated assault and battery. We go into litigation instinctively, like a young duck goes into the water. A man can't dig a shovel full of sand out of a drift that threatens to overwhelm his property, nor put a fence around his lot that some person has once driven a wagon across, but what he is dragged before some tribunal to answer to a misdemeanor. Personal revenge, or petty jealousies and animosities, or else the pursuit of information under difficulties, keep up a heavy calendar, and the Judge of the Court spends three fourths of his time listening to old women's quarrels, and tales that ought, in many cases, to consign the witnesses themselves to the prison cell, and dismissing prosecutions that are brought without probable cause, nor the shadow of it. A prosecuting people we are, and we are getting no better every day. The census of the city can almost be taken now from the Police Court calendar; and a month's attendance on that institution will give one a familiar acquaintance with more than half of our domestic establishments.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 16, 1864
It is said by those who ought to know, that the law against killing game only suspended operation at midnight on Wednesday, yet there were quails for breakfast at the Occidental at six o'clock the next morning. The man who brought those birds to town will wear himself out, some time or other, in getting up at such unseasonable hours of the night to take advantage of an outgoing law. It would be wrong to suspect him of having captured the quails the day before.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 16, 1864
A Chinese merchant of this city has left a superb Chinese lantern at the Mechanics' Fair, to be sold for the benefit of the Sanitary Fund, and certain young ladies are in the pleasant habit of leaving handsome bouquets on the big cheese daily, to be disposed of for the same charity. By far the most interesting curiosity of all, however, has lately been added to the collection in the Floral Tower. It is a voluminous and very musty old book, printed in London two hundred years ago, in the reign of Charles II., and is rich with the quaint language, spelling, and typography of the olden time. It is a "Chronicle" of the Kings of England, and is carried down to the year 1664, the second of Charles' reign. The chapter which gives the names of the members of the High Commission before which Charles I. was tried and condemned to death, is racy with comments upon the bad character, the ignominious pursuits, and the former social obscurity of those gentlemen, and must have occasioned great discomfort to such of them as were still living at the time of its publication. During the trial of the friendless monarch, "his staff fell to the floor, and seeing that none moved to take it up, he put forth his hand and took it up himself." The chronicler seemed to feel that no comment was needed there to show the deep humiliation into which the poor King had fallen, and he made none. At another stage of the trial, the head of the King's staff fell off, and a sense of the dreadful omen flitted across the countenances of the superstitious multitude around him. The old book contains the genealogy of the reigning monarch and that of all the nobility of England.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 16, 1864
We gather the following facts concerning this sad event from Chief Burke: At eight o'clock yesterday morning, the daily papers, as usual, were taken to the Doctor before he had risen from bed. After the lapse of half an hour, he was found lying in an insensible condition from the effects of a heavy dose of morphine, which he had swallowed. He had been reading, apparently; the Alta, with his spectacles: lying upon it, was on the bed. Antidotes were administered, and the stomach pump applied, and he rallied enough to show by the intelligence in his eyes that he recognized the persons who stood about him, but he was speechless. In spite of all efforts to expel the poison from his system and annul its effects, he gradually sank until a few minutes past one o'clock in the afternoon, when he died. Ever since his removal from the position of Resident Physician of the County Hospital, by the Board of Supervisors, on last Monday week, Dr. Raymond had been in a state of great mental depression and unhappiness, and during the three days preceding his death he had several times expressed fears that he was going to commit suicide. He told Dr. Nuttall that he was "possessed of a suicidal devil," and gave that gentleman his knife because of a desire he felt to use it upon himself. He refused the Doctor's request that he would remain with him at his house, however. Dr. Raymond also mentioned this yearning to commit suicide to Mr. Pond, at the Hospital, and said, "Keep an eye on me." Dr. Raymond occupied the post of Resident Physician of the City and County Hospital during the past six or seven years; he came here from St. Louis, about ten years ago, and those who knew him best speak highly of his character. He was about fifty years of age.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 16, 1864
The sworn statement, before the proper officer, of Vogel, that his employer, Isaacs, had received $1,300 in three years for repairs to the windows of the County Hospital, does not tally with the Auditor's books, which show bills paid to Dr. Raymond for this purpose amounting to only $80.87. If Vogel really knows of any criminality in the management of the affairs of the Hospital, it should be wrung from him, upon Isaacs' trial, so that if any be guilty, they may be punished, and in order that if he has made false charges, suspicion may be removed from the parties wronged. If his statements are invented simply to gratify a thirst for revenge, the fact should be ferreted out and a stool of repentence provided for him in the State Prison.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 16, 1864
Detective Officer Rose, who a few days ago was beaten and stabbed near Santa Clara, by a prisoner named Mortimer, whom he had arrested, is now entirely out of danger, and will be about the streets again shortly. We are glad it is so, for while rascality is so plenty hereabouts, the city could ill afford to lose so accomplished a detective. Officer Bovee, one of the men sent to track Mortimer through the southern country, has returned without having been able to obtain the slightest clue to his whereabouts.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 17, 1864
We are informed by a member of the Board of Supervisors that the removal of the late Dr. Raymond from the post of Resident Physician of the County Hospital, and which action so preyed upon his mind, was not valid and binding, but on the contrary was void and of no effect, because it was not recommended by the Hospital Committee, from which, according to an unrepealed resolution of the Board, all such motions for removal must emanate.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 17, 1864
THE LATE SUICIDE—CORONER'S INQUEST
An inquest was held last evening at the County Hospital, to inquire into the recent suicide of Dr. Raymond, late Resident Physician of that institution. R. G. Tobin, Esq., Justice of the First Township, officiated as Coroner. A number of witnesses were examined, who entered into a minute detail of everything that had transpired for several days previous to the death of the Doctor, having the slightest bearing on the matter, as to the commission of the rash act. The testimony fully establishes the fact that the Doctor, at the time and for sometime previous, was laboring under a temporary aberration of mind. Our limited space precludes the possibility of giving more than a faithful epitome of the witnesses' statements. Dr. Holman, on the morning of the 10th, received a note informing him that Dr. Raymond was ill, and leaving a message to that effect for Dr. Nuttall, he repaired at once to the Hospital, where he found deceased insensible, and evidently under the effect of morphine. He found it impossible to arouse him. The electrogalvanic battery was applied by Dr. Gerry; an emetic of the sulphate of zinc was administered by Mr. Pond, the apothecary of the Hospital, previous to the arrival of the physician, and an injection was given. Every remedy was used that medical skill could summon, without even appearing to rally him from the comatose condition in which he was at first discovered. The only sign of sensibility seemed to have been indicated when Mr. Pond applied his mouth close to the Doctor's ear, and called him in a loud voice. Dr. R. opened his eyes for a moment, and fixed them on Mr. Pond, but did not speak. From the first the sufferer exhibited all the effects of narcotic poison or apoplexy. His features were rigid, and his jaws so firmly set that it was only with the greatest difficulty that the tube of the stomach- pump could be introduced into his stomach. In an adjoining room, on a table, was a drachm vial of morphine, partly empty, and close by it a tumbler of water with morphine dissolved in it, from which he had evidently taken the fatal draught. On the bed in which the Doctor was lying was the Morning Alta, as Dr. Gerry positively states, and by it his spectacles. The witnesses differed some in their impressions concerning the effect on the mind of deceased of certain newspaper articles of that morning. Dr. Nuttall felt sure that the rash act was hastened from having read certain articles reflecting on his character, while Dr. Gerry and Mr. Pond both agree in their impressions, from the appearance of things, that the fatal dose was taken a considerable length of time before he got the paper, and that he had not even so much as seen the article in the paper that morning, as it was lying on his bed, having the appearance of not having been unfolded. Witnesses state that there was no other paper in the room. Deceased has recently spoken of suicidal propensities that possessed him at times, and made him apprehensive that he would make an attempt at self destruction. He spoke calmly about it, and said that at times it was almost irresistible. At such times he seemed extremely dejected; told Dr. Nuttall, a day or two before his death, that his "evil genius was a suicidal devil," and gave the Doctor his knife, fearing he might attempt violence on himself with it. He placed himself under treatment of Dr. N. a short time since, for this mental disease, and after two days seemed much better. All the medical witnesses, Drs. Holman, Nuttall and Geary, agree in their belief that the suicide was committed during a temporary fit of insanity, aggravated doubtless by certain recent charges implicating him in frauds in the Hospital accounts and management. He spoke of the matter as if his sense of honor was wounded, though Dr. Gerry testifies that he "saw Dr. Raymond previously with regard to the charges in the morning papers, and he appeared to regard them with the contempt which they merited." Dr. Raymond stated to Mr. Pond on Monday last, during a conversation with reference to his suicidal propensities, that he had twice before in his life been affected in the same manner, and he was fearful at times that he would do himself an injury. The day before he died he conversed very calmly with his cousin, Mr. I. W. Raymond, on this subject. Dr. Nuttall felt certain that the act was not one of his volition; that if deceased had been in a proper state of mind, his energies would have been directed against it. Deceased was in comfortable circumstances, suffered from no pecuniary embarrassments, had, he said, five thousand dollars in the Savings Bank, and about as much in United States Bonds, besides what he had in his pocket; said he was never better off in his life, and had plenty saved up for the time he was likely yet to live. Deceased was a native of New York, fifty eight years of age. He has a step mother and two brothers living—one in New York and one in Maryland. The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the above facts.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 18, 1864
Probably there is no law against it. A large truck wagon, with a load on it nearly as heavy as an ordinary church, came to a stand-still on the slippery cobble stones in front of the Russ House, yesterday, simply because the solitary horse attached to it found himself unable to keep up his regular gait with it. A street car and other vehicles were delayed some time by the blockade. It was natural to expect that a "streak" of lightning would come after the driver out of the cloudless sky, but it did not. It is likely Providence wasn't noticing.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 18, 1864
MAGUIRE'S OPERA HOUSE.—The past week has been devoted to benefits to the different leading members of the community; but the time is unpropitious for filling the house. Politics are surging; and our citizens find more amusement in attending their District Club meetings, mass meetings, and the rest, than in the theatre. To this cause as much as any other, perhaps, may be attributed the scant showing numbers present even when such popular actors as Charles R. Thorne and Frank Mayo made it a personal affair between themselves and the public. Again, the Mechanics' Industrial Fair is under full headway, and possesses attractions for an evening promenade among its collections of the wonders of science, art and skilled industry which the ladies find hard to resist. The theatrical managers would—to use the language of one of them—"rather fight twenty shows than one Mechanics' Fair;" especially such a complete one as has been opened in this city...Tonight, the drama of "A Life's Revenge" will be given; and next week James H. Warwick takes the stage.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 18, 1864
Someone carried away a costly and beautiful hat from the Occidental Hotel, (where it was doing duty as security for a board bill,) some ten days ago, to the great and increasing unhappiness of its owner. Its return to the place from whence it was ravished, or to this office, will be a kindness which we shall be only too glad to reciprocate if we ever get a precisely similar opportunity, and the victim shall insist upon it. The hat in question was of the "plug" species, and was made by Tiffany; upon its inner surface the name of "J. Smith" had once been inscribed, but could not easily be deciphered, latterly, on account of "Mark Twain" having been written over it. We do not know J. Smith personally, but we remember meeting him at a social party some time ago, and at that time a misfortune similar to the one of which we are now complaining happened to him. He had several virulent cutaneous diseases, poor fellow, and we have somehow acquired them, also. We do not consider that the hat had anything to do with the matter, but we mention the circumstance as being a curious coincidence. However, we do not desire to see the coincidence extend to the whole community, notwithstanding the fact that the contemplation of its progress could not do otherwise than excite a lively and entertaining solicitude on the part of the people, and therefore we hasten, after ten days' careful deliberation, to warn the public against the calamity by which they are threatened. And we will not disguise a selfish hope, at the same time, that these remarks may have the effect of weaning from our hat the spoiler's affections, and of inducing him to part with it with some degree of cheerfulness. We do not really want it, but it is a comfort to us in our sorrow to be able thus to make it (as a commodity of barter and sale to other parties,) something of a drug on the market, as it were.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 20, 1864
MAGUIRE'S OPERA HOUSE.—Mr. J. H. Warwick made his first appearance in an intensely sensational drama called "The Bottle." The play shows the unhappy results to a man of family which follow too close a devotion to the ardent, to the neglect of his regular business. Tableaux occur in it illustrative of Cruickshank's celebrated pictures. It is rather overwrought in the misery line, and a man who sits it out will be inclined to neglect his favorite brandy and water for a week or more. It has no comforting wind-up, as in "The Drunkard," where the reformed inebriate sings "Home; Sweet Home," in the midst of a family group and with his arm about his wife's waist; but after a series of unrelieved wretchedness, the least of which is murder, the unfortunate man in "The Bottle" dies in delirium tremens. Warwick was impressive in the principal character, Richard Thornley; and Mrs. Perry made a good deal out of the suffering wife. The drama will be repeated this evening, together with the farce of "His Last Legs."
WILSON-ZOYARA CIRCUS.—Some of the acrobatic feats at the pavilion excite the wonder of spectators. The most wonderful movements of the body are executed with a grace and precision that arouse unqualified admiration. Zoyara has the superb black horse Othello under the most perfect control, and he executes her bidding in the menage act with remarkable docility and accuracy—"like a Christian," as an enthusiastic horseman suggested. The camels are interesting; and altogether the show is very complete, and deserves to be visited by all.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 21, 1864
Two Chinamen got into a dispute early yesterday morning in a butcher shop, in Washington Alley, when one of them seized a pork cleaver and aimed four murderous blows at the other's head; the latter removed his head from the line of attack, and received the blows on his arm, hand and side. His arm got two deep gashes, his side a slight scratch, and his right hand was cut nearly in half, the blade striking a straight line across it a little below the base of the fingers. At this point the wounded man seized a knife and plunged it into his assailant's side, and withdrew from the contest, leaving him dangerously scared and feeble, but not fatally injured. He considered that he withdrew from the contest with credit to his share in the transaction; he evidently prided himself upon the fine judgment and spirit of moderation he had shown under circumstances where the forgetting of such virtues for a moment or two might be naturally regarded as excusable. Holding a stick in his mutilated left hand, he designated upon it with his thumb nail a point two inches and a half from the end of the stick, saying, "Only so how—not too litty, not too much!" Only an elaborate experience and the spirit of the true artist could have enabled this bland Chinaman to cypher down to a fraction the just amount of stabbing necessary to square accounts with his adversary without overdoing the thing or falling short of it. Officer James Conway arrested the mathematical Chinaman and jammed him into the station-house.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 21, 1864
A charge of assault with a deadly weapon, preferred in the Police Court yesterday, against Jacob Friedberg, was dismissed, at the request of all parties concerned, because of the scandal it would occasion to the Jewish Church to let the trial proceed, both the assaulted man and the man committing the assault being consecrated servants of that Church. The weapon used was a butcher-knife, with a blade more than two feet long, and as keen as a razor. The men were butchers, appointed by dignitaries of the Jewish Church to slaughter and inspect all beef intended for sale to their brethren, and in a dispute some time ago, one of them partly split the other's head open, from the top of the forehead to the end of his nose, with the sacred knife, and also slashed one of his hands. From these wounds the sufferer has only just recovered. The Jewish butcher is not appointed to his office in this country, but is chosen abroad by a college of Rabbis and sent hither. He kills beeves designed for consumption by Israelites, (or anyone else, if they choose to buy), and after careful examination, if he finds that the animal is in any way diseased, it is condemned and discarded; if the contrary, the seal of the Church is placed upon it, and it is permitted to be sent into the market—a custom that might be adopted with profit by all sects and creeds. It is said that the official butcher always assures himself that the sacred knife is perfectly sharp and without a wire edge, before he cuts a bullock's throat; he then draws it with a single lightning stroke (and at any rate not more than two strokes are admissible,) and if the knife is still without a wire edge after the killing, the job has been properly done; but if the contrary is the case, it is adjudged that a bone has been touched and pain inflicted upon the animal, and consequently the meat cannot receive the seal of approval and must be thrown aside. It is a quaint custom of the ancient Church, and sounds strangely enough to modern ears. Considering that the dignity of the Church was in some sense involved in the misconduct of its two servants, the dismissal of the case without a hearing was asked and granted.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 21, 1864
James Donlan, who has been serving out a term of imprisonment in the County Jail, for uttering treasonable language, yesterday paid into the County Court one hundred and fifty dollars, the balance of his fine, after deducting the equivalent of seven and a half days confinement, and was released. Jail life must be very satisfactory, for those who have been compelled to spend a few days there come out of it completely satisfied. They don't want to go back, nor stay any longer than they can help, under the polite attentions of the man who carries the key.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 22, 1864
At a case of pomological, ichthyological, mechanical, and a general variety of specimens, at the west side of the rotunda of the Mechanics' Fair building, is an unshapely looking animal, between a reptile and a fish, called the "Catfish Squid," preserved in alcohol. In size, the thing amounts to no more than a small potato, but the amount of physical force it is said to exert when not in liquor, and otherwise in good health, is somewhat enormous, being altogether disproportionate to its dimensions. A card appended to the jar that keeps the animal in spirits, informs the curious searcher after information that the squid can "take a man down and suck him to death." And if any is skeptical of the fact, he or she can just find out where there is one ready to perform, and try it on. This specimen was obtained near Oakland. Close by is an other jar containing an odd looking individual of the lobster species, found on the islands. It lives in white sand, and is usually found in pairs.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 22, 1864
STRIKE OF THE STEAMER EMPLOYEES
A large body of the strikers who have been employed on our ocean steamers, and who quit work because their wages were reduced below living rates, marched to Dall's shipping office, at the corner of Vallejo and Davis streets, yesterday morning, and afterwards proceeded to North Point, where the America was ready to set sail, but was waiting to ship a crew. Here they found men going aboard to take the vacant places at the reduced rates, and compelled them to take their kits ashore again, and give up the idea. Several men were knocked down and roughly handled in the melee which ensued, among them Captain Lees, of the Detective Police, who received a heavy blow on the head with a billet of wood. About noon the officers of the America acceded to the terms demanded by the workmen, and restored the former rate of wages, and a crew was then shipped without molestation. Wages on the Golden City will doubtless remain as they were before, also. The prices heretofore paid (and no increase was asked by the men,) were as follows: firemen, $70 a month; coal-passers, $60; sailors, $40, and waiters, $40; and they are little enough. Men who leave families ashore, could not support them on less, and it is anything but just to ask them to do it. The insignificant sum the steamship companies would make by the small reduction contemplated, would be lost again by the inferior capacity of the men employed, for good and capable men would not work at the terms offered.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 23, 1864
DEDICATION OF BUSH STREET SCHOOL
The handsome and costly building lately erected on the corner of Bush and Taylor streets, was dedicated yesterday morning. The first part of the ceremonies consisted of some vocal and instrumental music.
Mayor Coon made a plain, sensible speech, pertinent to the occasion, and delivered the keys of the edifice into the hands of Mr. Tait, Superintendent of the Public Schools, who read a carefully prepared and rather interesting document relating to educational matters in the city and county of San Francisco. According to his estimate, there are about 29,000 persons among us under the age of eighteen years; of these, 18,000 were born in California; 6,000 attend the Public, and nearly 5,000 the Private Schools; 2,600 children, old enough to receive instruction, attend no School at all, and would not if they could; and there is a still larger number that would if they could, but are debarred by the want of School accommodations at present. The new Bush Street School contains twelve classes, numbering in the aggregate seven hundred and sixty pupils.
Mr. Denman, the Principal of the School, followed with a brief but interesting history of the rise and progress of the Public School system of San Francisco, and after a song by the girls, the Rev. Dr. Bellows delivered what was probably the ablest address that such an occasion ever called forth, either here or anywhere else. There were two things in his discourse which marked the profound thinker, and which had in them more of significance and matter for serious reflection than all the speeches and sermons we have heard in a year. He said California had been blessed beyond all other lands in her mild and salubrious climate, and she was proud of it and grateful for it—but let her look to it that this blessing be not turned into a curse. There was danger of it; there was unquestionably great and serious danger of it. There was room for profound apprehension for the future of a land that had no firesides! It was around the home fireside, in the midst of the sacred home circle, when the toils, and the vanities and the cares of the day were over, and the world, with its pomp and wretchedness, and its sin and show and folly, shut out and forgotten, that those sweet and holy influences were brought to bear that trained young hearts in the love of the good and the abhorrence of evil; first impressions that clung to them, and formed and ennobled their characters, and fitted them to mould and purify society and advance the well being of the State in after life. He feared for the future happiness of a land without these fireside influences. In another division of his address the speaker dwelt upon the tremendous responsibilities resting upon those here in whose keeping was entrusted the moral, religious and educational training of the young, and said that in California those responsibilities were incalculably greater than in any other section of the Union, for upon them devolved the work of laying the foundations of a society and a government which, at the end of this generation, must be delivered into the hands of a community of young men and young women, with no old and experienced heads left among them to guide and watch over them with that sound wisdom and judgment which can only be gained by fighting the hard battle of life, and with few among their own numbers who have had an opportunity of getting even a theoretical idea of the worldly knowledge and wisdom that would have fallen to them in a land where old men and old women were numerous. He met only youths and maidens, comparatively speaking, in all the walks of life upon this Pacific Coast—a section of the world where forty years entitled a man to be called venerable. From his observation of the character, and habits, and domestic training of the new generation, full of life and activity, and impatient of restraint, which he saw growing up here, debarred from association with age and from wholesome instruction from the experienced, California had need to fear for her well-being when her few remaining veterans shall have passed away, and left this great and powerful State, with its mighty interests, in the keeping of a community who are men and women in age, but merely boys and girls in wisdom and experience. This was why he considered that the teachers of the youth on this coast were burthened with heavier responsibilities than those of any other land. The task before them is to raise up a great and good people, out of an army of youths and maidens springing up in a land where aged men and women are not, and firesides are unknown.
Dr. Bellows uttered many a great and original thought during his oration, but none seemed so new and startling, and withal so pregnant with significance as these two which we have attempted to set down here in outline. The spirit of prophecy was upon him. It will be well if California heeds the warning he has proclaimed to her.
SAWYER AND MINGINS
Dr. Bellows was followed by the Rev. Mr. Mingins and Dr. Sawyer. Their addresses contained nothing worth reporting, and only had the effect of postponing the calisthenic exercises of the school girls till two o'clock, thus disappointing many who had come on purpose to see them. Sawyer lauded the Board and the building, but he neglected to mention the salaries of the poor teachers. And he abused the newspapers for censuring the Board of Education—warned the people to disbelieve everything editors and reporters published against that spotless body of men.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 23, 1864
FAREWELL ADDRESS OF DR. BELLOWS
A fair idea of the estimation in which the Rev. Dr. Bellows is held by the people of this coast, and the impression he has made upon them in his patriotic and benevolent labors on behalf of our country and our country's defenders, might have been conceived from the attendance on the meeting last night at Platt's Hall appointed as an occasion for this great and good man to bid a final farewell to the people of California. The house was filled to its utmost capacity, yet not a sound of disorder was heard, nor a breath of disapprobation. The Presidio Band did its part, as usual, unexceptionably, the airs discoursed being somewhat of a solemn character, selected in adaptation to the occasion. The entrance of General McDowell was greeted with applause. Dr. Bellows was not present, when Governor Low, the President of the California Branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, opened the meeting with a short address, and consequently other speakers occupied the time until the Dr. entered. The Rev. Mr. Grot, of Marysville, made the opening prayer, and Rev. Dr. Cheney was presented to the audience. After speaking of the fame of Californians for their work in behalf of the Commission, their noble and generous contributions, referring feelingly to the death of Rev. Starr King, and stating the impressions he received during a recent visit of four months to the Eastern States, with regard to the strong current of feeling in favor of the Sanitary Commission, the substantial aid it receives from all quarters, the veneration the soldier has for the organization and its agents, and then referring to the pluck and the fortitude of the soldier, on the field, or wounded and maimed in the hospitals, he yielded the floor and was followed by Rev. Mr. Stebbins, the successor of Dr. Bellows in the Pastorship of the Geary Street Church, (late Starr King's.) Dr. Bellows arrived while Mr. Stebbins was speaking, and followed next in order. His appearance was the signal for prolonged applause. His speech was characterized by that animation of thought and fluency of expression that is peculiar to the Doctor. His devotion to the cause of the Commission of which he is the honored head, warmed up in him, and the relief of the suffering soldier and the support of the cause in which he is suffering usurped his every thought and lifted his soul above every other consideration. He paid an affectionate and mournful tribute to the memory of the late T. Starr King, and passed a glowing eulogy on the liberality of Californians to the cause of the Sanitary Commission; out of their impecuniosity they had contributed largely. He praised the people of this State for their fidelity to the Government; expressed his confidence in our civil and military heads; condoled with us in our present seeming adversity; and after exhorting the people to make the ballot box their paramount object, to which the cause of the Sanitary Commission must be held as secondary in importance, breathing his fervent loyalty to the Government, and declaring his thorough adhesion to the Administration, he invoked the blessings of Heaven on our people, and bade his audience an affectionate farewell. To hear Dr. Bellows speak, was what the people thronged the Hall for, and as soon as he closed his address, without waiting for a formal adjournment, they dismissed themselves and the meeting ended.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 24, 1864
Ah Sow, the mathematical Chinaman, who stabbed Ah Wong "not too litty, not too much," but just exactly enough to make him uncomfortable, was discharged from custody yesterday, at the request of the grateful creature who was indebted for his life to his spirit of forbearance and the exercise of his extraordinary anatomical judgment.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 24, 1864
The children of the Public Schools come in droves and armies to the Fair now, every day, by invitation of the management. The children belonging to the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum visited the Pavilion yesterday, and the pupils of the Mason Street Public School, to the number of eight or nine hundred, filed into the building during the afternoon. A strong force of Teachers and exhibitors has to be on hand on occasions like these, to keep Young America from getting ground up in the machinery.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 25, 1864
About seventy of the handsomest young ladies in the State marched in double file into the Fair Pavilion yesterday morning, broke ranks, deployed as skirmishers, and effected a bloodless capture of the place, at five minutes to eleven o'clock. It was observed that they seemed to take a deeper interest in the pianos and pictures, and especially in the laces and hair-oil and furs, than in the quartz mashers and patent grindstones. It is because their tastes are not fully developed yet, perhaps. They made the only good music that has been extracted from the fine pianos in the Art Gallery since those instruments have been condemned to public persecution in that place; they played "Sweet Home," with tender expression, and thought of lively Oakland, where they came from, and sighed for the turmoil and excitement of its busy thoroughfares. This detachment of young ladies was from Mrs. Harmon's Pacific Female Seminary, one of the best schools in the State. It is situated about a mile from the city just named. Mr. McClure, Mr. Beldler, Miss Wills, Mrs. Harvey, Madame Parot, Miss Cameron, and perhaps other Teachers employed in the Seminary, accompanied Mrs. Harmon and her pupils to the Fair. We have ascertained that no young gentlemen pupils are wanted at present.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 25, 1864
Charles James Mortimer, who attempted to kill Detective Rose, a short time ago, has been seen in the coast range, between San Mateo and Spanishtown, within the past day or two. He was recognized by two men, and his capture attempted, but he shot one of his assailants in the hand, and the other in the foot, and escaped. These facts were ascertained by a telegram from Sheriff Keith, of San Mateo county, and Officer Chappel was at once sent down there to look after Mortimer. He telegraphed Captain Lees, yesterday, that no traces of the missing scoundrel could be found, and that it would be useless to send down a larger force to hunt for him. The country where he was seen is covered for miles with a dense growth of willows, and Mortimer can hide in them and elude pursuit as long as he wants to. He need not lack for animal food, for the district is full of fowls, pigs, sheep, and bullocks, from which he can take his choice at any time under cover of the night. The only sure method of catching him lies in burning the willows; but as this would probably result in the destruction of the crops thereabouts, the farmers will not permit it to be done.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 25, 1864
A man was summoned to testify in the Police Court, yesterday, and simply because he said he would swear a jackass was a canary, if necessary, his services were declined. It was not generous to crush a liberal spirit like that.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 25, 1864
A report is abroad that the Branch Mint is about to close—that the employees, being no longer able to support themselves and families on the mere prospect of getting the salaries due them paid some day or other, have given notice that unless their accounts are previously squared, they will quit work in a body on the 30th instant. These reports were not without foundation. We are glad to be able to state, however, that the Mint is not going to stop, nor the men be allowed to suffer much longer for the moneys due them. Within two weeks, or at farthest three, all cause of complaint will be removed, and the employees themselves have been satisfied of this fact. We get our information at headquarters.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 27, 1864
One Pinkney, a 'longshoreman, had some of the crew of a French bark up before the Police Court, yesterday, for an assault and battery, alleged to have been committed upon him. The Frenchmen testified that a stray boat was drifting toward their vessel, and they received signals from a Bremen bark, to which it belonged, to catch it, which they prepared to do. Pinkney came out after it with his boat, and overtook it just as it touched the bow of the French bark; his mast got entangled in the vessel's chains, and fell over and struck him on the arm; five French sailors pushed off and took the stray boat away from Pinkney. Pinkney testified that he got the blow on his arm from an oar in the hands of one of the sailors, and when asked if he had any witnesses to prove that such was the case, he said "No;" that the District Attorney told him his arm would be sufficient evidence! The Attorney had a precedent. John Phoenix once told of a bull that pulled fifteen hundred logs at one time, and if any one doubted it, he could go and show him the bull. Pinkney's arm was not considered sufficient evidence of the assault, nor yet his whole anatomy together, and the case was dismissed.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 27, 1864
Mrs. Hall entered complaint against a groggery at the corner of Post and Taylor streets, as a nuisance, yesterday, in the Police Court. The case was dismissed. It might not have been, if she had gone to the expense of procuring more legal assistance to prosecute it. The Prosecuting Attorney is a powerful engine, in his way, but he is not infallible. If parties would start him in and let him worm out of the witnesses all the facts that have no bearing upon the case, and no connection with it, and whether the offence was committed "In the City'n County San Francisco" or not, and then have another talented lawyer to start in and find out all the facts that do bear upon the case and are really connected with it, what multitudes of rascals that now escape would suffer the just penalties of their transgressions. With his spectacles on, and his head tilted back at a proper angle, there is no question that the Prosecuting Attorney is an ornament to the Police Court; but whether he is particularly useful or not, or whether Government could worry along without him or not, or whether it is necessary that a Prosecuting Attorney should give all his time, or bend all his energies, or throw all his soul into the one thing of being strictly ornamental, or not, are matters which do not concern us, and which we have never once thought about. Sometimes he has some of his witnesses there, and isn't that sufficient?
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 29, 1864
The inmates of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, to the number of about three dozen, visited the Fair yesterday, in company with their Teachers, and kept up an unceasing and extraordinarily animated conversation about its wonders until their arms and fingers were utterly fagged out with talking. Poor fellows; we could not help thinking what a great advantage they have over ordinary people, for you might remove their tongues and break one of their arms, and they would go on talking with the other all the same. These pupils talk with incredible rapidity, and their hands, bodies, and the muscles of their expressive faces are never at rest. They are always listening with their watchful, restless eyes, and no movement escapes them. The pupils of the Public School at the corner of Fifth and Market streets also attended the Fair yesterday, in a crowd numbering between five and six hundred.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 29, 1864
Detective Officer Rose is able to walk about the streets again, although the wounds he received at Mortimer's hands would have proved mortal to any but a petrified constitution. Rose's left hand is still in a badly crippled condition, and his little finger will have to be cut off. He says that when Mortimer struck him on the head with a stone, in the twilight of that eventful evening, the blow stunned him somewhat, but did not render him unconscious; he grappled with his man, but found that he was unable to cope with him, and when he was stabbed through the windpipe, he feigned death, and instead of spitting out the flowing blood that was threatening to choke him, he lay still and swallowed it. When Mortimer came back the second time and spoke to him, he did not answer, but the motion of his body, caused by breathing, betrayed him, and Mortimer commenced beating him over the head with the pistol. Rose counted the blows, down to the thump behind the ear that knocked him senseless. As we remarked above, Mr. Rose is now sufficiently recovered to be about again. He left yesterday to hunt for Mortimer, and has made up his mind to catch him.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 29, 1864
Witnesses in the Police Court, who expect to be questioned on the part of the prosecution, should always come prepared to answer the following questions: "Was you there, at the time?" "Did you see it done, and if you did, how do you know?" "City and County of San Francisco?" "Is your mother living, and if so, is she well?" "You say the defendant struck the plaintiff with a stick. Please state to the Court what kind of a stick it was?" "Did it have the bark on, and if so, what kind of bark did it have on?" "Do you consider that such a stick would be just as good with the bark on, as with it off, or vicy versy?" "Why?" "I think you said it occurred in the City and County of San Francisco?" "You say your mother has been dead seventeen years—native of what place, and why?" "You don't know anything about this assault and battery do you?" "Did you ever study astronomy?—hard, isn't it?" "You have seen this defendant before, haven't you?" "Did you ever slide on a cellar door when you were a boy?" "Well—that's all." "Stay: did this occur in the City and County of San Francisco?" The Prosecuting Attorney may mean well enough, but meaning well and doing well are two very different things. His abilities are of the mildest description, and do not fit him for a position like the one he holds, where energy, industry, tact, shrewdness, and some little smattering of law, are indispensable to the proper fulfilment of its duties. Criminals leak through his fingers every day like water through a sieve. He does not even afford a cheerful amount of competition in business to the sharp lawyers over whose heads he was elected to be set up as an ornamental effigy in the Police Court. He affords a great deal less than no assistance to the Judge, who could convict sometimes if the District Attorney would remain silent, or if the law had not hired him at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month to unearth the dark and ominous fact that the "offence was committed in the City and County of San Francisco." The man means well enough, but he don't know how; he makes of the proceedings in behalf of a sacred right and justice in the Police Court, a drivelling farce, and he ought to show his regard for the public welfare by resigning.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 30, 1864
It would have worried the good King Herod to see the army of school children that swarmed into the Fair yesterday, if he could have been there to suffer the discomfort of knowing he could not slaughter them under our eccentric system of government without getting himself into trouble. There were about eight hundred pupils of the Public Schools in the building at one time.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, September 30, 1864
John Bassett, who had a crowd of witnesses to prove that his honesty was almost miraculous, and that his character was a holy hash of all the Christian virtues, and who stood through it all, in the prisoners' dock, stunned to learn it for the first time in his life, no doubt, was ordered to appear before the County Court and answer to a charge of highway robbery, committed lately on Pacific street, when he knocked a man down and took twenty-six dollars away from him. We have seen many a nice lot of witnesses in the Police Court, but those for the defence in this case could about discount the best of them in the matter of clean, straight-forward swearing to doubtful propositions.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 1, 1864
The case of Wm. Galloway against C. F. Richards et al., in the Fourth District Court, was brought to a close yesterday evening, the jury, after two hours' absence, returning a verdict for four hundred dollars in favor of the plaintiff. The action was brought to recover damages laid at two thousand five hundred dollars, from defendants, who are druggists, for putting up a prescription in a wrongful manner, thereby causing a temporary injury to plaintiff's health. The verdict took some, who had heard the evidence throughout, by surprise; and a motion will be made on behalf of defendants for a new trial. The truth of the matter is, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred of these mistakes in putting up prescriptions, the whole blame lies with the prescribing physicians, who, like a majority of lawyers, and many preachers, write a most abominable scrawl, which might be deciphered by a dozen experts as many different ways, and each one sustain his version by the manuscript. When a physician writes the abbreviation of "pulverized cinchona" in such a manner that nine out of ten among experienced pharmacists would, without hesitancy, read it "pulverized cantharides," and damage results from it, if the apothecary is culpable at all, the physician certainly ought to come in for a share of blame. It would be a good thing for the world at large, however unprofessional it might be, if medical men were required by law to write out in full the ingredients named in their prescriptions. Let them adhere to the Latin, or Fejee, if they choose, but discard abbreviations, and form their letters as if they had been to school one day in their lives, so as to avoid the possibility of mistakes on that account.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 2, 1864
California is a noble old State. The echoes of the cry of distress jingle with the ring of dollars. Dr. Bellows says we're poor but don't know it, but generous, and can't help it, and Dr. Bellows knows. Almost every few minutes we receive a little note like this: "Mr. H. Behre, proprietor of the Pavilion Restaurant, will give all the profits from the receipts on Monday, day and evening, to the Santa Barbara sufferers." All the hands connected with the restaurant will also volunteer their services. Mr. Perkins drops in to say that the proceeds of his sale of fruits will be devoted to the same noble object; also the receipts of the Sanitary Cheese Exhibition.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 2, 1864
All of the officials in the Mint have, for the last six months, had a hard time of it, and some of them a very hard one. For six months they had received nothing until yesterday, although there has been money enough here to pay a portion of their demands. Some technical objection on the part of the Treasurer, Mr. Cheesman, is said to have been the cause. Latterly, Mr. Swain, the Superintendent, after long effort, succeeded in getting a positive order to use any money to the credit of the Mint in the payment of the officials. As Treasury Notes have fallen very much since a portion of their pay was due, Mr. Swain, having authority, allowed the pay-rolls to be made out in such amounts as would make up to the recipients an amount in gold at present prices of green-backs equal to what their pay would have been if received when due. This is strictly just. Most of the officials were thus paid three months' salaries of the six due. But two of the unfortunate clerks chance to be the appointees of the Treasurer, who objected to pay their salaries unless the additions mentioned were abated. Mr. Swain declined to thus make out their pay-rolls, knowing that if thus paid they would resign. They are faithful, honest, competent, and he cannot at once, if at all, supply their places. If they resign, the operations of the Mint must stop for a while, at least, and they cannot afford to remain for the pay insisted upon by Mr. Cheesman. The result yesterday was, that after waiting six months for their pay, they left the Mint, not having received a dollar. They are poor men, we hear, and greatly need their pay. If the operations of the Mint should cease tomorrow, we presume it will be because Mr. Cheesman desired to make capital with the Secretary at the expense of Mr. Swain, by showing that his appointees can be forced to submit to any loss which his own pertinacious technicalities have caused. The treatment of these men is not only unjust but cruel, and the effect upon the public will probably be great inconvenience and loss to all who have dealings with the Mint.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 6, 1864
A case was brought before Judge Shepheard yesterday afternoon, on preliminary examination, which involved some nice points, and also enriched the polite literature of the country with what Mr. Cook, counsel for one of the parties, termed "foreign correspondence"—a number of epistolary communications, equal to the productions of Madame de Sevigne or the Countess of Blessington. One of the questions presented was, whether a Chinaman's wife is his'n or your'n if you want her. Ah Chung had a friend who had a wife; friend was in the mountains, wife in this city, and Ah Chung in Shasta. Ah Chung visited the city, and delivered to his friend's wife what purported to be a letter from her husband, directing her to pack up her trunks and go to him, the messenger to be her escort. She packed up, and Ah Chung took her to Shasta for his own use. She found herself betrayed, and in durance. A female friend of her own nation sympathized with her, and wrote a letter, informing a friend of the distressed captive in this city of Ah Chung's infamy—Bulwer Lytton couldn't have done it more eloquently—stating that the perfidious Ah Chung claimed the woman as his property, and asked two hundred dollars to redeem her. A correspondence on the subject followed, resulting in the liberation of the abducted victim; though without her baggage, which had been confiscated by the avaricious Ah Chung. The denouement was Ah Chung's being held yesterday, by Judge Shepheard, in the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars, to answer in the County Court to a charge of grand larceny. The letters, which were written, of course, in Chinese characters, were translated by Mr. Charles Carvalto, and afforded an interesting specimen of sentiment and condolence as expressed by they of the Flowery Kingdom.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 8, 1864
Benjamin Roderick has been arrested on charges of malicious mischief, carrying a concealed weapon, and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. Yesterday morning, shortly after midnight, he went to the house of Mary Roberts and got into a quarrel with her, and drawing a Bowie-knife, threatened to take her life; he went away, and afterwards returned, renewed his threats, and proceeded to smash up all the furniture in her house; he created havoc and destruction on all sides, and ended by breaking the windows with large stones. At last the cries of the woman attracted the attention of Special Officer Forner, and he was about to arrest Roderick when the latter broke away and ran. Forner fired his pistol in the air, which frightened the fugitive, and he stopped and gave himself up. Besides his Bowie-knife, he carried on his person a murderous weapon in the shape of a short-handled hatchet—an equipment calculated to make him rather formidable at short range. Roderick had been marching with the Broom Rangers, and the woman says he was drunk when he entered her house.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 9, 1864
The would-be desperado, Roderick, who threatened the life of Mary Roberts, in a house in Broadway, on Thursday night, was tried and convicted in the Police Court, yesterday morning, on three Separate charges. The first charge was carrying a concealed deadly weapon; he had a pocket full of them—a Bowie-knife, a short-handled hatchet, and a hat full of bed-rock, with a trace of quartz in it. The second charge, of assault with a deadly weapon, was sustained by the testimony of the complaining witness, Mary Roberts, who swore that Roderick seized her and aimed a blow at her with his Bowie-knife, when Providence provided her with invisible wings. She said she knew she had wings at that moment of her utmost need, although they were not palpable to her imperfect mortal vision, and she flew away—she gently soared downstairs. Judging by the woman's general appearance, and her known character and antecedents, this interference of Providence in her behalf was remarkable, to say the least, and must have been quite a surprise to her. The third charge was of malicious mischief. It was shown in evidence that he wantonly destroyed furniture belonging to the woman, worth one hundred dollars. The prisoner was ordered to appear for sentence on all three of the charges, to-morrow morning. Roderick killed a man once. He is rather a bad looking man, but probably not nearly so dangerous as one might suppose from his lawless conduct. He has bad habits, similar to those of many a professedly better man, and he carries an armament better suited to a fortress than a well meaning private citizen. All these things are against him, and he deserves to be punished for having them against him, and for breaking furniture that did not belong to him. He was not anxious to kill the woman, though, or even do her a bodily injury, as his opportunities for doing so were ample, and he threw them away. He might have made a good sensation item for the newspapers, and he carelessly threw that opportunity away also. Roderick is a useless incumbrance, any way you take him.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 9, 1864
A case of the most infernal description of miscegenation has come to light in this city—a mixture of white and Chinese. A Chinaman married a white woman in New York ten years ago, has had children by her, and has been living with her here in Sacramento street. Latterly, for some cause or other, he has become abusive toward her, and has several times beaten her. Finally, influenced by white friends, and by another beating at the hands of her pagan husband, on Thursday evening she left him, and applied to Chief Burke for protection, bringing two mixed children with her. A Special Officer tried to rescue her from this last assault, and succeeded in diverting the bulk of it to himself, receiving several powerful blows to his share, and giving several in return; the main Chinaman escaped from him, but he captured an accessory and brought him to the station-house. Officer Evatt accompanied the woman back to the place to protect her while she got possession of her clothing, and she is now living with some friends in Hinckley street. She is quite handsome, and of prepossessing appearance and address; one of her children is a very pretty little girl; she has had four children by her Chinaman. Late last evening, news came that the husband had been captured and confined by the mate of the ship Smyrniote, for stealing, and Officer Evatt went down to take charge of him.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 9, 1864
The monitor Camanche is rapidly approaching completion. The side armor of wood is all on but about twenty feet at the stern, making nearly three and a half feet of solid wood on the sides of the monster, from stem to stern. The work of putting on the five inches of iron plating, outside of the wood, is being pushed rapidly forward, and already about seventy feet from the prow is completed. For the last two or three days, the workmen have been putting the iron plates on the deck, and about one thousand feet of the deck has been covered with the two plates of iron designed for it. Those who wish to see the monitor again before she is launched, and while they can witness the manner of securing the enormous weight of wood and iron with which the sides are covered, will do well to do so to-morrow, or within a few days, as she will soon be wholly encased with her impenetrable coat of mail.
The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, October 11, 1864
A lad of some twelve years was seized with convulsions, while sitting in a buggy at the corner of Sacramento and Montgomery streets, yesterday afternoon. Restoratives were speedily brought in play, and in a short time the youth went on his way, viewing with astonishment the multitude that had collected, which was variously estimated at from one thousand to four thousand eight hundred and eighty. One kind-hearted person, whose condition, unfortunately, bordered on the "salubrious," had his place close to the convulsed boy, and puffed smoke from a villanous cigar into his eyes with seeming industry, until gently remonstrated with by a Policeman, on whom he turned furiously, insisting upon tobacco smoke as an infallible remedy for fits, and that he would give the officer fits if he interfered further. However, during this sanitary dispute, the subject had come to and gone off; and the opportunity for determining fully the efficacy of burnt tobacco and whisky fumes in cases of fits, was unfortunately lost for the present.
The Sacramento Daily Union, April 16, 1866
On Board Steamer Ajax
Honolulu (H. I.), March 18th.
We arrived here to-day at noon, and while I spent an hour or so talking, the other passengers exhausted all the lodging accommodations of Honolulu. So I must remain on board the ship to-night. It is Very warm in the stateroom, no air enters the ports. Therefore, have dressed in a way which seems best calculated to suit the exigencies of the case. A description of this dress is not necessary. I may observe, however, that I bought the chief article of it at "Ward's."
There are a good many mosquitoes around to-night and they are rather troublesome; but it is a source of unalloyed satisfaction to me to know that the two millions I sat down on a minute ago will never sing again.
SEA-GOING OUTFIT
I will "bunch" the first four or five days of my "log" of this voyage and make up a few paragraphs therefrom.
We backed out from San Francisco at 4 P.M., all full—some full of tender regrets for severed associations, others full of buoyant anticipations of a pleasant voyage and a revivifying change of scene, and yet others full of schemes for extending their business relations and making larger profits. The balance were full of whisky. All except Brown. Brown had had a couple of peanuts for lunch, and therefore one could not say he was full of whisky, solely, without shamefully transcending the limits of truth.
Our little band of passengers were well and thoughtfully cared for by the friends they left weeping upon the wharf as ever were any similar party of pilgrims. The traveling outfit conferred upon me began with a naval uniform, continued with a case of wine, a small assortment of medicinal liquors and brandy, several boxes of cigars, a bunch of matches, a fine tooth comb and a cake of soap, and ended with a pair of socks. (N.B.—I gave the soap to Brown, who bit into it, and then shook his head and said that, "as a general thing, he liked to prospect curious foreign dishes and find out what they were like, but he couldn't go that"—and threw it overboard.) This outfit is a fair sample of what our friends did for all of us. Three of our passengers—old sea captains, whalers—Captain Cuttle, Captain Phelps and Captain Fitch (fictitious names)—had bought eight gallons of whisky, and their friends sent them eleven gallons more. (N. B.—Owing to head winds and a rough sea, this outfit did not hold out; the nineteen gallons were ample for the proposed eight-day voyage, but we were out upwards of ten days, you see. The whalers were all dry and unhappy this morning.)
Leaving all care and trouble and business behind in the city, now swinging gently around the hills and passing house by house and street by street out of view, we swept down through the Golden Gate and stretched away toward the shoreless horizon. It was a pleasant, breezy afternoon, and the strange new sense of entire and perfect emancipation from labor and responsibility coming strong upon me, I went up on the hurricane deck so that I could have room to enjoy it. I sat down on a bench, and for an hour I took a tranquil delight in that kind of labor which is such a luxury to the enlightened Christian-to-wit the labor of other people. Captain Godfrey was "making sail," and he was moving the men around briskly. He made short work of the job, and his orders were marked by a felicity of language which challenged my admiration. Said he:
"Let go the main-hatch. Belay! Haul away on your tops'l jib! Belay! Clew up your top-gallants'l spanker boom halliards! Belay! Port your gaff-tops'l sky-scrapers! Belay! Lively, you lubbus! Take a reef in the lee scuppers! Belay! Mr. Baxter, it's coming on to blow at about four bells in the hog-watch; have everything taut and trim for it. Belay!"
The ship was rolling fearfully. At this point I got up and started over to ask the Captain if it wouldn't be a good idea to belay a little for a change, but I fell down. I then resumed my former seat. For twenty minutes after this I took careful note of how the Captain leaned his body to port when the ship lurched to starboard, and hard to larboard when she lurched to port, and then got up to practice a little. I only met with moderate success, though, and after a few extraordinary evolutions, fetched up against the mainmast. The concussion did not injure the mast perceptibly, but if it had been a brick house the case might have been very different. I proceeded below, rather discouraged.
SEVERAL EFFECTS OF THE TURBULENT SEA
I found twenty-two passengers leaning over the bulwarks vomiting and remarking, "Oh, my God!" and then vomiting again. Brown was there, ever kind and thoughtful, passing from one to another and saying, "That's all right—that's all right, you know—it'll clean you out like a jug, and then you won't feel so onery and smell so ridiculous."
The sea was very rough for several days and nights, and the vessel rolled and pitched heavily. All but six or eight of us took their meals in bed constantly, and remained shut up in the staterooms day and night. The saloons and decks looked deserted and lonesome. But gradually the seasick unfortunates convalesced until our dinner complement was augmented to fifteen or twenty. There were frames or "racks" on the tables to keep the dishes in their places, but they did not always succeed in doing it. An occasional heavy lurch would hoist out a dozen and start them prospecting for the deck. Brown was bitterly opposed to the racks, and said he "Wasn't raised to eat out of them brick moulds." No rack would answer for soup. The soup plate had to be held in the hand and nicely tilted from side to side to accommodate the fluid to the pitching of the ship. The chairs were not fastened to the floor, and it was fun to see a procession of gentlemen go sliding backwards to the bulkhead, holding their soup plates on a level with their breasts, and giving their whole attention to preventing the contents from splashing out. They would come back with the flowtide and sail away again on the ebb. It would not do to set a glass of water down. The attentive waiters kept bringing water to Brown, who was always talking, and would not see the glass set down in time to make his remark heard: "Frank, don't bring me any water; have to drink it at a gulp to keep it from spilling, and I've had more'n enough already." And yet about once every two minutes some passenger opposite would put up his hands and shrink behind them and exclaim, "Your water, Mr. Brown! your water! Look out for your water!" and lo, the suffering Brown would find his glass once more replenished and canting dangerously to leeward. It would be instantly seized and emptied. At the end of a quarter of an hour Brown had accomplished nothing in the way of dinner, on account of these incessant watery interruptions. The boy Frank brought another glass of water, and said, "Will you have some beefsteak, Mr. Brown?" "Take that water and go to blazes with it! Beefsteak! no! I've drank eleven gallons of water in fifteen minutes, and there ain't room enough in me for a sirloin steak off'm a sand-fly!"
JOURNAL
Heaving my "log," I find the following entries on my tablets:
Wednesday, 7th—Left San Francisco at 4 P.M.; rough night.
Thursday—Weather still rough. Passengers nearly all sick; only half a dozen at breakfast out of thirty.
Friday—Strong gale all night; heavy sea on this evening; black overhead.
Saturday—Weather same, or more so.
You can rake that four-days dose of your infamous "Pacific," Mr. Balboa, and digest it, and you may consider it well for your reputation in California that we had pretty fair weather the balance of the voyage. If we hadn't, I would have given you a blast in this letter that would have made your old dry bones rattle in your coffin—you shameless old foreign humbug!
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, April 17, 1866
Honolulu, March 19, 1866
THE OLD NOR'WEST SWELL
On the Sunday following our departure we had a fine day, and no wind scarcely, yet the sea ran high and the ship rolled a good deal. Upon inquiry, I learned that this was caused by the "old nor'west swell," which resembles any Broadway "swell" in that it puts on a good many airs and conducts itself pretentiously even when it is not able to "raise the wind." The old nor'west swell, produced by the prevailing wind from that quarter, is always present in these seas, ever drifting on its eternal journey across the waters of the Pacific, year after year, and century after century as well, no doubt, and piling its billows aloft careless whether it be storm or calm. The wind and the swell both die out just above the equator. Another wind and another swell come up around Cape Horn from the opposite direction, and these die out just below the equator—so that a windless, waveless belt is left at the center of the earth, which marks the equator as distinctly as does the little black line on the map. Ships drift idly on that glassy sea, under the flaming sun of the tropics, for weeks together, without a breath of wind to flutter the drooping sails or fan the sweltering and blasphemous sailors.
A BLAST FOR BALBOA, THE DISCOVERER
We hear all our lives about the "gentle, stormless Pacific," and about the "smooth and delightful route to the Sandwich Islands," and about the "steady blowing trades" that never vary, never change, never "chop around," and all the days of our boyhood we read how that infatuated old ass, Balboa, looked out from the top of a high rock upon a broad sea as calm and peaceful as a sylvan lake, and went into an ecstasy of delight, like any other Greaser over any other trifle, and shouted in his foreign tongue and waved his country's banner, and named his great discovery "Pacific"—thus uttering a lie which will go on deceiving generation after generation of students while the old ocean lasts. If I had been there, with my experience, I would have said to this man Balboa, "Now, if you think you have made a sufficient display of yourself, cavorting around on this conspicuous rock, you had better fold up your old rag and get back into the woods again, because you have jumped to a conclusion, and christened this sleeping boy-baby by a girl's name, without stopping to inquire into the sex of it."
From all I can discover, if this foreign person had named this ocean the "Four Months Pacific," he would have come nearer the mark. My information is to the effect that the Summer months give fine weather, smooth seas and steady winds, with a month and a few days good weather at the fag end of Spring and the beginning of Autumn; and that for the other seven or eight months of the year one can calculate pretty regularly on head winds and stern winds, and winds on the quarter, and winds several points abaft the beam, and winds that blow straight up from the bottom, and still other winds that come so straight down from above that the fore-stuns'l spanker—jib-boom makes a hole through them as clean as a telescope. And the sea rolls and leaps and chops and surges "thortships" and up and down and fore-and-aft by turns, when the gales are blowing; and when they die out the old nor'west swell comes in and takes a hand, and stands a watch, and keeps up the marine earthquake until the winds are rested and ready to make trouble again.
In a word, the Pacific is "rough," for seven or eight months in the year—not stormy, understand me—not what one could justly call stormy, but contrary, baffling and very "rough". Therefore, if that Balboa-constrictor had constructed a name for it that had "Wild," or "Untamed," to it, there would have been a majority of two months in the year in favor and in support of it.
A WORD TO THE COMMERCIALLY WISE
If the Pacific were always pacific and its "trades" blew steadily the year around, there would never be any necessity for steamers between Honolulu and San Francisco; but as it is, a trade is building up between the two ports, a considerable share of which is going to consist of fast freight and passengers, and only steamers can extend and develop this and conduct it successfully. You see we plowed through the tangled seas and against the head winds this trip in a fraction over ten days, arriving a day after one of the fast clippers which left San Francisco a matter of three weeks before. The passage back, at this rate, is about five to seven days longer for the clipper, but not more than a day and a half or two days longer for the Ajax. You can rest assured that in the tremendous trade that is to spring up between California and the Islands during the next few years, the fast freight and passengers must be carried by steamers for seven or eight months in the year.
I will remark here that my information about the character of this ocean route is obtained from old ship-captains, one of whom has commanded in the packet trade for many years, and who has sailed these seas, whaling and otherwise, for forty-six years.
But the main argument in favor of a line of fast steamers is this: They would soon populate these islands with Americans, and loosen that French and English grip which is gradually closing around them, and which will result in a contest before many years as to which of the two shall seize and hold them. I leave America out of this contest, for her influence and her share in it have fallen gradually away until she is out in the cold now, and does not even play third fiddle to this European element.
But if California can send capitalists down here in seven or eight days time and take them back in nine or ten, she can fill these islands full of Americans and regain her lost foothold. Hawaii is too far away now, though, when it takes a man twenty days to come here and twenty-five or thirty to get back again in a sailing vessel.
The steamer line ought to be established, even if it should lose money for two years. Your State has never paid one single dollar of profit to the United States—you are nothing but a burden and an expense to the country—but the kingdom of Hawaii, without costing the United States a cent, has paid her, in customs, $400,000 in a single year.
California's profits from this section can be made greater and far more lasting than those from Montana. Therefore let your Merchants' Exchange look after the former just as earnestly as they are doing with the latter.
In writing about sea voyages it is customary to state, with the blandest air of conveying information of rare freshness and originality, that anything, however trivial, that promises to spice the weary monotony of the voyage with a new sensation, is eagerly seized upon and the most made of it by the passengers. I decline to insult your intelligence by making this thread-bare statement, preferring to believe you would easily divine the existence of the fact without having to be told it.
We had a bullock tied up on the forecastle, and a box near by with two sheep and a pig in it. These animals afforded a trifling amusement for us on our fair days, and when the opportunity offered we used to go forward and worry them. The bullock was always down on his beam-ends. If he ever dared to get up on his feet for a second in stormy weather, the next lurch of the ship would "snatch him bald-headed," as Mr. Brown expressed it, and flop him flat on the deck; and in fair weather he was seldom able to get up, on account of his sore bones, acquired through the bangs and bruises of his foul weather experiences. So the bullock lay down pretty much all the time from San Francisco to Honolulu—and ever as his wandering gaze rested upon reeling men, and plunging ship and towering billow, his eloquent eye damned the weather.
Said Mr. Brown, once: "Let's go forward and twist the Captain's tail."
"Who? Captain Godfrey?"
"Thunder! no; Captain Gordon."
"Who?"
"Why, the bullock—Captain Gordon. We call him Captain Gordon because he lays down so much."
I recognized the point of Mr. Brown's facetiousness then. Captain Gordon, a not undistinguished officer of the Eastern armies, had kept his room all the way, but as he was unwell enough to prefer that course to staggering about the tossing decks, and had a right to do as he pleased anyway, I reprimanded Brown on the spot for his inconsiderate levity.
The pig was pulled and hauled and cuffed for the amusement of the idle passengers, but unknown to himself he had his revenge; for he imparted such a villainous odor of the sty to the hands and clothing of any man who meddled with him, that that man could never drift to windward of a lady passenger without suffering disgrace and humiliation under the rebuke of her offended upturned nose. The pig had no name. This was a source of ceaseless regret to Mr. Brown, and he often spoke of it. At last one of the sailors named it, and Brown happened to be passing by and overheard him. The sailor was feeding the animals, and the pig kept crowding the sheep away and monopolizing the slop pail. The sailor rapped him on the nose and said:
"Oh, go way wid you, Dennis."
To have heard the passengers go into explosions of laughter when Brown rushed in, in a state of wild excitement, and related this circumstance, one might have supposed that this ship had been sailing round and round the world for dreary ages, and that this was the first funny circumstance that had ever blessed with a gleam of cheerfulness the dismal voyage. But, as other writers have said before, even so diluted a thing as this can send a thrill of delight through minds and bodies growing torpid under the dull sameness of a long sea voyage.
From that day forward it was Dennis here, and Dennis there, and Dennis everywhere. Dennis was in everybody's mouth; Dennis was mentioned twice where the everlasting wonder, "how many miles we made yestaday," was expressed once. A stranger's curiosity would have been excited to the last degree to know who this rival to General Grant in notoriety was, that had so suddenly sprung up—this so thoroughly canvassed, discussed, and popular "Dennis." But on the 16th of March Dennis was secretly executed by order of the steward, and Brown said that when the fact became generally known, there was not a dry eye in the ship. He fully believed what he said, too. He has a generous heart and a fervent imagination, and a capacity for creating impossible facts and then implicitly believing them himself, which is perfectly marvelous.
Dennis was served up on the 17th for our St. Patrick's dinner, and gave me a stomach-ache that lasted twenty four hours. In life he was lovely, and behold, he was powerful in death. Peace to his ashes!
The most steady-going amusement the gentlemen had on the trip was euchre, and the most steady-going the ladies had was being sea-sick. For days and nights together we used to sit in the smoking room and play euchre on the same table so sacredly devoted to "seven-up" by the livelier set of passengers who traveled last voyage in the Ajax. It took me some little time to learn to play euchre with those old sea captains, because they brought in so many terms that are neither in Hoyle nor the dictionary. Hear how they talked:
Captain Fitch—"Who hove that ace on there?"
Captain Phelps—"Why, I did."
Captain Cuttle—"No, you didn't, either—I hove it myself"
Captain Phelps—"You didn't, by the Eternal!—You hove the king."
Captain Fitch—"Well, now, that's just the way always jawin' about who hove this and who hove that—always sailin' on a taut bowlin'. Why can't you go slow? You keep heavin' on 'em down so fast that a man can't tell nothing about it."
Captain Phelps—"Well, I don't care—let it go—I can stand it, I cal' late. Here goes for a euchre!" (Here the captain played an odd-suit ace.) "Swing your bower if you've got it, but I'll take them three last tricks or break a rope-yarn."
(I, as partner to Captain Phelps, got bewildered, and made a bad play.)
Captain Phelps—"Now what did you trump my ace for? That ain't any way to do; you're always a sailin' too close to the wind."
(In a moment or two I make another bad play.)
Captain Phelps—"Ger-reat Scotland! What in the nation you dumpin' that blubber at such a time as this for? Rip! I knowed it! took with a nine-spot! royals, stuns'ls—everything, gone to smash, and nobody euchred!"
It is necessary to explain that those ancient, incomprehensible whalers always called worthless odd-suit cards "blubber."
AT HOME
We passengers are all at home now—taking meals at the American Hotel, and sleeping in neat white cottages, buried in noble shade trees and enchanting tropical flowers and shrubbery.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, April 18, 1866
Honolulu, March 1866
I have been here a day or two now, but I do not know enough concerning the country yet to commence writing about it with confidence, so I will drift back to sea again.
THE AJAX—HER OFFICERS
The Ajax is a 2,000 ton propeller, and one of the strongest bulk vessels afloat. All her timber-work is very heavy and fastened and bolted together as if to hold for a century. She was intended for a warship, and this accounts for her extraordinary strength. She has excellent cabin accommodations for sixty passengers, without crowding, and bunks for forty more. She has room for over twelve hundred tons of freight after her coal and stores for the round trip are all in; and when a coal depot is established for her hereafter at Honolulu, so that she need carry only fuel enough for half the voyage, she can take two or three hundred tons more. Her principal officers all served in the war. Captain Godfrey and the Chief mate, Baxter, were both in our navy, and Sanford, the Chief Engineer, has seen a great deal of service. He held his commission as Chief Engineer in the navy for sixteen years, and was in seven battles in the Mexican war, and six during the rebellion—a very good record. Hite, the Purser, served under General Sherman, in the Paymaster's department, with the rank of Captain.
The Ajax has a "harp" engine, laid horizontally, so as to be entirely below the waterline, a judicious arrangement, in view of the ship's intended duty originally, in a service where cannon-balls and shells would pelt her, instead of the rain showers of the Pacific. The horizontal engine takes up much less room than when placed in an upright position; it packs as closely as sardines in a box and gives the ship a good deal of extra space for freight and passengers. Every portion of the Ajax's engine and fire rooms is kept in perfect neatness and good order by the Chief's crew of 18 men.
In this place I would drop a hint of caution to all romantic young people who yearn to become bold sailor boys and ship as firemen on a steamer. Such a berth has its little drawbacks—in conveniences—which not all the romance in the world can reconcile one to. The principal of these is the sultry temperature of the furnace room, where the fireman, far below the surface of the sea and away from the fresh air and the light of day, stands in a narrow space between two rows of furnaces that flame and glare like the fires of hell, and shovels coal four hours at a stretch in an unvarying temperature of 148 degrees Fahrenheit! And yet how the people of Honolulu growl and sweat on an uncommonly warm day, with the mercury at 82 degrees in the shade and somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 degrees in the sun! Steamer firemen do not live, on an average, over 5 years.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HAWAIIAN TRADE
It is a matter of the utmost importance to the United States that her trade with these islands should be carefully fostered and augmented. Because—it pays. There can be no better reason than that. In actual revenue California is a burden to the country; she always falls behind; she always leaves a deficit at the end of the year to be made up by the nation; she never yields revenue enough to support the Government establishments within her borders. In contrast with this, the Sandwich Islands, which cost the United States but little, have paid her, in customs, as high as $400,000 in gold coin in a single year! duties paid upon sugar, etc., received in American ports and subtracted from the profits of the producer here. I will give the figures. They were compiled by the late N. Lombard Ingals, Secretary of the San Francisco Board of Brokers, regarded as one of the best accountants and financial statisticians that ever visited these islands. The following estimate is for 1864:
Coffee, 14,854 lbs., duty 5c per lb.—$ 742.70
Molasses, 259,469 gals., duty 8c per gal.—23,757.52
Pulu, 664,600 lbs. (at 7c per lb., $46,522), at 20 per cent.—9,304.40
Salt, 308,000 lbs., at 18c per 100 lbs.—554.40
Sugar, 885,957 lbs., at 3c average duty.—265,558.71
Rice, 337,978 lbs., at 2 1/2c per lb.—9,449.45
Unenumerated, at least—2,000.00
Being for San Francisco alone, fully—$311,367.18
Mr. Ingals then adds sugar and molasses sent to Portland, Oregon, the same year, on which $40,000 duties were paid, making over $350,000 paid in revenues to the United States for Sandwich Island products on the Pacific coast alone.
Mr. Ingals then says: "The Eastern vessels' cargoes consist mostly of oil transhipped from American whalers, and therefore duty free—the balance of their cargoes are hides, wool and sundries. I think it would be safe to estimate that the whole of them did not pay over $50,000 to the Custom house."
You will acknowledge that a trade which pays so well, albeit with no risk and small expense to the United States, ought to be encouraged, extended and irrevocably secured. There are two ways of doing this: Let Congress moderate the high duties some what; secondly—let the Islands be populated with Americans. To accomplish the latter, a steamer is indispensable. The sailing vessels can carry freight easily enough, but they [are] too slow and uncertain to build up the passenger trade from which immigration and permanent settlement here must naturally result. In California people are always pressed for time; it is only a few scattering idlers and pleasure seekers who can look serenely upon such an appalling sacrifice of precious hours as a tedious voyage of three weeks hither in a baffled and buffeted sailing vessel and a return trip occupying four or five weeks. But businessmen and capitalists would run down here by the steamer when they knew the sea voyage could be ciphered down to days and hours before starting—and a short number of days at that. And with the influx of capital would come population, and then I could not ride over mile after mile of fertile soil (as I did yesterday) without seeing half a dozen human habitations.
HOW OUR TRADE MUST BE EXTENDED, IF IT IS DONE AT ALL
An important question to be considered is how a steamer is to be made to pay during the year or two that she is populating the islands, doubling their productions and establishing a profitable trade for herself (for more than one-half of the export trade is now in the hands of the sailing vessels, secured to them by joint ownership in ships and plantations, by long time contracts for transportation, and by advance money to planters), and will remain so for some time. The legitimate way to establish a steamer on a paying basis from the first is to give her a Government subsidy of fifty or a hundred thousand dollars a year for carrying the mails, and subtract it from the $500,000 a year appropriated for the China Mail Company, which is to begin business the first of next January. The latter company will either let a sub-contract to the Ajax, or else put a small steamer of their own into the Honolulu trade—probably the former.
The China steamer will be a 5,000 ton vessel; the Ajax is 2,000 tons burden. Neither of them can enter here except in broad daylight, so narrow and crooked and shallow is the channel. The harbor is so small that it cannot accommodate more than two hundred vessels comfortably, and so narrow that a large ship cannot be handled freely in it. It is not much wider than the river at Sacramento—a section of your river a mile and a half long opposite Sacramento would afford an ampler harbor than this. For half a mile a ship coming in winds about through a channel as crooked as a dog's hind leg, and marked by long lines of upright posts on either side, and in this channel there is not good room enough for two ships to pass abreast.
The great China mail steamer can not enter this port. She will draw too much water—there is only about twenty-two feet on the bar. If she arrived here at dusk she would have to lie at anchor outside the harbor all night and exchange mails by small boats in the morning—that is, in fair weather. In the stormy season—in the season of the terrible Kona she might have to lie there for five or six days. The China mail steamer will be at sea from thirty-five to forty days on a round trip. With her provisions and sixty or seventy tons of coal a day, and other expenses, if she gets off with an outlay of $1,500 a day, while under way, she will do well. Honolulu is clear out of her way, both going and coming. Leaving San Francisco she would naturally come down until a little below the thirtieth parallel, to get the benefit of "the trades," but from thence to Honolulu, nine degrees further south, would be all lost time to her. Returning, she would leave Shanghae [sic] and bend around north till above the fortieth parallel, to get the west winds, and then if she had no destination but San Francisco she could go straight across with a spanking breeze all the way—but that not being the case she would make use of the west wind a great part of the voyage, I suppose, and then take in a lot of no longer useful canvas and come straight down south a matter of twenty degrees, land at Honolulu, and then sail north again about seventeen, to get to San Francisco. Thus, you see, she will come out of her course, outward bound, over five hundred miles, to strike Honolulu; returning, she will come out of her course 1,200 altogether, full 1,700 miles every trip more than she would have to make if she left the islands out of her voyage. The Ajax is considered fast; the greatest day's run she made this trip, with the wind exactly right and every rag of canvass set and drawing, was about 300 miles. On several other occasions she did not make over 200. So, to allow the China ship the very liberal average speed of 275 miles a day (250 would be nearer right), she must lose over six days every voyage if she comes to Honolulu; she will fool away at least one day here, each way—eight days altogether; expense for a year, $144,000. It cannot be done any cheaper by the China mail steamer. The Ajax can do it for a great deal less, and the China company would make money by sub-letting the contract to her. The China steamer will certainly never perform the Sandwich Island part of her contract with the Government; that portion will unquestionably be executed by some other steamer, and so, why not turn it over to the Ajax, and thus secure to the country the benefits that must accrue to it from the permanent establishment of a San Francisco and Honolulu steamship line?
I am not particular whether the Ajax owners continue her in this trade or not, but I would like to see some steamer line established on this route, and I only speak of the Ajax in this connection because she has already gained a good footing, and because she is owned by a company which has the confidence of the public and is financially able to carry out a project of this kind in a good and satisfactory manner, and because, further, if the China company put a small steamer of their own in this trade they will not be likely to do it for a year to come, and a twelvemonth is a good deal of time to lose.
MARK TWAIN
The Sacramento Daily Union, April 19, 1866
Honolulu, March, 1866.
A LITTLE MORE
We came in sight of two of this group of islands, Oahu and Molokai (pronounced O-waw-hoo and Molloki), on the morning of the 18th, and soon exchanged the dark blue waters of the deep sea for the brilliant light blue of "sounding." The fat, ugly birds (said to be a species of albatross) which had skimmed after us on tireless wings clear across the ocean, left us, and an occasional flying-fish went skimming over the water in their stead. Oahu loomed high, rugged, useless, barren, black and dreary, out of the sea, and in the distance Molokai lay like a homely sway-backed whale on the water.
As we rounded the promontory of Diamond Head (bringing into view a grove of cocoa-nut trees, first ocular proof that we were in the tropics), we ran up the stars and stripes at the main-spencer-gaff, and the Hawaiian flag at the fore. The latter is suggestive of the prominent political elements of the Islands. It is part French, part English, part American and is Hawaiian in general. The union is the English cross; the remainder of the flag (horizontal stripes) looks American, but has a blue French stripe in addition to our red and white ones. The flag was gotten up by foreign legations in council with the Hawaiian Government. The eight stripes refer to the eight islands which are inhabited; the other four are barren rocks incapable of supporting a population.
REFLECTIONS
As we came in sight we fired a gun, and a good part of Honolulu turned out to welcome the steamer. It was Sunday morning, and about church time, and we steamed through the narrow channel to the music of six different church bells, which sent their mellow tones far and wide, over hills and valleys, which were peopled by naked, savage, thundering barbarians only fifty years ago! Six Christian churches within five miles of the ruins of a Pagan temple, where human sacrifices were daily offered up to hideous idols in the last century! We were within pistol shot of one of a group of islands whose ferocious inhabitants closed in upon the doomed and helpless Captain Cook and murdered him, eighty-seven years ago; and lo! their descendants were at church! Behold what the missionaries have wrought!
THE CROWD ON THE PIER
By the time we had worked our slow way up to the wharf, under the guidance of McIntyre, the pilot, a mixed crowd of four or five hundred people had assembled—Chinamen, in the costume of their country—foreigners and the better class of natives, and "half whites" in carriages and dressed in Sacramento Summer fashion; other native men on foot, some in the cast off clothing of white folks, and a few wearing a battered hat, an old ragged vest, and nothing else at least nothing but an unnecessarily slender rag passed between the legs; native women clad in a single garment—a bright colored robe or wrapper as voluminous as a balloon, with full sleeves. This robe is "gathered" from shoulder to shoulder, before and behind, and then descends in ample folds to the feet—seldom a chemise or any other under garment—fits like a circus tent fits the tent pole, and no hoops. These robes were bright yellow, or bright crimson, or pure black occasionally, or gleaming white; but "solid colors" and "stunning" ones were the rule. They wore little hats such as the sex wear in your cities, and some of the younger women had very pretty faces and splendid black eyes and heavy masses of long black hair, occasionally put up in a "net;" some of these dark, ginger bread colored beauties were on foot—generally on bare-foot, I may add—and others were on horseback—astraddle; they never ride any other way, and they ought to know which way is best, for there are no more accomplished horsewomen in the world, it is said. The balance of the crowd consisted chiefly of little half-naked native boys and girls. All were chattering in the catchy, chopped-up Kanaka language; but what they were chattering about will always remain a mystery to me.
Captain Fitch said, "There's the King! that's him in the buggy! I know him far as I can see him."
I had never seen a King in my life, and I naturally took out my note book and put him down: "Tall, slender, dark; full-bearded; green frock coat, with lappels and collar bordered with gold band an inch wide—plug hat—broad gold band around it; royal costume looks too much like a livery; this man isn't as fleshy as I thought he was."
I had just got these notes entered when Captain Fitch discovered that he had got hold of the wrong King—or, rather, that he had got hold of the King's driver or a carriage-driver of one of the nobility. The King was not present at all. It was a great disappointment to me. I heard afterward that the comfortable, easy going King Kamehameha (pronounced Ka-may-ah may-ah) V had been seen sitting on a barrel on the wharf, the day before, fishing; but there was no consolation in that; that did not restore to me my lost King.
The town of Honolulu (said to contain between 12,000 and 15,000 inhabitants) is spread over a dead level; has streets from twenty to thirty feet wide, solid and level as a floor, most of them straight as a line and a few as crooked as a corkscrew; houses one and two stories high, built of wood, straw, 'dobies and dull cream-colored pebble-and-shell-conglomerated coral cut into oblong square blocks and laid in cement, but no brick houses; there are great yards, more like plazas, about a large number of the dwelling houses, and these are carpeted with bright green grass, into which your foot sinks out of sight; and they are ornamented by a hundred species of beautiful flowers and blossoming shrubs, and shaded by noble tamarind trees and the "Pride of India," with its fragrant flower, and by the "Umbrella Tree," and I do not know how many more. I had rather smell Honolulu at sunset than the old Police Courtroom in San Francisco.
ALMOST A KING
I had not shaved since I left San Francisco—ten days. As soon as I got ashore I hunted for a striped pole, and shortly found one. I always had a yearning to be a King. This may never be, I suppose. But at any rate it will always be a satisfaction to me to know that if I am not a King, I am the next thing to it—I have been shaved by the King's barber.
Walking about on shore was very uncomfortable at first; there was no spring to the solid ground, and I missed the heaving and rolling of the ship's deck; it was unpleasant to lean unconsciously to an anticipated lurch of the world and find that the world did not lurch, as it should have done. And there was something else missed—something gone—something wanting, I could not tell what—a dismal vacuum of some kind or other—a sense of emptiness. But I found out what it was presently. It was the absence of the ceaseless dull hum of beating waves and whipping sails and fluttering of the propeller, and creaking of the ship—sounds I had become so accustomed to that I had ceased to notice them and had become unaware of their existence until the deep Sunday stillness on shore made me vaguely conscious that a familiar spirit of some kind or other was gone from me. Walking on the solid earth with legs used to the "giving" of the decks under his tread, made Brown sick, and he went off to bed and left me to wander alone about this odd-looking city of the tropics.
NEW SCENES AND STRONG CONTRASTS
The further I traveled through the town the better I liked it. Every step revealed a new contrast—disclosed something I was unaccustomed to. In place of the grand mud-colored brown stone fronts of San Francisco, I saw neat white cottages, with green window-shutters; in place of front yards like billiard-tables with iron fences around them, I saw those cottages surrounded by ample yards, about like Portsmouth Square (as to size), thickly clad with green grass, and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate; in place of the customary infernal geranium languishing in dust and general debility on tin-roofed rear additions or in bedroom windows, I saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the richest dyes; in place of the dingy horrors of the "Willows," and the painful sharp-pointed shrubbery of that funny caricature of nature which they call "South Park," I saw huge-bodied, wide-spreading forest trees, with strange names and stranger appearance—trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud, and were able to stand alone without being tied to green poles; in place of those vile, tiresome, stupid, everlasting gold-fish, wiggling around in glass globes and assuming all shades and degrees of distortion through the magnifying and diminishing qualities of their transparent prison houses, I saw cats—Tom-cats, Mary Ann cats, long-tailed cats, bobtail cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep; in place of roughs and rowdies staring and blackguarding on the corners, I saw long-haired, saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens sitting on the ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or who ever happened along; instead of that wretched cobble-stone pavement nuisance, I walked on a firm foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea by the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a light layer of lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless hell long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands dead and cold and harmless yonder in the distance now; instead of cramped and crowded street cars, I met dusky native women sweeping by, free as the wind, on fleet horses and astraddle, with gaudy riding-sashes streaming like banners behind them; instead of the combined stenches of Sacramento street, Chinadom and Brannon street slaughter-houses, I breathed the balmy fragrance of jessamine, oleander, and the Pride of India; in place of the hurry and bustle and noisy confusion of San Francisco, I moved in the midst of a Summa calm as tranquil as dawn in the Garden of Eden; in place of our familiar skirting sand hills and the placid bay, I saw on the one side a frame-work of tall, precipitous mountains close at hand, clad in refreshing green, and cleft by deep, cool, chasm-like valleys—and in front the grand sweep of the ocean; a brilliant, transparent green near the shore, bound and bordered by a long white line of foamy spray dashing against the reef, and further out the dead, blue water of the deep sea, flecked with "white caps," and in the far horizon a single, lonely sail—
At this moment, this man Brown, who has no better manners than to read over one's shoulder, observes:
"Yes, and hot. Oh, I reckon not (only 82 in the shade)! Go on, now, and put it all down, now that you've begun; just say, 'And more "santipedes," and cockroaches, and fleas, and lizards, and red ants, and scorpions, and spiders, and mosquitoes and missionaries'—oh, blame my cats if I'd live here two months, not if I was High-You-Muck-a-Muck and King of Wawhoo, and had a harem full of hyenas!" (Wahine [most generally pronounced Wyheeny], seems to answer for wife, woman and female of questionable character, indifferently. I never can get this man Brown to understand that "hyena" is not the proper pronunciation. He says "It ain't any odds; it describes some of 'em, any way.")
I remarked: "But, Mr. Brown, these are trifles."
"Trifles be—blowed! You get nipped by one of them scorpions once, and see how you like it! There was Mrs. Jones, swabbing her face with a sponge; she felt something grab her cheek; she dropped the sponge and out popped a scorpion an inch and a half long! Well, she just got up and danced the Highland fling for two hours and a half—and yell!—why, you could have heard her from Lu-wow to Hoolahoola, with the wind fair! and for three days she soaked her cheek in brandy and salt, and it swelled up as big as your two fists. And you want to know what made me light out of bed so sudden last night? Only a 'santipede'—nothing, only a 'santipede,' with forty-two legs on a side, and every foot hot enough to burn a hole through a rawhide. Don't you know one of them things grabbed Miss Boone's foot when she was riding one day? He was hid in the stirrup, and just clamped himself around her foot and sunk his fangs plum through her shoe; and she just throwed her whole soul into one war-whoop and then hinted. And she didn't get out of bed nor set that foot on the floor again for three weeks. And how did Captain Godfrey always get off so easy? Why, because he always carried a bottle full of scorpions and santipedes soaked in alcohol, and whenever he got bit he bathed the place with that devilish mixture or took a drink out of it, I don't recollect which. And how did he have to do once, when he hadn't his bottle along? He had to cut out the bite with his knife and fill up the hole with arnica, and then prop his mouth open with the boot-jack to keep from getting the lockjaw. Oh, fill me up about this lovely country! You can go on writing that slop about balmy breezes and fragrant flowers, and all that sort of truck, but you're not going to leave out them santipedes and things for want of being reminded of it, you know."
I said, mildly: "But, Mr. Brown, these are the mere—"
"Mere—your grandmother! they ain't the mere anything! What's the use of you telling me they're the mere—mere—whatever it was you was going to call it? You look at them raw splotches all over my face—all over my arms—all over my body! Mosquito bites! Don't tell me about mere—mere things! You can't get around them mosquito bites. I took and brushed out my bar [mosquito net] good night before last, and tucked it in all around, and before morning I was eternally chawed up, anyhow. And the night before I fastened her up all right, and got in bed and smoked that old strong pipe until I got strangled and smothered and couldn't get out, and then they swarmed in there and jammed their bills through my shirt and sucked me as dry as a life-preserver before I got my breath again. And how did that dead-fall work? I was two days making it, and sweated two buckets full of brine, and blame the mosquito ever went under it, and sloshing around in my sleep I ketched my foot in it and got it flattened out so that it wouldn't go into a green turtle shell forty-four inches across the back. Jim Ayers grinding out seven double verses of poetry about Waw-hoo! and crying about leaving the blasted place in the two last verses; and you slobbering here about—there you are! Now—now, what do you say? That yellow spider could straddle over a saucer just like nothing—and if I hadn't been here to set that spittoon on him, he would have been between your sheets in a minute—he was traveling straight for your bed—he had his eye on it. Just pull at that web that he's been stringing after him—pretty near as hard to break as sewing silk; and look at his feet sticking out all round the spittoon. Oh, confound Waw hoo!"
I am glad Brown has got disgusted at that murdered spider and gone; I don't like to be interrupted when I am writing—especially by Brown, who is one of those men who always looks at the unpleasant side of everything, and I seldom do.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, April 20, 1866
Honolulu, March, 1866.
I did not expect to find as comfortable a hotel as the American, with its large, airy, well-furnished rooms, distinguished by perfect neatness and cleanliness, its cool, commodious verandas, its excellent table, its ample front yard, carpeted with grass and adorned with shrubbery, etcetera—and so I was agreeably disappointed. One of our lady passengers from San Francisco, who brings high recommendations, has purchased a half interest in the hotel, and she shows such a determination to earn success that I heartily wish she may achieve it—and the more so because she is an American, and if common remark can be depended upon the foreign element here will not allow an American to succeed if a good strong struggle can prevent it.
Several of us have taken rooms in a cottage in the center of the town, and are well satisfied with our quarters. There is a grassy yard as large as Platt's Hall on each of the three sides of the premises; a number of great tamarind and algeraba trees tower above us, and their dense, wide-spreading foliage casts a shade that palls our verandas with a sort of solemn twilight, even at noonday. If I were not so fond of looking into the rich masses of green leaves that swathe the stately tamarind right before my door, I would idle less and write more, I think. The leaf of this tree is of the size and shape of that of our sickly, homely locust in the States; but the tamarind is as much more superb a tree than the locust as a beautiful white woman is more lovely than a Digger squaw who may chance to generally resemble her in shape and size.
The algeraba (my spelling is guess work) has a gnarled and twisted trunk, as thick as a barrel, far-reaching crooked branches and a delicate, feathery foliage which would be much better suited to a garden shrub than to so large a tree.
We have got some handsome mango trees about us also, with dark green leaves, as long as a goose quill and not more than twice as broad. The trunk of this tree is about six inches through, and is very straight and smooth. Five feet from the ground it divides into three branches of equal size, which bend out with a graceful curve and then assume an upright position. From these numerous smaller branches spout. The main branches are not always three in number, I believe, but our's have this characteristic, at any rate.
We pay from five to seven dollars a week for furnished rooms, and ten dollars for board.
FURTHER PARTICULARS IN THIS CONNECTION
Mr. Laller, an American, and well spoken of, keeps a restaurant where meals can be had at all hours. So you see that folks of both regular and eccentric habits can be accommodated in Honolulu.
Washing is done chiefly by the natives, price, a dollar a dozen. If you are not watchful, though, your shirt won't stand more than one washing, because Kanaka artists work by a most destructive method. They use only cold water—sit down by a brook, soap the garment, lay it on one rock and "pound" it with another. This gives a shirt a handsome fringe around its borders, but it is ruinous on buttons. If your washerwoman knows you will not put up with this sort of thing, however, she will do her pounding with a bottle, or else rub your clothes clean with her hands. After the garments are washed the artist spreads them on the green grass, and the flaming sun and the winds soon bleach them as white as snow. They are then ironed on a cocoa-leaf mat spread on the ground, and the job is finished. I cannot discover that anything of the nature of starch is used.
Board, lodging, clean clothes, furnished room, coal oil or whale oil lamp (dingy, greasy, villainous)—next you want water, fruit, tobacco and cigars, and possibly wines and liquors—and then you are "fixed," and ready to live in Honolulu.
WATER
The water is pure, sweet, cool, clear as crystal, and comes from a spring in the mountains, and is distributed all over the town through leaden pipes. You can find a hydrant spiriting away at the bases of three or four trees in a single yard, sometimes, so plenty and cheap is this excellent water. Only twenty-four dollars a year supplies a whole household with a limitless quantity of it.
FRUIT
You must have fruit. You feel the want of it here. At any rate, I do, though I cared nothing whatever for it in San Francisco. You pay about twenty-five cents ("two reals," in the language of the country, borrowed from Mexico, where a good deal of their silver money comes from) a dozen for oranges; and so delicious are they that some people frequently eat a good many at luncheon. I seldom eat more than ten or fifteen at a sitting, however, because I despise to see anybody gormandize. Even fifteen is a little surprising to me, though, for two or three oranges in succession were about as much as I could ever relish at home. Bananas are worth about a bit a dozen—enough for that rather over-rated fruit. Strawberries are plenty, and as cheap as the bananas. Those which are carefully cultivated here have a far finer flavor than the California article. They are in season a good part of the year. I have a kind of a general idea that the tamarinds are rather sour this year. I had a curiosity to taste these things, and I knocked half a dozen off the tree and ate them the other day. They sharpened my teeth up like a razor, and put a "wire edge" on them that I think likely will wear off when the enamel does. My judgment now is that when it comes to sublimated sourness, persimmons will have to take a back seat and let the tamarinds come to the front. They are shaped and colored like a pea-nut, and about three times as large. The seeds inside of the thin pod are covered with that sour, gluey substance which I experimented on. They say tamarinds make excellent preserves (and by a wise provision of Providence, they are generally placed in sugar-growing countries), and also that a few of them placed in impure water at sea will render it palatable. Mangoes and guavas are plenty. I do not like them. The limes are excellent, but not very plenty. Most of the apples brought to this market are imported from Oregon. Those I have eaten were as good as bad turnips, but not better. They claim to raise good apples and peaches on some of these islands. I have not seen any grapes, or pears or melons here. They may be out of season, but I keep thinking it is dead Summer time now.
The only cigars smoked here are those trifling, insipid, tasteless, flavorless things they call "Manilas"—ten for twenty-five cents; and it would take a thousand to be worth half the money. After you have smoked about thirty-five dollars worth of them in a forenoon you feel nothing but a desperate yearning to go out somewhere and take a smoke. They say high duties and a sparse population render it unprofitable to import good cigars, but I do not see why some enterprising citizen does not manufacture them from the native tobacco. A Kanaka gave me some Oahu tobacco yesterday, of fine texture, pretty good flavor, and so strong that one pipe full of it satisfied me for several hours. [This man Brown has just come in and says he has bought a couple of tons of Manilas to smoke to-night.]
WINES AND LIQUORS
Wines and liquors can be had in abundance, but not of the very best quality. The duty on brandy and whisky amounts to about three dollars a gallon, and on wines from thirty to sixty cents a bottle, according to market value. And just here I would caution Californians who design visiting these islands against bringing wines or liquors with their baggage, lest they provoke the confiscation of the latter. They will be told that to uncork the bottles and take a little of the contents out will compass the disabilities of the law, but they may find it dangerous to act upon such a suggestion, which is nothing but an unworthy evasion of the law, at best. It is incumbent upon the custom officers to open trunks and search for contraband articles, and although I think the spirit of the law means to permit foreigners to bring a little wine or liquor ashore for private use, I know the letter of it allows nothing of the kind. In addition to searching a passenger's baggage, the Custom-house officer makes him swear that he has got nothing contraband with him. I will also mention, as a matter of information, that a small sum (two dollars for each person) is exacted for permission to land baggage, and this goes to the support of the hospitals.
I have said that the wines and liquors sold here are not of the best quality. It could not well be otherwise, as I can show. There seem to be no hard, regular drinkers in this town, or at least very few; you perceive that the duties are high; saloon keepers pay a license of a thousand dollars a year; they must close up at ten o'clock at night and not open again before daylight the next morning; they are not allowed to open on Sunday at all. These laws are very strict, and are rigidly obeyed.
WATER AGAIN
I must come back to water again, though I thought I had exhausted the subject. As no ice is kept here, and as the notion that snow is brought to Honolulu from the prodigious mountains on the island of Hawaii is a happy fiction of some imaginative writer, the water used for drinking is usually kept cool by putting it into "monkeys" and placing those animals in open windows, where the breezes of heaven may blow upon them. "Monkeys" are slender-necked, large bodied, gourd-shaped earthenware vessels, manufactured in Germany and are popularly supposed to keep water very cool and fresh, but I cannot indorse that supposition. If a wet blanket were wrapped around the monkey, I think the evaporation would cool the water within, but nobody seems to consider it worthwhile to go to that trouble, and I include myself among this number.
Ice is worth a hundred dollars a ton in San Francisco, and five or six hundred here, and if the steamer continues to run, a profitable trade may possibly be driven in the article here after. It does not pay to bring it from Sitka in sailing vessels, though. It has been tried. It proved a mutinous and demoralizing cargo, too; for the sailors drank the melted freight and got so high-toned that they refused ever afterwards to go to sea unless the Captains would guarantee them ice water on the voyage. Brown got the latter fact from Captain Phelps, and says he "coppered it in consideration of the source." To "copper" a thing, he informs me, is to bet against it.
If you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu, and experience that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and address him as "Captain." Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his countenance that you are on the wrong tack, ask him where he preaches. It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler. I am now personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six missionaries. The captains and ministers form one half of the population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families, and the final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian Government. And there are just about cats enough for three apiece all around.
A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs yesterday, and said:
"Good morning, your reverence. Preach in the stone church yonder, no doubt?"
"No, I don't. I'm not a preacher."
"Really, I beg your pardon, Captain. I trust you had a good season. How much oil—"
"Oil? Why, what do you take me for? I'm not a whaler."
"Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency. Major General in the household troops no doubt? Minister of the Interior, likely? Secretary of War? First Gentleman of the Bedchamber? Commissioner of the Royal—"
"Stuff! man. I'm no official. I'm not connected in any way with the Government."
"Bless my life! Then, who the mischief are you? What the mischief are you? and how the mischief did you get here, and where in thunder did you come from?"
"I'm only a private personage—an unassuming stranger—lately arrived from America."
"No? Not a missionary! not a whaler! not a member of his Majesty's Government! not even Secretary of the Navy! Ah, Heaven! it is too blissful to be true—alas, I do but dream. And yet that noble, honest countenance—those oblique, ingenuous eyes—that massive head, incapable of—of—anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif. Excuse these tears. For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this, and—"
Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away. I pitied this poor creature from the bottom of my heart. I was deeply moved. I shed a few tears on him and kissed him for his mother. I then took what small change he had and "shoved."
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, April 21, 1866
Honolulu, March, 1866.
I am probably the most sensitive man in the kingdom of Hawaii tonight—especially about sitting down in the presence of my betters. I have ridden fifteen or twenty miles on horseback since 5 P.M., and to tell the honest truth, I have a delicacy about sitting down at all. I am one of the poorest horsemen in the world, and I never mount a horse without experiencing a sort of dread that I may be setting out on that last mysterious journey which all of us must take sooner or later, and I never come back in safety from a horseback trip without thinking of my latter-end for two or three days afterward. This same old regular devotional sentiment began just as soon as I sat down here five minutes ago.
An excursion to Diamond Head and the King's Cocoanut Grove was planned to-day—time, 4:30 P.M.—the party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen and three ladies. They all started at the appointed hour except myself. I was at the Government Prison, and got so interested in its examination that I did not notice how quickly the time was passing. Somebody remarked that it was twenty minutes past five o'clock, and that woke me up. It was a fortunate circumstance that Captain Phillips was there with his "turn-out," as he calls a top-buggy that Captain Cook brought here in 1778, and a horse that was here when Captain Cook came. Captain Phillips takes a just pride in his driving and in the speed of his horse, and to his passion for displaying them I owe it that we were only sixteen minutes coming from the prison to the American Hotel—a distance which has been estimated to be over half a mile. But it took some awful driving. The Captain's whip came down fast, and the blows started so much dust out of the horse's hide that during the last half of the journey we rode through an impenetrable fog, and ran by a pocket compass in the hands of Captain Fish, a whaler Captain of twenty-six years experience, who sat there through that perilous voyage as self-possessed as if he had been on the euchre-deck of his own ship, and calmly said, "Port your helm—port," from time to time, and "Hold her a little free-steady—so-o," and "Luff—hard down to starboard!" and never once lost his presence of mind or betrayed the least anxiety by voice or manner. When we came to anchor at last, and Captain Phillips looked at his watch and said, "Sixteen minutes—I told you it was in her! that's ova three miles an hour!" I could see he felt entitled to a compliment, and so l said I had never seen lightning go like that horse. And I never had.
THE STEED OAHU
The landlord of the American said the party had been gone nearly an hour, but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could easily overtake them. I said, never mind—I preferred a safe horse to a fast one—I would like to have an excessively gentle horse—a horse with no spirit whatever—a lame one, if he had such a thing. Inside of five minutes I was mounted, and perfectly satisfied with my outfit. I had no time to label him "This is a horse," and so if the public took him for a sheep I cannot help it. I was satisfied, and that was the main thing. I could see that he had as many fine points as any man's horse, and I just hung my hat on one of them, behind the saddle, and swabbed the perspiration from my face and started. I named him after this island, "Oahu" (pronounced O-waw-hoo). The first gate he came to he started in; I had neither whip nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him. He firmly resisted argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse. He backed out of that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street. I triumphed by my former process. Within the next six hundred yards he crossed the street fourteen times and attempted thirteen gates, and in the meantime the tropical sun was beating down and threatening to cave the top of my head in, and I was literally dripping with perspiration and profanity. (I am only human and I was sorely aggravated. I shall behave better next time.) He quit the gate business after that and went along peaceably enough, but absorbed in meditation. I noticed this latter circumstance, and it soon began to fill me with the gravest apprehension. I said to myself, this malignant brute is planning some new outrage, some fresh deviltry or other—no horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly as this one is doing just for nothing. The more this thing preyed upon my mind the more uneasy I became, until at last the suspense became unbeatable and I dismounted to see if there was anything wild in his eye—for I had heard that the eye of this noblest of our domestic animals is very expressive. I cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when I found that he was only asleep. I woke him up and started him into a faster walk, and then the inborn villainy of his nature came out again. He tried to climb over a stone wall, five or six feet high. I saw that I must apply force to this horse, and that I might as well begin first as last. I plucked a stout switch from a tamarind tree, and the moment he saw it, he gave in. He broke into a convulsive sort of a canter, which had three short steps in it and one long one, and reminded me alternately of the clattering shake of the great earthuake, and the sweeping plunging of the Ajax in a storm.
OUT OF PRISON, BUT IN THE STOCKS
And now it occurs to me that there can be no fitter occasion than the present to pronounce a fervent curse upon the man who invented the American saddle. There is no seat to speak of about it—one might as well sit in a shovel—and the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance. If I were to write down here all the abuse I expended on those stirrups, it would make a large book, even without pictures. Sometimes I got one foot so far through, that the stirrup partook of the nature of an anklet—sometimes both feet were through and I was handcuffed by the legs and some times my feet got clear out and left the stirrups wildly dangling about my shins. Even when I was in proper position and carefully balanced upon the balls of my feet, there was no comfort in it, on account of my nervous dread that they were going to slip one way or the other in a moment. But the subject is too exasperating to write about.
ABOUT HORSES AND KANAKA SHREWDNESS
This is a good time to drop in a paragraph of information. There is no regular livery stable in Honolulu, or, indeed, in any part of the kingdom of Hawaii; therefore, unless you are acquainted with wealthy residents (who all have good horses), you must hire animals of the vilest description from the Kanakas. Any horse you hire, even though it be from a white man, is not often of much account, because it will be brought in for you from some ranch, and has necessarily been leading a hard life. If the Kanakas who have been caring for him (inveterate riders they are) have not ridden him half to death every day themselves, you can depend upon it they have been doing the same thing by proxy, by clandestinely hiring him out. At least, so I am informed. The result is, that no horse has a chance to eat, drink, rest, recuperate, or look well or feel well, and so strangers go about in the islands mounted as I was to-day.
In hiring a horse from a Kanaka, you must have all your eyes about you, because you can rest satisfied that you are dealing with as shrewd a rascal as ever patronized a penitentiary. You may leave your door open and your trunk unlocked as long as you please, and he will not meddle with your property; he has no important vices and no inclination to commit robbery on a large scale; but if he can get ahead of you in the horse business, he will take a genuine delight in doing it. This trait is characteristic of horse jockeys, the world over, is it not? He will overcharge you if he can; he will hire you a fine-looking horse at night (anybody's—maybe the King's, if the royal steed be in convenient view), and bring you the mate to my Oahu in the morning, and contend that it is the same animal. If you raise a row, he will get out by saying it was not himself who made the bargain with you, but his brother, "who went out in the country this morning." They have always got a "brother" to shift the responsibility upon. A victim said to one of these fellows one day:
"But I know I hired the horse of you, because I noticed that scar on your cheek."
The reply was not bad: "Oh, yes—yes—my brother all same—we twins!"
A friend of mine, J. Smith, hired a horse yesterday, the Kanaka warranting him to be in excellent condition. Smith had a saddle and blanket of his own, and he ordered the Kanaka to put these on the horse. The Kanaka protested that he was perfectly willing to trust the gentleman with the saddle that was already on the animal, but Smith refused to use it. The change was made; then Smith noticed that the Kanaka had only changed the saddles, and had left the original blanket on the horse; he said he forgot to change the blankets, and so, to cut the bother short, Smith mounted and rode away. The horse went lame a mile from town, and afterward got to cutting up some extraordinary capers. Smith got down and took off the saddle, but the blanket stuck fast to the horse—glued to a procession of raw sores. The Kanaka's mysterious conduct stood explained.
Another friend of mine bought a pretty good horse from a native, a day or two ago, after a tolerably thorough examination of the animal. He discovered to-day that the horse was as blind as a bat, in one eye. He meant to have examined that eye, and came home with a general notion that he had done it; but he remembers now that every time he made the attempt his attention was called to something else by his victimizer.
One more yarn, and then I will pass to something else. I am informed that when Leland was here he bought a pair of very respectable-looking match horses from a native. They were in a little stable with a partition through the middle of it—one horse in each apartment. Leland examined one of them critically through a window (the Kanaka's "brother" having gone to the country with the key), and then went around the house and examined the other through a window on the other side. He said it was the neatest match he had ever seen, and paid for the horses on the spot. Whereupon the Kanaka departed to join his brother in the country. The scoundrel had shamefully swindled Leland. There was only one "match" horse and he had examined his starboard side through one window and his port side through another! I decline to believe this story, but I give it because it is worth something as a fanciful illustration of a fixed fact—namely, that the Kanaka horse-jockey is fertile in invention and elastic in conscience.
HONOLULU PRICES FOR HORSEFLESH
You can buy a pretty good horse for forty or fifty dollars, and a good enough horse for all practical purposes for two dollars and a half. I estimate Oahu to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five cents. A good deal better animal than he is was sold here day before yesterday for a dollar and six bits, and sold again to-day for two dollars and twenty-five cents; Brown bought a handsome and lively little pony yesterday for ten dollars; and about the best common horse on the island (and he is a really good one) sold yesterday, with good Mexican saddle and bridle, for seventy dollars—a horse which is well and widely known, and greatly respected for his speed, good disposition and everlasting bottom. You give your horse a little grain once a day; it comes from San Francisco, and is worth about two cents a pound; and you give him as much hay as he wants; it is cut and brought to the market by natives, and is not very good, it is baled into long, round bundles, about the size of a large man; one of them is stuck by the middle on each end of a six-foot pole, and the Kanaka shoulders the pole and walks about the streets between the upright bales in search of customers. These hay bales, thus carried, have a general resemblance to a colossal capital H.
These hay-bundles cost twenty-five cents apiece, and one will last a horse about a day. You can get a horse for a song, a week's hay for another song, and you can turn your animal loose among the luxuriant grass in your neighbor's broad front yard without a song at all—you do it at midnight, and stable the beast again before morning. You have been at no expense thus far, but when you come to buy a saddle and bridle they will cost you from $20 to $35. You can hire a horse, saddle and bridle at from $7 to $10 a week, and the owner will take care of them at his own expense.
Well, Oahu worried along over a smooth, hard road, bordered on either side by cottages, at intervals, pulu swamps at intervals, fish ponds at intervals, but through a dead level country all the time, and no trees to hide the wide Pacific ocean on the right or the rugged, towering rampart of solid rock, called Diamond Head or Diamond Point, straight ahead.
THE KING'S GROVE, WAIKIKI
A mile and a half from town, I came to a grove of tall cocoa-nut trees, with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of cocoa-nuts—not more picturesque than a forest of colossal ragged parasols, with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be. About a dozen cottages, some frame and the others of native grass, nestled sleepily in the shade here and there. The grass cabins are of a grayish color, are shaped much like our own cottages, only with higher and steeper roofs usually, and are made of some kind of weed strongly bound together in bundles. The roofs are very thick and so are the walls; the latter have square holes in them for windows. At a little distance these cabins have a furry appearance, as if they might be made of bear skins. They are very cool and pleasant inside. The King's flag was flying from the roof of one of the cottages, and His Majesty was probably within. He owns the whole concern thereabouts, and passes his time there frequently, on sultry days "laying off." The spot is called "The King's Grove."
RUINS OF AN ANCIENT HEATHEN TEMPLE
Near by is an interesting ruin—the meager remains of an ancient heathen temple—a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it to him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice—in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance, he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell! And it inclines right thinking man to weep rather than to laugh when he reflects how surprised they must have been when they got there. This ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a roofless inclosure, a hundred and thirty feet long and seventy wide—nothing but naked walls, very thick but not much higher than a man's head. They will last for, ages, no doubt, if left unmolested. Its three altars and other sacred appurtenances have crumbled and passed away years ago. It is said that in the old times thousands of human beings were slaughtered here, in the presence of multitudes of naked, whooping and howling savages. If these mute stones could speak, what tales they could tell, what pictures they could describe, of fettered victims, writhing and shrieking under the knife; of dense masses of dusky forms straining forward out of the gloom, with eager and ferocious faces lit up with the weird light of sacrificial fires—of the vague back ground of ghostly trees; of the mournful sea washing the dim shore—of the dark pyramid of Diamond Head standing sentinel over the dismal scene, and the peaceful moon looking calmly down upon it through rifts in the drifting clouds!
When Kamehameha (pronounced Ka-may-ha-may-ah) the Great—who was a very Napoleon in military genius and uniform success—invaded this island of Oahu three-quarters of a century ago, and exterminated the army sent to oppose him, and took full and final possession of the country, he searched out the dead body of the king of Oahu, and those of the principal chiefs, and impaled their heads upon the walls of this temple.
Those were savage times when this old slaughter-house was in its prime. The king and the chiefs ruled the common herd with a rod of iron; made them gather all the provisions the masters needed; build all the houses and temples; stand all the expenses, of whatever kind; take kicks and cuffs for thanks; drag out lives well flavored with misery, and then suffer death for trifling offenses or yield up their lives on the sacrificial alters to purchase favors from the gods for their hard rulers. The missionaries have clothed them, educated them, broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the right to enjoy whatever the labor of their hand and brains produces, with equal laws for all and punishment for all alike who transgress them. The contrast is so strong—the wonderful benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable and so unquestionable, that the frankest compliment I can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the condition of the Sandwich Islanders of Captain Cook's time, and their condition to-day. Their work speaks for itself.
The little collection of cottages (of which I was speaking a while ago) under the cocoa-nut trees is a historical point. It is the village of Waikiki (usually pronounced Wy-kee-ky), once the Capital of the kingdom and the abode of the great Kamehameha I. In 1801, while he lay encamped at this place with seven thousand men, preparing to invade the island of Kau[a]i (he had previously captured and subdued the seven other inhabited islands of the group, one after another), a pestilence broke out in Oahu and raged with great virulence. It attacked the king's army and made great havoc in it. It is said that three hundred bodies were washed out to sea in one day.
There is an opening in the coral reef at this point, and anchorage inside for a small number of vessels, though one accustomed to the great Bay of San Francisco would never take this little belt of smooth water, with its border of foaming surf, to be a harbor, save for Whitehall boats or something of that kind. But harbors are scarce in these islands—open roadsteads are the rule here. The harbor of Waikiki was discovered in 1786 (seven or eight years after Captain Cook's murder) by Captains Portlock and Dixon, in the ships King George and Queen Charlotte—the first English vessels that visited the islands after that unhappy occurrence. This little bathing tub of smooth water possesses some further historical interest as being the spot where the distinguished navigator Vancouver, landed when he came here in 1792.
In a conversation with a gentleman to-day about the scarcity of harbors among the islands (and in all the islands of the South Pacific), he said the natives of Tahiti have a theory that the reason why there are harbors wherever fresh water streams empty into the sea, and none elsewhere, is that the fresh water kills the coral insect, or so discommodes or disgusts it that it will not build its stony wall in its vicinity, and instanced what is claimed as fact, viz., that the break in the reef is always found where the fresh water passes over it, in support of this theory.
[This notable equestrian excursion will be concluded in my next, if nothing happens.]
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, April 24, 1866
Honolulu, March, 1866
THE EQUESTRIAN EXCURSION CONCLUDED
I wandered along the sea beach on my steed Oahu around the base of the extinct crater of Leahi, or Diamond Head, and a quarter of a mile beyond the point I overtook the party of ladies and gentlemen and assumed my proper place—that is, in the rear—for the horse I ride always persists in remaining in the rear in spite of kicks, cuffs and curses. I was satisfied as long as I could keep Oahu within hailing distance of the cavalcade—I knew I could accomplish nothing better even if Oahu were Norfolk himself.
We went on—on—on—a great deal too far, I thought, for people who were unaccustomed to riding on horseback, and who must expect to suffer on the morrow if they indulged too freely in this sort of exercise. Finally we got to a point which we were expecting to go around in order to strike an easy road home; but we were too late; it was full tide and the sea had closed in on the shore. Young Henry McFarlane said he knew a nice, comfortable route over the hill—a short cut—and the crowd dropped into his wake. We climbed a hill a hundred and fifty feet high, and about as straight up and down as the side of a house, and as full of rough lava blocks as it could stick—not as wide, perhaps, as the broad road that leads to destruction, but nearly as dangerous to travel, and apparently leading in the same general direction. I felt for the ladies, but I had no time to speak any words of sympathy, by reason of my attention being so much occupied by Oahu. The place was so steep that at times he stood straight up on his tip-toes and clung by his forward toenails, with his back to the Pacific Ocean and his nose close to the moon—and thus situated we formed an equestrian picture which was as uncomfortable to me as it may have been picturesque to the spectators. You may think I was afraid, but I was not. I knew I could stay on him as long as his ears did not pull out.
It was a great relief to me to know that we were all safe and sound on the summit at last, because the sun was just disappearing in the waves, night was abroad in the land, candles and lamps were already twinkling in the distant town, and we gratefully reflected that Henry had saved us from having to go back around the rocky, sandy beach. But a new trouble arose while the party were admiring the rising moon and the cool, balmy night breeze, with its odor of countless flowers, for it was discovered that we had got into a place we could not get out of—we were apparently surrounded by precipices—our pilot's chart was at fault, and he could not extricate us, and so we had the prospect before us of either spending the night in the admired night-breeze, under the admired moon, or of clambering down the way we came, in the dark. However, a Kanaka came along presently and found a first-rate road for us down an almost imperceptible decline, and the party set out on a cheerful gallop again, and Oahu struck up his miraculous canter once more. The moon rose up, and flooded mountain and valley and ocean with silvery light, and I was not sorry we had lately been in trouble, because the consciousness of being safe again raised our spirits and made us more capable of enjoying the beautiful scene than we would have been otherwise. I never breathed such a soft, delicious atmosphere before, nor one freighted with such rich fragrance. A barber shop is nothing to it.
BATTLE-GROUND WHOSE HISTORY IS FORGOTTEN
Gayly laughing and talking, the party galloped on, and with set teeth and bouncing body I clung to the pommel and cantered after. Presently we came to a place where no grass grew—a wide expanse of deep sand. They said it was an old battle-ground. All around everywhere, not three feet apart, the bleached bones of men gleamed white in the moonlight. We picked up a lot of them for mementoes. I got quite a number of arm bones and leg bones—of great chiefs, maybe, who had fought savagely in that fearful battle in the old days, when blood flowed like wine where we now stood—and wore the choicest of them out on Oahu afterward, trying to make him go. All sorts of bones could be found except skulls; but a citizen said, irreverently, that there had been an unusual number of "skull hunters" there lately—a species of sportsmen I had never heard of before. The conversation at this point took a unique and ghastly turn. A gentleman said:
"Give me some of your bones, Miss Blank; I'll carry them for you."
Another said:
"You haven't got bones enough, Mrs. Blank; here's a good shin-bone, if you want it.."
Such observations as these fell from the lips of ladies with reference to their queer newly-acquired property:
"Mr. Brown, will you please hold some of my bones for me a minute?" And,
"Mr. Smith, you have got some of my bones; and you have got one, too, Mr. Jones, and you have got my spine, Mr. Twain. Now don't any of you gentlemen get my bones all mixed up with yours so that you can't tell them apart."
These remarks look very irreverent on paper, but they did not sound so, being used merely in a business way and with no intention of making sport of the remains. I did not think it was just right to carry off any of these bones, but we did it, anyhow. We considered that it was at least as right as it is for the Hawaiian Government and the city of Honolulu (which is the most excessively moral and religious town that can be found on the map of the world), to permit those remains to lie decade after decade, to bleach and rot in sun and wind and suffer desecration by careless strangers and by the beasts of the field, unprotected by even a worm-fence. Call us hard names if you will, you statesmen and missionaries! but I say shame upon you, that after raising a nation from idolatry to Christianity, and from barbarism to civilization, you have not taught it the comment [sic] of respect for the dead. Your work is incomplete.
LEGENDARY
Nothing whatever is known about this place—its story is a secret that will never be revealed. The oldest natives make no pretense of being possessed of its history. They say these bones were here when they were children. They were here when their grandfathers were children—but how they came here, they can only conjecture. Many people believe this spot to be an ancient battle-ground, and it is usual to call it so, and they believe that these skeletons have lain for ages just where their proprietors fell in the great fight. Other people believe that Kamehameha I fought his first battle here. On this point, I have heard a story, which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which have been written, concerning these islands—I do not know where the narrator got it. He said that when Kamehameha (who was at first merely a subordinate chief on the island of Hawaii), landed here, he brought a large army with him, and encamped at Waikiki. The Oahuans marched against him, and so confident were they of success that they readily acceded to a demand of their priests that they should draw a line where these bones now lie, and take an oath that, if forced to retreat at all, they would never retreat beyond this boundary. The priests told them that death and everlasting punishment would overtake any who violated the oath, and the march was resumed. Kamehameha drove them back step by step; the priests fought in the front rank and exhorted them both by voice and inspiring example to remember their oath—to die, if need be, but never cross the fatal line. The struggle was manfully maintained, but at last the chief priest fell, pierced to the heart with a spear, and the unlucky omen fell like a blight upon the brave souls at his back; with a triumphant shout the invaders pressed forward—the line was crossed—the offended gods deserted the despairing army, and accepting the doom their perjury had brought upon them, they broke and fled over the plain where Honolulu stands now—up the beautiful Nuuanu Valley—paused a moment, hemmed in by precipitous mountains on either hand and the frightful precipice of the Pari [pronounced Pally; intelligent natives claim that there is no r in the Kanaka alphabet] in front, and then were driven over—a sheer plunge of six hundred feet!
The story is pretty enough, but Mr. Jarves' excellent history says the Oahuans were intrenched in Nuuanu Valley; that Kamehameha ousted them, routed them, pursued them up the valley and drove them over the precipice. He makes no mention of our bone-yard at all in his book.
There was a terrible pestilence here in 1804, which killed great numbers of the inhabitants, and the natives have legends of others that swept the islands long before that; and therefore many persons now believe that these bones belonged to victims of one of these epidemics who were hastily buried in a great pit. It is by far the most reasonable conjecture, because Jarves says that the weapons of the Islanders were so rude and inefficient that their battles were not often very bloody. If this was a battle it was astonishingly deadly, for in spite of the depredations of "skull hunters," we rode a considerable distance over ground so thickly strewn with human bones that the horses' feet crushed them, not occasionally, but at every step.
SENTIMENT
Impressed by the profound silence and repose that rested over the beautiful landscape, and being, as usual, in the rear, I gave voice to my thought. I said:
"What a picture is here slumbering in the solemn glory of the moon! How strong the rugged outlines of the dead volcano stand out against the clear sky! What a snowy fringe marks the bursting of the surf over the long, curved reef! How calmly the dim city sleeps yonder in the plain! How soft the shadows lie upon the stately mountains that border the dream haunted Manoa Valley! What a grand pyramid of billowy clouds towers above the storied Pari! How the grim warriors of the past seem flocking in ghostly squadrons to their ancient battlefield again—how the wails of the dying well up from the—"
At this point the horse called Oahu deliberately sat down in the sand. Sat down to listen, I suppose. Never mind what he heard. I stopped apostrophising and convinced him that I was not a man to allow contempt of Court on the part of a horse. I broke the back bone of a Chief over his rump and set out to join the cavalcade again.
Very considerably fagged out we arrived in town at 9 o'clock at night, myself in the lead—for when my horse finally came to understand that he was homeward bound and hadn't far to go, he threw his legs wildly out before and behind him, depressed his head and laid his ears back, and flew by the admiring company like a telegram. In five minutes he was far away ahead of everybody.
We stopped in front of a private residence—Brown and I did—to wait for the rest and see that none were lost. I soon saw that I had attracted the attention of a comely young girl and I felt duly flattered. Perhaps thought I, she admires my horsemanship—and I made a savage jerk at the bridle and said, "Ho! will you!" to show how fierce and unmanageable the beast was—though, to say truly, he was leaning up against a hitching post peaceably enough at the time. I stirred Oahu up and moved him about, and went up the street a short distance to look for the party, and "loped" gallantly back again, all the while making a pretense of being unconscious that I was an object of interest. I then addressed a few "peart" remarks to Brown, to give the young lady a chance to admire my style of conversation, and was gratified to see her step up and whisper to Brown and glance furtively at me at the same time. I could see that her gentle face bore an expression of the most kindly and earnest solicitude, and I was shocked and angered to hear Brown burst into a fit of brutal laughter
As soon as we started home, I asked with a fair show of indifference, what she had been saying.
Brown laughed again and said: "She thought from the slouchy way you rode and the way you drawled out your words, that you was drunk! She said, 'Why don't you take the poor creature home, Mr. Brown? It makes me nervous to see him galloping that horse and just hanging on that way, and he so drunk.'"
I laughed very loudly at the joke, but it was a sort of hollow, sepulchral laugh, after all. And then I took it out of Oahu.
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
I have found an old acquaintance here—Rev. Franklin S. Rising, of the Episcopal minister, who has had charge of a church in Virginia, Nevada, for several years, and who is well known in Sacramento and San Francisco. He sprained his knee in September last, and is here for his health. He thinks he has made no progress worth mentioning towards regaining it, but I think differently. He can ride on horseback, and is able to walk a few steps without his crutches—things he could not do a week ago.
"WHILE WE WERE MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA!"
The popular-song nuisance follows us here. In San Francisco it used to be "Just Before the Battle Mother," every night and all night long. Then it was "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." After that it was "Wearin' of the Green." And last and most dreadful of all, came that calamity of "When We Were Marching Through Georgia." It was the last thing I heard when the ship sailed, and it gratified me to think I should hear it no more for months. And now, here at dead of night, at the very outpost and fag-end of the world on a little rock in the middle of a limitless ocean, a pack of dark-skinned savages are tramping down the street singing it with a vim and an energy that make my hair rise!—singing it in their own barbarous tongue! They have got the tune to perfection—otherwise I never would have suspected that
"Waikiki lantani oe Kaa hooly hooly wawhoo"
means, "When We Were Marching Through Georgia." If it would have been all the same to General Sherman, I wish he had gone around by the way of the Gulf of Mexico, instead of matching through Georgia.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, May 21, 1866
Honolulu (S. I.), April, 1866.
Mounted on my noble steed Hawaii (pronounced Hah-wy-ye—stress on second syllable), a beast that cost thirteen dollars and is able to go his mile in three—with a bit of margin to it—I departed last Saturday week for—for any place that might turn up.
SATURDAY IN HONOLULU
Passing through the market place we saw that feature of Honolulu under its most favorable auspices—that is, in the full glory of Saturday afternoon, which is a festive day with the natives. The native girls by twos and threes and parties of a dozen, and sometimes in whole platoons and companies, went cantering up and down the neighboring streets astride of fleet but homely horses, and with their gaudy riding habits streaming like banners behind them. Such a troop of free and easy riders, in their natural home, which is the saddle, makes a gay and graceful and exhilarating spectacle. The riding habit I speak of is simply a long, broad scarf, like a tavern tablecloth brilliantly colored, wrapped around the loins once, then apparently passed up between the limbs and each end thrown backward over the same, and floating and flapping behind on both sides beyond the horse's tail like a couple of fancy flags; and then, with a girl that throws her chest forward and sits up like a Major General and goes sweeping by like the wind. "Gay?" says Brown, with a fine irony; "oh, you can't mean it!"
The girls put on all the finery they can scare up on Saturday afternoon—fine black silk robes; flowing red ones that nearly put your eyes out; others as white as snow; still others that discount the rainbow—and they wear their hair in nets, and trim their jaunty hats with fresh flowers, and encircle their dusky throats with home-made necklaces of the brilliant vermilion-tinted blossom of the ohia; and they fill the markets and the adjacent streets with their bright presences, and smell like thunder with their villainous cocoa-nut oil.
Occasionally you see a heathen from the sunny isles away down in the South Seas with his face and neck tattooed till he looks like the customary unfortunate from Reese River who has been blown up in a mine. Some are tattooed a dead blue color down to the upper lip—masked, as it were—leaving the natural light yellow skin of Micronesia unstained from thence down; some with broad marks drawn down from hair to neck, on both sides of the face, and a strip of the original yellow skin, two inches wide, down the center—a grid-iron with a spoke broken out; and some with the entire face discolored with the popular mortification tint, relieved only by one or two thin, wavy threads of natural yellow running across the face from ear to ear, and eyes twinkling out of this darkness, from under shadowing hat-brims, like stars in the dark of the moon.
Moving among the stirring crowds, you come to the poi merchants, squatting in the shade on their hams, in true native fashion, and surrounded by purchasers. (The Sandwich Islanders always squat on their hams, and who knows but they may be the old original "ham sandwiches?" The thought is pregnant with interest.) The poi looks like common flour paste, and is kept in large bowls formed of a species of gourd, and capable of holding from one to three or four gallons. Poi is the chief article of food among the natives, and is prepared from the kalo or taro plant (k and t are the same in the Kanaka alphabet, and so are l and r). The taro root looks like a thick, or, if you please, a corpulent sweet potato, in shape, but is of a light purple color when boiled. When boiled it answers as a passable substitute for bread. The buck Kanakas bake it underground, then mash it up well with a heavy lava pestle, mix water with it until it becomes a paste, set it aside and let it ferment, and then it is poi—and a villainous mixture it is, almost tasteless before it ferments and too sour for a luxury afterward. But nothing in the world is more nutritious. When solely used, however, it produces acrid humors, a fact which sufficiently accounts for the blithe and humorous character of the Kanakas. I think there must be as much of a knack in handling poi as there is in eating with chopsticks. The forefinger is thrust into the mess and stirred quickly around several times and drawn as quickly out, thickly coated, just as if it were poulticed; the head is thrown back, the finger inserted in the mouth and the poultice stripped off and swallowed—the eye closing gently, meanwhile, in a languid sort of ecstasy. Many a different finger goes into the same bowl and many a different kind of dirt and shade and quality of flavor is added to the virtues of its contents. One tall gentleman, with nothing in the world on but a soiled and greasy shirt, thrust in his finger and tested the poi, shook his head, scratched it with the useful finger, made another test, prospected among his hair, caught something and ate it; tested the poi again, wiped the grimy perspiration from his brow with the universal hand, tested again, blew his nose—"Let's move on, Brown," said I, and we moved.
Around a small shanty was collected a crowd of natives buying the awa root. It is said that but for the use of this root the destruction of the people in former times by venereal diseases would have been far greater than it was, and by others it is said that this is merely a fancy. All agree that poi will rejuvenate a man who is used up and his vitality almost annihilated by hard drinking, and that in some kinds of diseases it will restore health after all medicines have failed; but all are not willing to allow to the awa the virtues claimed for it. The native manufacture an intoxicating drink from it which is fearful in its effects when persistently indulged in. It covers the body with dry, white scales, inflames the eyes, and causes premature decrepitude. Although the man before whose establishment we stopped has to pay a Government license of eight hundred dollars a year for an exclusive right to sell awa root, it is said that he makes a small fortune every twelve-month; while saloon keepers, who pay a thousand dollars a year for the privilege of retailing whisky, etc., only make a bare living.
We found the fish market crowded; for the native is very fond of fish, and eats the article raw. Let us change the subject.
OLD-TIME SATURDAYS
In old times here Saturday was a grand gala day indeed. All the native population of the town forsook their labors, and those of the surrounding country journeyed to the city. Then the white folks had to stay indoors, for every street was so packed with charging cavaliers and cavalieresses that it was next to impossible to thread one's way through the cavalcades without getting crippled. In the afternoon the natives were wont to repair to the plain, outside the town, and indulge in their ancient sports and pastimes and bet away their week's earnings on horse races. One might see two or three thousand, some say five thousand, of these wild riders, skurrying over the plain in a mass in those days. And it must have been a fine sight.
At night they feasted and the girls danced the lascivious hula hula—a dance that is said to exhibit the very perfection of educated motion of limb and arm, hand, head and body, and the exactest uniformity of movement and accuracy of "time." It was performed by a circle of girls with no raiment on them to speak of, who went through with an infinite variety of motions and figures without prompting, and yet so true was their "time," and in such perfect concert did they move that when they were placed in a straight line, hands, arms, bodies, limbs and heads waved, swayed, gesticulated, bowed, stooped, whirled, squirmed, twisted and undulated as if they were part and parcel of a single individual; and it was difficult to believe they were not moved in a body by some exquisite piece of mechanism. Of late years, however, Saturday has lost most of its quondam gala features. This weekly stampede of the natives interfered too much with labor and the interests of the white folks, and by sticking in a law here, and preaching a sermon there, and by various other means, they gradually broke it up. The demoralizing hula hula was forbidden to be performed, save at night, with closed doors, in presence of few spectators, and only by permission duly procured from the authorities and the payment of ten dollars for the same. There are few girls now-a-days able to dance this ancient national dance in the highest perfection of the art.
Cantering across the bridge and down the firm, level, gleaming white coral turnpike that leads toward the south, or the east, or the west, or the north (the points of the compass being all the same to me, inasmuch as, for good reasons, I have not had an opportunity thus far of discovering whereabouts the sun rises in this country—I know where it sets, but I don't know how it gets there nor which direction it comes from), we presently arrived at a massive coral edifice which I took for a fortress at first, but found out directly that it was the Government prison. A soldier at the great gate admitted us without further authority than my countenance, and I suppose he thought he was paying me a handsome compliment when he did so; and so did I until I reflected that the place was a penitentiary. However, as far as appearances went, it might have been the king's palace, so neat, and clean, and white, and so full of the fragrance of flowers was the establishment, and I was satisfied.
We passed through a commodious office, whose walls were ornamented with linked strands of polished handcuffs and fetters, through a hall, and among the cells above and below. The cells for the men were eight or ten feet high, and roomy enough to accommodate the two prisoners and their hammocks, usually put in each, and have space left for several more. The floors were scrubbed clean, and were guiltless of spot or stain of any kind, and the painfully white walls were unmarred by a single mark or blemish. Through ample gratings, one could see the blue sky and get his hair blown off by the cool breeze. They call this a prison—the pleasantest quarters in Honolulu.
There are four wards, and one hundred and thirty-two prisoners can be housed in rare and roomy comfort within them.
There were a number of native women in the female department. Poor devils, they hung their heads under the prying eyes of our party as if they were really ashamed of being there.
In the condemned cell and squatting on the floor, all swathed in blankets, as if it were cold weather, was a brown-faced, gray-bearded old scalliwag, who, in a frolicsome mood, had massacred three women and a batch of children—his own property, I believe—and reflects upon that exploit with genuine satisfaction to this hour, and will go to the gallows as tranquilly indifferent as a white man would go to dinner.
OUT AT THE BACK DOOR
The prison-yard—that sad inclosure which, in the prisons of my native America, is a cheerless barren and yieldeth no vegetation save the gallows-tree, with its sorrowful human fruit—is a very garden! The beds, bordered by rows of inverted bottles (the usual style here), were filled with all manner of dainty flowers and shrubs: Chinese mulberry and orange trees stood here and there, well stocked with fruit; a beautiful little pine tree—rare, and imported from the far South Seas—occupied the center, with sprays of gracefully arching green spears springing outward like parasol tops, at marked and regular intervals, up its slender stem, and diminishing in diameter with mathematical strictness of graduation, till the sprouting plume at the top stood over a perfect pyramid. Vines clambered everywhere and hid from view and clothed with beauty everything that might otherwise have been suggestive of chains and captivity. There was nothing here to remind one of the prison save a brace of dove cotes, containing several pretty birds brought hither from "strange, strange lands beyond the sea." These, sometimes, may pine for liberty and their old free life among the clouds or in the shade of the orange groves, or abroad on the breezy ocean—but if they do, it is likely they take it out in pining, as a general thing.
CAPTAIN TAIT, SCRIPTURAL STUDENT
Against one wall of the prison house stands an airy little building which does duty as a hospital. A harmless old lunatic, named Captain Tait, has his quarters here. He has a wife and children in the town, but he prefers the prison hospital, and has demanded and enjoyed its hospitality (slip of the pen—no joke intended) for years. He visits his family at long intervals—being free to go and come as he pleases—but he always drifts back to the prison again after a few days. His is a religious mania, and he professes to read sixty chapters of the Bible every day, and write them down in a book. He was about down to chapter thirty-five when I was introduced to him, I should judge, as it was nearly two in the afternoon.
I said, "What book are you reading, Captain?"
"The precious of the precious—the book of books—the Sacred Scriptures, sir."
"Do you read a good deal in it?"
"Sixty chapters every day (with a perceptible show of vanity, but a weary look in the eye withal)—sixty chapters every day, and write them all down in a plain, legible hand."
"It is a good deal. At that rate, you must ultimately get through, and run short of material."
"Ah, but the Lord looks out for his own. I am in His hands—He does with me as He wills. I often read some of the same chapters over again, for the Lord tells me what to read, and it is not for me to choose. Providence always shows me the place."
"No hanging fire?—I mean, can you always depend on—on this information coming to time every day, so to speak?"
"Always—always, sir. I take the sacred volume in my hand, in this manner, every morning, in a devout and prayerful spirit, and immediately, and without any volition on my part, my fingers insert themselves between the leaves—so directed from above (with a sanctified glance aloft)—and I know that the Lord desires me to open at that place and begin. I never have to select the chapter myself—the Lord always does it for me."
I heard Brown mutter, "The old man appears to have a good thing, anyway—and his poi don't cost him anything, either; Providence looks out for his regular sixty, the prison looks out for his hash, and his family looks out for itself. I've never seen any sounder maniac than him, and I've been around considerable."
We were next introduced to General George Washington, or, at least, to an aged, limping negro man, who called himself by that honored name. He was supposed to be seventy years old, and he looked it. He was as crazy as a loon, and sometimes, they say, he grows very violent. He was a Samson in a small way; his arms were corded with muscle, and his legs felt as hard as if they were made of wood. He was in a peaceable mood at present, and strongly manacled. They have a hard time with him occasionally, and some time or other he will get in a lively way and eat up the garrison of that prison, no doubt. The native soldiers who guard the place are afraid of him, and he knows it.
His history is a sealed book—or at least all that part of it which transpired previously to the entry of his name as a pensioner upon the Hawaiian Government fifteen years ago. He was found carrying on at a high rate at one of the other islands, and it is supposed he was put ashore there from a vessel called the Olive Branch. He has evidently been an old sailor, and it is thought he was one of a party of negroes who fitted out a ship and sailed from a New England port some twenty years ago. He is fond of talking in his dreamy, incoherent way, about the Blue Ridge in Virginia, and seems familiar with Richmond and Lynchburg. I do not think he is the old original General W.
ALOFT
Upstairs in the prison are the handsome apartments used by the officers of the establishment—also a museum of quaint and curious weapons of offense and defense, of all nations and all ages of the world. The prison is to a great extent a self-supporting institution, through the labor of the convicts farmed out to load and unload ships and work on the highways, and I am not sure but that it supports itself and pays a surplus into the public treasury besides, but I have no note of this, and I seldom place implicit confidence in my memory in matters where figures and finance are concerned and have not been thought of for a fortnight. This Government Prison is in the hands of W. C. Parke, Marshal of the Kingdom, and he has small need to be ashamed of his management of it. Without wishing to betray too much knowledge of such matters, I should say that this is the model prison of the western half of the world, at any rate.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, May 22, 1866
Honolulu, April, 1866.
I have just met an estimable lady—Mrs. Captain Jollopson, whose husband (with her assistance) commands the whaling bark Lucretia Wilkerson—and she said:
"Oh, I've never had such a time of it! I'm clean out of luck, I do believe. The wind's been dead ahead with me all this day. It appears to me that I can't do no way but that it comes out wrong. First, I turned out this morning and says I, 'Here's a go—eight bells and no duff yet! I just know it's going to blow great guns for me to-day.' And so it's come out. Start fair, sail fair; otherwise, just the reverse. Well, I hove on my dress and cleared for the market, and took the big basket, which I don't do when I'm alone, because I'm on the short lay when it comes to eating; but when the old man's in port, it's different, you know, and I go fixed when I recruit for him—never come back in ballast then, because he's on the long lay, and it's expensive too; you can depend on it, his leakage and shrinkage shows up on his home bills when he goes out of port, and it's all on account of recruiting, too—though he says it's on account of toggery for me, which is a likely yarn, when I can't even buy a set of new halliards for my bonnet but he growls, and what few slops I do have I've got to smuggle 'em; and yet, bless you, if we were to ship 'em the freight on mine wouldn't pay primage on his—but where was I? Oh, yes—I hove on my dress and hove down toward the market, and while I was laying off and on before the Post Office, here comes a ship keeper round the corner three sheets in the wind and his deadlights stove in, and I see by the way he was bulling that if he didn't sheer off and shorten sail he'd foul my larboard stuns'l boom, which I had my basket on—because, you see, he'd been among his friends having a bit of a gam, and had got about one fid too much aboard, and his judgment had fetched away in the meantime, and so he steered bad, and was making latitude all the time when he ought to have been making longitude, and here he was to wind'ard of me, but making so much leeway that—well, you see how it was. I backed off fast as I could, and sung out to him to port his helm, but it warn't no use; he'd everything drawing and I had considerable sternway, and he just struck me a little abaft the beam, and down I went, head on, and skunned my elbow!" I said, "Bless my life!" And she said, "Well you may say it! My! such a jolt! It started everything. It's worse'n being pulled! I shouldn't wonder if I'd have to be hove down—" and then she spread her hand alongside of her mouth and sung out, "Susy, ahoy!" to another woman, who rounded to to wait for her, and the two fell off before the wind and sailed away together.
"Eight bells" stands for the closing of a watch—two to an hour, four hours to a watch, six watches in a day—on board ship.
"Duff" is Jack Tar's dessert—a sort of dough, with dried apples or something of the kind in it on extra occasions.
"Cleared" for the market—A ship "clears" for her voyage when she takes out her papers at the Custom house.
"Short lay" and "long lay"—These phrases are confined to the whaling interest. Neither the officers nor men get any wages on a whaleship, but receive, instead, a proportion of all the bone and oil taken; Jack usually gets about the one-hundred-and-twentieth part of all the "catch" (or profits of the voyage), for his share, and this is called a "long lay"; the Captain generally gets a tenth, twelfth or fourteenth, which is a "short lay," and the other officers in proportion. Some Captains also have perquisites besides their "lay"—a dollar or more on every barrel of the "catch," over a certain number. The luckiest Captain of the lot made $50,000 last season. Very good for a few months work. When a ship is ready to sail and must suddenly supply the place of some seaman who has fallen sick, candidates will take advantage of the circumstances and demand as short a "lay" as a second mate's to ship as the last man and complete the crew. I am informed (but I do not believe it), that this is termed the "Lay of the Last Minstrel."
"Recruit"—The whaling voyage to the North Seas occupies about seven months; then the vessel returns to Honolulu, tranships her oil to the States, refits and goes over to the coast of California about November or December, to put in her idle time catching hump-back whales or devil fish, returning here along in March and April to "recruit"—that is, procure vegetables, and especially potatoes, which are a protective against scurvy, and give the men a few days run on shore, and then off for the north again as early in the Spring as possible. Those vessels which do not consider the coast fishing profitable, because of the "stoving" of boats by the savage hump-backs and the consequent loss of men and material, go to "west'ard," as they term going down to the line after sperm whales; and when they have finished this "between season," they go over and "recruit" at Japan, and from thence proceed directly north.
"Leakage and Shrinkage"—When a whaler returns here with her cargo, the United States Consul estimates its probable value in the East, and buys the interests of the officers and men on behalf of the owners of the ship, and pays for the same in gold. To secure the ship-owner against loss, a bill of contingencies is brought against poor Jack by the Consul (leakage and shrinkage being among the items), which reduces the profits of his long voyage about one-half or two-thirds. For instance, take the case of the whaling bark—last year. The Consul considered oil to be worth between one dollar and seventy-five cents and two dollars a gallon (in greenbacks) in the States; he put it down at one dollar and seventy-five cents to be on the safe side, and then reduced as follows:
First—Premium to be paid for money, and difference between gold and paper—so much. (Jack must be paid in gold.)
Second—An allowance of eight per cent., for probable leakage and shrinkage of the oil on its homeward voyage.
Third—Freight on the homeward voyage—paid by Jack.
Fourth—Interest and insurance on the cargo hence to the States—paid by Jack.
Fifth—Commission of the owner at home (2 1/2 per cent.) for selling the cargo—paid by Jack.
And after all these reductions, what do you suppose the Consul paid Jack for his one hundred and twentieth "lay" in a cargo of oil worth over $1.75 a gallon at home? He paid him seventy-four cents a gallon. As a general thing, the ship-owner at home makes a princely profit out of this "gouging" of the sailor-man; but instances have occurred—rarely, however—where the price set by the Consul here was so much above the real value of the oil at home, that all the gouging was not sufficient to save the ship-owner from loss.
"Home Bills"—It makes no difference how much money a sailor brings into port, he is soon head over heels in debt. In order to secure his services on a voyage, the ship is obliged to assume this indebtedness. The item is entered against Jack on the ship's books at the home port in the East as his "home bill." If the voyage proves lucky, the ship gets even on Jack's home bill by subtracting it from his "lay;" but if she takes no oil she must pay the bill anyhow, and is "out and injured," of course. These "home bills" are first assumed by one of the professional "sharks" in New Bedford and New London who furnish crews to ships; say Jack owes fifty dollars; the shark enters his name for a voyage, assumes his debt, advances him a dollar or so for a farewell spree, and takes his note for $150; and the ship owner agrees to cash it at the end of six months. Ships have left port responsible for $5,000 home bills, lost four or five men by desertion, been to great trouble and expense to supply other men, and then had no luck and failed to catch a single whale.
"Slops"—Improvident Jack is apt to leave port short of jackets, trousers, shirts, tobacco, pipes, letter paper, and so forth and so on. The ship takes a large quantity of these things along, and supplies them to him at extremely healthy prices, so that sometimes, after a long, unlucky voyage, no wages and heavy home bills and bills for "slops," Jack will return to port very considerably in debt to the ship, and the ship must stand the loss, for an unprofitable voyage squares all such accounts. In squaring up a voyage before the Consul, the ship-Captain piles up the slop bills as high as he can get them, though it does not put a single cent in his own pocket; he forgets, in his enthusiasm for his owner's interest, that while he is gouging Jack for the benefit of "the firm," the firm are gouging himself, and Jack too, by the system of Consular assessment I have mentioned above. The Captain says to the Consul:
"Put down three pair of boots on this man's slop bill."
Jack—"But I didn't have but one pair, sir."
Captain—"Belay! Don't talk back; you might have had 'em if you'd a' wanted 'em. And put him down for eleven pair of socks."
Jack—"But I only had two pair, sir."
Captain—"Well,—it, is that any o' my fault? they there for anybody that wanted 'em? And set him down for two ream of letter paper."
Jack—"Why, I never writ a letter whilst I was gone, sir."
Captain—"Hold your yop! Do you cal'late for me to be responsible for all your dam foolishness? You might have had four ream, if you'd wanted it. And set on ten per cent. for other truck, which I don't recollect what it was."
And so Jack is gouged by the Captain, for the owner's exclusive benefit, and both are fleeced by that same owner with strict impartiality. Perhaps the Captain's "lay" will go East to be sold, and "the firm" will sell at a dollar and a half and then report to him that the market had fallen and they only got a dollar for it. Thus ungrateful are they to the Captain who gouged the seaman on his "slops" for their sole benefit.
"Primage"—This term obtains in most seaports. No man can tell now what gave it birth, for it is very ancient, and its origin is long ago forgotten. It is a tax of five per cent. on a ship's freight bills, and in old times went to her captain. In our day, however, it goes to the ship-owner with the other freight money (although it forms a separate item in the freight bill), or is turned over to the agent who procured a cargo for a vessel, as his commission. When you engage for the shipment of a lot of freight, you make no mention of this five per cent. primage, but you perfectly understand that it will be added, and you must pay it; therefore, when you are ostensibly shipping at twenty cents, you are really shipping at twenty-one.
"Laying off and on"—A sailor phrase, sufficiently well understood by landsmen to need no explanation.
"Ship-keeper"—A man who stands guard on a whaler and takes care of the ship when the boats and the crew are off after whales.
"Bulling"—A term usually applied to the chafing of vessels together when riding at anchor in harbors subject to chopping swells. Some whalers say that one reason why they avoid San Francisco is that this "bulling" process in our Bay is more damaging to their vessels, frequently, than a long voyage.
"Gam"—The whaleman's phrase for gossip—very common here.
"Fid"—The whaleman's term for our "smile"—drink. A fid is an instrument which the sailor uses when he splices the main brace on board ship.
"Fetched away"—A nautical phrase signifying to break loose from fastenings in a storm—such as the fetching away of furniture, rigging, etc.
"Skunned"—After examining various authors I have discovered that this is a provincial distortion of our word "skinned."
"Pulled"—A term signifying the arraigning of a ship's officers before the Courts by the crew to answer for alleged cruelties practiced upon them on the high seas—such as the "pulling" of captains and mates by the crews of the Mercury, the White Swallow, the Great Republic, etc., in the San Francisco Courts. Here is another reason why, out of the eighty seven American whaleships that will fish in the North seas this Summer, only about sixteen will venture to touch at San Francisco either going or coming: they find it safer and cheaper to rendezvous and procure supplies here, and save 4,200 miles extra sailing, than to start from, and return to, San Francisco and run the chance of getting "pulled." Honolulu would not amount to anything at all without her whaling trade, and so Jack cannot "pull" his Captain here—no matter what his grievance was, he could not easily get it before these Courts; the lawyer who ventured to take his case would stand a fair chance of being run out of town by the enraged community. But the whaler-man says, "You drop into 'Frisco and great Neptune! your men'll pull you before you get your anchor down—and there you are for three months, on expenses, waiting on them Courts; and they'll go in and swear to the infernalest pack of lies, and the jury'll believe every word of it, and the Judge'll read you a sermon that'll take the hair off your head, and then he'll take and jam you into a jail. Oh, no; it don't pay a whale-ship to stop at San Francisco."
"Hove down"—In ports where there are [no] docks, damaged vessels are hauled out and "hove down" on their sides when repairs to their bottoms are required.
By this time, if you will go back and read the first paragraphs of this letter you may be able to understand them.
Every section of our western hemisphere seems supplied with a system of technicalities, etiquette and slang, peculiar to itself. The above chapter is intended to give you a somewhat exaggerated idea of the technicalities of conversation in Honolulu—bred from the great whaling interest which centers here, and naturally infused in to the vocabulary of the place. Your favorite California similes were bred from the technicalities of surface mining—those of Washoe come from the profound depths of the "main lead," and those of the Honoluluian were born of whalebone, blubber and the traffic of the seas. Perhaps no single individual would use more than two or three of the nautical and whaling phrases I have quoted, in any one conversation, but you might hear all of them in the course of a week, if you talked with a good many people.
And etiquette varies according to one's surroundings. In the mining camps of California, when a friend tenders you a "smile" or invites you to take a "blister," it is etiquette to say, "Here's hoping your dirt'll pan out gay." In Washoe, when you are requested to "put in a blast," or invited to take "your regular pison," etiquette admonishes you to touch glasses and say, "Here's hoping you'll strike it rich in the lower level." And in Honolulu, when your friend the whaler asks you to take a "fid" with him, it is simple etiquette to say, "Here's eighteen hundred barrels, old salt!" But "Drink hearty!" is universal. That is the orthodox reply, the world over.
In San Francisco sometimes, if you offend a man, he proposes to take his coat off, and inquires, "Are you on it?" If you are, you can take your coat off, too. In Virginia City, in former times, the insulted party, if he were a true man, would lay his hand gently on his six-shooter and say, "Are you heeled?" But in Honolulu, if Smith offends Jones, Jones asks (with a rising inflection on the last word, which is excessively aggravating), "How much do you weigh?" Smith replies, "Sixteen hundred and forty pound—and you?" "Two ton to a dot, at a quarter past eleven this forenoon—peel yourself; you're my blubber!"
APOLOGETIC AND EXPLANATORY
When I began this letter I meant to furnish some facts and figures concerning the great Pacific whaling traffic, to the end that San Francisco might take into consideration the expediency of making an effort to divert the patronage of the fleet to herself, if it seemed well to do so; and chiefly I meant to try and explain why that patronage does not gravitate to that center naturally and of its own accord. True, many know the reason already, and need no explanation, but many more do not understand it so well or know so much about it. But not being in a sufficiently serious mood to-day, I have wisely left for my next letter the discussion of a subject of such overwhelming gravity.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, May 23, 1866
Honolulu, April, 1866.
The whaling trade of the North Seas—which is by no means insignificant—centers in Honolulu. Shorn of it this town would die—its businessmen would leave and its real estate would become valueless, at least as city property, though Honolulu might flourish afterwards as a fine sugar plantation, the soil being rich, and scarcely needing irrigation.
The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce might do worse than make an effort to divert the whaling trade to her city. Honolulu fits out and provisions a majority out of ninety-six whalers this year, and receives a very respectable amount of money for it. Last year she performed this service for only fifty-one vessels—so you can see how the trade is increasing. Sailors always spend all their money before they leave port. Last year they spent $150,000 here, and will doubtless spend double as much when this year's fleet returns. It is said that in the palmy days of whaling, fifteen or twenty years ago, they have squandered as high as a million and a half in this port at the end of a successful voyage. There have been vast fleets of whaleships fitted out here and provisioned and recruited in a single year, in those days, and everything promises that the whaling interest will now move steadily forward, under the impetus of the long continued high rates of oil and bone, until it eclipses in importance any degree it has ever attained in former times. In chartering vessels to carry home the "catch" of whalers; in equipping them, and supplying and recruiting them—and in relieving their crews of their money at the end of the season, San Francisco might manage to get several hundred thousands a year out of the whaling trade if she could get it into her hands, or a million or so, should whaling again reach its former high prosperity.
It costs from $l,000 all the way up to $20,000 to provision and fit a whaler here for her voyage to the North Seas, including paying off crew, and taking them "by and large," the average is about $6,000 to each vessel. Of the ninety-six ships which go north from here this season, only forty-nine will fit here—the other forty-seven, being the increase in tonnage and on their first voyage, were equipped at home. The home equipment is generally for two full seasons—so Honolulu will not get the job of supplying these new ships for a couple of years yet; but after that she will have their whole custom, unless, perhaps, San Francisco can make a satisfactory bid for the whaling trade in the meantime.
There have been over four hundred whalers in the North Seas at one time in the palmy days of the trade, two thirds of which were supplied in this market, and paid Honolulu over a million for doing it, even at the moderate prices of those days.
Oil is valuable, but whalebone is more so.
Sperm whales are chiefly caught at the "line," or "west'art," as they term it. They do not yield any bone, but the oil is worth from 75 to 100 per cent. more than any other at the present time.
Humpbacks and devil-fish are caught on the coast of California, "between seasons." The yield is called "coast oil." They yield no bone.
Ockotsk whales yield about twenty per cent. less bone than the Arctic whale, and it is worth four to five cents a pound less than Arctic.
The "catch" is a term which signifies the fruits of a voyage. The average catch for three years past of ships sailing out of this port, was about 650 barrels of oil a year to each vessel, and 8,000 pounds of bone.
CONSULAR PRICES
The Consular prices at which crews of whalers were paid off here in the Fall of 1865 were as follows: Whale oil, 64 cents a gallon; coast oil, 60; sperm oil, 92. Ochotsk bone, 74 cents a pound; Arctic, 78—in gold. These prices were not one-half what the articles were worth in the Eastern markets—in currency.
PAST AND PRESENT
The "palmy days of whaling"—the phrase which one hears here as often as he hears in California of matters which transpired "in an early day" there, or in Washoe of "the flush times of '63"—refers to a period some fifteen years gone by. But the "palmy days," in a modified form, lasted clear up to 1853. Let me give a few figures: The fleet brought to this port in 1853—Oil, 4,000,000 gallons; bone, 2,020,264 pounds. Then for several years the yield gradually fell away, till in 1858 the figures were: Oil, considerable under 3,000,000 gallons; bone, 1,614,710 pounds. Five years after, in 1863, in the midst of the war, the catch had fallen away down to—Oil, 732,031 gallons; bone, 337,043 pounds. Still lower in 1864: Oil, 642, 362 gallons; bone, 339,331 pounds. But in 1865, in spite of the pirate Shenandoah, the trade almost held its own; it had "struck bottom," as we say in Washoe, and was ready to start up again. The yield was: Oil, 621,434 gallons; bone, 337,394 pounds.
These last figures were for sixty seven ships, all told—fifty-one of which went from here. We may look for better results this season, with ninety-six vessels in the fleet; and next year the "palmy days" may come again, for everything that can be turned into a whale ship by any process known to art is being bought up or chartered in the East now for this trade, and in due time the icy solitudes of the North Seas will once more become populous with the winged servants of commerce.
WHAT COMMANDS THE WHALER PATRONAGE
I have talked whaler talk and read whaling statistics and asked questions about the whaling interest every now and then for two or three weeks, and have discovered that it was easy to get plausible information concerning every point connected with this commerce save one, and that was: Why is it that this remote port, in a foreign country, is made the rendezvous of the whaling fleet, instead of the seemingly more eligible one of San Francisco, on our own soil? This was a "stunner." Most people would venture a chance shot at one portion of the mystery, but nobody was willing to attempt its entire solution. The truth seems to be that there is no main, central, prominent reason for it, but it is made up of a considerable bundle of reasons, neither of which is especially important when taken by itself.
SAN FRANCISCO VS. HONOLULU
1. See how the case stands: In Honolulu it is not a holiday job to ship a crew, natives comprise it chiefly, and the Government frowns upon their employment as sailors, because it causes the agricultural interests to suffer for want of labor, and you see the plantations build up the whole kingdom, while the whaling trade only builds up Honolulu and one or two smaller seaports. So the Government first made the whalers enter into bonds of $100 for each man; that is, to insure the return of that man to the kingdom; the bond was increased, until now it is $300, and shipping taxes of various kinds have been instituted, which amount altogether to about $600 for each man, which must be paid in gold to the Government when the man ships. Ships usually go out under bonds of $3,000 to $10,000 for the return of their crews. The bond system, which was intended to keep the Kanakas all at home, don't work; the whalers still are obliged to take natives or go without crews. So, urged by the agricultural interest, an attempt will be made in the Legislature, which convenes two weeks hence, to pass a bill entirely forbidding the shipping of natives. If this is accomplished it will give San Francisco one good chance to get the whaling patronage—and it is a better and more permanent and safer thing to have than rich but ephemeral mines. In favor of San Francisco, it is acknowledged that as soon as it became the established whaling rendezvous, whaling crews would repair to it, and men could be shipped at small expense and without bonds.
2. It is twenty-one hundred miles from San Francisco to Honolulu—so that these whalers, by coming here, do four thousand two hundred miles more sailing than they need to do, and waste about a month and a half of time in doing it.
3. They cannot insure directly, here. The policies must go all the way to the East, and then maybe the insurance office may approve them and maybe it may reject them, and per chance the ship may be lost in the meantime.
In San Francisco insurance could be directly effected.
4. Here the whole whaling fleet, nearly, is paid off at once, and in gold, and of course exchange goes up to a high figure; started at five or six, last Fall, and went up to ten per cent premium. It stands at two and a half even now, when there is no especial call for money.
In San Francisco it need never go to two and a half at any time. Whale men's bills are the best paper in the country, being always sure and prompt, scarcely a single failure to pay them is recorded.
5. Facilities for transhipment of oil eastward would be much greater in San Francisco than here.
6. Facilities for chartering, equipping, provisioning and recruiting whalers would be much greater and cheaper in San Francisco than here.
7. Here it takes a mild eternity for a whaler or his agent to communicate with the ship-owner at home. In San Francisco, your steamers, overland stages and telegraphs bring them face to face.
I think I have stated the case fairly. In facilities for shipping crews, in economy of time and distance of travel of a voyage, in facilities for insuring, in cheapness of money, in facilities for transhipping cargoes, ditto ditto for chartering and equipping vessels, and ditto ditto for communicating with owners, Honolulu cannot begin to compete with San Francisco.
Then why does the whaling fleet rendezvous in a remote port in a foreign land, instead of a convenient one at home?
AN ATTEMPT AT A SOLUTION
I have got the question answered by piecemeal by many different persons, and I will jot down the several items here. They say it is hard to get crews in San Francisco, but they confess that this would not be the case if that city became the established rendezvous. They say men can "run away" so easily there, and put the ship in for their "home bills," etc., but that here they can't get off the islands. They say the ship is preyed upon by everybody, and fleeced for everything from spun yarn up to salt beef. They say their ships are worn out by "bulling" in the harbor there, but the harbor is smooth and roomy here. And they say, finally (and then the old sea dogs gnash their teeth and swear till the air turns blue around them), that "there's more land-sharks (lawyers) in 'Frisco than there's fiddlers in hell, I tell you; and you'll get 'pulled' before your anchor's down!" If there is a main, central count in the indictment against San Francisco that is it. A whaler can be snatched up ("pulled") by his men and the land-sharks, and hauled into Court in San Francisco with the utmost facility, but they can not touch him here. The lawyer who took charge of a sailor's complaint against his Captain might as well emigrate—he could practice no more in Honolulu. True, when a case is so flagrant that it cannot possibly be overlooked, a sort of trial is sometimes had, but it never amounts to much.
The above are the whaling Captain's arguments—or were, in the first place, but from their mouths they have gone into everybody's else, and belong to nobody in particular now. Then there are other arguments which you hear oftener from other people than from the whalers themselves. For instance, several persons have explained about in this wise: In San Francisco the agent transacts the Captain's business exactly as it is done here, and then brings in a bill, item by item, for commissions—a bill that any man can understand in a minute, and it looks expensive; but here the agent, with fine sagacity, charges no commissions—at least they do not appear on the surface—they are faithfully wrung into the general bill in a sort of "debtor to sundries" fashion, though, and nobody notices it, and consequently nobody grumbles!
Another powerful argument may be stated thus: A whaleman don't amount to much in San Francisco, but here he is the biggest frog in the pond. Up there the agent lets him dance attendance until more important business is attended to, and then goes out with him and assists him in just such of his concerns as absolutely require assistance, and then leaves him to paddle his own canoe with the remainder; but here the agent welcomes the old salt like a long lost brother, and makes him feel that he is a man of consequence and so he is, and should be so treated in San Francisco; and the agent attends closely to all the whaler's shore business, of every kind whatever, if it is desired, and thus the Captain's stay in port is a complete holiday.
A SUGGESTION
If I were going to advise San Franciscans as to the best strategy to employ in order to secure the whaling trade, I would say, cripple your facilities for "pulling" sea-captains on every pretense that sailors can trump up, and show the whaler a little more consideration when he is in port. All other objections will die of themselves.
A STEP MADE
A nucleus is already formed up there. Swift & Allen have opened a branch of their New Bedford house in San Francisco, and their ships (they have eight at sea now) will rendezvous there hereafter. They are going to add several vessels to their fleet this season. Sixteen whalers, and possibly many more, will rendezvous at San Francisco this year. Those Captains who have tried that port during the past two years are satisfied with it all but one or two, who have been "pulled."
MARK TWAIN.
Return to Sacramento Daily Union index
The Sacramento Daily Union, May 24, 1866
Honolulu, April, 1866.
I have ridden up the handsome Nuuanu Valley; noted the mausoleum of the departed Kings of Hawaii by the wayside; admired the neat residences, surrounded by beautiful gardens that border the turnpike; stood, at last, after six miles of travel, on the famous Pari—the "divide," we would call it—and looked down the precipice of six or eight hundred feet, over which old Kamehameha I drove the army of the King of Oahu three-quarters of a century ago; and gazed upward at the sharp peak close at my left, springing several hundred feet above my head like a colossal church spire—stood there and saw the sun go down and the little plain below and the sea that bordered it become shrouded in thick darkness; and then saw the full moon rise up and touch the tops of the billows, skip over the gloomy valley and paint the upper third of the high peak as white as silver; and heard the ladies say: "Oh, beautiful!—and such a strong contrast!" and heard the gentlemen remark: "By George! talk about scenery! how's that?"
It was all very well, but the same place in daylight does not make so fine a picture as the Kalihi Valley (pronounced Kah-lee-he, stress on the second syllable). All citizens talk about the Pari; all strangers visit it the first thing; all scribblers write about it—but nobody talks or writes about or visits the Pari's charming neighbor, the Kalihi Valley. I think it was a fortunate accident that led me to stumble into this enchanted ground.
ANOTHER PARADISE
For a mile or two we followed a trail that branched off from the terminus of the turnpike that leads past the Government prison, and bending close around the rocky point of a foothill we found ourselves fairly in the valley, and the panorama began to move. After a while the trail took the course of a brook that came down the center of the narrowing canyon, and followed it faithfully throughout its eccentric windings. On either side the ground rose gradually for a short distance, and then came the mountain barriers—densely wooded precipices on the right and left, that towered hundreds of feet above us, and up which one might climb about as easily as he could climb up the side of a house. It was a novel sort of scenery, those mountain walls. Face around and look straight across at one of them, and sometimes it presented a bold, square front, with small inclination out of the perpendicular; move on a little and look back, and it was full of sharp ridges, bright with sunlight, and with deep, shady clefts between and what had before seemed a smooth bowlder, set in among the thick shrubbery on the face of the wall, was now a bare rampart of stone that projected far out from the mass of green foliage, and was as sharply defined against the sky as if it had been built of solid masonry by the hand of man. Ahead the mountains looked portly—swollen, if you please—and were marked all over, up and down, diagonally and crosswise, by sharp ribs that reminded one of the fantastic ridges which the wind builds of the drifting snow on a plain. Sometimes these ridges were drawn all about the upper quarter of a mountain, checking it off in velvety green squares and diamonds and triangles, some beaming with sunlight and others softly shaded—the whole upper part of the mountain looking something like a vast green veil thrown over some object that had a good many edges and corners to it—then a sort of irregular "eaves" all around, and from this the main body of the mountain swept down, with a slight outward curve, to the valley below. All over these highlands the forest trees grew so thickly that, even close at hand, they seemed like solid banks of foliage. These trees were principally of two kinds—the koa and the kukui—the one with a very light green leaf and the other with a dark green. Occasionally there were broad alternate belts of each extending diagonally from the mountain's bases to their summits, and here and there, in the midst of the dark green, were great patches of the bright light-colored leaves, so that, to look far down the valley, along the undulating front of the barrier of peaks, the effect was as if the sun were streaming down upon it through breaks and rifts in the clouds, lighting up belts at intervals all along, and leaving those intervening darkened by the shadows of the clouds; and yet there was not a shred of a cloud in the whole firmament! It was very soft, and dreamy, and beautiful. And following down the two tall ridges that walled the valley in, we saw them terminate at last in two bold, black headlands that came together like a V, and across this gate ran a narrow zone of the most brilliant light green tint (the shoal water of the distant sea, between reef and shore), and beyond this the somber blue of the deeper water stretched away to the horizon. The varied picture of the lights and shadows on the wooded mountains, the strong, dark outlines of the gate, and the bright green water and the belt of blue beyond, was one replete with charming contrasts and beautiful effects—a revelation of fairy land itself.
The mountain stream beside us, brawling over its rocky bed, leaped over a miniature precipice occasionally, and then reposed for a season in a limpid pool at her base, reflecting the dank and dripping vines and fans that clung to the wall and protruded in bunches and festoons through breaks in the sparkling cascade. On the gentle rising ground about us were shady groves of forest trees—the kou, the koa, the bread-fruit, the lau hala, the orange, lime, bukui, and many others; and, handsomest of all, the ohia, with its feathery tufts of splendid vermilion-tinted blossoms, a coloring so vivid as to be almost painful to the eye. Large tracts were covered with large hau (how) bushes, whose sheltering foliage is so thick as to be almost impervious to rain. It is spotted all over with a rich yellow flower, shaped something like a tea cup and sometimes it is further embellished by innumerable white bell shaped blossoms, that grow upon a running vine with a name unknown to me. Here and there were wide crops of bushes completely overgrown and hidden beneath the glossy green leaves of another species of vine, and so dense was this covering that it would hardly be possible for a bird to fly through it. Then there were open spaces well carpeted with grass, and sylvan avenues that wound hither and thither till they lost themselves among the trees. In one open spot a vine of the species I last mentioned had taken possession of two tall dead stumps and wound around and about them, and swung out from their tops and twined their meeting tendrils together into a faultless arch. Man, with all his art, could not have improved its symmetry.
Verily, with its rank luxuriance of vines and blossoms, its groves of forest trees, its shady nooks and grassy lawns, its crystal brook and its wild and beautiful mountain scenery, with that charming far-off glimpse of the sea, Kalihi is the Valley of Enchantment come again!
While I am on the subject of scenery, I might as well speak of Sam Brannan's palace, or "the Bungalow," as it is popularly called. Years ago it was built and handsomely furnished by Shillaber, now of San Francisco, at a cost of between thirty and forty thousand dollars, and in the day of its glory must have considerably outshone its regal neighbor, the palace of the king. It was a large mansion, with compact walls of coral; dimensions, say, 60 or 70 feet front and 80 feet depth, perhaps, including the ample verandah or portico in front; this portico was supported by six or eight tall fluted Corinthian columns, some three feet in diameter; a dozen coral steps led up to the portico from the ground, and these extended the whole length of the front; there were four rooms on the main floor, some twenty-four feet square, each, and about twenty feet high, besides a room or so of smaller dimensions. When its white paint was new, this must have been a very stately edifice. But finally it passed into Brannan's hands—for the sum of thirty thousand dollars (never mind the particulars of the transaction)—and it has been going to decay for the past ten years. It has arrived there now, and it is the completest ruin I ever saw. One or two of the pillars have fallen, and lie like grand Theban ruins, diagonally across the wide portico; part of the roof of the portico has caved down, and a huge gridiron of plasterless lathing droops from above and threatens the head of the apostrophizing stranger; the windows are dirty, and some of them broken; the shutters are unhinged; the elegant doors are marred and splintered; within, the floors are strewn with debris from the shattered ceilings, weeds grow in damp mold in obscure corners; lizards peep curiously out from unsuspected hiding places and then skurry along the walls and disappear in gaping crevices; the Summer breeze sighs fitfully through the desolate chambers, and the unforbidden sun looks down through many a liberal vent in roof and ceiling. The spacious grounds without are rank with weeds, and the fences are crazy with age and chronic debility. No more complete and picturesque ruin than the Bungalow exists to-day in the old world or the new. It is the most discouraged looking pile the sun visits on its daily round, perhaps. In the sorrowful expression of its deserted halls, its fallen columns and its decayed magnificence, it seems to proclaim, in the homely phrase of California, that it has "got enough pie."
Thomas Jefferson John Quincy Adams, of San Francisco, agent for the State Agricultural Society of California, and agent of pretty much all the other institutions of the kind in the world, including the Paris Exhibition, who has traveled all over these islands during the past eight months, and gathered more information, and collected more silkworms, and flowers, and seeds, and done more work and stayed longer in people's houses an uninvited guest, and got more terrific hints and had a rougher time generally, on an imperceptible income, than any other man the century has produced, is Sam Brannan's trusted agent to put the Bungalow in elegant repair and draw on him for five thousand dollars for the purpose. It is not possible for me to say when the work will be commenced or who will take the daring contract—but I can say that so small a sum as five thousand dollars expended on the Bungalow would only spoil it as an attractive ruin, without making it amount to much as a human habitation. Let it alone, Brannan, and give your widely known and much discussed agent another job.
THE KING'S PALACE
Stands not far from the melancholy Bungalow, in the center of grounds extensive enough to accommodate a village. The place is surrounded by neat and substantial coral walks, but the gates pertaining to them are out of repair, and so was the soldier who admitted us—or at any rate his uniform was. He was an exception, however, for the native soldiers usually keep their uniforms in good order. The palace is a large, roomy frame building, and was very well furnished once, though now some of the appurtenances have lost some of their elegance. But the King don't care, I suppose, as he spends nearly all his time at his modest country residence at Waikiki. A large apartment in the center of the building serves as the royal council chamber; the walls are hung with life-size portraits of various European monarchs, sent hither as tokens of that cousinly regard which exists between all kings, at least on paper. To the right is the reception room or hall of audience, and to the left are the library and a sort of anteroom or private audience chamber. In one of these are life-size portraits of old Kamehameha the Great and one or two Queens and Princes. The old war-horse had a dark brown, broad and beardless face, with native intelligence apparent in it, and something of a crafty expression about the eye; hair white with age and cropped short; in the picture he is clad in a white shirt, long red vest and with the famous feather war-cloak over all. We were permitted to examine the original cloak. It is very ample in its dimensions, and is made entirely of the small, silky, bright yellow feathers of the man-of-war or tropic bird, closely woven into a strong, coarse netting of grass by a process which promises shortly to become a lost art, inasmuch as only one native, and he an old man, is left who understands it in its highest elegance. These feathers are rare and costly, because each bird has but two of them—one under each wing—and the birds are not plenty. It required several generations to collect the materials and manufacture this cloak, and had the work been performed in the United States, under our fine army contract system, it would have cost the Government more millions of dollars than I can estimate without a large arithmetic and a blackboard. In old times, when a king put on his gorgeous feather war-cloak, it meant trouble; some other king and his subjects were going to catch it. We were shown other war-cloaks, made of yellow feathers, striped and barred with broad bands of red ones—fine specimens of barbaric splendor. The broken spear of a terrible chief who flourished seven hundred years ago, according to the tradition, was also brought out from among the sacred relics of a former age and displayed. It is said that this chieftain stood seven feet high without his boots (he was permanently without them), and was able to snake an enemy out of the ranks with this spear at a distance of forty to sixty and even a hundred feet and the spear, of hard, heavy, native wood, was once thirty feet long. The name of this pagan hero is sounded no more from the trumpet of fame, his bones lie none knows where, and the record of his gallant deeds is lost. But he was a "brick," we may all depend upon that. How the wood of the weapon has managed to survive seven centuries of decay, though, is a question calculated to worry the antiquaries.
But it is sunrise, now, and time for honest people to begin to "turn in."
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, June 20, 1866
Honolulu, May 23, 1866
I have been reporting the Hawaiian Legislature all day. This is my first visit to the Capitol. I expected to be present on the 25th of April and see the King open his Parliament in state and hear his speech, but I was in Maui then and Legislatures had no charms for me.
The Government of the Hawaiian Kingdom is composed of three estates, viz.: The King, the Nobles and the Commons or Representatives. The Nobles are members of the Legislature by right of their nobility—by blood, if you please—and hold the position for life. They hold the right to sit, at any rate, though that right is not complete until they are formally commissioned as Legislators by the King. Prince William, who is thirty-one years of age, was only so commissioned two years ago, and is now occupying a seat in the Parliament for the first time. The King's Ministers belong to the Legislature by virtue of their office. Formerly the Legislative Assembly consisted of a House of Nobles and a House of Representatives, and worked separately, but now both estates sit and vote together. The object of the change was to strengthen the hands of the Nobles by giving them a chance to overawe the Commons (the latter being able to outvote the former by about three to one), and it works well. The handful of Nobles and Ministers, being backed by the King and acting as his mouthpieces, outweigh the common multitude on the other side of the House, and carry things pretty much their own way. It is well enough, for even if the Representatives were to assert their strength and override the Nobles and pass a law which did not suit the King, his Majesty would veto the measure and that would be the end of it, for there is no passing a bill over his veto.
Once, when the legislative bodies were separate and the Representatives did not act to suit the late King (Kamehameha IV), he took Cromwell's course—prorogued the Parliament instanter and sent the members about their business. When the present King called a Convention, a year or two ago, to frame a new Constitution, he wanted a property qualification to vote incorporated (universal suffrage was the rule before) and desired other amendments, which the Convention refused to sanction. He dismissed them at once, and fixed the Constitution up to suit himself, ratified it, and it is now the fundamental law of the land, although it has never been formally ratified and accepted by the people or the Legislature. He took back a good deal of power which his predecessors had surrendered to the people, abolished the universal suffrage clause and denied the privilege of voting to all save such as were possessed of a hundred dollars worth of real estate or had an income of seventy-five dollars a year. And, if my opinion were asked, I would say he did a wise thing in this last named matter.
The King is invested with very great power. But he is a man of good sense and excellent education, and has an extended knowledge of business, which he acquired through long and arduous training as Minister of the Interior under the late King, and therefore he uses his vast authority wisely and well.
THE CAPITOL—AN AMERICAN SOVEREIGN SNUBBED
The Legislature meets in the Supreme Court-room, an apartment which is larger, lighter and better fitted and furnished than any Courtroom in San Francisco. A railing across the center separates the legislators from the visitors.
When I got to the main entrance of the building, and was about to march boldly in, I found myself confronted by a large placard, upon which was printed:
NO ADMITTANCE BY THIS ENTRANCE EXCEPT TO MEMBERS OF THE LEGISLATURE AND FOREIGN OFFICIALS.
It shocked my republican notions somewhat, but I pocketed the insinuation that I was not high-toned enough to go in at the front door, and went around and entered meekly at the back one. If ever I come to these islands again I will come as the Duke of San Jose, and put on as many frills as the best of them.
THE KING'S FATHER
I found the Legislature to consist of half a dozen white men and some thirty or forty natives. It was a dark assemblage. The nobles and Ministers (about a dozen of them altogether) occupied the extreme left of the hall, with David Kalakaua (the King's Chamberlain) and Prince William at the head. The President of the Assembly, His Royal Highness M. Kekuanaoa, and the Vice President (Rhodes) sat in the pulpit, if I may so term it.
The President is the King's father. He is an erect, strongly built, massive featured, white-haired, swarthy old gentleman of 80 years of age or thereabouts. He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust or blemish upon them. He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific old fighter, Kamehameha I, more than half a century ago, and I could not help saying to myself, "This man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages far back in the past, and reveled in slaughter and carnage; has worshiped wooden images on his bended knees has seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to hideous idols, at a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man's God; has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the King—and now look at him: an educated Christian: neatly and handsomely dressed; a high minded, elegant gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country and in general, practical information. Look at him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are white men—a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had never been out of it in his lifetime. Lord! how the experiences of this old man's strange, eventful life must shame the cheap inventions of romance!"
Kekuanaoa is not of the blood royal. He derives his princely rank from his wife, who was a daughter of Kamehameha the Great. Under other monarchies the male line takes precedence of the female in tracing genealogies, but here the opposite is the case—the female line takes precedence. Their reason for this is exceedingly sensible, and I recommend it to the aristocracy of Europe: They say it is easy to know who a man's mother was, but, etc., etc.
A COMPREHENSIVE SLUR
The mental caliber of the Legislative Assembly is up to the average of such bodies the world over—and I wish it were a compliment to say it, but it is hardly so. I have seen a number of Legislatures, and there was a comfortable majority in each of them that knew just about enough to come in when it rained, and that was all. Few men of first class ability can afford to let their affairs go to ruin while they fool away their time in Legislatures for months on a stretch. Few such men care a straw for the small-beer distinction one is able to achieve in such a place. But your chattering, one-horse village lawyer likes it, and your solemn ass from the cow counties, who don't know the Constitution from the Lord's Prayer, enjoys it, and these you will always find in the Assembly—the one gabble, gabble, gabbling threadbare platitudes and "give-me-liberty-or-give me-death" buncombe from morning till night, and the other asleep, with his slab-soled brogans set up like a couple of grave-stones on the top of his desk.
Among the Commons in this Legislature are a number of Kanakas with shrewd, intelligent faces, and a "gift of gab" that is appalling. The Nobles are able, educated, fine-looking men, who do not talk often, but when they do they generally say something—a remark which will not apply to all their white associates in the same house. If I were not ashamed to digress so often I would like to expatiate a little upon the noticeable fact that the nobility of this land, as a general thing, are distinguishable from the common herd by their large stature and commanding presence, and also set forth the theories in vogue for accounting for it, but for the present I will pass the subject by.
IN SESSION—BILL RAGSDALE
At 11 A.M. His Royal Highness the President called the House to order. The roll-call was dispensed with for some reason or other, and the Chaplain, a venerable looking white man, offered up a prayer in the native tongue; and I must say that this curious language, with its numerous vowels and its entire absence of hissing sounds, fell very softly and musically from his lips. A white Chief Clerk read the Journal of the preceding day's proceedings in English, and then handed the document to Bill Ragsdale, a "half white" (half white and half Kanaka), who translated and clattered it off in Kanaka with a volubility that was calculated to make a slow-spoken man like me distressingly nervous.
Bill Ragsdale stands up in front of the Speaker's pulpit, with his back against it, and fastens his quick black eye upon any member who rises, lets him say half a dozen sentences and then interrupts him, and repeats his speech in a loud, rapid voice, turning every Kanaka speech into English and every English speech into Kanaka, with a readiness and felicity of language that are remarkable—waits for another installment of talk from the member's lips and goes on with his translation as before. His tongue is in constant motion from 11 in the forenoon till four in the afternoon, and why it does not wear out is the affair of Providence, not mine. There is a spice of deviltry in the fellow's nature and it crops out every now and then when he is translating the speeches of slow old Kanakas who do not understand English. Without departing from the spirit of a member's remarks, he will, with apparent unconsciousness, drop in a little voluntary contribution occasionally in the way of a word or two that will make the gravest speech utterly ridiculous. He is careful not to venture upon such experiments, though, with the remarks of persons able to detect him. I noticed when he translated for His Excellency David Kalakaua, who is an accomplished English scholar, he asked, "Did I translate you correctly, your Excellency?" or something to that effect. The rascal.
FAMILIAR CHARACTERISTICS
This Legislature is like all other Legislatures. A wooden-head gets up and proposes an utterly absurd some thing or other, and he and half a dozen other wooden-heads discuss it with windy vehemence for an hour, the remainder of the house sitting in silent patience the while, and then a sensible man—a man of weight—a big gun—gets up and shows the foolishness of the matter in five sentences; a vote is taken and the thing is tabled. Now, on one occasion, a Kanaka member, who paddled over here from some barren rock or other out yonder in the ocean—some scalawag who wears nothing but a pair of socks and a plug hat when he is at home, or possibly is even more scantily arrayed in the popular malo got up and gravely gave notice of a bill to authorize the construction of a suspension bridge from Oahu to Hawaii a matter of a hundred and fifty miles! He said that natives would prefer it to the interisland schooners, and they wouldn't suffer from sea-sickness on it. Up came Honorables Ku and Kulaui, and Kowkow and Kiwawhoo and a lot of other clacking geese, and harried and worried this notable internal improvement until some sensible person rose and choked them off by moving the previous question. Do not do an unjust thing now, and imagine Kanaka Legislatures do stupider things than other similar bodies. Rather blush to remember that once, when a Wisconsin Legislature had the affixing of a penalty for the crime of arson under consideration, a member got up and seriously suggested that when a man committed the damning crime of arson they ought either to hang him or make him marry the girl! To my mind the suspension bridge man was a Solomon compared to this idiot.
[I shall have to stop at this point and finish this subject to-morrow. There is a villain over the way, yonder, who has been playing "Get out of the Wilderness" on a flute ever since I sat down here to-night—sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and always skipping the first note in the second bar—skipping it so uniformly that I have got to waiting and painfully looking out for it latterly. Human nature cannot stand this sort of torture. I wish his funeral was to come off at half-past eleven o'clock tomorrow and I had nothing to do. I would attend it.]
EXPLANATORY
It has been six weeks since I touched a pen. In explanation and excuse I offer the fact that I spent that time (with the exception of one week) on the island of Maui. I only got back yesterday. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place good-bye so regretfully. I doubt if there is a mean person there, from the homeliest man on the island (Lewers) down to the oldest (Tallant). I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I had a jolly time. I would not have fooled away any of it writing letters under any consideration whatever. It will be five or six weeks before I write again. I sail for the island of Hawaii tomorrow, and my Maui notes will not be written up until I come back.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, June 21, 1866
Honolulu, May 23, 1866.
LEGISLATURE CONTINUED—THE SOLONS AT WORK
The first business that was transacted to-day was the introduction of a bill to prohibit the intermarrying of old persons with young ones, because of the non-fruitfulness of such unions. The measure was discussed, laughed over, and finally tabled. I will remark here that I noticed that there seemed to be no regular order of business observed. Motions, resolutions, notices, introduction and third reading of bills, etc., were jumbled together. This may be convenient enough for the members, but it must necessarily be troublesome to the clerks and reporters.
Then a special Committee reported back favorably a bill to prohibit Chinamen from removing their male children from the islands, and the report was adopted—which I thought was rather hard on the Chinamen.
WAR
Next "the gentleman from Kohala" offered a resolution requesting the Minister of the Interior to bring his books into the House and separate the "Bishop of England's" printing account from his omnibus of "sundries," and show just how my Lord's account with the Government printing office stood. [Sensation.]
A member jumped up and moved to amend by requesting a general inquisition into printing affairs, and to strike out the offensive clause particularizing the Bishop's bill.
The Minister of the Interior (an Englishman—Dr. Hutchinson) opposed the motion, angrily—said it "showed the animus of the thing the way it stood." He said he was ready to produce the books, and went at once and brought them in.
Another member moved to table the original motion.
Harris, Minister of Finance, wanted the motion to stand unamended; he said it showed the animus of the thing, too; said it was the old insinuation, emanating from outside the walls of this House—that the Minister of the Interior was diverting the public funds to the support of the Anglican church; the ancient insinuation that he was recreant to his duty, etc.; said the animus was prominent enough in the language of the resolution, which denied to the Lord Bishop of Honolulu the title which all the world recognized as his, and called him the "Bishop of England;" said the Bishop always paid his bills; he (Harris) always paid his bills, and gave money frequently to the Anglican church; was a member of it—would like to know of a single solitary instance where the Congregationalist member from Kohala had ever contributed one dollar, one shilling, one infinitesimal fraction of a farthing to the support of the Reformed Catholic Church of the Lord Bishop; but a King's Minister couldn't be honest, oh no! and a Minister couldn't be a gentleman—certainly not! impossible!—oh, utterly!
And so forth and so on, wandering further and further from the question before the House, and quacking about stuff that had no more to do with the subject under discussion than the Decalogue has got to do with the Declaration of Independence. This man was on his feet every five minutes for an hour. One timid Commoner feebly moved the previous question once, with a vague hope of shutting up the Minister, but he never got a second, and was snubbed in a moment, and "went in his hole," as they say in California.
The original motion was finally tabled, but it made a fearful stir among the Ministers during its brief existence. It created a bitter discussion, and showed how malignant are the jealousies that rankle in the breasts of the rival religious denominations here.
The Vice President said he was sorry the motion had been offered; that it was an insult to the Government, to the Bishop of Honolulu, to the House, and to all parties concerned, and it grieved him to have to put it to a vote.
In the debate, his Excellency Minister Harris was the champion of the Reformed Catholic Church (though, to save my soul, I could not see what any Church had to do—that is, openly and aboveboard—with the question before the House). He was the champion; and without any ill feeling toward him I will yet express the conviction that about two more such champions would bring ruin and destruction upon any cause under the sun.
MINISTER HARRIS
Is six feet high, bony and rather slender, middle-aged; has long, ungainly arms; stands so straight that he leans back a little; has small side whiskers; from my distance his eyes seemed blue, and his teeth looked too regular and too white for an honest man; he has a long head the wrong way—that is, up and down; and a bogus Roman nose and a great, long, cadaverous undertaker's countenance, displayed upon which his ghastly attempts at humorous expressions were as shocking as a facetious leer on the face of a corpse. He is a native of New Hampshire, but is unworthy of the name of American. I think, from his manner and language to-day, that he belongs, body and soul, and boots, to the King of the Sandwich Islands and the "Lord Bishop of Honolulu." He has no command of language—or ideas. His oratory is all show and pretense; he makes considerable noise and a great to do, and impresses his profoundest incoherencies with an oppressive solemnity and ponderous windmill gesticulations with his flails. He raises his hand aloft and looks piercingly at the interpreter and launches out into a sort of prodigious declamation, thunders upward higher and higher toward his climax—words, words, awful four-syllable words, given with a convincing emphasis that almost inspires them with meaning, and just as you take a sustaining breath and "stand by" for the crash, his poor little rocket fizzes faintly in the zenith and goes out ignominiously. The sensation one experiences is the same a miner feels when he puts in a blast which he thinks will send the whole top of a mountain to the moon, and after running a quarter of a mile in ten seconds to get out of the way, is disgusted to hear it make a trifling, dull report, discharge a pipe-full of smoke, and barely jolt half a bushel of dirt. After one of these incomprehensible ravings, Mr. Harris bends down and smiles a horrid smile of self-complacency in the face of the Minister of the Interior—bends to the other side and continues it in the face of the Minister of Foreign Affairs; beams it serenely upon the admiring lobby, and finally confers the remnants of it upon the unhappy interpreter—all of which pantomime says as plainly as words could say it: "Eh?—but wasn't it an awful shot?" Harris says the weakest and most insipid things, and then tries by the expression of his countenance to swindle you into the conviction that they are the most blighting sarcasms. And in seven years I have never lost my cheerfulness and wanted to lay me down in some secluded spot and die, and be at rest, until I heard him try to be funny to-day. If I had had a double-barreled shotgun I would have blown him into a million fragments. Harris deals in long paragraphs of personalities, that would not be permitted in any other Legislature. This man has the reputation of being an "able" man; yet he was talking pretty much all the time to-day, and all the good sound sense or point there was in his vaporings could have been boiled down into half a page of foolscap. Harris is not a man of first-class abilities—but that is only my opinion, you know—not Harris'. He knows some things, though. He knows that his salary of $4,000 is little enough, in all conscience (especially as he gets nothing as Acting Attorney General, and is not allowed to engage in outside business), and he knew enough on one occasion to vote against reducing his pay to $3,000 when his single vote was necessary to kill the proposed economy. He is an inveterate official barnacle, and is generally well supplied with offices—some people say the Hawaiian Government is a wheel barrow, and that Harris is the wheel.
The Legislature voted an appropriation yesterday to have the photographs of its members taken and hung up in the Capitol. If they had known I was going to paint Harris, they might have saved about three dollars. Harris, you won't do.
If I had time now I would write you a little something about Harris. Under the circumstances, though, I feel it my duty to pass on to some thingelse.
MINISTER HUTCHINSON
Next to His Excellency Mr. Harris, His Majesty's Minister of Finance, sits His Excellency Mr. Hutchinson, His Majesty's Minister of the Interior—an Englishman. He has sandy hair, sandy mustache, sandy complexion—is altogether one of the sandiest men I ever saw, so to speak: is a tall, stoop shouldered, middle-aged lowering-browed, intense-eyed, irascible man and looks like he might have his little prejudices and partialities. He has got one good point, however—he don't talk.
THE OTHER MINISTERS
Near Dr. Hutchinson sit His Excellency the Governor of Oahu (born in this country of Italian and American parentage, and considered an American) and His Excellency M. De Varigny, Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs—a Frenchman. These are merely sensible, unpretentious men—nothing particularly remarkable about their manner or appearance. If Varigny were as hopelessly bad as his English pronunciation, nothing but a special intervention of Providence could save him from perdition hereafter.
THE MILLENNIUM AT HAND
I have found at least one startling peculiarity about this Hawaiian Legislature. They do not accuse its members of being stained with bribery and corruption. It is a new and pleasant sensation to me. Some people ascribe this singular purity to innate virtue, while others less charitable say the members are not offered bribes because they are such leaky vessels that they would be sure to let it out. Doubtless, in some cases one theory is correct, and the other correct in other cases. I hope it is somehow that way; at any rate, I haven't time to discuss it.
LEGISLATIVE ETIQUETTE
Legislative etiquette is of a low grade everywhere, I believe. I find no exception to the rule here. All hands smoke during the session, from the highest down to the pock-marked messenger. Cow county members—or perhaps I should say taro-patch members—lay the sides of their faces on the desks, encircle them with their arms and go to sleep for a few moments at a time. I know they must put their feet on the desks sometimes, but I could not catch them at it. I saw them eating crackers and cheese, though, and freely excused them for it, because they hold long, fatiguing sessions—from 11 till 4 o'clock, without intermission. I am grieved to say that their etiquette is a shade superior to that of the early Washoe Legislature. "Horse Williams" was a member of one of them, and he used to always prop his vast feet upon his desk and get behind them and eat a raw turnip during prayer by the Chaplain.
MORE CHARACTERISTICS
So much for the Legislature. I came away and left them at the favorite occupation of such bodies—crowding the finance officer's estimates to the utmost limit. The last thing they did was to provide a Clerk for the Sheriff of Maui, with a salary of $1,000, which was well enough, considering that for $2,000 a year and some trifling perquisites, that officer acts as Sheriff of the Island of Maui, Postmaster of Lahaina, Custom-house officer, Tax Collector of the Island of Lanai, and probably does a little in a general way in the missionary line, though he is better at entertaining a temporary guest, as I am aware; but you know the inevitable result—every Sheriff of every little dab of rock in this group will have to have a thousand-dollar clerk now.
MR. BROWN DISAPPOINTED
Brown has been keeping a sharp lookout for the King for nearly three months, now. When we came out of the Capitol we heard his Majesty had been at the door a few minutes before. Said the impetuous child of nature:
"Blame that King, ain't I ever—"
"Peace, son!" said I; "respect the sacred name of royalty."
A CORRECTION
Speaking of the King reminds me of something which ought to be said and might as well be said in this paragraph. Some people in California have an idea that the King of the Sandwich Islands is a man who spends his time idling about the town of Honolulu with individuals of questionable respectability, and drinking habitually and to excess. This impression is wrong. Before he ascended the throne he was "faster" than was well for him or for his good name, but, like the hero of Agincourt, he renounced his bad habits and discarded his Falstaffs when he became King, and since that time has conducted himself as becomes his high position. He attends closely to his business, makes no display, does not go about much, and in manners and habits is a thorough gentleman. He only appears in the streets when his affairs require it, and then he goes well mounted or in his carriage, and decently and properly attended.
And while upon this subject I will remark that His Majesty's income is amply sufficient for the modest state he indulges in. The Legislature appropriates $16,000 a year to his use, and his estates (called the "Royal Domain"), yield him $20,000 a year besides. The present palace is to be pulled down and a new one erected. The Legislature has just made an appropriation of $40,000 to begin the work and carry it on for the next two years. There was nothing said about what it is ultimately to cost—wherefore I surmise that it is the design of the Government to build a palace well worthy of the name.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, July 16, 1866
Honolulu, June 22, 1866.
I have just got back from a three weeks' cruise on the island of Hawaii and an eventful sojourn of several days at the great volcano. But of that trip I will speak hereafter. I am too badly used up to do it now. I only want to write a few lines at present by the Live Yankee, merely to keep my communications open, as the soldiers say.
I find Hawaiian politics in a state of unusual stir on account of the death of the King's sister. Her Royal Highness the Princess Victoria Kamamalu Kaahumanu, heir presumptive to the crown. She was something over twenty-seven years old, and had never been married, although she was formally betrothed to Prince William and the marriage day appointed more than once, but circumstances interfered and the nuptials were never consummated.
The Princess was a granddaughter of old Kamehameha the Conqueror, and like all of that stock, was talented. She was the last female descendant of the old warrior.
The care of her infancy was confided to Dr. A. F. [correctly G. P.] Judd (afterward so honorably distinguished in Hawaiian history). Subsequently Hon. John Ii was appointed her guardian by the King. She was carefully educated in the Royal Chief School, which was at that time presided over by the earliest friends of the Hawaiians, the American Missionaries. (It is now in the hands of the gentlemen of the Royal Hawaiian Church, otherwise the "Reformed Catholic Church," a sort of nondescript wild cat religion imported here from England.) She became an accomplished pianist and vocalist, and for many years sat at the melodeon and led the choir in the great stone church here. From her infancy it was expected that she would one day fill the throne, and therefore great importance was attached to her acts, and they were duly observed and noted as straws calculated to show how the wind would be likely to set in her ultimate official life. Consequently the strong friendship she manifested for the missionaries was regarded with jealous eye in certain quarters, and frequent attempts were made to diminish her partiality for them. The late Mr. Wyllie, Minister of Foreign Affairs (a native of Scotland), once sent for Hon. Mr. Ii, and endeavored to get him to use his influence in dissuading the Princess and Mrs. Bishop (a high chiefess) who visited California in the Ajax lately, from further attendance upon the church choirs. He said it was very improper and out of character for Princesses to sing in a choir, and that such personages in England would not do such a thing. The effort was fruitless, however; Victoria continued her former course, and remained faithful to her early friends. She was urged to desert them and go over to the Reformed Catholic Church, but she steadfastly refused.
The Princess was distinguished as the founder and Perpetual President of a benevolent association called "Aha Hui Kaahumanu"—an organization partaking of the benevolent character of Freemasonry, but without its secrecy. It was composed of her countrywomen, and supported by their subscriptions; its membership was exceedingly numerous, and its ramifications extended all over the several islands of the group. Its objects were to secure careful nursing of its members when sick, and their decent burial after death. The society always formed in procession and followed deceased members to the grave, arrayed in a uniform composed of a white robe and a scarf, which indicated the official rank of the wearer by its color.
The Princess was possessed of immense landed estates, and formerly kept up considerable state. She rode in a fine carriage, and had her guards and sentries about her several residences, in European fashion.
The natives have always been remarkable for the extravagant love and devotion they show toward their Chiefs—it almost amounts to worship. When Victoria was a girl of fifteen she made an excursion through the island of Hawaii (the realm of the ancient founders of her race), with her guardian and a retinue of servants, and was everywhere received with a wild enthusiasm by her people. In Hilo, they came in multitudes to the house of the reverend missionary, where she was stopping, and brought with them all manner of offerings—poi, taro, bananas, pigs, fowls—anything they [could] get hold of which was valuable in their eyes—and many of them stinted and starved themselves for the time being, no doubt, to do this honor to a Princess who could not use or carry away the hundredth part of what they lavished upon her. And for hours and even days together the people thronged around the place and wept and chanted their distressing songs, and wailed their agonizing wails; for joy at the return of a loved one and sorrow at his death are expressed in precisely the same way with this curious people.
The Princess died on Tuesday, May 29th, and on Wednesday the body was conveyed to the King's palace, there to lie in state about four weeks, which is royal custom here. The chamber is still darkened, and its walls and ceilings draped and festooned with solemn black. The corpse is attired in white satin, trimmed with lace and ruche, and reposes upon the famous yellow-feather war-cloak of the kings of Hawaii; a simple coronet of orange blossoms, interwoven with white feathers, adorns the head that was promised a regal diadem, six kahili beaters stand upon each side, and these are surrounded by a guard of honor in command of one of the High Chiefs; a party of Chief women are in constant attendance, and officers of the household troops and of the volunteer forces are on duty about the palace; the old Queen Dowager sleeps in the chamber every night. Candelabras burn day and night at the head and feet of the corpse, and shed a funereal twilight over it, and over the silent attendants and the dark and dismal symbols of woe. Every evening a new chant, composed by some Chief woman several days before, and carefully rehearsed, is sung. All this in the death chamber.
Outside, on the broad verandahs and in the ample palace yard, a multitude of common natives howl and wail, and weep and chant the dreary funeral songs of ancient Hawaii, and dance the strange dance for the dead. Numbers of these people remain there day after day and night after night, sleeping in the open air in the intervals of their mourning ceremonies.
I am told these things. I have not seen them. The King has ordered that no foreigner shall be permitted to enter the palace gates before the last night previous to the funeral. The reason why this order was issued is, I am told, that the performances at the palace at the time the corpse of the late King lay there in state were criticised and commented upon too freely. These performances were considerably toned down while the missionaries were in power, but under the more liberal regime of the new Reformed Catholic dispensation they fell back toward their old-time barbarous character. The gates were thrown open and everybody went in and saw and heard what may be termed the funeral orgies of the dead King. The term is coarse, but perhaps it is a better one than a milder one would be. And then scribblers like myself wrote column after column about the matter in the public prints, and the subject was discussed and criticised in private circles and inveighed against in the pulpits. All this was harassing and disagreeable to the parties nearest concerned, and hence the present order forbidding any but Hawaiian citizens and lenient friends from witnessing the ceremonies. So strong is some people's curiosity, however, that the law has already been violated several times within the past week by strangers, who entered the tabooed grounds in disguise. They were discovered, however, and quietly turned out.
The deceased Princess has lain in state now for more than three weeks—yet still the nightly wailing goes on in the palace yard, and the crowds of natives who conduct it increases steadily by influx from the other islands, and the lamentations grow more extravagant all the time. The missionary efforts to discourage and break up this weird custom, inherited from the old pagan days, are quietly rebuked in a little advertisement which appears over the signature of the King's Chamberlain in the public papers to-day, wherein he invites all natives to come to the palace grounds and stay there night and day and take part in the wailing for the departed. That looks like a disposition on the part of the authorities not only to check the progress of civilization, but to go backward a little.
The Legislature have appropriated $6,000 to defray the funeral expenses of the Princess. The obsequies will take place the latter part of next week. I have seen the coffin (it is not quite finished yet), and certainly it is the most elegant piece of burial furniture I ever saw. It is made of those two superb species of native wood, kou and koa. The former is nearly as dark as ebony; the latter is like fine California laurel, richly grained and clouded with mahogany. Both woods have an iron-like hardness, and are exceedingly close in grain, and when highly polished and varnished nothing in the shape of wood can be more brilliant, more lustrous, more beautiful. It produces a sort of ecstasy in me to look at it, and holds me like a mesmeric fascination. There is nothing extraordinary about the fashioning—the planning and construction—of this coffin, but still it is beautiful. The wood is so splendidly burnished, and so gracefully grained and clouded.
The silver tablet upon the coffin, upon which is to be inscribed the name and title of the deceased, is to cost $500. I go into these minor details to show you that royal state in the Sandwich Islands approaches as near to its European models as the circumstances of the case will admit.
HOW FUNERALS OF DEAD CHIEFS WERE CELEBRATED IN OLD TIMES
If a Sandwich Islands missionary comes across a stranger, I think he weighs him and measures him and judges him (in defiance of the injunction to "Judge not, etc.") by an ideal which he has created in his own mind—and if that stranger falls short of that ideal in any particular, the good missionary thinks he falls just that much short of what he ought to be in order to stand a chance for salvation; and with a tranquil simplicity of self-conceit, which is marvelous to a modest man, he honestly believes that the Almighty, of a necessity, thinks exactly as he does. I violate the injunction to judge not, also. I judge that missionary, but, with a modesty which is entitled to some credit, I freely confess that my judgment may err. Now, therefore, when I say that the Sandwich Islands missionaries are pious; hard-working; hard-praying; self-sacrificing; hospitable; devoted to the well-being of this people and the interests of Protestantism; bigoted; puritanical; slow; ignorant of all white human nature and natural ways of men, except the remnant of these things that are left in their own class or profession; old fogy—fifty years behind the age; uncharitable toward the weaknesses of the flesh; considering all shortcomings, faults and failings in the light of crimes, and having no mercy and no forgiveness for such—when I say this about the missionaries, I do it with the explicit understanding that it is only my estimate of them—not that of a Higher Intelligence—nor that of even other sinners like myself. It is only my estimate, and it may fall far short of being a just one.
Now, after the above free confession of my creed, I think I ought to be allowed to print a word of defense of these missionaries without having that eternal charge of "partiality and prejudice" launched at me that is generally sure to be discharged at any man here who ventures—in certain quarters—to give them any credit or offer to defend them from ill-natured aspersions.
Mr. Staley, my Lord Bishop of Honolulu—who was built into a Lord by the English Bishop of Oxford and shipped over here with a fully equipped "Established Church" in his pocket—has frequently said that the natives of these islands are morally and religiously in a worse condition to-day than they were before the American missionaries ever came here. Now that is not true—and in that respect the statement bears a very strong family likeness to many other of the Bishop's remarks about our missionaries. Our missionaries are our missionaries—and even if they were our devils I would not want any English prelate to slander them. I will not go into an argument to prove that the natives have been improved by missionary labor—because facts are stronger than argument. Above I have stated how the natives are now singing and wailing every night—queerly enough, but innocently and harmlessly—out yonder in the palace yard, for the dead Princess. Following is some account of the style of conducting this sort of thing shortly before the traduced missionaries came. I quote from Jarves' History of the Sandwich Islands:
"The ceremonies observed on the death of any important personage were exceedingly barbarous. The hair was shaved or cut close, teeth knocked out and sometimes the ears were mangled. Some tattooed their tongues in a corresponding manner to the other parts of their bodies. Frequently the flesh was cut or burnt, eyes scooped out, and other even more painful personal outrages inflicted. But these usages, however shocking they may appear were innocent compared with the horrid saturnalia which immediately followed the death of a chief of the highest rank. Then the most unbounded license prevailed; law and restraint were cast aside, and the whole people appeared more like demons than human beings. Every vice and crime was allowed. Property was destroyed, houses fired and old feuds revived and avenged. Gambling, theft and murder were as open as the day; clothing was cast aside as a useless incumbrance; drunkenness and promiscuous prostitution prevailed through out the land, no women, excepting the widows of the deceased, being exempt from the grossest violation. There was no passion however lewd, or desire however wicked, but could be gratified with impunity during the continuance of this period which, happily, from its own violence soon spent itself. No other nation was ever witness to a custom which so entirely threw off all moral and legal restraints and incited the evil passions to unresisted riot and wanton debauchery."
It is easy to see, now, that the missionaries have made a better people of this race than they formerly were; and I am satisfied that if that old time national spree were still a custom of the country, my Lord Bishop would not be in this town to-day saying hard things about the missionaries. No; his excellent judgment would have impelled him to take to the woods when the Princess died.
The great bulk of the wealth, the commerce, the enterprise and the Spirit of progress in the Sandwich Islands centers in the Americans. Americans own the whaling fleet; they own the great sugar plantations; they own the cattle ranches; they own their share of the mercantile depots and the lines of packet ships. Whatever of commercial and agricultural greatness the country can boast of it owes to them. Consequently the question of who is likely to succeed to the crown in case of the death of the present King, is an interesting one to American residents, and therefore to their countrymen at home. The incumbent of the throne has it in his power to help or hinder them a good deal. The King is not married; and if he dies without leaving an heir of his own body or appointing a successor, the crown will be likely to fall upon either His Highness Prince William C. Lunalilo or David Kalakaua. The former is of the highest blood in the kingdom—higher than the King himself, it is said—and Kalakaua is descended from the ancient Kings of the island of Hawaii. King Keoua (father of Kamehameha the Great), great-great grandfather of the present King, was also the great-great-grandfather of Prince William; but from Kamehameha the lines diverge, and if there is any kinship between William and Kamehameha V it is distant. They both had a common ancestor in King Umi, however, a gentleman who flourished several hundred years ago. Prince William is called eleventh in descent from Umi, and the present King only fourteenth, which confers seniority of birth and rank upon the former. But this subject is tanglesome.
PRINCE WILLIAM
Prince William is a man of fine large build; is thirty-one years of age, is affable, gentlemanly, open, frank, manly; is as independent as a lord and has a spirit and a will like the old Conqueror himself. He is intelligent, shrewd, sensible—is a man of first-rate abilities, in fact. He has a right handsome face, and the best nose in the Hawaiian kingdom, white or other wise; it is a splendid beak, and worth being proud of. He has one most unfortunate fault—he drinks constantly; and it is a great pity, for if he would moderate this appetite, or break it off altogether, he could become a credit to himself and his nation. I like this man, and I like his bold independence, and his friendship for and appreciation of the American residents; and I take no pleasure in mentioning this failing of his. If I could print a sermon that would reform him, I would cheerfully do it.
DAVID KALAKA
Hon. David Kalakaua, who at present holds the office of King's Chamberlain, is a man of fine presence, is an educated gentleman and a man of good abilities. He is approaching forty, I should judge—is thirty-five, at any rate. He is conservative, politic and calculating, makes little display, and does not talk much in the Legislature. He is a quiet, dignified, sensible man, and would do no discredit to the kingly office.
The King has power to appoint his successor. If he does such a thing, his choice will probably fall on Kalakaua. In case the King should die without making provision for a successor, it would be the duty of the Legislature to select a King from among the dozen high Chiefs, male and female, who are eligible under the Hawaiian Constitution. Under these circumstances, if Prince William were thoroughly redeemed from his besetting sin, his chances would be about even with Kalakaua's.
FUNERAL MUSIC
It is two o'clock in the morning and I have just been up toward the palace to hear some of the singing of the numerous well-born watchers (of both sexes) who are standing guard in the chamber of death. The voices were very pure and rich, and blended together without harshness or discord and the music was exceedingly plaintive and beautiful. I would have been glad enough to get closer. When the plebeians outside the building resumed their distressing noise I came away. In the distance I hear them at if yet, poor, simple, loving, faithful, Christian savages.
POSTSCRIPT
The Swallow arrived here on Monday morning, with Anson Burlingame, United States Minister to China, and General Van Valkenburgh, United States Minister to Japan. Their stay is limited to fourteen days, but a strong effort will be made to persuade them to break that limit and pass the Fourth of July here. They are paying and receiving visits constantly, of course, and are cordially welcomed. Burlingame is a man who would be esteemed, respected and popular anywhere, no matter whether he were among Christians or cannibals.
The people are expecting McCook, our new Minister to these islands, every day.
Whartenby and Mackie, of Nevada (Cal.), arrived here in the last vessel, and will start back in a week or two. They came merely for recreation.
Several San Franciscans have come to Honolulu to locate permanently. Among them Dr. A. C. Buffum; he has a fair and growing practice. Judge Jones is another; he has already more law practice on his hands than he can well attend to. And lastly, J. J. Ayers, late one of the proprietors of the Morning Call, has arrived, with material for starting a newspaper and job office. He has not made up his mind yet, however, to try the experiment of a newspaper here. Sanford, last Chief Engineer of the Ajax, came in the last vessel, and proposes to settle in the islands—perhaps in the sugar line. He has gone to Maui to see what the chances are in that deservedly famous sugar-producing region.
A letter arrived here yesterday morning giving a meager account of the arrival on the island of Hawaii of nineteen poor starving wretches, who had been buffeting a stormy sea in an open boat for forty-three days! Their ship, the Hornet, from New York, with a quantity of kerosene on board, had taken fire and burned in lat. 2 degrees north and long. 135 degrees west. Think of their sufferings for forty-three days and nights, exposed to the scorching heat of the center of the torrid zone, and at the mercy of a ceaseless storm! When they had been entirely out of provisions for a day or two and the cravings of hunger became insupportable, they yielded to the shipwrecked mariner's final and fearful alternative, and solemnly drew lots to determine who of their number should die to furnish food for his comrades—and then the morning mists lifted and they saw land. They are being cared for at Sanpohoihoi [Laupahoehoe], a little seaside station I spent a night at two weeks ago. This boat-load was in charge of the Captain of the Hornet. He reports that the remainder of the persons in his ship (twenty in number) left her in two boats, under command of the first and second mates and the three boats kept company until the night of the nineteenth day, when they got separated. No further particulars have arrived here yet, and no confirmation of the above sad story.
DINNER TO THE ENVOYS
The American citizens of Honolulu, anxious to show to their distinguished visitors the honor and respect due them, have invited them to partake of a dinner upon some occasion before their departure. Burlingame and General Van Valkenburgh have accepted the invitation and will inform the Committee this evening what Day will best suit their convenience.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, July 19, 1866
BURNING OF THE CLIPPER SHIP HORNET AT SEA
Detailed Account of the Sufferings of Officers and Crew, as given by the Third Officer and Members of the Crew.
Honolulu, June 25, 1866.
In the postscript to a letter which I wrote two or three days ago, and sent by the ship Live Yankee, I gave you the substance of a letter received here from Hilo by Walker, Allen & Co. informing them that a boat containing fifteen men, in a helpless and starving condition, had drifted ashore at Laupahoehoe, Island of Hawaii, and that they had belonged to the clipper ship Hornet, Mitchell master, and had been afloat on the ocean since the burning of that vessel, about one hundred miles north of the equator, on the 3d of May—forty-three days.
The third mate and ten of the seamen have arrived here and are now in the hospital. Captain Mitchell, one seaman named Antonio Passene, and two passengers (Samuel and Henry Ferguson, of New York city, young gentlemen, aged respectively 18 and 28) are still at Hilo, but are expected here within the week.
In the Captain's modest epitome of this terrible romance, which you have probably published, you detect the fine old hero through it. It reads like Grant.
THE THIRD MATE
I have talked with the seamen and with John S. Thomas, third mate, but their accounts are so nearly alike in all substantial points, that I will merely give the officer's statement and weave into it such matters as the men mentioned in the way of incidents, experiences, emotions, etc. Thomas is very intelligent and a very cool and self possessed young man, and seems to have kept a pretty accurate log of his remarkable voyage in his head. He told his story, of three hours length, in a plain, straightforward way, and with no attempt at display and no straining after effect. Wherever any incident may be noted in this paper where any individual has betrayed any emotion, or enthusiasm, or has departed from strict, stoical self-possession, or had a solitary thought that was not an utterly unpoetical and essentially practical one, remember that Thomas, the third mate, was not that person. He has been eleven days on shore, and already looks sufficiently sound and healthy to pass almost anywhere without being taken for an invalid. He has the marks of a hard experience about him though, when one looks closely. He is very much sunburned and weather-beaten, and looks thirty-two years old. He is only twenty-four, however, and has been a sailor fifteen years. He was born in Richmond, Maine, and still considers that place his home.
SAILING OF THE "HORNET"—PACIFIC RAILROAD IRON
The following is the substance of what Thomas said: The Hornet left New York on the 15th of January last, unusually well manned, fitted and provisioned—as fast and as handsome a clipper ship as ever sailed out of that port. She had a general cargo—a little of everything; a large quantity of kerosene oil in barrels; several hundred cases of candles—also four hundred tons Pacific Railroad iron and three engines. The third mate thinks they were dock engines, and one of the seamen thought they were locomotives. Had no gales and no bad weather—nothing but fine sailing weather and she went along steadily and well—fast, very fast, in fact. Had uncommonly good weather off Cape Horn; he had been around that Cape seven times—each way—and had never seen such fine weather there before. On the 12th of April, in latitude, say, 35 south and longitude 95 west, signaled a Prussian bark—she set Prussian ensign, and the Hornet responded with her name, expressed by means of Merritt's system of signals. She was sailing west—probably bound for Australia. This was the last vessel ever seen by the Hornet's people until they floated ashore at Hawaii in the long boat—a space of sixty-four days.
THE SHIP ON FIRE
At seven o'clock on the morning of the 3d of May, the chief mate and two men started down into the hold to draw some "bright varnish" from a cask. The captain told him to bring the cask on deck—that it was dangerous to have it where it was, in the hold. The mate, instead of obeying the order, proceeded to draw a can full of the varnish first. He had an "open light" in his hand, and the liquid took fire; the can was dropped, the officer in his consternation neglected to close the bung, and in a few seconds the fiery torrent had run in every direction, under bales of rope, cases of candles, barrels of kerosene, and all sorts of freight, and tongues of flame were shooting upward through every aperture and crevice toward the deck.
The ship was moving along under easy sail, the watch on duty were idling here and there in such shade as they could find, and the listlessness and repose of morning in the tropics was upon the vessel and her belongings. But as six bells chimed, the cry of "Fire!" rang through the ship, and woke every man to life and action. And following the fearful warning, and almost as fleetly, came the fire itself. It sprang through hatchways, seized upon chairs, table, cordage, anything, everything—and almost before the bewildered men could realize what the trouble was and what was to be done the cabin was a hell of angry flames. The mainmast was on fire—its rigging was burnt asunder! One man said all this had happened within eighteen or twenty minutes after the first alarm—two others say in ten minutes. All say that one hour after the alarm, the main and mizzenmasts were burned in two and fell overboard.
Captain Mitchell ordered the three boats to be launched instantly, which was done—and so hurriedly that the longboat (the one he left the vessel in himself) had a hole as large as a man's head stove in her bottom. A blanket was stuffed into the opening and fastened to its place. Not a single thing was saved, except such food and other articles as lay about the cabin and could be quickly seized and thrown on deck. Thomas was sent into the longboat to receive its proportion of these things, and, being barefooted at the time, and bareheaded, and having no clothing on save an undershirt and pantaloons, of course he never got a chance afterward to add to his dress. He lost everything he had, including his log-book, which he had faithfully kept from the first. Forty minutes after the fire alarm the provisions and passengers were on board the three boats, and they rowed away from the ship—and to some distance, too, for the heat was very great. Twenty minutes afterward the two masts I have mentioned, with their rigging and their broad sheets of canvas wreathed in flames, crashed into the sea.
All night long the thirty-one unfortunates sat in their frail boats and watched the gallant ship burn; and felt as men feel when they see a tried friend perishing and are powerless to help him. The sea was illuminated for miles around, and the clouds above were tinged with a ruddy hue; the faces of the men glowed in the strong light as they shaded their eyes with their hands and peered out anxiously upon the wild picture, and the gunwales of the boats and the idle oars shone like polished gold.
At five o'clock on the morning after the disaster, in latitude 2 degrees 20' north, longitude 112 degrees 8' west, the ship went down, and the crew of the Hornet were alone on the great deep, or, as one of the seamen expressed it, "We felt as if somebody or something had gone away—as if we hadn't any home anymore."
Captain Mitchell divided his boat's crew into two watches and gave the third mate charge of one and took the other himself. He had saved a studding sail from the ship, and out of this the men fashioned a rude sail with their knives; they hoisted it, and taking the first and second mates' boats in tow, they bore away upon the ship's course (northwest) and kept in the track of vessels bound to or from San Francisco, in the hope of being picked up.
THEIR WATER, PROVISIONS, ETC.
I have said that in the few minutes time allowed him, Captain Mitchell was only able to seize upon the few articles of food and other necessaries that happened to lie about the cabin. Here is the list: Four hams, seven pieces of salt pork, (each piece weighed about four pounds), one box of raisins, 100 pounds of bread (about one barrel), twelve two-pound cans of oysters, clams and assorted meats; six buckets of raw potatoes (which rotted so fast they got but little benefit from them), a keg with four pounds of butter in it, twelve gallons of water in a forty-gallon tierce or "scuttle-butt," four one-gallon demijohns full of water, three bottles of brandy, the property of passengers; some pipes, matches and a hundred pounds of tobacco; had no medicines. That was all these poor fellows had to live on for forty-three days—the whole thirty one of them!
Each boat had a compass, a quadrant, a copy of Bowditch's Navigator and a nautical almanac, and the captain's and chief mate's boat had chronometers.
RATIONS
Of course, all hands were put on short allowance at once. The day they set sail from the ship each man was allowed a small morsel of salt pork—or a little piece of potato, if he preferred it—and half a sea biscuit three times a day. To understand how very light this ration of bread was, it is only necessary to know that it takes seven of these sea biscuits to weigh a pound. The first two days they only allowed one gill of water a day to each man; but for nearly a fortnight after that the weather was lowering and stormy, and frequent rain squalls occurred. The rain was caught in canvas, and whenever there was a shower the forty-gallon cask and every other vessel that would hold water was filled—even all the boots that were water tight were pressed into this service, except such as the matches and tobacco were deposited in to keep dry. So for fourteen days. There were luxurious occasions when there was plenty of water to drink. But after that how they suffered the agonies of thirst for four long weeks!
HOPING AGAINST HOPE
For seven days the boats sailed on, and the starving men ate their fragment of biscuit and their morsel of raw pork in the morning, and hungrily counted the tedious hours until noon and night should bring their repetitions of it. And in the long intervals they looked mutely into each other's faces, or turned their wistful eyes across the wild sea in search of the succoring sail that was never to come.
"Didn't you talk?" I asked one of the men.
"No; we were too down-hearted—that is, the first week or more. We didn't talk—we only looked at each other and over the ocean."
And thought, I suppose. Thought of home—of shelter from storms—of food and drink, and rest.
The hope of being picked up hung to them constantly—was ever present to them, and in their thoughts, like hunger. And in the Captain's mind was the hope of making the Clarion Islands, and he clung to it many a day.
The nights were very dark. They had no lantern and could not see the compass, and there were no stars to steer by. Thomas said, of the boat "She handled easy, and we steered by the feel of the wind in our faces and the heave of the sea." Dark, and dismal, and lonesome work was that! Sometimes they got a fleeting glimpse of the sailor's friend, the north star, and then they lighted a match and hastened anxiously to see if their compass was faithful to them—for it had to be placed close to an iron ring-bolt in the stern, and they were afraid, during those first nights, that this might cause it to vary. It proved true to them, however.
SUMPTUOUS FARE
On the fifth day a notable incident occurred. They caught a dolphin! and while their enthusiasm was still at its highest over this stroke of good fortune, they captured another. They made a trifling fire in a tin plate and warmed the prizes—to cook them was not possible—and divided them equitably among all hands and ate them.
On the sixth day two more dolphins were caught.
Two more were caught on the seventh day, and also a small bonita, and they began to believe they were always going to live in this extravagant way, but it was not to be—these were their last dolphins, and they never could get another bonita, though they saw them and longed for them often afterward.
RATIONS REDUCED
On the eighth day the rations were reduced about one-half. Thus—breakfast, one-fourth of a biscuit, an ounce of ham and a gill of water to each man; dinner, same quantity of bread and water, and four oysters or clams; supper, water and bread the same, and twelve large raisins or fourteen small ones, to a man. Also, during the first twelve or fifteen days, each man had one spoonful of brandy a day, then it gave out.
This day, as one of the men was gazing across the dull waste of waters as usual, he saw a small, dark object rising and falling upon the waves. He called attention to it, and in a moment every eye was bent upon it in intensest interest. When the boat had approached a little nearer, it was discovered that it was a small green turtle, fast asleep. Every noise was hushed as they crept upon the unconscious slumberer. Directions were given and hopes and fears expressed in guarded whispers. At the fateful moment—a moment of tremendous consequence to these famishing men—the expert selected for the high and responsible office stretched forth his hand, while his excited comrades bated their breath and trembled for the success of the enterprise, and seized the turtle by the hind leg and handed him aboard! His delicate flesh was carefully divided among the party and eagerly devoured—after being "warmed" like the dolphins which went before him.
THE BOATS SEPARATE
After the eighth day I have ten days unaccounted for—no notes of them save that the men say they had their two or three ounces of food and their gill of water three times a day—and then the same weary watching for a saving sail by day and by night, and the same sad "hope deferred that maketh the heart sick," was their monotonous experience. They talked more, however, and the Captain labored without ceasing to keep them cheerful. [They have always a word of praise for the "old man"]
The eighteenth day was a memorable one to the wanderers on the lonely sea. On that day the boats parted company. The Captain said that separate from each other there were three chances for the saving of some of the party where there could be but one chance if they kept together.
The magnanimity and utter unselfishness of Captain Mitchell (and through his example, the same conduct in his men) throughout this distressing voyage, are among its most amazing features. No disposition was ever shown by the strong to impose upon the weak, and no greediness, no desire on the part of any to get more than his just share of food, was ever evinced. On the contrary, they were thoughtful of each other and always ready to care for and assist each other to the utmost of their ability. When the time came to part company, Captain Mitchell and his crew, although theirs was much the more numerous party (fifteen men to nine and seven respectively in the other boats), took only one-third of the meager amount of provisions still left, and passed over the other two-thirds to be divided up between the other crews. These men could starve, if need be but they seem not to have known how to be mean.
After the division the Captain had left for his boat's share two-thirds of the ham, one-fourth of a box of raisins, half a bucket of biscuit crumbs, fourteen gallons of water, three cans of "soup-and bully." [That last expression of the third mate's occurred frequently during his narrative, and bothered me so painfully with its mysterious incomprehensibility, that at length I begged him to explain to me what this dark and dreadful "soup and-bully" might be. With the Consul's assistance he finally made me understand the French dish known as "soup bouillon" is put up in cans like preserved meats, and the American sailor is under the impression that its name is a sort of general tide which describes any description of edible whatever which is hermetically sealed in a tin vessel, and with that high contempt for trifling conventionalities which distinguishes his class, he has seen fit to modify the pronunciation into soup-and-bully.—MARK.]
The Captain told the mates he was still going to try to make the Clarion Isles, and that they could imitate his example if they thought best, but he wished them to freely follow the dictates of their own judgment in the matter. At eleven o'clock in the forenoon the boats were all cast loose from each other, and then, as friends part from friends whom they expect to meet no more in life, all hands hailed with a fervent "God bless you, boys; Good-bye!" and the two cherished sails drifted away and disappeared from the longing gaze that followed them so sorrowfully.
ANOTHER CAPTURE
On the afternoon of this eventful eighteenth day two "boobies" were caught—a bird about as large as a duck, but all bone and feathers—not as much meat as there is on a pigeon—not nearly so much, the men say. They eat them raw—bones, entrails and everything—no single morsel was wasted; they were carefully apportioned among the fifteen men. No fire could be built for cooking purposes—the wind was so strong and the sea ran so high that it was all a man could do to light his pipe.
A GOOD FRIEND GONE
At even tide the wanderers missed a cheerful spirit—a plucky, strong-hearted fellow, who never drooped his head or lost his grip—a staunch and true good friend, who was always at his post in storm or calm, in rain or shine—who scorned to say die, and yet was never afraid to die—a little trim and taut old rooster, he was, who starved with the rest, but came on watch in the stern-sheets promptly every day at four in the morning and six in the evening for eighteen days and crowed like a maniac! Right well they named him Richard of the Lion Heart! One of the men said with honest feeling: "As true as I'm a man, Mr. Mark Twain, if that rooster was here to-day and any man dared to abuse the bird I'd break his neck!" Richard was esteemed by all and by all his rights were respected. He received his little ration of bread crumbs every time the men were fed, and, like them, he bore up bravely and never grumbled and never gave way to despair. As long as he was strong enough he stood in the stern-sheets or mounted the gunwale as regularly as his watch came round, and crowed his two-hour talk, and when at last he grew feeble in the legs and had to stay below, his heart was still stout and he slapped about in the water on the bottom of the boat and crowed as bravely as ever! He felt that under circumstances like these America expects every rooster to do his duty, and he did it. But is it not to the high honor of that boat's crew of starving men, that, tortured day and night by the pangs of hunger as they were, they refused to appease them with the blood of their humble comrade? Richard was transferred to the chief mate's boat and sailed away on the eighteenth day.
RELIGIOUS SERVICES
The third mate does not remember distinctly, but thinks morning and evening prayers were begun on the nineteenth day. They were conducted by one of the young Fergusons, because the Captain could not read the prayer book without his spectacles, and they had been burned with the ship. And ever after this date, at the rising and the setting of the sun, the storm tossed mariners reverently bowed their heads while prayers went up for "they that are helpless and far at sea."
AN INCIDENT
On the morning of the twenty-first day, while some of the crew were dozing on the thwarts and others were buried in reflection, one of the men suddenly sprang to his feet and cried, "A sail! a sail!" Of course, sluggish blood bounded then and eager eyes were turned to seek the welcome vision. But disappointment was their portion, as usual. It was only the chief mate's boat drifting across their path after three days' absence. In a short time the two parties were abreast each other and in hailing distance. They talked twenty minutes; the mate reported "all well" and then sailed away, and they never saw him afterward.
FURTHER REDUCTION OF RATIONS
On the twenty-fourth day Captain Mitchell took an observation and found that he was in latitude 16 degrees north and longitude 117 degrees west—about l,000 miles from where his vessel was burned. The hope he had cherished so long that he would be able to make the Clarion Isles deserted him at last he could only go before the wind, and he was now obliged to attempt the best thing the southeast trades could do for him—blow him to the "American group" or to the Sandwich Islands—and therefore he reluctantly and with many misgivings turned his prow towards those distant archipelagoes. Not many mouthfuls of food were left, and these must be economized. The third mate said that under this new programme of proceedings "we could see that we were living too high; we had got to let up on them raisins, or the soup-and-bullies, one, because it stood to reason that we warn't going to make land soon, and so they wouldn't last." It was a matter which had few humorous features about it to them, and yet a smile is almost pardonable at this idea, so gravely expressed, of "living high" on fourteen raisins at a meal.
The rations remained the same as fixed on the eighth day, except that only two meals a day were allowed, and occasionally the raisins and oysters were left out.
What these men suffered during the next three weeks no mortal man may hope to describe. Their stomachs and intestines felt to the grasp like a couple of small tough balls, and the gnawing hunger pains and the dreadful thirst that was consuming them in those burning latitudes became almost insupportable. And yet, as the men say, the Captain said funny things and talked cheerful talk until he got them to conversing freely, and then they used to spend hours together describing delicious dinners they had eaten at home, and earnestly planning interminable and preposterous bills of fare for dinners they were going to eat on shore, if they ever lived through their troubles to do it, poor fellows. The Captain said plain bread and butter would be good enough for him all the days of his life, if he could only get it.
But the saddest things were the dreams they had. An unusually intelligent young sailor named Cox said: "In those long days and nights we dreamed all the time—not that we ever slept. I don't mean—no, we only sort of dozed—three-fourths of the faculties awake and the other fourth benumbed into the counterfeit of a slumber; oh, no—some of us never slept for twenty-three days, and no man ever saw the Captain asleep for upward of thirty. But we barely dozed that way and dreamed—and always of such feasts! bread, and fowls, and meat—everything a man could think of, piled upon long tables, and smoking hot! And we sat down and seized upon the first dish in our reach, like ravenous wolves, and carried it to our lips, and—and then we woke up and found the same starving comrades about us, and the vacant sky and the desolate sea!
These things are terrible even to think of.
RATIONS STILL FURTHER REDUCED
It even startles me to come across that significant heading so often in my note-book, notwithstanding I have grown so familiar with its sound by talking so much with these unfortunate men.
On the twenty-eighth day the rations were: One teaspoonful of bread crumbs and about an ounce of ham for the morning meal; a spoonful of bread crumbs alone for the evening meal, and one gill of water three times a day! A kitten would perish eventually under such sustenance.
At this point the third mate's mind reverted painfully to an incident of the early stages of their sufferings. He said there were two between decks, on board the Hornet, who had been lying there sick and helpless for he didn't know how long; but when the ship took fire they turned out as lively as any one under the spur of the excitement. One was a "Portyghee," he said, and always of a hungry disposition—when all the provisions that could be got had been brought aft and deposited near the wheel to be lowered into the boats, "that sick Portyghee watched his chance, and when nobody was looking he harnessed the provisions and eat up nearly a quarter of a bar'l of bread before the old man caught him, and he had more than two notions to put his lights out." The third mate dwelt up on this circumstance as upon a wrong he could not fully forgive, and intimated that the Portyghee stole bread enough, if economised in twenty eighth-day rations, to have run the long-boat party three months.
THEY CAPTURE A PRIZE
Four little flying fish, the size of the sardines of these latter days, flew into the boat on the night of the twenty eighth day. They were divided among all hands and devoured raw. On the twenty-ninth day they caught another, and divided it into fifteen pieces, less than a teaspoonful apiece.
On the thirtieth day they caught a third flying fish and gave it to the revered old Captain—a fish of the same poor little proportions as the others—four inches long—a present a king might be proud of under such circumstances—a present whose value, in the eyes of the men who offered it, was not to be found in the Bank of England—yea, whose vaults were notable to contain it! The old Captain refused to take it; the men insisted; the Captain said no—he would take his fifteenth—they must take the remainder. They said in substance, though not in words, that they would see him in Jericho first! So the Captain had to eat the fish.
I believe I have done the third mate some little wrong in the beginning of this letter. I have said he was as self possessed as a statue that he never betrayed emotion or enthusiasm. He never did except when he spoke of "the old man." It always thawed through his ice then. The men were the same way; the Captain is their hero—their true and faithful friend, whom they delight to honor. I said to one of these infatuated skeletons, "But you wouldn't go quite so far as to die for him?" A snap of the finger—"As quick as that!—I wouldn't be alive now if it hadn't been for him." We pursued the subject no further.
RATIONS STILL FURTHER REDUCED
I still claim the public's indulgence and belief. At least Thomas and his men do through me. About the thirty second day the bread gave entirely out. There was nothing left, now, but mere odds and ends of their stock of provisions. Five days afterward, on the thirty-seventh day—latitude 16 degrees 30' north, and longitude 170 degrees west—kept off for the "American group"—"which don't exist and never will, I suppose," said the third mate. Ran directly over the ground said to be occupied by these islands—that is between latitude 16 degrees and 17 degrees north and longitude 133 degrees to 136 degrees west. Ran over the imaginary islands and got into 136 degrees west, and then the Captain made a dash for Hawaii, resolving that he would go till he fetched land, or at any rate as long as he and his men survived.
THE LAST RATION!
On Monday, the thirty-eighth day after the disaster, "we had nothing left," said the third mate, "but a pound and a half of ham—the bone was a good deal the heaviest part of it—and one soup-and-bully tin." These things were divided among the fifteen men, and they ate it all—two ounces of food to each man. I do not count the ham bone, as that was saved for the next day. For some time, now, the poor wretches had been cutting their old boots into small pieces and eating them. They would also pound wet rags to a sort of pulp and eat them.
STARVATION FARE
On the thirty-ninth day the ham bone was divided up into rations, and scraped with knives and eaten. I said: "You say the two sick men remained sick all through, and after awhile two or three had to be relieved from standing watch; how did you get along without medicines!"
The reply was: "Oh, we couldn't have kept them if we'd had them, if we'd had boxes of pills, or anything like that, we'd have eaten them. It was just as well—we couldn't have kept them, and we couldn't have given them to the sick men alone—we'd have shared them around all alike, I guess." It was said rather in jest, but it was a pretty true jest, no doubt.
After apportioning the ham bone, the Captain cut the canvas cover that had been around the ham into fifteen equal pieces, and each man took his portion. This was the last division of food that the Captain made. The men broke up the small oaken butter tub and divided the staves among them selves, and gnawed them up. The shell of the little green turtle, heretofore mentioned, was scraped with knives and eaten to the last shaving. The third mate chewed pieces of boots and spit them out, but ate nothing except the soft straps of two pairs of boots—eat three on the thirty-ninth day and saved one for the fortieth.
THE AWFUL ALTERNATIVE
The men seem to have thought in their own minds of the shipwrecked mariner's last dreadful resort—cannibalism; but they do not appear to have conversed about it. They only thought of the casting lots and killing one of their number as a possibility; but even when they were eating rags, and bone, and boots, and shell, and hard oak wood, they seem to have still had a notion that it was remote. They felt that someone of the company must die soon—which one they well knew; and during the last three or four days of their terrible voyage they were patiently but hungrily waiting for him. I wonder if the subject of these anticipations knew what they were thinking of? He must have known it—he must have felt it. They had even calculated how long he would last; they said to themselves, but not to each other, I think they said, "He will die Saturday—and then!"
There was one exception to the spirit of delicacy I have mentioned—a Frenchman, who kept an eye of strong personal interest upon the sinking man and noted his failing strength with untiring care and some degree of cheerfulness. He frequently said to Thomas: "I think he will go off pretty soon, now, sir. And then we'll eat him!" This is very sad.
Thomas and also several of the men state that the sick "Portyghee," during the five days that they were entirely out of provisions, actually ate two silk handkerchiefs and a couple of cotton shirts, besides his share of the boots, and bones, and lumber.
THE CAPTAIN'S BIRTHDAY
Captain Mitchell was fifty-six years old on the 12th of June—the fortieth day after the burning of the ship and the third day before the boat's crew reached land. He said it looked somewhat as if it might be the last one he was going to enjoy. He had no birthday feast except some bits of ham canvas—no luxury but this, and no substantials save the leather and oaken bucket staves.
Speaking of the leather diet, one of the men told me he was obliged to eat a pair of boots which were so old and rotten that they were full of holes; and then he smiled gently and said he didn't know, though, but what the holes tasted about as good as the balance of the boot. This man was still very feeble, and after saying this he went to bed.
LAND HO!
At eleven o'clock on the 15th of June, after suffering all that men may suffer and live for forty-three days, in an open boat, on a scorching tropical sea, one of the men feebly shouted the glad tidings, "Land ho!" The "watch below" were lying in the bottom of the boat. What do you suppose they did? They said they had been cruelly disappointed over and over again, and they dreaded to risk another experience of the kind—they could not bear it—they lay still where they were. They said they would not trust to an appearance that might not be land after all. They would wait.
Shortly it was proven beyond question that they were almost to land. Then there was joy in the party. One man is said to have swooned away. Another said the sight of the green hills was better to him than a day's rations, a strange figure for a man to use who had been fasting for forty days and forty nights.
The land was the island of Hawaii, and they were off and could see nothing in shore but breakers. I was there a week or two ago and it is a very dangerous place. When they got pretty close to shore they saw cabins, but no human beings. They thought they would lower the sail and try to work in with the oars. They cut the ropes and the sail came down, and then they found they were not strong enough to ship the oars. They drifted helplessly toward the breakers, but looked listlessly on and cared not a straw for the violent death which seemed about to overtake them after all their manful struggles, their privations and their terrible sufferings. They said "it was good to see the green fields again." It was all they cared for. The "green fields" were a haven of rest for the weary wayfarers; it was sufficient; they were satisfied; it was nothing to them that death stood in their pathway; they had long been familiar to him; he had no terrors for them.
Two of Captain Spencer's natives saw the boat, knew by the appearance of things that it was in trouble, and dashed through the surf and swam out to it. When they climbed aboard there were only five yards of space between the poor sufferers and a sudden and violent death. Fifteen minutes afterward the boat was beached upon the shore and a crowd of natives (who are the very incarnation of generosity, unselfishness and hospitality) were around the strangers dumping bananas, melons, taro, poi—anything and everything they could scrape together that could be eaten—on the ground by the cart-load; and if Mr. Jones, of the station, had not hurried down with his steward, they would soon have killed the starving men with kindness. As it was, the sick "Portyghee" really ate six bananas before Jones could get hold of him and stop him. This is a fact. And so are the stories of his previous exploits. Jones and the Kanaka girls and men took the mariners in their arms like so many children and carried them up to the house, where they received kind and judicious attention until Sunday evening, when two whaleboats came from Hilo, Jones furnished a third, and they were taken in these to the town just named, arriving there at two o'clock Monday morning.
REMARKS
Each of the young Fergusons kept a journal from the day the ship sailed from New York until they got on land once more at Hawaii. The Captain also kept a log every day he was adrift. These logs, by the Captain's direction, were to be kept up faithfully as long as any of the crew were alive, and the last survivor was to put them in a bottle, when he succumbed, and lash the bottle to the inside of the boat. The Captain gave a bottle to each officer of the other boats, with orders to follow his example. The old gentleman was always thoughtful.
The hardest berth in that boat, I think, must have been that of provision-keeper. This office was performed by the Captain and the third mate; of course they were always hungry. They always had access to the food, and yet must not gratify their craving appetites.
The young Fergusons are very highly spoken of by all the boat's crew, as patient, enduring, manly and kind-hearted gentlemen. The Captain gave them a watch to themselves—it was the duty of each to bail the water out of the boat three hours a day. Their home is in Stamford, Connecticut, but their father's place of business is New York.
In the chief mate's boat was a passenger—a gentlemanly young fellow of twenty years, named William Lang, son of a stockbroker in New York.
The chief mate, Samuel Hardy, lived at Chatham, Massachusetts; second mate belonged in Shields, England; the cook, George Washington (negro), was in the chief mate's boat, and also the steward (negro); the carpenter was in the second mate's boat.
CAPTAIN MITCHELL
To this man's good sense, cool judgment, perfect discipline, close attention to the smallest particulars which could conduce to the welfare of his crew or render their ultimate rescue more probable, that boat's crew owe their lives. He has shown brain and ability that make him worthy to command the finest frigate in the United States, and a genuine unassuming heroism that [should] entitle him to a Congressional medal. I suppose some of the citizens of San Francisco who know how to appreciate this kind of a man will not let him go on hungry forever after he gets there. In the above remarks I am only echoing the expressed opinions of numbers of persons here who have never seen Captain Mitchell, but who judge him by his works—among others Hon. Anson Burlingame and our Minister to Japan, both of whom have called at the hospital several times and held long conversations with the men. Burlingame speaks in terms of the most unqualified praise of Captain Mitchell's high and distinguished abilities as evinced at every point throughout his wonderful voyage.
THE SICK
Captain Mitchell, one sailor, and the two Fergusons are still at Hilo. The two first mentioned are pretty feeble, from what I can learn. The Captain's sense of responsibility kept him strong and awake all through the voyage; but as soon as he landed, and that fearful strain upon his faculties was removed, he was prostrated—became the feeblest of the boat's company.
The seamen here are doing remarkably well, considering all things. They already walk about the hospital a little—and very stiff-legged, because of the long inaction their muscles have experienced.
When they came ashore at Hawaii no man in the party had had any movement of his bowels for eighteen days, several not for twenty-five or thirty, one not for thirty-seven, and one not for forty-four days. As soon as any of the men can travel they will be sent to San Francisco.
I have written this lengthy letter in a great hurry in order to get it off by the bark Milton Badger, if the thing be possible, and I may have made a good many mistakes, but I hardly think so. All the statistical information in it comes from Thomas, and he may have made mistakes, because he tells his story entirely from memory, and although he has naturally a most excellent one, it might well be pardoned for inaccuracies concerning events which transpired during a series of weeks that never saw his mind strongly fixed upon any thought save the weary longing for food and water. But the log-books of the Captain and the two passengers will tell the terrible romance from the first day to the last in faithful detail, and these I shall forward by the next mail if I am permitted to copy them.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, July 30, 1866
Honolulu, June 30, 1866.
For a little more than a month, the late Princess—her Royal Highness Victoria Kamamalu Kaahumanu, heir presumptive to the crown and sister to the King—lay in state at Iolani Palace, the royal residence. For a little over a month, troops of natives of both sexes, drawn here from the several islands by the great event, have thronged past my door every evening on their way to the palace. Every night, and all night long, for more than thirty days, multitudes of these strange mourners have burned their candle-nut torches in the royal inclosure, and sung their funeral dirges, and danced their hulahulas, and wailed their harrowing wail for the dead. All this time we strangers have been consumed with curiosity to look within those walls and see the pagan deviltry that was going on there. But the thing was tabu (forbidden—we get our word "taboo" from the Hawaiian language) to foreigners—haoles. The grounds were thrown open to everybody the first night, but several rowdy white people acted so unbecomingly—so shamefully, in fact—that the King placed a strict tabu upon their future admittance. I was absent—on the island of Hawaii [Maui]—at that time, and so I lost that one single opportunity to gratify my curiosity in this matter.
Last night was to behold the grand finale, inasmuch as the obsequies were to transpire to-day, and therefore I was a good deal gratified to learn that a few foreigners would be allowed to enter a side gate and view the performances in the palace yard from the verandah of Dr. Hutchinson's house (Minister of the Interior). I got there at a little after eight P.M.
NIGHT SCENE IN THE PALACE GROUNDS
The verandah we occupied overlooked the royal grounds, and afforded an excellent view of the two thousand or twenty-five hundred natives sitting, densely packed together, in the glare of the torches, between our position and the palace, a hundred feet in front of us. It was a wild scene—those long rows of eager, dusky faces, with the light upon them, the band of hula-girls in the center, showily attired in white bodices and pink skirts, and with wreaths of pink and white flowers and garlands of green leaves about their heads; and the strongly illuminated torch-bearers scattered far and near at intervals through the large assemblage and standing up conspicuously above the masses of sitting forms. Light enough found its way to the broad verandahs of the palace to enable us to see whatever transpired upon them with considerable distinctness. We could see nothing there, however, except two or three native sentries in red uniforms with gleaming muskets in their hands. Presently someone said: "Oh, there's the King!"
"Where?"
"There—on the verandah—now, he's just passing that—. No; it's that blasted Harris."
That isn't really his Christian name, but he is usually called by that or a stronger one. I state this by way of explanation. Harris is the Minister of Finance and Attorney General, and I don't know how many other things. He has three marked points: He is not a second Solomon—he is as vain as a peacock; he is as "cheeky" as—however, there is no simile for his "cheek." In the Legislature, the other day, the Speaker was trying to seat a refractory member; the member knew he was strictly in order, though, and that his only crime was his opposition to the Ministry, and so he refused to sit down. Harris whispered to the interpreter: "Tell the Speaker to let me have the chair a moment." The speaker vacated his place; Harris stepped into it, rapped fiercely with the gavel, scowled imperiously upon the intrepid commoner and ordered him to sit down. The man declined to do it. Harris commanded the Sergeant-at-Arms to seat him. After a trial, that officer said the bold representative of the people refused to permit him to seat him. Harris ordered the Sergeant to take the man out of the house—remove him by force! [Sensation—tempest, I should rather say.] The poor humbled and brow-beaten country members threw off their fears for the moment and became men; and from every part of the house they shouted: "Come out of that chair! leave that place! put him out! put out the——!" [I have forgotten the Hawaiian phrase, but it is equivalent to "miserable dog."] And this terrible man who was going to perform such wonders, vacated the Speaker's chair and went meekly back to his own place, leaving the stout opponent of the Ministry master of the field. The Legislature adjourned at once, and the excited and triumphant burst forth into a stirring battle-hymn of the old days of Kamehameha the Great. Harris was an American once (he was born in Portsmouth, N. H.), but he is no longer one. He is hoopilimeaai to the King. How do you like that, Mr. H.? How do you like being attacked in your own native tongue?
[NOTE TO THE READER.—That long native word means—well, it means Uriah Heep boiled down—it means the soul and spirit of obsequiousness. No genuine American can be other than obedient and respectful toward the Government he lives under and the flag that protects him, but no such an American can ever be hoopilimeaai to anybody.]
I hope the gentle reader will pardon this digression; but if the gentle reader don't want to do it, he can let it alone.
A GLIMPSE OF THE HEATHEN AGES
About half-past eight o'clock a dozen native women rose up and began the sad mourning rites. They locked arms and swayed violently backward and forward; faced around and went through a number of quick gestures with hands, heads and bodies; turned and twisted and mingled together—heads and hands going all the time, and their motions timed to a weird howling which it would be rather complimentary to call singing; and finished up spreading their arms abroad and throwing their heads and bodies far backward simultaneously, and all uttering a deafening squall at the same moment.
"Well, if there's anything between the Farallones and Fiddlers Green as devilish as that, I wish I may—"
"Brown," I said, "these solemn and impressive funeral rites of the ancient times have been rescued from the oblivion to which the ignorant missionaries consigned them forty years ago, by the good and wise Lord Bishop Staley, and it ill-beseems such as you to speak irreverently of them. I cannot permit you to say more in this vein in my presence."
When the women had finished the multitude clapped their hands boisterously in token of applause.
A number of native boys next stood up and went through a performance a good deal like that which I have just described, singing, at the same time, a strange, unmusical chant. The audience applauded again. (Harris came out once more on that part of the verandah which could be seen best by the great assemblage, and assumed an attitude and expression so suggestive of his being burdened with the cares of state of sixty or seventy kingdoms, that, if I had been a stranger, I must have said to myself: "The trifles Richelieu had to contend with were foolishness to what this man has got on his hands.")
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION IN WARM QUARTERS
Next, about twenty native women dressed in black rose up and sang some hymns like ours, but in the Kanaka tongue, and made good music of them. Some of the voices were very rich and sweet, the harmony was excellent and the time perfect. Every now and then, while this choir sang (and, in fact, all the evening), old time natives scattered through the crowd would suddenly break out into a wild heart-broken wail that would almost startle one's pulse into stillness. And there was one old fellow near the center who would get up often, no matter what was going on, and branch forth into a sort of singsong recitation, which he would eventually change into a stump speech; he seemed to make a good many hits judging by the cordial applause he got from a coterie of admirers in his immediate vicinity.
MORE HEATHEN DEVILTRY
A dozen men performed next—howled and distorted their bodies and flung their arms fiercely about, like very maniacs.
"God bless my soul, just listen at that racket! Your opinion is your opinion, and I don't quarrel with it; and my opinion is my opinion; and I say, once for all, that if I was Mayor of this town I would just get up here and read the Riot Act once, if I died for it the next—"
"Brown, I cannot allow this language. These touching expressions of mourning were instituted by the good Bishop, who has come from his English home to teach this poor benighted race to follow the example and imitate the sinless ways of the Redeemer, and did not he mourn for the dead Lazarus? Do not the sacred scriptures say 'Jesus wept'?"
I overheard this person Brown muttering something about the imitation being rather overdone or improved on, or something of that kind, but I paid no attention to it. The man means well; his ignorance is his misfortune—not his crime.
Twenty Kanakas in striped knit shirts now filed through the dense crowd and sat down in a double row on the ground; each bore an immense gourd, more than two feet long, with a neck near one end and a head to it the outer, or largest end, was a foot in diameter; these things were dry and hollow, and are the native tom-toms or drums. Each man set his gourd on end, and supported it with a hand on each side; at a given signal every drummer launched out into a dismal chant and slapped his drum twice in quick succession with his open hands; then three times; then twice again; then—well, I cannot describe it; they slapped the drums in every conceivable way, and the sound produced was as dull and dry as if the drums had been solid stone; then they held them above their heads a few moments, or over their shoulders, or in front of their faces, or behind their necks, and then brought them simultaneously to the ground with a dead, hollow thump; and then they went on slapping them as before. They kept up this most dreary and unexciting performance for twenty minutes or more, and the great concourse of natives watched every motion with rapt and eager admiration, and loudly applauded the musicians.
Brown muttered (under the vile pretense of not intending to be overheard):
"Brown," I said, "your conduct is shameful. It has always been conceded that in following the example set us by the Savior we may be allowed some latitude. But I will not argue with a man who is so bigoted, fault-finding and uncharitable. I will have nothing further to say to you upon this subject."
"He—he wept."
I thought I heard those words, but Brown's head was out of the window, and I was not certain. I was already irritated to that degree that to speak would be to lose my temper, and therefore I allowed the suspected mutinous language to pass unnoticed.
THE CELEBRATED NATIONAL DANCE ( HULAHULA )
After the drumming came the famous hulahula we had heard so much about and so longed to see—the lascivious dance that was wont to set the passions of men ablaze in the old heathen days, a century ago. About thirty buxom young Kanaka women, gayly attired as I have before remarked, in pink and white, and with heads wreathed with flowers and evergreens, formed themselves into half a dozen rows of five or six in a row, shook the reefs out of their skirts, tightened their girdles and began the most unearthly caterwauling that was ever heard, perhaps; the noise had a marked and regular time to it, however, and they kept strict time to it with writhing bodies; with heads and hands thrust out to the left, then to the right; then a step to the front and the left hands all projected simultaneously forward, and the right hands placed on the hips; then the same repeated with a change of hands; then a mingling together of the performers—quicker time, faster and more violently excited motions—more and more complicated gestures—(the words of their fierce chant meantime treating in broadest terms, and in detail, of things which may be vaguely hinted at in a respectable newspaper but not distinctly mentioned)—then a convulsive writhing of the person, continued for a few moments and ending in a sudden stop and a grand caterwaul in chorus [Great applause].
"Jesus wept!"
I barely heard the words, and that was all. They sounded like blasphemy. I offered no rebuke to the utterer, because I could not disguise from myself that the gentle grief of the Savior was but poorly imitated here—that the heathen orgies resurrected by the Lord Bishop of Honolulu were not warranted by the teachings of the Master whom he professes to serve.
Minister Harris emerging from the Palace verandah at this moment with the weight of his sixty kingdoms bearing down on him heavier than ever, and it being past midnight, I judged it time to go home, and I did so.
WHOSE CIRCUS IT WAS
It is reported that the King has said: "The foreigners like their religion—let them enjoy it, and freely. But the religion of my fathers is good enough for me." Now that is all right. At least I think so. And I have no fault to find with the natives for the lingering love they feel for their ancient customs. But I do find fault with Bishop Staley for reviving those customs of a barbarous age at a time when they had long been abandoned and were being forgotten—when one more generation of faithful adherence to the teachings of the American missionaries would have buried them forever and made them memories of the past—things to be talked of and wondered at, like the old laws that made it death for a plebeian to stand erect in the presence of his king, or for a man to speak to his wife on a tabu day—but never imitated.
For forty years before the Bishop brought his Royal Hawaiian Established Reformed Catholic Church here the kings and chiefs of this land had been buried with the quiet, simple, Christian rites that are observed in England and America, and no man thought of anything more being necessary. But one of the first things Bishop Staley did when he arrived here a few years ago was to write home that the missionaries had deprived the natives of their innocent sports and pastimes (such as the lascivious hulahula, and the promiscuous bathing in the surf of nude natives of opposite sexes), and one of the next things he did was to attend a hulahula at Waikiki with his holy head tricked out in the flower and evergreen trumpery worn by the hula-girls. When the late king died the Bishop revived the half forgotten howling and hula dancing and other barbarisms in the palace yard, and officiated there as a sort of master of ceremonies. For many a year before he came that wretchedest of all wretched musical abortions, the tom-tom, had not been heard near the heart of Honolulu; but he has reinstated it and brought it into its ancient esteem and popularity. The old superstitions of this people were passing away far faster than is the case with the inhabitants of the unfrequented and sparsely populated country districts of America, France and Wales, but Bishop Staley is putting a stop to progress in this direction.
We owe the strange and unpleasant scenes of last night to him—there are not ten white men in the kingdom who have ever seen their like before in public—and I am told that he is appalled at the work of his own hands—that he is ashamed—that he dreads to think of the comments it will provoke in Christian lands—in a word, that he finds, too late, that he has made a most melancholy blunder.
BISHOP STALEY
If I may speak freely, I think this all comes of elevating a weak, trivial minded man to a position of rank and power—of making a Bishop out of very inferior material—of trying to construct greatness out of constitutional insignificance. My estimate of Bishop Staley is not carelessly formed there is evidence to back it. He gossips habitually; he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of a man, his own tongue—he says ill-advised things in public speeches and then in other public speeches denies that he ever said them; he shows spite, a trait which is not allied to greatness; he is fond of rushing into print, like mediocrity the world over, and is vainer of being my Lord Bishop over a diocese of fifteen thousand men and women (albeit they belong to other people's churches) than some other men would be of wielding the world-wide power of the Pope; and finally, every single important act of his administration has evinced a lack of sagacity and an unripeness of judgment which might be forgiven a youth, but not a full-grown man—or, if that seems too severe, which might be forgiven a restless, visionary nobody, but not a Bishop. My estimate of Bishop Staley may be a wrong one, but it is at least an honest one.
Persons who are intimate with Bishop Staley say he is a good man, and a well educated and cultivated one, and that in social life he is companionable, pleasant and liberal spirited when church matters are not the topic of conversation. This is no doubt true; but it is my province to speak of him in his official, not in his private capacity. He has shown the temerity of an incautious, inexperienced and immature judgment in rushing in here fresh from the heart and home of a high English civilization and throwing down the gauntlet of defiance before a band of stern, tenacious, unyielding, tireless, industrious, devoted old Puritan knights who have seen forty years of missionary service; whose time was never fooled away in theorizing, but whose lightest acts always meant business; who landed here two score years ago, full of that fervent zeal and resistless determination inherited from their Pilgrim forefathers, and marched forth and seized upon this people with a grip of iron, and infused into their being, wrought into their very natures, the spirit of democracy and the religious enthusiasm that animated themselves; whose grip is still upon the race and can never be loosened till they, of their own free will and accord, shall relax it. He showed a marvelous temerity—one weak, inexperienced man against a host of drilled and hardy veterans; and among them great men—men who would be great in wider and broader spheres than that they have chosen here. He miscalculated the force, the confidence, the determination of that Puritan spirit which subdued America and underlies her whole religious fabric to-day—which has subdued these islanders, and whose influence over them can never be unseated.
THE REFORMED CATHOLIC CHURCH—THE COURT RELIGION
His church was another miscalculation. It was a mistake to appeal by imposing ceremonies and showy display to a people imbued with a thorough Puritan distaste for such things, and who had never been much accustomed to anything of the kind at any period of their history. There is little in common between the simple evergreen decorations and the tom-toms and the hulahulas of the natives, and the cheap magnificence of the Bishop's cathedral altar, his gaudily painted organ-pipes and the monotonous and unattractive ceremonials of his church service.
He is fighting with good nerve, but his side is weak. The moneyed strength of these islands—their agriculture, their commerce, their mercantile affairs—is in the hands of Americans—republicans; the religious power of the country is wielded by Americans—republicans; the whole people are saturated with the spirit of democratic Puritanism, and they are—republicans. This is a republic, to the very marrow, and over it sit a King, a dozen Nobles and half a dozen Ministers. The field of the Royal Hawaiian Established Church is thus so circumscribed that the little cathedral in Nuuanu street, with its thirty pews of ten-individual capacity each, is large enough to accommodate it in its entirety, and have room to spare.
And this is the bugbear that has kept the American missionaries in hot water for three or four years! The Bishop of Honolulu ought to feel flattered that a chance so slim as his, and a power so feeble as his, has been able to accomplish it. But at the same time he ought to feel grateful, because, if let alone, he and his Church must infallibly have been and remained insignificant. I do not say this ill-naturedly, for I bear the Bishop no malice, and I respect his sacred office; I simply state a palpable fact.
I will say a word or two about the Reformed Catholic Church, to the end that strangers may understand its character. Briefly, then, it is a miraculous invention. One might worship this strange production itself without breaking the first commandment, for there is nothing like it in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. The Catholics refuse to accept it as Catholic, the Episcopalians deny that it is the church they are accustomed to, and of course the Puritans claim no kindred with it. It is called a child of the Established Church of England, but it resembles its parent in few particulars. It has got an altar which is gay with fiery velvet, showy white trimmings, vases of flowers and other mantel ornaments. (It was once flanked by imposing, seven-branched candlesticks, but these were obnoxious and have been removed.) Over it is a thing like a gilt sign-board, on which is rudely painted two processions—four personages in each—marching solemnly and in single file toward the crucified Savior in the center, and bringing their baggage with them. The design of it is a secret known only to the artist and his Maker. Near the pulpit is a red canopied shower-bath—I mean it looks like one—upon which is inscribed, "Separated unto the Gospel of God." The Bishop sits under it at a small desk, when he has got nothing particular to do. The organ pipes are colored with a groundwork of blue, which is covered all over with a flower work wrought in other colors. Judging by its striking homeliness, I should say that the artist of the altar piece had labored here also. Near the door of the church, but inside, of course, stands a small pillar, surmounted by a large shell. It may be for holy water or it may be a contribution box. If the latter be the case, I must protest that this ghastly pun—this mute suggestion to shell out—is ill suited to the sacred character of the place, and it is only with the profoundest pain that I force myself to even think for a moment upon so distressing a circumstance. Against the wall is a picture of the future Cathedral of Honolulu—a more imposing structure than the present one; that many a year may elapse before it is built is no wish of mine. A dozen acolytes—Chinese, Kanaka and half white boys, arrayed in white robes, hold positions near the altar, and during the early part of the service they sing and go through some performances suggestive of the regular Catholic services; after that, the majority of the boys go off on furlough. The Bishop reads a chapter from the Bible; then the organist leaves his instrument and sings a litany peculiar to this Church, and not to be heard elsewhere; there is nothing stirring or incendiary about his mild, nasal music; the congregation join the chorus; after this a third clergyman preaches the sermon; these three ecclesiastics all wear white surplices. I have described the evening services. When the Bishop first came here he indulged in a good deal of showy display and ceremony in his Church, but these proved so distasteful, even to Episcopalians, that he shortly modified them very much.
I have spoken rather irreverently once or twice in the above paragraph, and am ashamed of it. But why write it over? I would not be likely to get it any better. I might make the matter worse.
"And say that—."
"Brown, have you, in defiance of all my reproofs, been looking over my shoulder again?"
"Yes, but that's all right, you know—that's all right. Just say—just say that the Bishop works as hard as any man, and makes the best fight he can—and that's a credit to him, anyway."
"Brown, that is the first charitable sentiment I have ever heard you utter. At a proper moment I will confer upon you a fitting reward for it. But for the present, good-night, son. Go, now. Go to your innocent slumbers. And wash your feet, Brown—or perhaps it is your teeth—at any rate you are unusually offensive this evening. Remedy the matter. Never mind explaining—good-night."
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSION
The French Roman Catholic Mission here, under the Right Reverend Lord Bishop Maigret, goes along quietly and unostentatiously; and its affairs are conducted with a wisdom which betrays the presence of a leader of distinguished ability. The Catholic clergy are honest, straightforward frank and open; they are industrious and devoted to their religion and their work; they never meddle; wherever they do can be relied on as being prompted by a good and worthy motive. These things disarm resentment—prejudice cannot exist in their presence. Consequently, Americans are never heard to speak ill or slightingly of the French Catholic Mission. Their religion is not nondescript—it is plain, out and out, undisguised and unmistakable Catholicism. You know right where to find them when you want them. The American missionaries have no quarrel with these men; they honor and respect and esteem them—and bid them God-speed. There is an anomaly for you—Puritan and Roman Catholic striding along, hand in hand, under the banner of the Cross!
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, August 1, 1866
Honolulu, July 1, 1866.
At ten o'clock yesterday morning, the court, members of the legislature and various diplomatic bodies assembled at the Iolani Palace, to be present at the funeral of the late Princess. The sermon was preached by the Rev. Mr. Parker, pastor of the great stone church—of which the Princess was a member, I believe, and whose choir she used to lead in the days of her early womanhood. To the day of her death she was a staunch, unwavering friend and ally of the missionaries, and it is a matter of no surprise that Parker, always eloquent, spoke upon this occasion with a feeling and pathos which visibly moved the hearts of men accustomed to conceal their emotions.
The Bishop of Honolulu, ever zealous, had sought permission to officiate in Parker's stead, but after duly considering the fact that the Princess had always regarded the Bishop with an unfriendly eye and had persistently refused to have anything to do with his church, his request was denied. However, he demanded and was granted the place of honor in the procession, although it belonged properly to the officiating clergyman. The Bishop also claimed that inasmuch as the Royal Mausoleum was consecrated ground, it would be sacrilegious to allow a Calvinistic minister to officiate there when the body was consigned to the tomb, and so he was allowed to conduct that portion of the obsequies himself. However, he explained that it was not the custom of his church to read a burial service or offer up a prayer over such as had never belonged to that church, and therefore the departed Princess was consigned to her last resting place with no warmer or kindlier a recommendation than a meager, non-committal benediction—a sort of chilly funereal politeness—nothing more. But then we should not blame the Bishop in this matter, because he has both authority and example to sustain his position, as I find by reference to a "Review" by W. D. Alexander of one of his "Pastoral Addresses." I quote from Alexander:
"Only last December, Thomas Powell, near Peterborough in England, wished to have his son buried in the parish church-yard, and a Dissenting minister to officiate. When the friends had gathered around the grave, a messenger arrived from the clergyman of the Established Church, one Ellaby, stating that he was ready to perform the Episcopal service. This was courteously declined, upon which the Rector issued from the church and forbade the burial. Even the right of silent interment was denied them, and when the afflicted father would himself perform the last sad offices at the grave of his child the spade was wrenched from his hand by the sexton."
In offering this defense of the Bishop of Honolulu, I do so simply with an unselfish wish to do him justice and save him from hasty and injurious criticism, and not through a mean desire to curry favor with him.
THE GRAND FUNEREAL PAGEANT
As the hour of eleven approached, large bodies of white and native residents, chiefly on horseback, moved toward the palace through the quiet streets, to see the procession form. All business houses were closed, of course, and many a flag, half-mast high, swung lazily in the Summer air.
The procession began to move at eleven, amid the solemn tolling of bells and the dull booming of minute guns from the heights overlooking the city. A glance of the eye down the procession revealed a striking and picturesque spectacle—large bodies of women, in melancholy black, and roofed over with a far-reaching double line of black umbrellas; troops of men and children, in black; carriages; with horses clad from head to foot in sable velvet; and in strong contrast with all this were the bright colors flashing here and there along the pageant—swarthy Zouaves in crimson raiment; soldiers, in blue and white and other lively hues; mounted lancers, with red and white pennants fluttering from their weapons; nobles and great offices in splendid uniforms; and—conspicuous amid its gloomy surrounding—the catafalque, flanked on either side with gorgeously-tinted kahilis. The slow and measured tread of the marching squadrons; the mournful music of the bands; the chanting of the virtues of the dead and the warrior deeds of her ancestors, by a gray and venerable woman here and there, the wild wail that rang out at times from some bereaved one to whom the occasion brought back the spirit of the buried past—these completed the effect.
THE KAHILIS
The kahilis are symbols of mourning which are sacred to the aristocracy. They are immense plumes, mounted upon tall poles, and are made of feathers of all bright and beautiful colors; some are a rich purple; some crimson; others brown, blue, white and black, etc. These are all dyed, but the costly kahilis formed of the yellow feather of royalty (tabu to the common herd) were tinted by the hand of nature, and come from the tropic bird, which, as I have said in a previous letter, has but two of them—one under each wing. One or two kahilis, also, made of red feathers from a bird called by sailors the marlinspike bird, had no artificial coloring about them. These feathers are very long and slender (hence the fowl's name), and each bird's tail is furnished with two, and only two, of them. The birds of the Sandwich Islands seem uncommonly indigent in the matter of strictly ornamental feathers. A dozen or more of these gaudy kahilis were upheld by pallbearers of high blood and fenced in the stately catafalque with a vari-colored wall as brilliant as a rainbow. Through the arches of the catafalque could be seen the coffin, draped with that badge and symbol of royalty, the famous yellow feather war-cloak, whose construction occupied the toiling hands of its manufacturers during nine generations of Hawaiian Kings.
"STYLE"
We have here, in this little land of 50,000 inhabitants, the complete machinery, in its minutest details, of a vast and imposing empire, done in miniature. We have all the sounding titles, all the grades and castes, all the pomp and circumstance, of a great monarchy. To the curious, the following published programme of the procession will not be uninteresting. After reading the long list of dignitaries, etc., and remembering the sparseness of the population, one is almost inclined to wonder where the material for that portion of the procession devoted to "Hawaiian Population Generally" is going to be procured:
DETAILS
The "Ahahui Kaahumanu"—a benevolent society instituted (and presided over) by the late Princess for the nursing of the sick and the burial of the dead—was numerously represented. It is composed solely of native women. They were dressed in black, and wore sashes of different colors.
His Majesty the King, attended by a guard of nobles and princes, whose uniforms were splendid, with bright colors and loops and braids of gold, rode with his venerable father in the first carriage in the rear of the catafalque. The Bishop of Honolulu occupied the place of honor in that portion of the procession which preceded the catafalque.
The servants of the King and the late Princess would have made quite a respectable procession by themselves. They numbered two hundred and fifty, perhaps.
Four or five poodle dogs, which had been the property of the deceased, were carried in the arms of individuals among these servants of peculiar and distinguished trustworthiness. It is likely that all the Christianity the Hawaiians could absorb would never be sufficient to wean them from their almost idolatrous affection for dogs. And these dogs, as a general thing, are the smallest, meanest, and most spiritless, homely and contemptible of their species.
As the procession passed along the broad and beautiful Nuuanu street, an innocent native would step out occasionally from the ranks, procure a slice of watermelon, or a pineapple, or a lighted pipe, from some dusky spectator and return to his place and enjoy the refreshing luxury as he kept step with the melancholy music.
When we had thoroughly examined the pageant we retired to a back street and galloped ahead to the mausoleum, two miles from the center of the town, and sat down to wait. This mausoleum is a neat edifice, built of dressed blocks of coral, has a high, sharp, slated roof, and its form is that of a Greek cross. The remains of the later Kings repose in it, but those of ancient times were hidden or burned, in compliance with a custom of the dark ages; some say, to prevent evil-disposed persons from getting hold of them and thus being enabled to pray a descendant to death; others say, to prevent the natives from making fish hooks out of them, it being held that there were superior fishhook virtues in the bones of a high chief. There are other theories for accounting for this custom, but I have forgotten what they are. It is said that it was usual to send a friend to hide the bones (after they had been stripped of the flesh and neatly tied in a bundle), and then waylay him and kill him as he came back, whereby it will be observed that to do a favor of this kind was attended with consequences which could not be otherwise than disagreeable to the party assuming the kindly office of undertaker to a dead dignitary. Of course, as you will easily divine, the man was killed to prevent the possibility of his divulging his precious secret.
The mausoleum is large enough to accommodate many dead Kings and Princes. It stands in the middle of a large grass-clad lawn, which is inclosed by a stone wall.
ARRIVAL OF THE PROCESSION
As the procession filed through the gate, the military deployed handsomely to the right and left and formed an avenue through which the long column of mourners passed to the tomb. The coffin was borne through the door of the mausoleum, followed by the King and his chiefs, the great officers of the kingdom, foreign Consuls, Ambassadors and distinguished guests (Burlingame and General Van Valkenburgh). Several of the kahilis were then fastened to a framework in front of the tomb, there to remain until they decay and fall to pieces, or forestalling this, until another scion of royalty dies. At this point of the proceedings the multitude set up such a dismal, heart-broken wailing as I hope never to hear again. The soldiers fired three volleys of musketry—the wailing being previously silenced to permit of the guns being heard. His Highness Prince William, in a showy military uniform (who was formerly betrothed to the Princess but was not allowed to marry her), stood guard and paced back and forth within the door. The privileged few who followed the coffin into the mausoleum remained some time, but
THE KING
Soon came out and stood in the door and near one side of it. A stranger could have guessed his rank (although he was so simply and unpretentiously dressed) by the profound deference paid him by all persons in his vicinity; by seeing his high officers receive his quiet orders and suggestions with bowed and uncovered heads; and by observing how careful those persons who came out of the mausoleum were to avoid "crowding" him (although there was room enough in the doorway for a wagon to pass, for that matter); how respectfully they edged out sideways, scraping their backs against the wall and always presenting a front view of their persons to His Majesty, and never putting their hats on until they were well out of the royal presence.
The King is thirty-four years of age it is said, but looks all of fifty. He has an observant, inquiring eye, a heavy, massive face, a lighter complexion than is common with his race, tolerably short, stiff hair, a moderate mustache and imperial, large stature, inclining somewhat to corpulence (I suppose he weighs fully one hundred and eighty—maybe a little over), has fleshy hands, but a small foot for his size, is about six feet high, is thoughtful and slow of movement, has a large head, firmly set upon broad shoulders, and is a better man and a better looking one than he is represented to be in the villainous popular photographs of him, for none of them are good. That last remark is surplusage, however, for no photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody—hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the meekest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and a fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look merely serious when he sits for his picture, the photograph makes him as solemn as an owl; if he smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively; if he tries to look pleasant, the photograph looks silly; if he makes the fatal mistake of attempting to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down an ass. The sun never looks through the photographic instrument that it does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a 'negative"—a contradiction—a misrepresentation—a falsehood. I speak feelingly of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Solomon, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot, and I am neither.
The King was dressed entirely in black—dress-coat and silk hat—and looked rather democratic in the midst of the showy uniforms about him. On his breast he wore a large gold star, which was half hidden by the lapel of his coat. He remained at the door a half hour, and occasionally gave an order to the men who were erecting the kahilis before the tomb. He had the good taste to make one of them substitute black crape for the ordinary hempen rope he was about to tie one of them to the framework with. Finally he entered his carriage and drove away, and the populace shortly began to drop in his wake. While he was in view there was but one man who attracted more attention than himself, and that was Minister Harris. This feeble personage had crape enough around his hat to express the grief of an entire nation, and as usual he neglected no opportunity of making himself conspicuous and exciting the admiration of the simple Kanakas. Oh! noble ambition of this modern Richelieu!
A CONTRAST—HOW THEY DID IN ANCIENT TIMES
It is interesting to contrast the funeral ceremonies of the Princess Victoria with those of her great ancestor Kamehameha the Conqueror, who died less than fifty years ago—in 1819, the year before the first missionaries came:
"On the 8th of May, 1819, at the age of sixty-six, he died, as he had lived, in the faith of his country. It was his misfortune not to have come in contact with men who could have rightly influenced his religious aspirations. Judged by his advantages and compared with the most eminent of his countrymen he may be justly styled not only great, but good. To this day his memory warms the heart and elevates the national feelings of Hawaiians. They are proud of their old warrior King; they love his name; his deeds form their historical age; and an enthusiasm everywhere prevails, shared even by foreigners who knew his worth, that constitutes the firmest pillar of the throne of his son.
"In lieu of human victims (the custom of that age), a sacrifice of three hundred dogs attended his obsequies—no mean holocaust when their national value and the estimation in which they were held are considered. The bones of Kamehameha, after being kept for a while, were so carefully concealed that all knowledge of their final resting place is now lost. There was a proverb current among the common people that the bones of a cruel King could not be hid; they made fish-hooks and arrows of them, upon which, in using them, they vented their abhorrence of his memory in bitter execrations."
The account of the circumstances of his death, as written by the native historians, is full of minute detail, but there is scarcely a line of it which does not mention or illustrate some bygone custom of the country. In this respect it is the most comprehensive document I have yet met with. I will quote it entire:
"When Kamehameha was dangerously sick and the priests were unable to cure him, they said: 'Be of good courage and build a house for the god' (his own private god or idol) 'that thou mayest recover.' The chiefs corroborated this advice of the priests, and a place of worship was prepared for Kukailimoku, and consecrated in the evening. They proposed also to the King, with a view to prolong his life, that human victims should be sacrificed to his deity; upon which the greater part of the people absconded through fear of death, and concealed themselves in hiding places till the tabu, in which destruction impended, was past. It is doubtful whether Kamehameha approved of the plan of the chiefs and priests to sacrifice men, as he was known to say, 'The men are sacred for the King;' meaning that they were for the service of his successor. This information was derived from Liholiho, his son.
"After this, his sickness increased to such a degree that he had not strength to turn himself in his bed. When another season, consecrated for worship at the new temple (heiau) arrived; he said to his son, Liholiho, 'Go thou and make supplication to thy god; I am not able to go, and will offer my prayers at home. When his devotions to his feathered god, Kukailimoku, were concluded, a certain religiously disposed individual, who had a bird god, suggested to the King that through its influence his sickness might be removed. The name of this god was Pua; its body was made of a bird, now eaten by the Hawaiians, and called in their language alae. Kamehameha was willing that a trial should be made, and two houses were constructed to facilitate the experiment; but while dwelling in them he became so very weak as not to receive food. After lying there three days, his wives, children and chiefs, perceiving that he was very low, returned him to his own house. In the evening he was carried to the eating house, where he took a little food in his mouth which he did not swallow—also a cup of water. The chiefs requested him to give them his counsel; but he made no reply, and was carried back to the dwelling house—but when near midnight—ten o'clock, perhaps—he was carried again to the place to eat; but, as before, he merely tasted of what was presented to him. Then Kaikioewa addressed him thus: 'Here we all are, your younger brethren, your son Liholiho and your foreigner; impart to us your dying charge, that Liholiho and Kaahumanu may hear.' Then Kamehameha inquired, 'What do you say?' Kaikiowa repeated, 'Your counsels for us.' He then said, 'Move on in my good way and—.' He could proceed no further. The foreigner, Mr. Young, embraced and kissed him. Hoapili also embraced him, whispering something in his ear, after which he was taken back to the house. About twelve he was carried once more to the house for eating, into which his head entered, while his body was in the dwelling house immediately adjoining. It should be remarked that this frequent carrying of a sick chief from one house to another resulted from the tabu system, then in force. There were at that time six houses connected with an establishment—one for worship, one for the men to eat in, an eating house for the women, a house to sleep in, a house in which to manufacture kapa (native cloth) and one where, at certain intervals, the women might dwell in seclusion.
"The sick was once more taken to his house, when he expired; this was at two o'clock, a circumstance from which Leleiohoku derived his name. As he breathed his last, Kalaimoku came to the eating house to order those in it to go out. There were two aged persons thus directed to depart; one went, the other remained on account of love to the King, by whom he had formerly been kindly sustained. The children also were sent away. Then Kalaimoku came to the house, and the chiefs had a consultation. One of them spoke thus: 'This is my thought—we will eat him raw.' Kaahumanu (one of the dead King's widows) replied, 'Perhaps his body is not at our disposal; that is more properly with his successor. Our part in him—his breath—has departed; his remains will be disposed of by Liholiho.'
"After this conversation the body was taken into the consecrated house for the performance of the proper rites by the priest and the new King. The name of this ceremony is uko; and when the sacred hog was baked the priest offered it to the dead body, and it became a god, the King at the same time repeating the customary prayers.
"Then the priest, addressing himself to the King and chiefs, said: 'I will now make known to you the rules to be observed respecting persons to be sacrificed on the burial of this body. If you obtain one man before the corpse is removed, one will be sufficient; but after it leaves this house four will be requited. If delayed until we carry the corpse to the grave there must be ten; but after it is deposited in the grave there must be fifteen. To-morrow morning there will be a tabu, and, if the sacrifice be delayed until that time, forty men must die.'
"Then the high priest, Hewahewa, inquired of the chiefs, 'Where shall be the residence of King Liholiho?' They replied, 'Where indeed? You, of all men, ought to know.' Then the priest observed, 'There are two suitable places—one is Kau, the other is Kohala.' The chiefs preferred the latter, as it was more thickly inhabited. The priest added, 'These are proper places for the King's residence; but he must not remain in Kona, for it is polluted.' This was agreed to. It was now break of day. As he was being carried to the place of burial the people perceived that their King was dead, and they wailed. When the corpse was removed from the house to the tomb, a distance of one chain, the procession was met by a certain man who was ardently attached to the deceased. He leaped upon the chiefs who were carrying the King's body; he desired to die with him on account of his love. The chiefs drove him away. He persisted in making numerous attempts, which were unavailing, also had it in his heart to die with him, but was prevented by Hookio.
"The morning following Kamehameha's death, Liholiho and his train departed for Kohala, according to the suggestions of the priest, to avoid the defilement occasioned by the dead. At this time if a chief died the land was polluted, and the heirs sought a residence in another part of the country until the corpse was dissected and the bones tied in a bundle, which being done, the season of defilement terminated. If the deceased were not a chief, the house only was defiled, which became pure again on the burial of the body. Such were the laws on this subject.
"On the morning on which Liholiho sailed in his canoe for Kohala, the chiefs and people mourned after their manner on occasion of a chief's death, conducting themselves like madmen and like beasts. Their conduct was such as to forbid description. The priests, also, put into action the sorcery apparatus, that the person who had prayed the King to death might die; for it was not believed that Kamehameha's departure was the effect either of sickness or old age. When the sorcerers set up by their fireplaces sticks with a strip of kapa flying at the top, the chief Keeaumoku, Kaahumanu's brother, came in a state of intoxication and broke the flagstaff of the sorcerers, from which it was inferred that Kaahumanu and her friends had been instrumental in the King's death. On this account they were subjected to abuse."
You have the contrast, now, and a strange one it is. This great Queen, Kaahumanu, who was "subjected to abuse" during the frightful orgies that followed the King's death, in accordance with an ancient custom, afterwards became a devout Christian and a steadfast and powerful friend of the missionaries.
MARK TWAIN.
POSTSCRIPT—THE MINISTERS
Burlingame and Van Valkenburgh, United States Ministers to China and Japan, are ready to sail, but are delayed by the absence of two attaches, who went to Hawaii to see the volcano, and who were not aware how slow a country this is to get around in. The journey to Hilo, which would be made anywhere else almost in eighteen or twenty hours, requires a week in the little inter-island schooners.
Colonel Kalakaua, the King's Chamberlain, has invited the Ministerial party to a great luau (native dinner) at Waikiki.
Gen. Van Valkenburgh has achieved a distinguished success as a curiosity finder—not hunter. Standing on the celebrated Pari, a day or two ago, and amusing himself by idly punching into the compact lava wall through which the road is cut, he crumbled away a chunk of it, and observing something white sticking to it, he instituted an examination, and found a sound, white, unmarred and unblemished human jaw-tooth firmly imbedded in the lava! Now the question is how did it get there—in the side (where a road had been cut in) of a mountain of lava—seven hundred feet above the valley? a mountain which has been there for ages, this being one of the oldest islands in the group. Burlingame was present, and saw the General unearth his prize. I have critically examined it, but, as I half expected myself, the world knows as much about how to account for the wonder now as if I had let it alone. In old times, the bones of Chiefs were often thrown into the volcanoes, to make sure that no enemy could get a chance to meddle with them; and Brown has given it as his deliberate opinion that "that old snag used to belong to one of them fellows." Possibly—but the opinion comes from a source which entitles it to but little weight. However, that tooth is as able a curiosity as any I have yet seen in the Sandwich Islands. M. T.
The Sacramento Daily Union, August 18, 1866
Honolulu, July, 1866
Bound for Hawaii, to visit the great volcano and behold the other notable things which distinguish this island above the remainder of the group, we sailed from Honolulu on a certain Saturday afternoon, in the good schooner Boomerang.
The Boomerang was about as long as two street cars, and about as wide as one. She was so small (though she was larger than the majority of the inter-island coasters) that when I stood on her deck I felt but little smaller than the Colossus of Rhodes must have felt when he had a man-of war under him. I could reach the water when she lay over under a strong breeze. When the Captain and Brown and myself and four other gentlemen and the wheelsman were all assembled on the little after portion of the deck which is sacred to the cabin passengers, it was full—there was not room for any more quality folks. Another section of the deck, twice as large as ours, was full of natives of both sexes, with their customary dogs, mats, blankets, pipes, calabashes of poi, fleas, and other luxuries and baggage of minor importance. As soon as we set sail the natives all laid down on the deck as thick as negroes in a slave-pen, and smoked and conversed and captured vermin and ate them, spit on each other, and were truly sociable.
The little low-ceiled cabin below was rather larger than a hearse, and as dark as a vault. It had two coffins on each side—I mean two bunks—though Mr. Brown, with that spirit of irreverence which is so sad a feature of his nature, preferred to call the bunk he was allotted his shelf. A small table, capable of accommodating three persons at dinner, stood against the forward bulkhead, and over it hung the dingiest whale-oil lantern that ever peopled the obscurity of a dungeon with grim and ghostly shapes. The floor room unoccupied was not extensive. One might swing a cat in it, perhaps, but then it would be fatal to the cat to do it. The hold forward of the bulkhead had but little freight in it, and from morning till night a villainous old rooster, with a voice like Baalam's ass, and the same disposition to use it, strutted up and down in that part of the vessel and crowed. He usually took dinner at 6 o'clock, and then, after an hour devoted to meditation, he mounted a barrel and crowed a good part of the night. He got hoarser and hoarser all the time, but he scorned to allow any personal consideration to interfere with his duty, and kept up his labors in defiance of threatened diphtheria.
Sleeping was out of the question when he was on watch. He was a source of genuine aggravation and annoyance to me. It was worse than useless to shout at him or apply offensive epithets to him—he only took these things for applause, and strained himself to make more noise. Occasionally, during the day, I threw potatoes at him through an aperture in the bulkhead, but he simply dodged them and went on crowing.
The first night, as I lay in my coffin, idly watching the dim lamp swinging to the rolling of the ship, and snuffing the nauseous odors of bilge water, I felt something gallop over me. Lazarus did not come out of his sepulchre with a more cheerful alacrity than I did out of mine. However, I turned in again when I found it was only a rat. Presently something galloped over me once more. I knew it was not a rat this time, and I thought it might be a centipede, because the Captain had killed one on deck in the afternoon. I turned out. The first glance at the pillow showed me a repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it—cockroaches as large as peach leaves—fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something. I had often heard that these reptiles were in the habit of eating of sleeping sailors' toenails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more. I laid down on the floor. But a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair. In a few moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas were throwing double summersets about my person in the wildest disorder, and taking a bite every time they struck. I was beginning to feel really annoyed. I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck.
The above is not an attempt to be spicy—it is simply an attempt to give a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life. There is no such thing as keeping a vessel in elegant condition, I think, when she carries molasses and Kanakas.
"ROLL ON, SILVER MOON"
It was compensation for all my sufferings to come unexpectedly upon so beautiful a scene as met my eye—to step suddenly out of the sepulchral gloom of the cabin and stand under the strong light of the moon—in the center, as it were, of a glittering sea of liquid silver, to see the broad sails straining in the gale, the ship keeled over on her side, and the angry foam hissing past her lee bulwarks, and sparkling sheets of spray dashing high over her bows and raining upon her decks; to brace myself and hang fast to the first object that presented itself, with hat jammed down and coat-tails whipping in the breeze, and feel that exhilaration that thrills in one's hair and quivers down his backbone when he knows that every inch of canvas is drawing and the vessel cleaving through the billows at her utmost speed. There was no darkness, no dimness, no obscurity there. All was brightness, every object was vividly defined. Every prostrate Kanaka; every coil of rope; every calabash of poi; every puppy; every seam in the flooring; every bolthead; every object, however minute, showed sharp and distinct in its every outline; and the shadow of the broad mainsail lay black as a pall upon the deck, leaving Brown's white upturned face glorified and his body in a total eclipse.
I ENDEAVOR TO ENTERTAIN THE SEASICK MAN
I turned to look down upon the sparkling animalculae of the South Seas and watch the train of jeweled fire they made in the wake of the vessel. I—
"Oh, me!"
"What is the matter, Brown?"
"Oh, me!"
"You said that before, Brown. Such tautology—"
"Tautology be hanged! This is no time to talk to a man about tautology when he is sick—so sick—oh, my! and has vomited up his heart and—ah, me—oh my! hand me that soup dish, and don't stand there hanging to that bulkhead looking like a fool!"
I handed him the absurd tin shaving-pot, called "berth-pan," which they hang by a hook to the edge of a berth for the use of distressed landsmen with unsettled stomachs, but all the sufferer's efforts were fruitless—his tortured stomach refused to yield up its cargo.
I do not often pity this bitter enemy to sentiment—he would not thank me for it, anyhow—but now I did pity him; and I pitied him from the bottom of my heart. Any man, with any feeling, must have been touched to see him in such misery. I did not try to help him—indeed I did not even think of so unpromising a thing—but I sat down by him to talk to him and so cause the tedious hours to pass less wearily, if possible. I talked to him for some time, but strangely enough, pathetic narratives did not move his emotions, eloquent declamation did not inspirit him, and the most humorous anecdotes failed to make him even smile. He seemed as distressed and restless, at intervals—albeit the rule of his present case was to seem to look like an allegory of unconditional surrender—hopeless, helpless and indifferent—he seemed as distressed and restless as if my conversation and my anecdotes were irksome to him. It was because of this that at last I dropped into poetry. I said I had been writing a poem—or rather, been paraphrasing a passage in Shakespeare—a passage full of wisdom, which I thought I might remember easier if I reduced it to rhyme—hoped it would be pleasant to him—said I had taken but few liberties with the original; had preserved its brevity and terseness, its language as nearly as possible, and its ideas in their regular sequence--and proceeded to read it to him, as follows:
POLONIUS' ADVICE TO HIS SON—PARAPHRASED FROM HAMLET
Beware of the spoken word! Be wise;
Bury thy thoughts in thy breast;
Nor let thoughts that are unnatural
Be ever in acts expressed.
Be thou courteous and kindly toward all—
Be familiar and vulgar with none;
But the friends thou hast proved in thy need
Hold thou fast till life's mission is done!
Shake not thy faith by confiding
In every new-begot friend,
Beware thou of quarrels—but in them
Fight them out to the bitter end.
Give thine ear unto all that would seek it
But to few thy voice impart;
Receive and consider all censure
But thy judgment seal in thy heart.
Let thy habit be ever as costly
As thy purse is able to span;
Never gaudy but rich—for the raiment
Full often proclaimeth the man.
Neither borrow nor lend—oft a loan
Both loseth itself and a friend,
And to borrow relaxeth the thrift
Whereby husbandry gaineth its end.
But lo! above all set this law:
UNTO THYSELF BE THOU TRUE!
Then never toward any canst thou
The deed of a false heart do.
As I finished, Brown's stomach cast up its contents, and in a minute or two he felt entirely relieved and comfortable. He then said that the anecdotes and the eloquence were "no good," but if he got seasick again he would like some more poetry.
THE ZONES OF THE EARTH CONCENTRATED
Monday morning we were close to the island of Hawaii. Two of its high mountains were in view—Mauna Loa and Hualalai. The latter is an imposing peak, but being only ten thousand feet high is seldom mentioned or heard of. Mauna Loa is fourteen thousand feet high. The rays of glittering snow and ice, that clasped its summit like a claw, looked refreshing when viewed from the blistering climate we were in. One could stand on that mountain (wrapped up in blankets and furs to keep warm), and while he nibbled a snow-ball or an icicle to quench his thirst he could look down the long sweep of its sides and see spots where plants are growing that grow only where the bitter cold of Winter prevails; lower down he could see sections devoted to productions that thrive in the temperate zone alone; and at the bottom of the mountain he could see the home of the tufted cocoa palms and other species of vegetation that grow only in the sultry atmosphere of eternal Summers. He could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of eight or ten miles as the bird flies.
THE REFUGE FOR THE WEARY
We landed at Kailua (pronounced Ki-loo-ah), a little collection of native grass houses reposing under tall cocoa-nut trees—the sleepiest, quietest, Sundayest looking place you can imagine. Ye weary ones that are sick of the labor and care, and the bewildering turmoil of the great world, and sigh for a land where ye may fold your tired hands and slumber your lives peacefully away, pack up your carpet sacks and go to Kailua! A week there ought to cure the saddest of you all.
An old ruin of lava-block walls down by the sea was pointed out as a fort built by John Adams for Kamehameha I, and mounted with heavy guns—some of them 32-pounders—by the same sagacious Englishman. I was told that the fort was dismantled a few years ago, and the guns sold in San Francisco for old iron—which was very improbable. I was told that an adjacent ruin was old Kamehameha's sleeping-house; another, his eating-house; another, his god's house; another, his wife's eating-house—for by the ancient tabu system, it was death for man and woman to eat together. Every married man's premises comprised five or six houses. This was the law of the land. It was this custom, no doubt, which has left every pleasant valley in these islands marked with the ruins of numerous house inclosures, and given strangers the impression that the population must have been vast before those houses were deserted; but the argument loses much of its force when you come to consider that the houses absolutely necessary for half a dozen married men were sufficient in themselves to form one of the deserted "villages" so frequently pointed out to the "Californian" (to the natives all whites are haoles—how- ries—that is, strangers, or, more properly, foreigners; and to the white residents all white newcomers are "Californians"—the term is used more for convenience than any thing else).
I was told, also, that Kailua was old Kamehameha's favorite place of residence, and that it was always a favorite place of resort with his successors. Very well, if Kailua suits these Kings—all right. Every man to his taste; but, as Brown observed in this connection, "You'll excuse me."
STEWED CHICKEN—MIRACULOUS BREAD
I was told a good many other things concerning Kailua—not one of which interested me in the least. I was weary and worn with the plunging of the Boomerang in the always stormy passages between the islands; I was tired of hanging on by teeth and toenails and, above all, I was tired of stewed chicken. All I wanted was an hour's rest on a foundation that would let me stand up straight without running any risk—but no information; I wanted something to eat that was not stewed chicken—I didn't care what—but no information. I took no notes, and had no inclination to take any.
Now, the foregoing is nothing but the feverish irritability of a short, rough sea-voyage coming to the surface—a voyage so short that it affords no time for you to tone down and grow quiet and reconciled, and get your stomach in order, and the bad taste out of your mouth, and the unhealthy coating off your tongue. I snarled at the old rooster and the cockroaches and the national stewed chicken all the time—not because these troubles could be removed, but only because it was a sanitary necessity to snarl at something or perish. One's salt-water spleen must be growled out of the system—there is no other relief. I pined—I longed—I yearned to growl at the Captain himself, but there was no opening. The man had had such passengers before, I suppose, and knew how to handle them, and so he was polite and painstaking and accommodating—and most exasperatingly patient and even tempered. So I said to myself "I will take it out of your old schooner, anyhow; I will blackguard the Boomerang in the public prints, to pay for your shameless good-nature when your passengers are peevish and actually need somebody to growl at for very relief!"
But now that I am restored by the land breeze, I wonder at my ingratitude; for no man ever treated me better than Captain Kangaroo did on board his ship. As for the stewed chicken—that last and meanest substitute for something to eat—that soothing rubbish for toothless infants—that diet for cholera patients in the rice-water stage—it was of course about the best food we could have at sea, and so I only abused it because I hated it as I do sardines or tomatoes, and because it was stewed chicken, and because it was such a relief to abuse somebody or something. But Kangaroo—I never abused Captain Kangaroo. I hope I have a better heart than to abuse a man who, with the kindest and most generous and unselfish motive in the world, went into the galley, and with his own hands baked for me the worst piece of bread I ever ate in my life. His motive was good, his desire to help me was sincere, but his execution was damnable. You see, I was not sick, but nothing would taste good to me; the Kanaka cook's bread was particularly unpalatable; he was a new hand—the regular cook being sick and helpless below—and Captain Kangaroo, in the genuine goodness of his heart, felt for me in my distress and went down and made that most infernal bread. I ate one of those rolls—I would have eaten it if it had killed me—and said to myself: "It is on my stomach; 'tis well; if it were on my conscience, life would be a burden to me." I carried one up to Brown and he ate a piece, but declined to experiment further. I insisted, but he said no, he didn't want any more ballast. When the good deeds of men are judged in the Great Day that is to bring bliss or eternal woe unto us all, the charity that was in Captain Kangaroo's heart will be remembered and rewarded, albeit his bread will have been forgotten for ages.
THE FAMOUS ORANGE AND COFFEE REGION
It was only about fifteen miles from Kailua to Kealakekua Bay, either by sea or land, but by the former route there was a point to be weathered where the ship would be the sport of contrary winds for hours, and she would probably occupy the entire day in making the trip, whereas we could do it on horseback in a little while and have the cheering benefit of a respite from the discomforts we had been experiencing on the vessel. We hired horses from the Kanakas, and miserable affairs they were, too. They had lived on meditation all their lives, no doubt, for Kailua is fruitful in nothing else. I will mention, in this place, that horses are plenty everywhere in the Sandwich Islands—no Kanaka is without one or more—but when you travel from one island to another, it is necessary to take your own saddle and bridle, for these articles are scarce. It is singular baggage for a sea voyage, but it will not do to go without it.
The ride through the district of Kona to Kealakekua Bay took us through the famous coffee and orange section. I think the Kona coffee has a richer flavor than any other, be it grown where it may and call it by what name you please. At one time it was cultivated quite extensively, and promised to become one of the great staples of Hawaiian commerce; but the heaviest crop ever raised was almost entirely destroyed by a blight, and this, together with heavy American customs duties, had the effect of suddenly checking enterprise in this direction. For several years the coffee growers fought the blight with all manner of cures and preventives, but with small success, and at length some of the less persevering abandoned coffee-growing altogether and turned their attention to more encouraging pursuits. The coffee interest has not yet recovered its former importance, but is improving slowly. The exportation of this article last year was over 268,000 pounds, and it is expected that the present year's yield will be much greater. Contrast the progress of the coffee interest with that of sugar, and the demoralizing effects of the blight upon the former will be more readily seen.
EXPORTATIONS
1852
Coffee, pounds—117,000
Sugar, pounds—730,000
1865
Coffee, pounds—263,000
Sugar, pounds—15,318,097
Thus the sugar yield of last year was more than twenty times what it was in 1852, while the coffee yield has scarcely more than doubled.
The coffee plantations we encountered in our short journey looked well, and we were told that the crop was unusually promising.
There are no finer oranges in the world than those produced in the district of Kona; when new and fresh they are delicious. The principal market for them is California, but of course they lose much of their excellence by so long a voyage. About 500,000 oranges were exported last year against 15,000 in 1852. The orange culture is safe and sure, and is being more and more extensively engaged in every year. We passed one orchard that contained ten thousand orange trees.
There are many species of beautiful trees in Kona—noble forests of them—and we had numberless opportunities of contrasting the orange with them. The verdict rested with the orange. Among the varied and handsome foliage of the Kou, Koa, Kukui, breadfruit, mango, guava, peach, citron, ohia and other fine trees, its dark, rich green cone was sure to arrest the eye and compel constant exclamations of admiration. So dark a green is its foliage, that at a distance of a quarter of a mile the orange tree looks almost black.
WOODLAND SCENERY
The ride from Kailua to Kealakekua Bay is worth taking. It passes along on high ground—say a thousand feet above sea level—and usually about a mile distant from the ocean, which is always in sight, save that occasionally you find yourself buried in the forest in the midst of a rank, tropical vegetation and a dense growth of trees, whose great boughs overarch the road and shut out sun and sea and everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers. It was pleasant to ride occasionally in the warm sun, and feast the eye upon the ever-changing panorama of the forest (beyond and below us), with its many tints, its softened lights and shadows, its billowy undulations sweeping gently down from the mountain to the sea. It was pleasant also, at intervals, to leave the sultry sun and pass into the cool, green depths of this forest and indulge in sentimental reflections under the inspiration of its brooding twilight and its whispering foliage. The jaunt through Kona will always be to me a happy memory.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, August 24, 1866
STILL IN KONA—CONCERNING MATTERS AND THINGS
At one farmhouse we got some large peaches of excellent flavor while on our horseback ride through Kona. This fruit, as a general thing, does not do well in the Sandwich Islands. It takes a sort of almond shape, and is small and bitter. It needs frost, they say, and perhaps it does; if this be so, it will have a good opportunity to go on needing it, as it will not be likely to get it. The trees from which the fine fruit I have spoken of came had been planted and replanted over and over again, and to this treatment the proprietor of the orchard attributed his success.
We passed several sugar plantations—new ones and not very extensive. The crops were, in most cases, third rattoons. [NOTE.—The first crop is called "plant cane;" subsequent crops which spring from the original roots, without replanting are called "rattoons."] Almost everywhere on the island of Hawaii sugar-cane matures in twelve months, both rattoons and plant, and although it ought to be taken off as soon as it tassels, no doubt, it is not absolutely necessary to do it until about four months afterward. In Kona, the average yield of an acre of ground is two tons of sugar, they say. This is only a moderate yield for these islands, but would be extraordinary for Louisiana and most other sugar growing countries. The plantations in Kona being on pretty high ground—up among the light and frequent rains—no irrigation whatever is required.
In Central Kona there is but little idle cane land now, but there is a good deal in North and South Kona. There are thousands of acres of cane land unoccupied on the island of Hawaii, and the prices asked for it range from one dollar to a hundred and fifty an acre. It is owned by common natives, and is lying "out of doors." They make no use of it whatever, and yet, here lately, they seem disinclined to either lease or sell it. I was frequently told this. In this connection it may not be out of place to insert an extract from a book of Hawaiian travels recently published by a visiting minister of the gospel:
"Well, now, I wouldn't, if I was you."
"Brown, I wish you wouldn't look over my shoulder when I am writing and I wish you would indulge yourself in some little respite from my affairs and interest yourself in your own business sometimes."
"Well, I don't care. I'm disgusted with these mush-and-milk preacher travels, and I wouldn't make an extract from one of them. Father Damon has got stacks of books shoemakered up by them pious bushwhackers from America, and they're the flattest reading—they are sicker than the smart things children say in the newspapers. Every preacher that gets lazy comes to the Sandwich Islands to 'recruit his health,' and then he goes back home and writes a book. And he puts in a lot of history, and some legends, and some manners and customs, and dead loads of praise of the missionaries for civilizing and Christianizing the natives, and says in considerable chapters how grateful the savage ought to be; and when there is a chapter to be filled out, and they haven't got anything to fill it out with, they shovel in a lot of Scripture—now don't they? You just look at Rev. Cheever's book and Anderson's—and when they come to the volcano, or any sort of heavy scenery, and it is too much bother to describe it, they shovel in another lot of Scripture, and wind up with 'Lo! what God hath wrought!' Confound their lazy melts! [sic] Now, I wouldn't make extracts out of no such bosh."
"Mr. Brown, I brought you with me on this voyage merely because a newspaper correspondent should travel in some degree of state, and so command the respect of strangers; I did not expect you to assist me in my literary labors with your crude ideas. You may desist from further straining your intellect for the present, Mr. Brown, and proceed to the nearest depot and replenish the correspondent fountain of inspiration."
"Fountain dry now, of course. Confound me if I ever chance an opinion but I've got to trot down to the soda factory and fill up that cursed jug again. It seems to me that you need more inspiration—"
"Good afternoon, Brown."
The extract I was speaking of reads as follows:
"We were in North Kona. The arable uplands in both the Konas are owned chiefly by foreigners. Indeed the best of the lands on all the islands appear to be fast going into foreign hands; and one of the allegations made to me by a foreign resident against the missionaries was that their influence was against such a transfer. The Rev. Mr. _____ told me, however, that to prevent the lands immediately about him, once owned by the admirable Kapiolani, from going to strangers he knew not who, he had felt obliged to invest his own private funds in them."
We naturally swell with admiration when we contemplate a sacrifice like this. But while I read the generous last words of that extract, it fills me with inexpressible satisfaction to know that the Rev. Mr. _____ had his reward. He paid fifteen hundred dollars for one of those pieces of land—he did not have to keep it long, without sticking a spade into it he sold it to a foreigner for ten thousand dollars in gold. Yet there be those among us who fear to trust the precious promise, "Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall return unto thee after many days."
I have since been told that the original $1,500 belonged to a ward of the missionary, and that inasmuch as the latter was investing it with the main view to doing his charge the best service in his power, and doubtless would not have felt at liberty to so invest it merely to protect the poor natives, his glorification in the book was not particularly gratifying to him. The other missionaries smile at the idea of their tribe "investing their own private funds" in this free and easy, this gay and affluent way—buying fifteen hundred dollars worth of land at a dash (salary $400 a year), and merely to do a trifling favor to some savage neighbor.
NATURE'S PRINTED RECORD IN THE LAVA
At four o'clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land journey. This lava is the accumulation of ages; one torrent of fire after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island structure higher and higher. Underneath, it is honeycombed with caves; it would be of no use to dig wells in such a place; they would not hold water—you would not find any for them to hold, for that matter. Consequently, the planters depend upon cisterns.
The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now living who witnessed it. In one place it inclosed and burned down a grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunks stood are still visible; their sides retain the impression of the bark; the trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged, left in it the perfect counterfeit of every knot and branch and leaf, and even nut, for curiosity seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon and wonder at.
There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures in the lava as the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii did. It is a pity it is so, because such things are so interesting, but so it is. They probably went away. They went away early, perhaps. It was very bad. However, they had their merits—the Romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the Kanakas showed the sounder judgment.
As usual, Brown loaded his unhappy horse with fifteen or twenty pounds of "specimens," to be cursed and worried over for a time, and then discarded for new toys of a similar nature. He is like most people who visit these Islands; they are always collecting specimens, with a wild enthusiasm, but they never get home with any of them.
Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to every schoolboy in the wide world—Kealakekua Bay—the place where Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives nearly a hundred years ago. The setting sun was flaming upon it, a Summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent rainbows. Two gentlemen who were in advance of us rode through one of these, and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor. Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery the Rainbow Islands? These charming spectacles are present to you at every turn; they are as common in all the islands as fogs and wind in San Francisco; they are visible every day, and frequently at night also—not the silvery bow we see once in an age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful colors, like the children of the sun and rain. I saw one of them a few nights ago. What the sailors call "rain-dogs"—little patches of rainbow—are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like stained cathedral windows.
Kealakekua Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail shell, winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from shore to shore. It is bounded on one side—where the murder was done—by a little flat plain, on which stands a cocoa-nut grove and some ruined houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and bounds the inner extremity of it. From this wall the place takes its name, Kealakekua, which in the native tongue signifies "The Pathway of the Gods." They say (and still believe, in spite of their liberal education in Christianity), that the great god Lono, who used to live upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway when urgent business connected with heavenly affairs called him down to the seashore in a hurry.
As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean stems of the cocoa-nut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of the water on the flat rock pressed by Captain Cook's feet when the blow was dealt that took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages—the men in the ship crowding to the vessel's side and gazing in anxious dismay toward the shore—the—But I discovered that I could not do it.
It was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that the distant Boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I adjourned to the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think, and wish the ship would make the land—for we had not eaten much for the ten hours and were viciously hungry.
Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Wherever he went among the islands he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment.
When he landed at Kealakekua Bay, a multitude of natives, variously estimated at from ten to fifteen thousand, flocked about him and conducted him to the principal temple with more than royal honors—with honors suited to their chiefest god, for such they took him to be. They called him Lono—a deity who had resided at that place in a former age, but who had gone away and had ever since been anxiously expected back by the people. When Cook approached the awe-stricken people, they prostrated themselves and hid their faces. His coming was announced in a loud voice by heralds, and those who had not time to get out of the way after prostrating themselves, were trampled under foot by the following throngs. Arrived at the temple, he was taken into the most sacred part and placed before the principal idol, immediately under an altar of wood on which a putrid hog was deposited. "This was held toward him while the priest repeated a long and rapidly enunciated address, after which he was led to the top of a partially decayed scaffolding. Ten men, bearing a large hog and bundles of red cloth, then entered the temple and prostrated themselves before him. The cloth was taken from them by the priest, who encircled Cook with it in numerous folds, and afterward offered the hog to him in sacrifice. Two priests, alternately and in unison, chanted praises in honor of Lono, after which they led him to the chief idol, which, following their example, he kissed." He was anointed by the high priest—that is to say, his arms, hands and face, were slimed over with the chewed meat of a cocoa-nut; after this nasty compliment, he was regaled with awa manufactured in the mouths of attendants and spit out into a drinking vessel; "as the last most delicate attention, he was fed with swine meat which had been masticated for him by a filthy old man."
These distinguished civilities were never offered by the islanders to mere human beings. Cook was mistaken for their absent god; he accepted the situation and helped the natives to deceive themselves. His conduct might have been wrong, in a moral point of view, but his policy was good in conniving at the deception, and proved itself so; the belief that he was a god saved him a good while from being killed—protected him thoroughly and completely, until, in an unlucky moment, it was discovered that he was only a man. His death followed instantly. Jarves, from whose history, principally, I am condensing this narrative, thinks his destruction was a direct consequence of his dishonest personation of the god, but unhappily for the argument, the historian proves, over and over again, that the false Lono was spared time and again when simple Captain Cook of the Royal Navy would have been destroyed with small ceremony.
The idolatrous worship of Captain Cook, as above described, was repeated at every heathen temple he visited. Wherever he went the terrified common people, not being accustomed to seeing gods marching around of their own free will and accord and without human assistance, fled at his approach or fell down and worshipped him. A priest attended him and regulated the religious ceremonies which constantly took place in his honor; offerings, chants and addresses met him at every point. "For a brief period he moved among them an earthly god—observed, feared and worshipped." During all this time the whole island was heavily taxed to supply the wants of the ships or contribute to the gratification of their officers and crews, and, as was customary in such cases, no return expected. "The natives rendered much assistance in fitting the ships and preparing them for their voyages."
At one time the King of the island laid a tabu upon his people, confining them to their houses for several days. This interrupted the daily supply of vegetables to the ships; several natives tried to violate the tabu, under threats made by Cook's sailors, but were prevented by a chief, who, for thus enforcing the laws of his country, had a musket fired over his head from one of the ships. This is related in "Cook's Voyages." The tabu was soon removed, and the Englishmen were favored with the boundless hospitality of the natives as before, except that the Kanaka women were interdicted from visiting the ships; formerly, with extravagant hospitality, the people had sent their wives and daughters on board themselves. The officers and sailors went freely about the island, and were everywhere laden with presents. The King visited Cook in royal state, and gave him a large number of exceeding costly and valuable presents—in return for which the resurrected Lono presented His Majesty a white linen shirt and a dagger—an instance of illiberality in every way discreditable to a god.
"On the 2d of February, at the desire of his commander, Captain King proposed to the priests to purchase for fuel the railing which surrounded the top of the temple of Lono! In this Cook manifested as little respect for the religion in the mythology of which he figured so conspicuously, as scruples in violating the divine precepts of his own. Indeed, throughout his voyages a spirit regardless of the rights and feelings of others, when his own were interested, is manifested, especially in his last cruise, which is a blot upon his memory."
Cook desecrated the holy places of the temple by storing supplies for his ships in them, and by using the level grounds within the inclosure as a general workshop for repairing his sails, etc.—ground which was so sacred that no common native dared to set his foot upon it. Ledyard, a Yankee sailor, who was with Cook, and whose journal is considered the most just and reliable account of this eventful period of the voyage, says two iron hatchets were offered for the temple railing, and when the sacrilegious proposition was refused by the priests with horror and indignation, it was torn down by order of Captain Cook and taken to the boats by the sailors, and the images which surmounted it removed and destroyed in the presence of the priests ant chiefs.
The abused and insulted natives finally grew desperate under the indignities that were constantly being heaped upon them by men whose wants they had unselfishly relieved at the expense of their own impoverishment, and angered by some fresh baseness, they stoned a party of sailors and drove them to their boats. From this time onward Cook and the natives were alternately friendly and hostile until Sunday, the 14th, whose setting sun saw the circumnavigator a corpse.
Ledyard's account and that of the natives vary in no important particulars. A Kanaka, in revenge for a blow he had received at the hands of a sailor (the natives say he was flogged), stole a boat from one of the ships and broke it up to get the nails out of it. Cook determined to seize the King and remove him to his ship and keep him a prisoner until the boat was restored. By deception and smoothly worded persuasion he got the aged monarch to the shore, but when they were about to enter the boat a multitude of natives flocked to the place and one raised a cry that their King was going to be taken away and killed. Great excitement ensued, and Cook's situation became perilous in the extreme. He had only a handful of marines and sailors with him, and the crowd of natives grew constantly larger and more clamorous every moment. Cook opened the hostilities himself. Hearing a native make threats, he had him pointed out, and fired on him with a blank cartridge. The man, finding himself unhurt, repeated his threats, and Cook fired again and wounded him mortally. A speedy retreat of the English party to the boats was now absolutely necessary; as soon as it was begun Cook was hit with a stone, and discovering who threw it, he shot the man dead. The officer in the boats observing the retreat, ordered the boats to fire—this occasioned Cook's guard to face about and fire also, and then the attack became general. Cook and Lieutenant Phillips were together a few paces in the rear of the guard, and perceiving a general fire without orders, quitted the King and ran to the shore to stop it—but not being able to make themselves heard, and being close pressed upon by the chiefs, they joined the guard, who fired as they retreated. Cook having at length reached the margin of the water, between the fire and the boats, waved with his hat for them to cease firing and come in; and while he was doing this a chief stabbed him from behind with an iron dagger (procured in traffic with the sailors), just under the shoulder blade, and it passed quite through his body. Cook fell with his face in the water and immediately expired.
The native account says that after Cook had shot two men, he struck a stalwart chief with the flat of his sword, for some reason or other; the chief seized and pinioned Cook's arms in his powerful grip, and bent him backward over his knee (not meaning to hurt him, for it was not deemed possible to hurt the god Lono, but to keep him from doing further mischief) and this treatment giving him pain, he betrayed his mortal nature with a groan! It was his death-warrant. The fraud which had served him so well was discovered at last. The natives shouted, "He groans!—he is not a god!" and instantly they fell upon him and killed him.
His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of it which were sent on board the ships). The heart was hung up in a native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook it for the heart of a dog. One of these children grew to be a very old man, and died here in Honolulu a few years ago. A portion of Cook's bones were recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships.
Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook. They treated him well. In return, he abused them. He and his men inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, August 30, 1866
Kealakekua Bay (S. I.), 1866
GREAT BRITAIN'S QUEER MONUMENT TO CAPTAIN COOK
When I digressed from my personal narrative to write about Cook's death I left myself, solitary, hungry and dreary, smoking in the little warehouse at Kealakekua Bay. Brown was out somewhere gathering up a fresh lot of specimens, having already discarded those he dug out of the old lava flow during the afternoon. I soon went to look for him. He had returned to the great slab of lava upon which Cook stood when he was murdered, and was absorbed in maturing a plan for blasting it out and removing it to his home as a specimen. Deeply pained at the bare thought of such a sacrilege, I reprimanded him severely and at once removed him from the scene of temptation. We took a walk then, the rain having moderated considerably. We clambered over the surrounding lava field, through masses of weeds, and stood for a moment upon the doorstep of an ancient ruin—the house once occupied by the aged King of Hawaii—and I reminded Brown that that very stone step was the one across which Captain Cook drew the reluctant old king when he turned his footsteps for the last time toward his ship.
I checked a movement on Mr. Brown's part: "No," I said, "let it remain; seek specimens of a less hallowed nature than this historical stone."
We also strolled along the beach toward the precipice of Kealakelikua and gazed curiously at the semicircular holes high up in its face—graves, they are, of ancient kings and chiefs—and wondered how the natives ever managed to climb from the sea up the sheer wall and make those holes and deposit their packages of patrician bones in them.
Tramping about in the rear of the warehouse, we suddenly came upon another object of interest. It was a cocoa-nut stump, four or five feet high, and about a foot in diameter at the butt. It had lava boulders piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored sheets of copper, such as ships' bottoms are coppered with. Each sheet had a rude inscription scratched upon it—with a nail, apparently—and in every case the execution was wretched. It was almost dark by this time, and the inscriptions would have been difficult to read even at noonday, but with patience and industry I finally got them all in my note-book. They read as follows:
"Near this spot fell
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
The Distinguished Circumnavigator
who Discovered these islands A.D. 1778.
His Majesty's Ship Imogene,
October 17, 1837."
"Parties from H. M. ship Vixen visited this spot Jan. 25 1858."
"This sheet and capping put on by Sparrowhawk September 16, 1839, in order to preserve this monument to the memory of Cook."
"Captain Montressor and officers of H. M. S. Calypso visited this spot the 18th of October, 1858."
"This tree having fallen, was replaced on this spot by H. M. S. V. Cormorant, G. T. Gordon, Esq., Captain, who visited this bay May 18, 1846."
"This bay was visited, July 4, 1843, by H. M. S. Carysfort, the Right Honorable Lord George Paulet, Captain, to whom, as the representative of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria, these islands were ceded, February 25, 1843."
After Cook's murder, his second in command, on board the ship, opened fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon balls cut this cocoa-nut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing. It looked sad and lonely enough out there in the rainy twilight. But there is no other monument to Captain Cook. True, up on the mountain side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of lava blocks, which marks the spot where Cook's flesh was stripped from his bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument, since it was erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him. A thing like a guideboard was elevated above this pen on a tall pole and formerly there was an inscription upon it describing the memorable occurrence that had there taken place; but the sun and the wind have long ago so defaced it as to render it illegible.
"MUSIC SOOTHES THE SAD AND LONELY"
The sky grew overcast, and the night settled down gloomily. Brown and I went and sat on the little wooden pier, saying nothing, for we were tired and hungry and did not feel like talking. There was no wind; the drizzling, melancholy rain was still falling, and not a sound disturbed the brooding silence save the distant roar of the surf and the gentle washing of the wavelets against the rocks at our feet. We were very lonely. No sign of the vessel. She was still becalmed at sea no doubt. After an hour of sentimental meditation, I bethought me of working upon the feelings of my comrade. The surroundings were in every way favorable to the experiment. I concluded to sing—partly because music so readily touches the tender emotions of the heart, and partly because the singing of pathetic ballads and such things is an art in which I have been said to excel. In a voice tremulous with feeling, I began:
"'Mid pleasures and palaces though we
may roam, Be it ever so humble there's no place
like home; H-o—m—e—ho- home—sweet,
swe-he-he—"
My poor friend rose up slowly and came and stood before me and said:
"Now look a-here, Mark—it ain't no time, and it ain't no place, for you to be going on in that way. I'm hungry, and I'm tired, and wet; and I ain't going to be put upon and aggravated when I'm so miserable. If you was to start in on any more yowling like that, I'd shove you overboard—I would, by geeminy."
"Poor vulgar creature," I said to myself, "he knows no better. I have not the heart to blame him. How sad a lot is his, and how much he is to be pitied, in that his soul is dead to the heavenly charm of music. I cannot sing for this man; I cannot sing for him while he has that dangerous calm in his voice, at any rate."
HUNGER DRIVETH TO DESPERATE ENTERPRISES
We spent another hour in silence and in profound depression of spirits; it was so gloomy and so still, and so lonesome, with nothing human anywhere neat save those bundles of dry kingly bones hidden in the face of the cliff. Finally Brown said it was hard to have to sit still and starve with plenty of delicious food and drink just beyond our reach—rich young cocoa-nuts! I said, "what an idiot you are not to have thought of it before. Get up and stir yourself; in five minutes we shall have a feast and be jolly and contented again!"
The thought was cheering in the last degree, and in a few moments we were in the grove of cocoa palms, and their ragged plumes were dimly visible through the wet haze, high above our heads. I embraced one of the smooth slender trunks, with the thought of climbing it, but it looked very far to the top, and of course there were no knots or branches to assist the climber, and so I sighed and walked sorrowfully away.
"Thunder! what was that!"
It was only Brown. He had discharged a prodigious lava-block at the top of a tree, and it fell back to the earth with a crash that tore up the dead silence of the palace like an avalanche. As soon as I understood the nature of the case I recognized the excellence of the idea. I said as much to Brown, and told him to fire another volley. I cannot throw lava-blocks with any precision, never having been used to them, and therefore I apportioned our labor with that fact in view, and signified to Brown that he would only have to knock the cocoa-nuts down—I would pick them up myself.
Brown let drive with another boulder. It went singing through the air and just grazed a cluster of nuts hanging fifty feet above ground.'
"Well done!" said I; "try it again."
He did so. The result was precisely the same.
"Well done again!" said I; "move your hind-sight a shade to the left, and let her have it once more."
Brown sent another boulder hurling through the dingy air—too much elevation—it just passed over the cocoa-nut tuft.
"Steady, lad," said I; "you scatter too much. Now—one, two, fire!" and the next missile clove through the tuft and a couple of long, slender leaves came floating down to the earth. "Good!" I said, "depress your piece a line."
Brown paused and panted like an exhausted dog; then he wiped some perspiration from his face—a quart of it, he said—and discarded his coat, vest and cravat. The next shot fell short. He said, "I'm letting down; them large boulders are monstrous responsible rocks to send up there, but they're rough on the arms."
He then sent a dozen smaller stones in quick succession after the fruit, and some of them struck in the right place, but the result was—nothing. I said he might stop and rest awhile.
"Oh, never mind," he said, "I don't care to take any advantage—I don't want to rest until you do. But it's singular to me how you always happen to divide up the work about the same way. I'm to knock 'em down, and you're to pick 'em up. I'm of the opinion that you're going to wear yourself down to just nothing but skin and bones on this trip, if you ain't more careful. Oh, don't mind about me resting—I can't be tired—I ain't hove only about eleven ton of rocks up into that liberty pole."
"Mr. Brown, I am surprised at you. This is mutiny."
"Oh, well, I don't care what it is—mutiny, sass or what you please—I'm so hungry that I don't care for nothing."
It was on my lips to correct his loathsome grammar, but I considered the dire extremity he was in, and withheld the deserved reproof.
After some time spent in mutely longing for the coveted fruit, I suggested to Brown that if he would climb the tree I would hold his hat. His hunger was so great that he finally concluded to try it. His exercise had made him ravenous. But the experiment was not a success. With infinite labor and a great deal of awkwardly constructed swearing, he managed to get up some thirty feet, but then he came to an uncommonly smooth place and began to slide back slowly but surely. He clasped the tree with his arms and legs, and tried to save himself, but he had got too much sternway, and the thing was impossible; he dragged for a few feet and then shot down like an arrow.
"It is tabu," he said, sadly. "Let's go back to the pia. The transom to my trowsers has all fetched away, and the legs of them are riddled to rags and ribbons. I wish I was drunk, or dead, or something—anything so as to be out of this misery."
I glanced over my shoulders, as we walked along, and observed that some of the clouds had parted and left a dim lighted doorway through to the skies beyond; in this place, as in an ebony frame, our majestic palm stood up and reared its graceful crest aloft; the slender stem was a clean, black line the feathers of the plume—some erect some projecting horizontally, some drooping a little and others hanging languidly down toward the earth—were all sharply cut against the smooth gray background.
"A beautiful, beautiful tree is the cocoa-palm!" I said, fervently.
"I don't see it," said Brown, resentfully. "People that haven't clumb one are always driveling about how pretty it is. And when they make pictures of these hot countries they always shove one of the ragged things into the foreground. I don't see what there is about it that's handsome; it looks like a feather-duster struck by lightning."
Perceiving that Brown's mutilated pantaloons were disturbing his gentle spirit, I said no more.
PROVIDENTIALLY SAVED FROM STARVATION
Toward midnight a native boy came down from the uplands to see if the Boomerang had got in yet, and we chartered him for subsistence service. For the sum of twelve and a half cents in coin he agreed to furnish cocoa-nuts enough for a dozen men at five minutes' notice. He disappeared in the murky atmosphere, and in a few seconds we saw a little black object, like a rat, running up our tall tree and pretty distinctly defined against the light place in the sky; it was our Kanaka, and he performed his contract without tearing his clothes—but then he had none on, except those he was born in. He brought five large nuts and tore the tough green husks off with his strong teeth, and thus prepared the fruit for use. We perceived then that it was about as well that we failed in our endeavors, as we never could have gnawed the husks off. I would have kept Brown trying, though, as long as he had any teeth. We punched the eye-holes out and drank the sweet (and at the same time pungent) milk of two of the nuts, and our hunger and thirst were satisfied. The boy broke them open and we ate some of the mushy, white paste inside for pastime, but we had no real need of it.
After a while a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon worked into the bay and cast anchor. The boat came ashore for us, and in a little while the clouds and the rain were gone. The moon was beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, September 6, 1866
Kealakekua Bay, July, 1866
In my last I spoke of the old cocoa-nut stump, all covered with copper plates bearing inscriptions commemorating the visits of various British naval commanders to Captain Cook's death-place at Kealakekua Bay. The most magniloquent of these is that left by "the Right Hon. Lord George Paulet, to whom, as the representative of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria, the Sandwich Islands were ceded, February 25, 1843."
Lord George, if he is alive yet, would like to tear off that plate and destroy it, no doubt. He was fearfully snubbed by his Government, shortly afterward, for his acts as Her Majesty's representative upon the occasion to which he refers with such manifest satisfaction.
A pestilent fellow by the name of Charlton had been Great Britain's Consul at Honolulu for many years. He seems to have employed his time in sweating, fuming and growling about everything and everybody; in acquiring property by devious and inscrutable ways; in blackguarding the Hawaiian Government and the missionaries; in scheming for the transfer of the islands to the British crown; in getting the King drunk and laboring diligently to keep him so; in working to secure a foothold for the Catholic religion when its priests had been repeatedly forbidden by the King to settle in the country; in promptly raising thunder every time an opportunity offered, and in making himself prominently disagreeable and a shining nuisance at all times.
You will thus perceive that Charlton had a good deal of business on his hands. There was "a heap of trouble on the old man's mind."
He was sued in the Courts upon one occasion for a debt of long standing, amounting to 3,000 pounds, and judgment rendered against him. This made him lively. He swore like the army in Flanders. But it was of no avail. The case was afterwards carefully examined twice—once by a Commission of distinguished English gentlemen and once by the law officers of the British Crown—and the Hawaiian Court's decision sustained in both instances. His property was attached, and one Skinner, a relative who had $10,000 in bank, got ready to purchase it when it should be sold on execution. So far, so good.
Several other English residents had been worsted in lawsuits. They and Charlton became loud in their denunciation of what they termed a want of justice in the Hawaiian Courts. The suits were all afterwards examined by the law officers of the British Crown, and the Hawaiian Courts sustained, as in Charlton's case.
Charlton got disgusted, wrote a "sassy" letter to the King, and left suddenly for England, conferring his Consulate, for the time being, upon a kindred spirit named Simpson, a bitter traducer of the Hawaiian Government—an officer whom the Government at once refused to recognize. Charlton left with Simpson a demand upon the Government for possession of a large and exceedingly valuable tract of land in Honolulu, alleged to have been transferred to him by a deed duly signed by a native gentleman, who had never owned the property, and whose character for probity was such that no one would believe he ever would have been guilty of such a proceeding. Charity compels us to presume that the versatile Charlton forged the deed. The boundaries, if specified, were vaguely defined; it contained no mention of a consideration for value received—it had been held in abeyance and unmentioned for twenty years, and its signer and witnesses were long since dead. It was a shaky instrument altogether.
On his way to England Charlton met my Lord George in a Queen's ship, and laid his grievances before him, and then went on. My Lord sailed straight to Honolulu and began to make trouble. Under threats of bombarding the town, he compelled the King to make the questionable deed good to the person having charge of Charlton's property interests; demanded the reception of the new Consul; demanded that all those suits—a great number—which had been decided adversely to Englishmen (including many which had even been settled by amicable arbitration between the parties) should be tried over again, and by juries composed entirely of Englishmen, although the written law provided that but half the panel should be English, and therefore, of course, the demand could not be complied with without a tyrannical assumption of power by the King; he stopped the seizure and sale of Charlton's property; he brought in a little bill (gotten up by the newly created and promptly-emasculated Consul, Simpson) for $117,000 and some odd change—enough to "bust" the Hawaiian exchequer two or three times over—to use a popular missionary term—for all manner of imaginary damages sustained by British subjects at diverse and sundry times, and among the items was one demanding $3,000 to indemnify Skinner for having kept his $10,000 lying idle for four months, expecting to invest it in Charlton's property, and then not getting a chance to do it on account of Lord George having stopped the sale. An exceedingly nice party was Lord George, take him all around.
For days and nights together the unhappy Kamehameha III was in bitterest distress. He could not pay the bill, and the law gave him no power to comply with the other demands. He and his Ministers of state pleaded for mercy—for time to remodel the laws to suit the emergency. But Lord George refused steadfastly to accede to either request, and finally, in tribulation and sorrow, the King told him to take the islands and do with them as he would; he knew of no other way—his Government was too weak to maintain its rights against Great Britain.
And so Lord George took them and set up his Government, and hauled down the royal Hawaiian ensign and hoisted the English colors over the archipelago. And the sad King notified his people of the event in a proclamation which is touching in its simple eloquence:
"Where are you, chiefs, people and commons from my ancestors, and people from foreign lands!
"Hear ye! I make known to you that I am in perplexity by reason of difficulties into which I have been brought without cause; therefore I have given away the life of our land, hear ye! But my rule over you, my people, and your privileges will continue, for I have hope that the life of the land will be restored when my conduct is justified. KAMEHAMEHA III."
And then, I suppose, my Lord George Paulet, temporary King of the Sandwich Islands, went complacently skirmishing around his dominions in his ship, and feeding fat on glory—for we find him, four months later, visiting Kealakekua Bay and nailing his rusty sheet of copper to the memorial stump set up to glorify the great Cook—and imagining, no doubt, that his visit had conferred immortality upon a name which had only possessed celebrity before.
But my lord's happiness was not to last long. His superior officer, Rear Admiral Thomas, arrived at Honolulu a week or two afterward, and as soon as he understood the case he immediately showed the new Government the door and restored Kamehameha to all his ancient powers and privileges. It was the 31st of July, 1843. There was immense rejoicing on Oahu that day. The Hawaiian flag was flung to the breeze. The King and as many of his people as could get into the Great Stone Church went there to pray, and the balance got drunk. The 31st of July is Independence Day in the Sandwich Islands, and consequently in these times there are two grand holidays in the Islands in the month of July. The Americans celebrate the 4th with great pomp and circumstance, and the natives outdo them if they can, on the 31st—and the speeches disgorged upon both occasions are regularly inflicted in cold blood upon the people by the newspapers, that have a dreary fashion of coming out just a level week after one has forgotten any given circumstance they talk about.
A LUCRATIVE OFFICE
When I woke up on the schooner's deck in the morning, the sun was shining down right fervently, everybody was astir, and Brown was gone—gone in a canoe to Captain Cook's side of the bay, the Captain said. I took a boat and landed on the opposite shore, at the port of entry. There was a house there—I mean a foreigner's house—and near it were some native grass huts. The Collector of this port of entry not only enjoys the dignity of office, but has emoluments also. That makes it very nice, of course. He gets five dollars for boarding every foreign ship that stops there, and two dollars more for filling out certain blanks attesting such visit. As many as three foreign ships stop there in a single year, sometimes. Yet, notwithstanding this wild rush of business, the late Collector of the port committed suicide several months ago. The foreign ships which visit this place are whalers in quest of water and potatoes. The present Collector lives back somewhere—has a den up the mountain several thousand feet—but he comes down fast enough when a ship heaves in sight.
WASHOE MEN
I found two Washoe men at the house. But I was not surprised—I believe if a man were to go to perdition itself he would find Washoe men there, though not so thick, maybe, as in the other place.
THE HOLY PLACE
Two hundred yards from the house was the ruins of the pagan temple of Lono, so desecrated by Captain Cook when he was pretending to be that deity. Its low, rude walls look about as they did when he saw them, no doubt. In a cocoa-nut grove near at hand is a tree with a hole through its trunk, said to have been made by a cannon ball fired from one of the ships at a crowd of natives immediately after Cook's murder. It is a very good hole.
THE HERO OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL BOOKS
The high chief cook of this temple—the priest who presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices—was uncle to Obookia, and at one time that youth was an apprentice-priest under him. Obookia was a young native of fine mind, who, together with three other native boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the reign of Kamehameha I, and were the means of attracting the attention of the religious world to their country and putting it into their heads to send missionaries there. And this Obookia was the very same sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his people did not have the Bible. That incident has been very elaborately painted in many a charming Sunday School book—aye, and told so plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday School myself, on general principles, although at a time when I did not know much and could not understand why the people of the Sandwich Islands need care a cent about it as long as they did not know there was a Bible at all. This was the same Obookia—this was the very same old Obookia—so I reflected, and gazed upon the ruined temple with a new and absorbing interest. Here that gentle spirit worshipped; here he sought the better life, after his rude fashion; on this stone, perchance, he sat down with his sacred lasso, to wait for a chance to rope in some neighbor for the holy sacrifice; on this altar, possibly, he broiled his venerable grandfather, and presented the rare offering before the high priest, who may have said, "Well done, good and faithful servant." It filled me with emotion.
KANUI THE UNFORTUNATE
Obookia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his native land with the first missionaries, had he lived. The other native youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third, Wm. Kanui, fell from grace afterward, for a time, and when the gold excitement broke out in California he journeyed thither and went to mining, although he was fifty years old. He succeeded pretty well, but the failure of Page, Bacon & Co. relieved him of $6,000. and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt community. Thus, after all his toils, all his privations, all his faithful endeavors to gather together a competence, the blighting hand of poverty was laid upon him in his old age and he had to go back to preaching again. One cannot but feel sad to contemplate such afflictions as these cast upon a creature so innocent and deserving.
And finally he died—died in Honolulu in 1864. The Rev. Mr. Damon's paper, referring—in the obituary notice—to Page-Bacon's unpaid certificates of deposit in the unhappy man's possession, observes that "he departed this life leaving the most substantial and gratifying evidence that he was prepared to die." And so he was, poor fellow, so he was. He was cleaned out, as you may say, and was prepared to go. He was all ready and prepared—Page-Bacon had attended to that for him. All he had to do was to shed his mortal coil. Then he was all right. Poor, poor old fellow. One's heart bleeds for him.
For some time after his bereavement in the matter of finances, he helped Rev. M. Rowell to carry on the Bethel Church in San Francisco and gave excellent satisfaction for a man who was so out of practice. Sleep in peace, poor tired soul!—you were out of luck many a time in your long, checkered life, but you are safe now where care and sorrow and trouble can never assail you anymore.
TEMPLE TO THE RAIN GOD
Quite a broad tract of land near that port of entry, extending from the sea to the mountain top, was sacred to the god Lono in olden times—so sacred that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it it was time for him to make his will, because his time was come. He might go around it by water, but he could not cross it. It was well sprinkled with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of logs of wood. There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain—and with rare sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountain side that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be likely to get it every time. You would seldom get to your Amen before you would have to hoist your umbrella.
THE HOUSE BUILT BY THE DEAD MEN
And there was a large temple near at hand which was built in a single night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the ghastly hands of dead men! Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up the mountain side at dead of night—flitting hither and thither and bearing great lava-blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers—appearing and disappearing as the fitful lightning fell upon their pallid forms and faded away again. Even to this day, it is said, the natives hold this dread structure in awe and reverence, and will not pass by it in the night.
At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went down to look at them. But with a prudery which seems to be characteristic of that sex everywhere, they all plunged in with a lying scream, and when they rose to the surface they only just poked their heads out and showed no disposition to proceed any further in the same direction. I was naturally irritated by such conduct, and therefore I piled their clothes up on a boulder in the edge of the sea and sat down on them and kept the wenches in the water until they were pretty well used up. I had them in the door, as the missionaries say. I was comfortable, and I just let them beg. I thought I could freeze them out, maybe, but it was impracticable. I finally gave it up and went away, hoping that the rebuke I had given them would not be lost upon them. I went and undressed and went in myself. And then they went out. I never saw such singular perversity. Shortly a party of children of both sexes came floundering around me, and then I quit and left the Pacific ocean in their possession.
THE SHAMELESS BROWN
I got uneasy about Brown finally, and as there were no canoes at hand I got a horse whereon to ride three or four miles around to the other side of the bay and hunt him up. As I neared the end of the trip, and was riding down the "pathway of the gods" toward the sea in the sweltering sun I saw Brown toiling up the hill in the distance, with a heavy burden on his shoulder, and knew that canoes were scarce with him, too. I dismounted and sat down in the shade of a crag, and after a while—after numerous pauses to rest by the way—Brown arrived at last, fagged out, and puffing like a steamboat, and gently eased his ponderous burden to the ground—the cocoa-nut stump all sheathed with copper memorials to the illustrious Captain Cook.
"Heavens and earth!" I said, "what are you going to do with that?"
"Going to do with it!—lemme blow a little—lemme blow—it's monstrous heavy, that log is; I'm most tired out—going to do with it! Why, I'm going to take her home for a specimen."
"You egregious ass! March straight back again and put it where you got it. Why, Brown, I am surprised at you—and hurt. I am grieved to think that a man who has lived so long in the atmosphere of refinement which surrounds me can be guilty of such vandalism as this. Reflect, Brown, and say if it be right—if it be manly—if it be generous—to lay desecrating hands upon this touching tribute of a great nation to her gallant dead? Why, Brown, the circumnavigator Cook labored all his life in the service of his country—with a fervid soul and a fearless spirit, he braved the dangers of the unknown seas and planted the banner of England far and wide over their beautiful island world. His works have shed a glory upon his native land which still lives in her history to-day; he laid down his faithful life in her service at last and unforgetful of her son, she yet reveres his name and praises his deeds—and in token of her love, and in reward for the things he did for her, she had reared this monument to his memory—this symbol of a nation's gratitude—which you would defile with unsanctified hands. Restore it—go!"
"All right, if you say so; but I don't see no use of such a spread as you're making. I don't see nothing so very high-toned about this old rotten chunk. It's about the orneryest thing for a monument I've ever struck yet. If it suits Cook, though, all right; I wish him joy; but if I was planted under it I'd highst it, if it was the last act of my life. Monument! it ain't fit for a dog—I can buy dead loads of just such for six bits. She puts this over Cook—but she put one over that foreigner—what was his name?—Prince Albert—that cost a million dollars—and what did he do? Why, he never done anything—never done anything but lead a gallus, comfortable life, at home and out of danger, and raise a large family for Government to board at 300,000 pounds a year apiece. But with this fellow, you know, it was different. However, if you say the old stump's got to go down again, down she goes. As I said before, if it's your wishes, I've got nothing to say. Nothing only this—I've fetched her a mile or a mile and a half, and she weighs a hundred and fifty I should judge, and if it would suit Cook just as well to have her planted up here instead of down there, it would be considerable of a favor to me."
I made him shoulder the monument and carry it back, nevertheless. His criticisms on the monument and its patron struck me, though, in spite of myself. The creature has got no sense, but his vaporings sound strangely plausible sometimes.
In due time we arrived at the port of entry once more.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, September 22, 1866
Kealakekua Bay, July, 1866
I have been writing a good deal, of late, about the great god Lono and Captain Cook's personation of him. Now, while I am here in Lono's home, upon ground which his terrible feet have trodden in remote ages—unless these natives lie, and they would hardly do that, I suppose—I might as well tell who he was.
The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff twelve feet long. Unpoetical history says he was a favorite god on the island of Hawaii—a great king who had been deified for meritorious services—just our own fashion of rewarding heroes, with the difference that we would have made him a Postmaster instead of a god, no doubt. In an angry moment he slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Alii. Remorse of conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular spectacle of a god traveling "on the shoulder;" for in his gnawing grief he wandered about from place to place boxing and wrestling with all whom he met. Of course this pastime soon lost its novelty, inasmuch as it must necessarily have been the case that when so powerful a deity sent a frail human opponent "to grass" he never came back anymore. Therefore, he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft, stating that he would return some day, and that was the last of Lono. He was never seen anymore; his raft got swamped, perhaps. But the people always expected his return, and they were easily led to accept Captain Cook as the restored god.
THE POETIC TRADITION
But there is another tradition which is rather more poetical than this bald historical one. Lono lived in considerable style up here on the hillside. His wife was very beautiful, and he was devoted to her. One day he overheard a stranger proposing an elopement to her, and without waiting to hear her reply he took the stranger's life and then upbraided Kaikilani so harshly that her sensitive nature was wounded to the quick. She went away in tears, and Lono began to repent of his hasty conduct almost before she was out of sight. He sat him down under a cocoa-nut tree to await her return, intending to receive her with such tokens of affection and contrition as should restore her confidence and drive all sorrow from her heart. But hour after hour winged its tardy flight and yet she did not come. The sun went down and left him desolate. His all-wise instincts may have warned him that the separation was final, but he hoped on, nevertheless, and when the darkness was heavy he built a beacon fire at his door to guide the wanderer home again, if by any chance she had lost her way. But the night waxed and waned and brought another day, but not the goddess. Lono hurried forth and sought her far and wide, but found no trace of her. At night he set his beacon fire again and kept lone watch, but still she came not; and a new day found him a despairing, broken-hearted god. His misery could no longer brook suspense and solitude, and he set out to look for her. He told his sympathizing people he was going to search through all the island world for the lost light of his household and he would never come back anymore till he found her. The natives always implicitly believed that he was still pursuing his patient quest and that he would find his peerless spouse again someday, and come back; and so, for ages they waited and watched in trusting simplicity for his return. They gazed out wistfully over the sea at any strange appearance on its waters, thinking it might be their loved and lost protector. But Lono was to them as the rainbow-tinted future seen in happy visions of youth—for he never came.
Some of the old natives believed Cook was Lono to the day of their death; but many did not, for they could not understand how he could die if he was a god.
THE FIELD OF THE VANQUISHED GODS
Only a mile or so from Kealakekua Bay is a spot of historic interest—the place where the last battle was fought for idolatry. Of course we visited it and came away as wise as most people do who go and gaze upon such mementoes of the past when in an unreflective mood.
While the first missionaries were on their way around the Horn, the idolatrous customs which had obtained in the islands as far back as tradition reached were suddenly broken up. Old Kamehameha I was dead, and his son, Liholiho, the new King, was a free liver, a roystering, dissolute fellow, and hated the restraints of the ancient tabu. His assistant in the Government, Kaahumanu, the Queen dowager, was proud and high-spirited, and hated the tabu because it restricted the privileges of her sex and degraded all women very nearly to the level of brutes. So the case stood. Liholiho had half a'mind to put his foot down, Kaahumanu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and whisky did the rest. It was probably the first time whisky ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization. Liholiho came up to Kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast; the determined Queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless pitch, and then, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he moved deliberately forward and sat down with the women! They saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were appalled! Terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the King ate, still he lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were withheld! Then conviction came like a revelation—the superstitions of a hundred generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went up,
"The tabu is broken! the tabu is broken!"
Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful whisky preach the first sermon and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over the waves of the Atlantic.
The tabu broken and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege, the people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that Captain Cook was no god, merely because he groaned, and promptly killed him without stopping to inquire whether a god might not groan as well as a man if it suited his pleasure to do it; and satisfied that the idols were powerless to protect themselves they went to work at once and pulled them down—hacked them to pieces—applied the torch—annihilated them!
The pagan priests were furious. And well they might be; they had held the fattest offices in the land, and now they were beggared; they had been great—they had stood above the chiefs—and now they were vagabonds. They raised a revolt; they scared a number of people into joining their standard, and Kekuokalani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily persuaded to become their leader.
In the first skirmish the idolaters triumphed over the royal army sent against them, and full of confidence they resolved to march upon Kailua. The King sent an envoy to try and conciliate them, and came very near being an envoy short by the operation; the savages not only refused to listen to him, but wanted to kill him. So the King sent his men forth under Major General Kalaimoku and the two hosts met at Kuamoo. The battle was long and fierce—men and women fighting side by side, as was the custom—and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the tabu were dead in the land!
The royalists marched gayly home to Kailua glorifying the new dispensation. "There is no power in the gods," said they; "they are a vanity and a lie. The army with idols was weak; the army without idols was strong and victorious!" The nation was without a religion.
The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed by providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the gospel was planted as in a virgin soil.
At noon, we hired a Kanaka to take us down to the ancient ruins at Honaunau in his canoe—price two dollars—reasonable enough, for a sea voyage of eight miles, counting both ways.
The native canoe is an irresponsible looking contrivance. I cannot think of anything to liken it to but a boy's sled runner hollowed out, and that does not quite convey the correct idea. It is about fifteen feet long, high and pointed at both ends, is a foot and a half or two feet deep, and so narrow that if you wedged a fat man into it you might not get him out again. It seems to sit right upon top of the water like a duck, but it has an outrigger and does not upset easily if you keep still. This outrigger is formed of two long bent sticks, like plow handles, which project from one side, and to their outer ends is bound a curved beam composed of an extremely light wood, which skims along the surface of the water and thus saves you from an upset on that side, while the outrigger's weight is not so easily lifted as to make an upset on the other side a thing to be greatly feared. Still, until one gets used to sitting perched upon this knife-blade, he is apt to reason within himself that it would be more comfortable if there were just an outrigger or so on the other side also.
SLEEPY SCENERY
I had the bow seat, and Brown sat amidships and faced the Kanaka, who occupied the stern of the craft and did the paddling. With the first stroke the trim shell of a thing shot out from the shore like an arrow. There was not much to see. While we were on the shallow water of the reef, it was pastime to look down into the limpid depths at the large bunches of branching coral—the unique shrubbery of the sea. We lost that, though, when we got out into the dead blue water of the deep. But we had the picture of the surf, then, dashing angrily against the crag-bound shore and sending a foaming spray high into the air. There was interest in this beetling border, too, for it was honey-combed with quaint caves and arches and tunnels, and had a rude semblance of the dilapidated architecture of ruined keeps and castles rising out of the restless sea. When this novelty ceased to be a novelty, we had to turn our eyes shoreward and gaze at the long mountain with its rich green forests stretching up into the curtaining clouds, and at the specks of houses in rearward distance and the diminished schooner riding sleepily at anchor. And when these grew tiresome we dashed boldly into the midst of a school of huge, beastly porpoises engaged at their eternal game of arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again and keeping it up—always circling over, in that way, like so many well-submerged wheels. But the porpoises wheeled themselves away, and then we were thrown upon our own resources. It did not take many minutes to discover that the sun was blazing like a bonfire, and that the weather was of a melting temperature. It had a drowsing effect, too, and when Brown attempted to open a conversation, I let him close it again for lack of encouragement. I expected he would begin on the Kanaka, and he did: "Fine day, John." "Aole iki."
[I took that to mean "I don't know," and as equivalent to "I don't understand you."]
"Sorter sultry, though."
"Aole iki."
"You're right—at least I'll let it go at that, anyway. It makes you sweat considerable, don't it?"
"Aole iki."
"Right again, likely. You better take a bath when you get down here to Honaunau—you don't smell good, anyhow, and you can't sweat that way long without smelling worse."
"Aole iki."
"Oh, this ain't any use. This Injun don't seem to know anything but 'Owry ikky,' and the interest of that begins to let down after it's been said sixteen or seventeen times. I reckon I'll bail out a while for a change."
I expected he would upset the canoe, and he did. It was well enough to take the chances, though, because the sea had flung the blossom of a wave into the boat every now and then, until, as Brown said in a happy spirit of exaggeration, there was about as much water inside as there was outside. There was no peril about the upset, but there was a very great deal of discomfort. The author of the mischief thought there was compensation for it, however, in that there was a marked improvement in the Kanaka's smell afterwards.
At the end of an hour we had made the four miles, and landed on a level point of land, upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a tall cocoa-nut tree growing among them. Here was the ancient City of Refuge—a vast inclosure, whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the base, and fifteen or twenty feet high; an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet one way, and a fraction under seven hundred the other. Within this inclosure, in early times, have been three rude temples—each was 210 feet long by 100 wide, and 13 high.
In those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island the relatives of the deceased were privileged to take the murderer's life; and then a chase for life and liberty began—the outlawed criminal flying through pathless forests and over mountain and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the protecting walls of the City of Refuge, and the avenger of blood following hotly after him! Sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the panting pair sped through long files of excited natives, who watched the contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted refugee with sharp, inspirited ejaculations, and sending up a ringing shout of exultation when the saving gates closed upon him and the cheated pursuer sank exhausted at the threshold. But sometimes the flying criminal fell under the hand of the avenger at the very door, when one more brave stride, one more brief second of time would have brought his feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm. Where did these isolated pagans get this idea of a City of Refuge—this ancient Jewish custom?
This old sanctuary was sacred to all—even to rebels in arms and invading armies. Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and absolution obtained, the wretch with a price on his head could go forth without fear or without danger—he was tabu, and to harm him was death. The routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this place to claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved.
Close to a corner of the great inclosure is a round structure of stone, some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve feet in diameter. This was the place of execution. A high palisade of cocoa-nut piles shut out its cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude. Here criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure. If the man had been guilty of a high crime, the entire corpse was burned.
A STUDY FOR THE CURIOUS
The walls of the temple are a study. The same food for speculation that is offered the visitor to the Pyramids of Egypt he will find here—the mystery of how they were constructed by a people unacquainted with science and mechanics. The natives have no invention of their own for hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they have never even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lever. Yet some of the lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough, broken ground, and built into this wall, six or seven feet from the ground, are of prodigious size and would weigh tons. How did they transport and how raise them?
Both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front and are very creditable specimens of masonry. The blocks are of all manner of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest exactness. The gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is accurately preserved. No cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable of resisting storm and decay for centuries. Who built this temple, and how was it built, and when, are mysteries that may never be unraveled.
THERE WERE GIANTS IN THOSE DAYS
Outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end (it would weigh a few thousand pounds), which the high chief who held sway over this district many centuries ago brought hither on his shoulder one day to use as a lounge! This circumstance is established by the most reliable traditions. He used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and keep an eye on his subjects at work for him and see that there was no "soldiering" done. And no doubt there was not any done to speak of, because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to business on the part of an employee. He was fourteen or fifteen feet high. When he stretched himself at full length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored he woke the dead. These facts are all attested by irrefragable tradition.
Brown said: "I don't say anything against this Injun's inches, but I copper his judgment. He didn't know his own size. Because if he did, why didn't he fetch a rock that was long enough, while he was at it?"
KAAHUMANU'S ROCK
On the other site of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven feet long, seven feet wide and three feet thick. It is raised a foot or a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little stony pedestals. The same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the mountain, merely for fun (he had his own notions about fun, and they were marked by a quaint originality, as well), and propped it up as we find it now and as others may find it at a century hence, for it would take a score of horses to budge it from its position. They say that fifty or sixty years ago the proud Queen Kaahumanu used to fly to this rock for safety, whenever she had been making trouble with her fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased. But these Kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ablest efforts—for Kaahumanu was six feet high—she was bulky—she was built like an ox—and she could no more have squeezed under that rock than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill. What could she gain by it, even if she succeeded? To be chased and abused by her savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose under that rock would.
We walked a mile over a raised macadamized road of uniform width; a road paved with flat stones and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable degree of engineering skill. Some say that wise old pagan Kamehameha I planned and built it, but others say it was built so long before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out of the traditions. In either case, however, as the handiwork of an untaught and degraded race it is a thing of pleasing interest. The stones are worn and smooth, and pushed apart in places, so that the road has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of Rome which one sees in pictures.
A PETRIFIED NIAGARA
The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the base of the foothills—a congealed cascade of lava. Some old forgotten volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down the mountain side here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff some fifty feet high to the ground below. The flaming torrent cooled in the winds from the sea, and remains there to-day, all seamed, and frothed and tippled—a petrified Niagara. It is very picturesque, and withal so natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed. A smaller stream trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid about thirty feet high, which has the resemblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven together.
NATURE'S MINING ACHIEVEMENTS
We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed about fifty feet, but with no notable result, save that we made a discovery that may be of high interest to men of science. We discovered that the darkness in there was singularly like the darkness observable in other particularly dark places—exactly like it, I thought. I am borne out in this opinion by my comrade, who said he did not believe there was any difference but if there was, he judged it was in favor of this darkness here.
Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of Nature's mining abilities. Their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their roofs are gently arched. Their height is not uniform, however. We passed through one a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill and opens out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice whose foot rests in the waves of the sea. It is a commodious tunnel, except that there are occasionally places in it where one must stoop to pass under. The roof is lava, of course, and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed icicles an inch long, which hardened as they dripped. They project as closely together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed free of charge.
Brown tried to hurry me away from this vicinity by saying that if the expected land breeze sprang up while we were absent, the Boomerang would be obliged to put to sea without waiting for us; but I did not care; I knew she would land our saddles and shirt-collars at Kau, and we could sail in the superior schooner Emmeline [Emeline], Captain Crane, which would be entirely to my liking. Wherefore we proceeded to ransack the country for further notable curiosities.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, September 26, 1866
Honolulu, September 10, 1866.
I have visited Haleakala, Kilauea, Wailuku Valley, the Petrified Cataracts, the Pathway of the Great Hog God—in a word, I have visited all the principal wonders of the island, and now I come to speak of one which, in its importance to America, surpasses them all. A land which produces six, eight, ten, twelve, yea, even thirteen thousand pounds of sugar to the acre on unmanured soil! There are precious few acres of unmanured ground in Louisiana—none at all, perhaps—which will yield two thousand five hundred pounds of sugar; there is not an unmanured acre under cultivation in the Sandwich Islands which yields less. This country is the king of the sugar world, as far as astonishing productiveness is concerned. Heretofore the Mauritius has held this high place. Commodore Perry, in his report on the Mauritius, says:
"Before the introduction of guano into Mauritius the product of sugar on that island was from 2,000 to 2,500 pounds to the acre, but the increase since the application of this fertilizer has been so extraordinary as to be scarcely credible. In ordinary seasons the product has been from 6,000 to 7,000 pounds, and under peculiarly favorable circumstances it has even reached 8,000 pounds to the acre."
It was "scarcely credible." Guano has not been used in the Sandwich Islands at all, yet the sugar crop of Maui averages over 6,000 pounds straight through, all the time, for every acre cultivated. Last year the average was 7,000 pounds per acre on the Ulupalakua plantation; this year the "plant" crop on the Wailuku plantation averages 8,000. Portions of the Waikapu, Wailuku, Waihee, Ulupalakua, and many other plantations have yielded over 11,000 pounds to the acre, and twenty acres on the fourth named averaged the enormous yield of 13,000 pounds per acre one season! These things are "scarcely credible," but they are true, nevertheless.
By late Patent Office Reports it appears that the average sugar yield per acre throughout the world ranges from 500 to 1,000 pounds. The average in the Sandwich Islands, lumping good, bad and indifferent, is 5,000 pounds per acre.
PROGRESS OP THE ISLAND'S PRODUCTION
The cultivation of sugar in the islands dates back fourteen years; its cultivation as an actual business dates back only four years. This year the aggregate yield is 27,000,000 pounds. The cultivation of sugar in Louisiana dates back one hundred and fifteen years; its cultivation as an actual business dates back just one hundred years. When it had been a business forty years there were a hundred plantations in Louisiana—ten years later there were one hundred and fifty on the Mississippi, and the aggregate yield was only 10,000,000 pounds; a few years later it reached 25,000,000. Compare that with the 27,000,000 yield of twenty-nine small plantations in the Sandwich Islands. The sugar history of the islands may be compressed into a very small table. Aggregate yield of pounds for:
1852—730,000
1856—554,805
1857—700,556
1858—1,204,061
1851—1,826,620
1860—1,444,271
1861—2,567,498
1862—3,005,603
1863—5,292,121
1864—10,414,441
1865—15 318,097
1866—27,050.000
The exports of molasses during the entire year of 1865 amounted to half a million gallons—only a little more than was exported during the first six months of the present year.
The following table gives the yield in pounds of the twenty-nine principal plantations for the present year:
ISLAND OF HAWAII
Harto—150,000
Kohala—2,000,000
Onomea—1,200,000
Metcalf's—1,200,000
Kauiki—1,600,000
Hoonsing—600,000
Paukau—600,000
ISLAND OF MAUI
Makee—1,800,000
Haua—600,000
Waikapu—1,000,000
Wailuku—2,400,000
Bailey & Son—400,000
Lewers—2,000,000
Hobron—1,200,000
Haiku—800,000
East Maui—800,000
C. & Turton—1,000,000
Lahaina Sugar Co—1,200,000
Bal and Adams—700,000
ISLAND OF KAUAI
Princeville—2,000 000
Lihue—700 000
Koloa—700,000
Waipoa—300,000
ISLAND OF OAHU
Kauahai—200,000
Wilder—600,000
Kaalia—400,000
Story & Co—200,000
Halawa—400,000
Wailua—300,000
Total—27,050,000
When all the cane lands in the islands are under full cultivation, they will produce over 250,000,000 pounds of sugar annually.
COMPARATIVE
In Louisiana, sugar planters paid from $20 to $200 an acre for land, $500 to $1,000 apiece for negroes $50,000 to $100,000 for stock, mills, etc., raised 1,000 to 1,500 pounds of sugar to the acre, sold it for 5 and 6 cents—and got rich.
In the Islands wild sugar land is worth from $l to $20 an acre, mills and stock cost about the same as in Louisiana. The hire of each laborer is $100 a year—just about what it used to cost to board and clothe and doctor a negro—but there is no original outlay of $500 to $1,000 for the purchase of the laborer or $50 to $100 annual interest to be paid on the sum so laid out. The price of sugar is double what it was in Louisiana, and the actual net profit to the planter, notwithstanding high freights and high duties, is also double.
In Louisiana, it cost not less than $180,000 to purchase and stock with negroes, mill, animals, etc., a plantation of 300 acres, and its crop would yield $30,000 (allowing each acre to produce 2,000 pounds to the acre—which it wouldn't do). Deduct $60,000 outlay for negroes and half the cost of the land, $10,000, and the same plantation in the Islands would cost $110,000 and be ready for business. Its crop would yield 6,000 pounds to the acre and sell for $180,000 in San Francisco. If the planters of Louisiana have done well, surely those of the Islands ought.
When the production of a staple steadily increases and capital sticks to it and shows confidence in it, it is fair to presume that investments in it are considered secure and profitable. In 1839, '40 and '41, the yield in Louisiana ranged along in the neighborhood of 100,000,000 pounds annually—price, 4, 5 and 6 cents a pound. In 1852, '53 and '54, her yearly yield fluctuated between 350,000,000 and 500,000,000 pounds—market price, 3 1/2 to 5 cents. Thus, 1,000 to 1,500 pounds to the acre, at 3 1/2 to 6 cents, was so encouraging as to more than quadruple Louisiana's sugar production in less than thirty years. Six or eight thousand pounds to the acre, at 10 to 15 cents a pound, has encouraged the extravagant advance in the Islands from 3,000,000 pounds to 27,000,000, annual yield, in four years. Against this argument in favor of the security and productiveness of capital invested there, no logic can prevail.
MORE FIGURES
They have a bad system in the Sandwich Islands, whereby the planter has to ship twice and pay broker's commissions as often. This must change some day. The sugar pays a duty of three cents a pound when it enters San Francisco, and of course this comes out of the planter's pocket also. This year the Lewers (or Waihee), Wailuku, Ulupalakua, Princeville and Kohala plantations will each pay the United States about $60,000 in coin for duties alone; and the Waikapu, Onomea, Metcalf's and several other plantations whose names I could mention will each pay about half as much. The following bill of expenses will show the processes by which the planter's profits are diminished. The estimate was made in the island of Maui, in June, when sugar had been falling and had got down to $210 to $220 a ton in San Francisco:
ON A TON OF SUGAR
Barreling—$16.00
Drayage from mill—$1.00
Shipping to Honolulu—3.00
Brokerage in Honolulu—2.50
Freight to San Francisco—6.00
United States duty—60.00
Drayage in San Francisco—1.00
Brokerage in San Francisco—11.00
Total—$100.50
Gross sale 210.00
Remainder—$109.50
And out of that $109.50 must come about sixty per cent for plantation expenses and interest on the original outlay for land, mill, stock, etc.
The following estimate was made when sugar was worth a cent a pound more. It shows the business done the present year with three hundred acres, on a plantation which cost considerably under $90,000 for its stock, mill, lands and everything complete. The land was purchased unimproved, at an insignificant price. The present year's crop was 1,000 tons of sugar:
Gross yield—$240,000
Plantation expenses—$60,000
Freight, duties, etc., etc.—$120,000
Interest on original outlay—$10,000
Total disbursement—$190,000
Net profit—$50,000
There is more than one plantation in the islands which is worth, with all its appurtenances, $250,000, and will produce a $260,000 crop next year—perhaps this—and yield a profit of $70,000, after deducting all expenses of cultivating, shipping and disposal in San Francisco, and interest.
One of the best plantations in the Islands, though not one of the largest, by any means, cost, with its appurtenances, $100,000. All bills were promptly paid and no debts allowed to accrue and breed interest. The consequence was, that three years after the first plow disturbed its virgin soil, it had paid for itself and added a dividend of $20,000.
ADVANTAGES
In Louisiana they take off one plant and two crops usually before replanting, and so they do in the Islands, as a general thing, though some think the ratoons would run several years longer without disadvantage. The sugar crop in Louisiana is never sure—in the Islands, when favorably situated for irrigation, it never fails. In the former it must be immediately cut upon the first suspicion of a frost, whether it is mature or not—in the latter there is no frost, and the planter may cut it when it suits his convenience; it will stand several months after ripening without deteriorating. Not much of the cane of the species that tassel is cultivated, but even tassel cane can remain in the field four months after maturing without deteriorating.
In Louisiana the cane must always be cut before the frost comes, but in the Islands it may be cut whenever it is ripe—any day in the year. Consequently, the mills can take their time and grind comfortably along in all seasons, whereby the putting on of large extra forces and the employment of mills of immense capacity on small plantations to rush off a threatened crop and grind it is avoided. Louisiana has only five or six weeks to get off her crop in, and so the juice is generally green and the sugar necessarily inferior to that of the Islands.
The fuel chiefly used to make steam is the dry crushed cane which has passed through the mill. It is called "trash." It is mixed with hard wood, and the two combined make a very hot fire.
On the low ground of West Maui plant-cane matures in from eighteen to twenty months, and ratoons ripen in from fifteen to eighteen months. At Ulupalakua, whose lowest cane lands are 2,000 feet, and its highest 3,500 feet, above sea level, plant-cane requires all the way from twenty-two months to three years to ripen, according to elevation. One may see there plant-cane that is just sprouting, cane that is half-grown, cane that is full-grown, and first, second and third ratoons—all on the same plantation. At all seasons of the year there is cane ready for the mill, and labor in no department of sugar cultivation and manufacture need ever stop. A thousand acres are in cane, and from two hundred to three hundred of it are taken off yearly, yielding from eight hundred to one thousand tons of sugar. This plantation being high up in the neighborhood of the clouds, depends upon the frequent rains for irrigation, but 40,000 barrels of water are kept in cisterns for mill purposes, use of stock, etc., to be ready for emergencies. The West Maui plantations are all liberally irrigated from unfailing mountain streams.
In the hot neighborhood of Lahaina cane matures in nine or ten months, and a year is the average for the islands of Hawaii, Oahu and Kauai.
The sugar works of the Lewers plantation (formerly known as the Waihee plantation) are considered the model in the Islands, in the matter of cost, extent, completeness and efficiency. They make as fine an appearance as any between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and are doubtless as perfect in their appliances. The main building is some 200 feet long and about 40 wide (perhaps more) and proportionally high. Its walls are of stone masonry and very thick. It has a stately chimney that might answer for a shot tower. Being painted snow white, the mill building and the tall chimney stand out in strong contrast with the surrounding bright green cane-fields. A long, elevated flume in front, and a laboring overshot wheel of large diameter; at one side a broad peopled with Coolies spreading "trash" to dry; half a dozen Kanakas feeding cane to the whirling cylinders of the mill and a noisy procession of their countrymen driving cart loads of the material to their vicinity and dumping it—these things give the place a business-like aspect which is novel in the slumbering Sandwich Islands. The neighboring offices of the proprietor, the dwelling of the Superintendent, the store, blacksmith shop, quarters for white employees, native huts and a row of frame quarters for Chinese coolies, make Waihee a village of very respectable pretensions. The employees of the mill and plantation, with their families, number 350 persons, perhaps.
Within the commodious mill building I have described, are four long rows of iron vats (coolers), about twenty-five in a row, occupying almost the whole of the great floor, and with railways between the rows which are traversed by cars which convey the cooked sugar in a liquid state to the vats to be cooled. Each vat is about six feet long, three and a half or four feet wide and about two feet deep, and is able to contain an amount of sweetness equivalent to thirteen young women—in unpoetical figures, 1,400 pounds.
In the center is a small machine called a grinder—an exceedingly useful contrivance, and the only one I have seen in the Islands. When the sugar in the coolers becomes grained and hardened it has many hard lumps in it which it is difficult to reduce in the centrifugals, and this service the grinder performs. It is simply two swiftly-revolving iron cylinders, placed close together, and after the grained sugar has passed between them, lumps before are lumps no longer.
Close to the grinder are six centrifugals—small metallic tubs, whose sides are pierced with a few thousand pin-holes to the square inch. The nasty-looking grained sugar—it is about half black molasses, and looks like an inferior quality of mud—is dumped in, to the amount of a bushel; the tub is set to spinning around at the rate of ten or twelve hundred revolutions a minute—the mud begins to retreat from the center and cling to the sides—and in about three minutes the bottom is as clean as a dinner-plate; the sides are packed with a coating two or three inches thick of beautiful light straw-colored sugar ready for the table, and all the disagreeable molasses has been expressed through the innumerable pin-holes by the frightful velocity of the machine.
At the upper end of the apartment are several 500-gallon steam clarifiers, which receive the raw juice from the mill (which is a large machine on the same principle as the grinder, between whose cylinders the canes are squeezed dry of their juice) and cleanse it of its impurities.
Then it passes through pipes to the "train"—a row of great iron kettles, where it is well boiled and kept in constant motion.
The Weitzel pan receives the cane juice next, and completes the evaporation of the water from it. A revolving wheel paddles it into ceaseless motion here. This pan is heated by steam.
The persecuted juice goes hence to the "vacuum pan"—a very costly contrivance which is little used in the Islands. It is a huge iron globe, capable of containing several hundred gallons. The virtues claimed for it are, that it will boil the juice at half the temperature required by the ordinary open "concentrator," and that consequently the sugar will cool and grain quicker, that the sugar can even be grained in the pan, if necessary, and transferred at once to the centrifugals, instead of lingering in the coolers from four to seven days as is the case in other mills; and lastly, that it will make almost first quality sugar out of first molasses. The vacuum pan boils at a temperature of 140 to 160 degrees—the common open concentrator at 230 to 260. The juice is soon cooked and ready for the coolers, where it remains the best part of a day; then it passes through the grinder and from thence through the centrifugals. The perfected sugar is discharged through chutes into bins in the basement, and the expressed molasses sent back to be wrought into sugar or barreled for market. A cooper shop on the premises prepares the kegs to receive the sugar, and an ingenious affair along side the bins packs the article in them. It is a large auger set in a framework and worked by a screw; its blades resemble those of a propeller, and after being lowered into the empty barrel, it works upward as the sugar is shoveled in, packing it smoothly as it comes. Three Kanakas are required to tend it, and it does the work of six or seven. It packs 400 kegs in a day; a man's full day's work by the customary pounding process with a maul, is 60. This is the only machine for packing I have heard of in the Islands.
I have seen the cane cut in the fields; hauled to the works; squeezed through the mill; transferred to the clarifiers; thence to the train; thence to the Weitzel pan; thence to the vacuum pan; thence to the coolers—thence to the grinder; thence to the centrifugals; thence, as sugar, to the bins below; thence to the packer; thence to the artist who branded the quality and weight and the plantation's name upon the kegs, and thence to the schooner riding at anchor a mile and a half away—I have frequently seen this whole process gone through within two days, and yet I do not consider myself competent to make sugar.
Steam is used for half the machinery, and water power for the other half. The proprietor has just completed, at a cost of less than $7,000, a broad and deep ditch, four miles long, which carries an abundant stream of clear water along the base of the rear hills and full length of his plantation. It can be used to irrigate not only the 530 acres now in cane, but will add 210 more that were never susceptible of cultivation before—which addition is equivalent to adding $120,000 to the gross yield of the concern—that much, at any rate; the land produces the ordinary average—three tons to the acre.
I have described the Lewers mill as well as I could, and the same description will answer, in the main, for the Wailuku, Waikapu, Ulupalakua and all the other mills I have visited. No two mills are just alike, and yet no two are sufficiently unlike to render it worthwhile for a man to describe both.
The plantations I have named are all situated on the island of Maui. Perhaps a few acres of plant cane on either of them have fallen short of three tons this year, or any year, and choice pieces of ground on the Ulupalakua, Waikapu and Wailuku have yielded double that amount per acre. This plant cane averages about equally clear through—say three to three and a half tons per acre except in the case of the Wailuku, which reached an average of four tons this year. One twenty-acre lot on this plantation produced 10,000 pounds of sugar to the acre, and one eleven-acre lot 11,000 pounds per acre. I take the figures from the official account books of the Superintendent. The mill was turning out 200,000 pounds of excellent sugar a month when I was there.
I have said nothing about molasses. They work some of it over and reduce it to sugar, and each planter ships a few thousand dollars worth of it, and (as at Ulupalakua) feeds the third quality to his hogs, if he has any. Formerly inferior molasses was always thrown away, but here, lately, an enlightened spirit of progress has moved the Government to allow the erection of three distilleries I am told, and hereafter it will be made into whisky. [That remark will be shuddered at in some quarters. But I don't care. Ever since I have been a missionary to these islands I have been snubbed and kept down by the other missionaries, and so I will just bring our calling into disrepute occasionally by that sort of dreadful remarks. It makes me feel better.]
MONOPOLY
A San Francisco refinery company once contracted for all the sugar crop of the Islands for a year, to be taken directly from the coolers by its agent and paid for at the rate of about seven or seven and a half cents a pound, I think it was. This saved the planters a great deal of trouble and some expense, but they lost confidence and broke up the arrangement. It would have been a profitable thing for all parties if it could have been continued, and I think the planters would like to give some responsible man the sole control of the sugar market of the Pacific coast on similar terms.
LABOR
The principal labor used on the plantations is that of Kanaka men and women—six dollars to eight dollars a month and find them, or eight to ten dollars and let them find themselves. The contract with the laborer is in writing, and the law rigidly compels compliance with it; if the man shirks a day's work and absents himself, he has to work two days for it when his time is out. If he gets unmanageable and disobedient, he is condemned to work on the reef for a season, at twenty-five cents a day. If he is in debt to the planter for such purchases as clothing and provisions, however, when his time expires, the obligation is canceled—the planter has no recourse at law.
The sugar product is rapidly augmenting every year, and day by day the Kanaka race is passing away. Cheap labor had to be procured by some means or other, and so the Government sends to China for Coolies and farms them out to the planters at $5 a month each for five years, the planter to feed them and furnish them with clothing. The Hawaiian agent fell into the hands of Chinese sharpers, who showed him some superb Coolie samples and then loaded his ships with the scurviest lot of pirates that ever went unhung. Some of them were cripples, some were lunatics, some afflicted with incurable diseases and nearly all were intractable, full of fight and animated by the spirit of the very devil. However, the planters managed to tone them down and now they like them very well. Their former trade of cutting throats on the China seas has made them uncommonly handy at cutting cane. They are steady, industrious workers when properly watched. If the Hawaiian agent had been possessed of a reasonable amount of business tact he could have got experienced rice and sugar cultivators—peaceable, obedient men and women—for the same salaries that must be paid to these villains, and done them a real service by giving them good homes and kind treatment in place of the wretchedness and brutality they experience in their native land. Some of the women are being educated as house servants, and I observe that they do not put on airs, and "sass" their masters and mistresses, and give daily notice to quit, and try to boss the whole concern, as the tribe do in California.
COOLIES FOR CALIFORNIA
You will have Coolie labor in California some day. It is already forcing its superior claims upon the attention of your great mining, manufacturing and public improvement corporations. You will not always go on paying $80 and $100 a month for labor which you can hire for $5. The sooner California adopts Coolie labor the better it will be for her. It cheapens no labor of men's hands save the hardest and most exhausting drudgery—drudgery which neither intelligence nor education are required to fit a man for—drudgery which all white men abhor and are glad to escape from. You may take note of the fact that to adopt Coolie labor could work small hardship to the men who now do the drudgery, for every ship-load of Coolies received there and put to work would so create labor—would permit men to open so many mines they cannot afford to work now, and begin so many improvements they dare not think of at present—that all the best class of the working population who might be emancipated from the pick and shovel by that ship-load would find easier and more profitable employment in superintending and overseeing the Coolies. It would be more profitable, as you will readily admit, to the great mining companies of California and Nevada to pay 300 Chinamen an aggregate of $1,500 a month—or five times the amount, if you think it more just—than to pay 300 white men $30,000 a month. Especially when the white men would desert in a body every time a new mining region was discovered, but the Chinamen would have to stay until their contracts were worked out.
People are always hatching fine schemes for inducing Eastern capital to the Pacific coast. Yonder in China are the capitalists you want—and under your own soil is a bank that will not dishonor their checks. The mine purchased for a song by Eastern capital would pour its stream of wealth past your door and empty it in New York. You would be little the richer for that. There are hundreds of men in California who are sitting on their quartz leads, watching them year after year, and hoping for the day when they will pay—and growing gray all the time—hoping for a cheapening of labor that will enable them to work the mine or warrant another man in buying it—who would soon be capitalists if Coolie labor were adopted.
The Mission Woolen Mill Company take California wool and weave from it fabrics of all descriptions, which they challenge all America to surpass, and sell at prices which defy all foreign competition. The secret is in their cheap Chinese labor. With white labor substituted the mills would have to stop.
The Pacific Railroad Company employ a few thousand Chinamen at about $30 a month, and have white men to oversee them. They pronounce it the cheapest, the best, and most quiet, peaceable and faithful labor they have tried.
Some of the heaviest mining corporations in the State have it in contemplation to employ Chinese labor. Give this labor to California for a few years and she would have fifty mines opened where she has one now—a dozen factories in operation where there is one now—a thousand tons of farm produce raised where there are a hundred now—leagues of railroad where she has miles to-day, and a population commensurate with her high and advancing prosperity.
With the Pacific Railroad creeping slowly but surely toward her over mountain and desert and preparing to link her with the East, and with the China mail steamers about to throw open to her the vast trade of our opulent coast line stretching from the Amoor river to the equator, what State in the Union has so splendid a future before her as California? Not one, perhaps. She should awake and be ready to join her home prosperity to these tides of commerce that are so soon to sweep toward her from the east and the west.
To America it has been vouchsafed to materialize the vision, and realize the dream of centuries, of the enthusiasts of the old world. We have found the true Northwest Passage—we have found the true and only direct route to the bursting coffers of "Ormus and of Ind"—to the enchanted land whose mere drippings, in the ages that are gone, enriched and aggrandized ancient Venice, first, then Portugal, Holland, and in our own time, England—and each in succession they longed and sought for the fountainhead of this vast Oriental wealth, and sought in vain. The path was hidden to them, but we have found it over the waves of the Pacific, and American enterprise will penetrate to the heart and center of its hoarded treasures, its imperial affluence. The gateway of this path is the Golden Gate of San Francisco; its depot, its distributing house, is California—her customers are the nations of the earth; her transportation wagons will be the freight cars of the Pacific Railroad, and they will take up these Indian treasures at San Francisco and flash them across the continent and the vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company will deliver them in Europe fifteen days sooner than Europe could convey them thither by any route of her own she could devise.
California has got the world where it must pay tribute to her. She is about to be appointed to preside over almost the exclusive trade of 450,000,000 people—the almost exclusive trade of the most opulent land on earth. It is the land where the fabled Aladdin's lamp lies buried—and she is the new Aladdin who shall seize it from its obscurity and summon the geni and command him to crown her with power and greatness, and bring to her feet the hoarded treasures of the earth!
I may have wandered away from my original subject a little, but it is no matter—I keep thinking about the new subject, and I must have wandered into it eventually anyhow.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, October 25, 1866
Kilauea, June, 1866.
Leaving the caves and tunnels, we returned to the road and started in a general direction toward Honaunau but were presently attracted by a number of holes in a bluff not more than three or four hundred yards from the place we had just left. We concluded to go up and examine them. Our native boatman, who had faithfully followed us thus far, and who must have been bearing the chief part of the heat and burden of the day, from the amount of perspiring he was doing looked a little discouraged, I thought and therefore we signified to him, in elaborate pantomime, that he might sit down and wait till we came back. We scrambled through a tangle of weeds which concealed great beds of black and wrinkled lava, and finally reached the low bluff. But the holes were just high enough to be out of reach. I bent a little below the lower one and ordered Brown to mount my shoulders and enter it. He said he could hold me easier than I could hold him, and I said he was afraid to go in that dark cavern alone. He used some seditious language of small consequence and then climbed up and crawled in. I suppose the fellow felt a little nervous, for he paused up there on his hands and knees and peered into the darkness for some minutes with nothing of him visible in the face of the precipice but his broad boot soles and a portion of his person which a casual acquaintance might not have recognized at a cursory glance. Then he and his boot soles slowly disappeared. I waited a minute in a state of lively curiosity; another minute with flagging curiosity as regarded the cave, but with a new-born attention to the pelting sun; another long minute with no curiosity at all—I leaned drowsily against the wall. And about this time the investigator backed suddenly out of the hole and crushed me to the earth. We rolled down the slight declivity and brought up in a sitting posture face to face. I looked astonished, maybe, but he looked terrified.
"It's one of them infernal old ancient graveyards!" he said.
"No? This is why the superstitious Kanaka staid behind then?"
"Yes, likely. I suppose you didn't know that boneyard was there, else you'd have gone in yourself, instead of me. Certainly you would—oh, of course."
"Yes, you are right—but how is it in there, Brown? Compose yourself, lad—what did you find?"
"Oh, it's easy enough to talk, but I'm not going to prospect any more of them holes, not if I know myself, I aint, and I think I do; it aint right, anyway, to be stirring up a dead man that's done his work and earned his rest, and besides it aint comfortable."
"But what did you see, Brown—what did you see?"
"I didn't see anything, at first—I only felt. It was dark as the inside of a whale in there, and I crawled about fifteen feet and then fetched up against something that was wood with my nose and skinned the end of it a little where you notice it's bloody. I felt of it with my hand, and judged it to be a canoe, and reached in and took out something and backed out till it was light enough, and then I found it was a withered hand of one of them rusty old kings. And so l laid it down and come out."
"Yes, you did 'come out'—and you 'come out' in something of a hurry, too. Give me a light."
I climbed in and put the relic back into the canoe, with its fellows, and I trust the spirit of the deceased, if it was hovering near, was satisfied with this mute apology for our unintentional sacrilege.
And thus another item of patiently acquired knowledge grew shaky. We had learned, early, that the bones of great Chiefs were hidden, like those of Kamehameha the Great; the information was accepted until we learned that it was etiquette to convey them to the volcano and cast them into the lakes of fire; that was relied on till we discovered that the legitimate receptacle for them was the holes in the precipice of Kealakekua; but now found that the walls of the City of Refuge contain orifices in which the bones of the great Chiefs are deposited, and lo! here were more in this distant bluff!—and bones of great Chiefs, too—all bones of great Chiefs. The fact is, there is a lie out somewhere.
FREE-AND-EASY FASHIONS OF NATIVE WOMEN
Tired and over-heated, we plodded back to the ruined temple. We were blistered on face and hands, our clothes were saturated with perspiration and we were burning with thirst. Brown ran, the last hundred yards, and without waiting to take off anything but his coat and boots jumped into the sea, bringing up in the midst of a party of native girls who were bathing. They scampered out, with a modesty which was not altogether genuine, I suspect, and ran, seizing their clothes as they went. He said they were very handsomely formed girls. I did not notice, particularly.
These creatures are bathing about half their time, I think. If a man were to see a nude woman bathing at noonday in the States, he would be apt to think she was very little better than she ought to be, and proceed to favor her with an impudent stare. But the case is somewhat different here. The thing is so common that the white residents pass carelessly by, and pay no more attention to it than if the rollicking wenches were so many cattle. Within the confines of even so populous a place as Honolulu, and in the very center of the sultry city of Lahaina, the women bathe in the brooks at all hours of the day. They are only particular about getting undressed safely, and in this science they all follow the same fashion. They stoop down snatch the single garment over the head, and spring in. They will do this with great confidence within thirty steps of a man. Finical highflyers wear bathing dresses, but of course that is an affectation of modesty born of the high civilization to which the natives have attained, and is confined to a limited number.
Many of the native women are prettily formed, but they have a noticeable peculiarity as to shape—they are almost as narrow through the hips as men are.
EXIT, BOOMERANG
As we expected, there was no schooner Kangaroo at Kealakekua when we got back there, but the Emmeline [Emeline] was riding quietly at anchor in the same spot so lately occupied by our vessel, and that suited us much better. We waited until the land breeze served, and then put to sea. The land breeze begins to blow soon after the sun sets and the earth has commenced cooling; the sea breeze rushes inland in the morning as soon as the sun has begun to heat the earth again.
TRANQUIL SCENERY
All day we sailed along within three to six miles of the shore. The view in that direction was very fine. We were running parallel with a long mountain that apparently had neither beginning nor end. It rose with a regular swell from the sea till its forests diminished to velvety shrubbery and were lost in the clouds. If there were any peaks we could not see them. The white mists hung their fringed banners down and hid everything above a certain well defined altitude. The mountain side, with its sharply marked patches of trees; the smooth green spaces and avenues between them; a little white habitation nestling here and there; a tapering church-spire or two thrust upward through the dense foliage; and a bright and cheerful sunlight over all—slanted up abreast of us like a vast picture, framed in between ocean and clouds. It was marked and lined and tinted like a map. So distinctly visible was every door and window in one of the white dwellings, that it was hard to believe it was two or three miles from our ship and two thousand feet above the level of the sea. Yet it was—and it was several thousand feet below the top of the mountain, also.
INHERENT UNSELFISHNESS OF THE NATIVES
The night closed down dark and stormy. The sea ran tolerably high and the little vessel tossed about like a cork. About nine or ten o'clock we saw a torch glimmering on the distant shore, and presently we saw another coming toward us from the same spot; every moment or so we could see it flash from the top of a wave and then sink out of sight again. From the speed it made I knew it must be one of those fleet native canoes. I watched it with some anxiety, because I wondered what desperate extremity could drive a man out on such a night and on such a sea to play with his life—for I did not believe a canoe could live long in such rough water. I was on the forecastle. Pretty soon I began to think maybe the fellow stood some chance; shortly I almost believed he would make the trip, though his light was shooting up and down dangerously; in another minute he darted across our bow and I caught the glare from his torch in my face. I sprang aft then to get out of him his dire and dreadful news.
It was a swindle. It was one of those simple natives risking his life to bring the Captain a present of half a dozen chickens.
"He has got an ax to grind." I spoke in that uncharitable spirit of the civilized world which suspects all men's motives—which cannot conceive of an unselfish thought wrought into an unselfish deed by any man whatsoever, be he Pagan or Christian.
"None at all," said the Captain; "he expects nothing in return—wouldn't take a cent if I offered it—wouldn't thank me for it, anyway. It's the same instinct that made them load Captain Cook's ships with provisions. They think it is all right—they don't want any return. They will bring us plenty of such presents before we get to Kau."
I saw that the Kanaka was starting over the side again. I said:
"Call him back and give him a drink anyhow; he is wet—and dry also, maybe."
"Pison him with that Jamaica rum down below," said Brown.
"It can't be done—five hundred dollars fine to give or sell liquor to a native."
The Captain walked forward then to give some orders, and Brown took the Kanaka down stairs and "pisoned" him. He was delighted with a species of rum which Brown had tried by mistake for claret during the day, and had afterwards made his will, under the conviction that he could not survive it.
They are a strange race, anyhow, these natives. They are amazingly unselfish and hospitable. To the wayfarer who visits them they freely offer their houses, food, beds, and often their wives and daughters. If a Kanaka who has starved two days gets hold of a dollar he will spend it for poi, and then bring in his friends to help him devour it. When a Kanaka lights his pipe he only takes one or two whiffs and then passes it around from one neighbor to another until it is exhausted. The example of white selfishness does not affect their native unselfishness any more than the example of white virtue does their native licentiousness. Both traits are born in them—are in their blood and bones and cannot be educated out.
IN DISTRESS
By midnight we had got to within four miles of the place we were to stop at—Kau, but to reach it we must weather a point which was always hard to get around on account of contrary winds.
The ship was put about and we were soon standing far out to sea. I went to bed. The vessel was pitching so fearfully an hour afterward that it woke me up. Directly the Captain came down, looking greatly distressed, and said:
"Slip on your clothes quick and go up and see to your friend. It has been storming like everything for fifteen or twenty minutes, and I thought at first he was only seasick and could not throw up, but now he appears to be out of his head. He lies there on the deck and moans and says, 'Poetry—poetry—oh, me.' It is all he says. What the devil should he say that for? Hurry!"
Before the speech was half over I was plunging about the cabin with the rolling of the ship, and struggling frantically to get into my clothes. But the last sentence or two banished my fears and soothed me, I understood the case.
I was soon on deck in the midst of the darkness and the whistling winds, and with assistance groped my way to the sufferer. I told him I had nothing but some verses built out of alternate lines from the "Burial of Sir John Moore" and the "Destruction of the Sennacherib," and proceeded to recite them:
THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE
And other parties, subsequently to the Destruction of the Sennacherib.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
The turf with our bayonets turning,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,
And our lanterns dimly burning.
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
When the clock told the hour for retiring—
The lances uplifted, the trumpet unblown,
Though the foe were sullenly firing.
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
As his corse to the ramparts we hurried,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord,
O'er the grave when our hero we buried.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed—
And we far away on the billow!
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
As we bitterly thought on the morrow,
And their hearts but once heaved and forever grew still,
But we spake not a word of sorrow!
And there lay the steed, with his nostril all wide
In the grave where a Briton hath laid him,
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him.
And there lay the rider, distorted and pale,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory,
With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail—
So we left him alone in his glory!
"It is enough. God bless you!" said Brown, and threw up everything he had eaten for three days.
KAU AND WAIOHINU
All day the next day we fought that treacherous point—always in sight of it but never able to get around it. At night we tacked out forty or fifty miles, and the following day at noon we made it and came in and anchored.
We went ashore in the first boat and landed in the midst of a black, rough, lava solitude, and got horses and started to Waiohinu, six miles distant. The road was good, and our surroundings fast improved. We were soon among green groves and flowers and occasional plains of grass. There are a dozen houses at Waiohinu, and they have got sound roofs, which is well, because the place is tolerably high upon the mountainside and it rains there pretty much all the time. The name means "sparkling water," and refers to a beautiful mountain stream there, but they ought to divide up and let it refer to the rain also.
A sugar plantation has been started at Waiohinu, and 150 acres planted, a year ago, but the altitude ranges from 1,800 to 2,500 feet above sea level, and it is thought it will take another year for the cane to mature.
We had an abundance of mangoes, papaias and bananas here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It has a soft pulp, like a pawpaw, and is eaten with a spoon. The papaia looks like a small squash, and tastes like a pawpaw.
In this rainy spot trees and flowers flourish luxuriantly, and three of those trees—two mangoes and an orange—will live in my memory as the greenest, freshest and most beautiful I ever saw—and withal, the stateliest and most graceful. One of those mangoes stood in the middle of a large grassy yard, lord of the domain and incorruptible sentinel against the sunshine. When one passed within the compass of its broad arms and its impenetrable foliage he was safe from the pitiless glare of the sun—the protecting shade fell everywhere like a somber darkness.
In some places on the islands where the mango refused to bear fruit, a remedy suggested by the Scientific American has been tried with success. It consists in boring a hole in the trunk of the tree, filling the same with gunpowder and plugging it up. Perhaps it might be worthwhile to try it on other fruit trees.
THE CISTERN TREE
Speaking of trees reminds me that a species of large-bodied tree grows along the road below Waiohinu whose crotch is said to contain tanks of fresh water at all times; the natives suck it out through a hollow weed, which always grows near. As no other water exists in that wild neighborhood, within a space of some miles in circumference, it is considered to be a special invention of Providence for the behoof of the natives. I would rather accept the story than the deduction, because the latter is so manifestly but hastily conceived and erroneous. If the happiness of the natives had been the object, the tanks would have been filled with whisky.
KAU INDEPENDENCE—JUDICIAL SAGACITY
The natives of the district of Kau have always dwelt apart from their fellow islanders—cut off from them by a desolate stretch of lava on one side and a mountain on the other—and they have ever shown a spirit and an independence not elsewhere to be found in Hawaii-nei. They are not thoroughly tamed yet, nor civilized or Christianized. Kau was the last district on the island that submitted to Kamehameha I. Two heaps of stones near the roadside mark where they killed two of the early Kings of Hawaii. On both occasions these monarchs were trying to put down rebellion. They used to make their local chiefs very uncomfortable sometimes, and ten years ago, in playful mood, they made two Tax Collectors flee for their lives.
Most natives lie some, but these lie a good deal. They still believe in the ancient superstitions of the race, and believe in the Great Shark God and pray each other to death. When sworn by the Great Shark God they are afraid to speak anything but the truth; but when sworn on the Bible in Court they proceed to soar into flights of fancy lying that make the inventions of Munchausen seem poor and trifling in comparison.
They worship idols in secret, and swindle the wayfaring stranger.
Some of the native Judges and Justices of the Peace of the Kau district have been rare specimens of judicial sagacity. One of them considered that all the fines for adultery ($30 for each offense) properly belonged to himself. He also considered himself a part of the Government, and that if he committed that crime himself it was the same as if the Government committed it, and, of course, it was the duty of the Government to pay the fine. Consequently, whenever he had collected a good deal of money from other Court revenues, he used to set to work and keep on convicting himself of adultery until he had absorbed all the money on hand in paying the fines.
The adultery law has been so amended that each party to the offense is now fined $30; and I would remark, in passing, that if the crime were invariably detected and the fines collected, the revenues of the Hawaiian Government would probably exceed those of the United States. I trust the observation will not be considered in the light of an insinuation, however.
An old native Judge at Hilo once acquitted all the parties to a suit and then discovering, as he supposed, that he had no further hold on them and thus was out of pocket, he condemned the witnesses to pay the costs!
A Kau Judge, whose two years commission had expired, redated it himself and went on doing business as complacently as ever. He said it didn't make any difference—he could write as good a hand as the King could.
THE PROCESSION MOVETH AGAIN
Brown bought a horse from a native at Waiohinu for twelve dollars, but happening to think of the horse jockeying propensities of the race, he removed the saddle and found that the creature needed "half-soling," as he expressed it. Recent hard riding had polished most of the hide off his back. He bought another and the animal went dead lame before we got to the great volcano, forty miles away. I bought a reckless little mule for fifteen dollars, and I wish I had him yet. One mule is worth a dozen horses for a mountain journey in the Islands.
The first eighteen miles of the road lay mostly down by the sea, and was pretty well sprinkled with native houses. The animals stopped at all of them—a habit they had early acquired; natives stop a few minutes at every shanty they come to, to swap gossip, and we were forced to do likewise—but we did it under protest.
Brown's horse jogged along well enough for 16 or 17 miles, but then he came down to a walk and refused to improve on it. We had to stop and intrude upon a gentleman who was not expecting us, and who I thought did not want us, either, but he entertained us handsomely, nevertheless, and has my hearty thanks for his kindness.
We looked at the ruddy glow cast upon the clouds above the volcano, only twenty miles away, now (the fires had become unusually active a few days before) for awhile after supper, and then went to bed and to sleep without rocking.
We stopped a few miles further on, the next morning, to hire a guide, but happily were saved the nuisance of traveling with a savage we could not talk with. The proprietor and another gentleman intended to go to the volcano the next day, and they said they would go at once if we would stop and take lunch. We signed the contract, of course. It was the usual style. We had found none but pleasant people on the island, from the time we landed at.
To get through the last twenty miles, guides are indispensable. The whole country is given up to cattle ranching, and is crossed and recrossed by a riddle of "bull paths" which is hopelessly beyond solution by a stranger.
IN FAIRY LAND
Portions of that little journey bloomed with beauty. Occasionally we entered small basins walled in with low cliffs, carpeted with greenest grass, and studded with shrubs and small trees whose foliage shone with an emerald brilliancy. One species, called the mamona [mamani], with its bright color, its delicate locust leaf, so free from decay or blemish of any kind, and its graceful shape, chained the eye with a sort of fascination. The rich verdant hue of these fairy parks was relieved and varied by the splendid carmine tassels of the ohia tree. Nothing was lacking but the fairies themselves.
THE KINGDOM OF DESOLATION
As we trotted up the almost imperceptible ascent and neared the volcano, the features of the country changed. We came upon a long dreary desert of black, swollen, twisted, corrugated billows of lava—blank and dismal desolation! Stony hillocks heaved up, all seamed with cracked wrinkles and broken open from center to circumference in a dozen places, as if from an explosion beneath. There had been terrible commotion here once, when these dead waves were seething fire; but now all was motionless and silent—it was a petrified sea! The narrow spaces between the upheavals were partly filled with volcanic sand, and through it we plodded laboriously. The invincible ohia struggled for a footing even in this desert waste, and achieved it—towering above the billows here and there, with trunks flattened like spears of grass in the crevices from which they sprang.
We came at last to torn and ragged deserts of scorched and blistered lava—to plains and patches of dull gray ashes—to the summit of the mountain, and these tokens warned us that we were nearing the palace of the dread goddess Pele, the crater of Kilauea.
MARK TWAIN.
The Sacramento Daily Union, November 16, 1866
Volcano House,
June 3d—Midnight.
I suppose no man ever saw Niagara for the first time without feeling disappointed. I suppose no man ever saw it the fifth time without wondering how he could ever have been so blind and stupid as to find any excuse for disappointment in the first place. I suppose that any one of nature's most celebrated wonders will always look rather insignificant to a visitor at first, but on a better acquaintance will swell and stretch out and spread abroad, until it finally grows clear beyond his grasp—becomes too stupendous for his comprehension. I know that a large house will seem to grow larger the longer one lives in it, and I also know that a woman who looks criminally homely at a first glance will often so improve upon acquaintance as to become really beautiful before the month is out.
I was disappointed when I saw the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low way-ah) to-day for the first time. It is a comfort to me to know that I fully expected to be disappointed, however, and so, in one sense at least, I was not disappointed.
As we "raised" the summit of the mountain and began to canter along the edge of the crater, I heard Brown exclaim, "There's smoke, by George!" (poor infant—as if it were the most surprising thing in the world to see smoke issuing from a volcano), and I turned my head in the opposite direction and began to crowd my imagination down. When I thought I had got it reduced to about the proper degree, I resolutely faced about and came to a dead halt. "Disappointed, anyhow!" I said to myself "Only a considerable hole in the ground—nothing to Haleakala—a wide, level, black plain in the bottom of it, and a few little sputtering jets of fire occupying a place about as large as an ordinary potato-patch, up in one corner—no smoke to amount to anything. And these 'tremendous' perpendicular walls they talk about, that inclose the crater! they don't amount to a great deal, either; it is a large cellar—nothing more—and precious little fire in it, too." So I soliloquized. But as I gazed, the "cellar" insensibly grew. I was glad of that, albeit I expected it. I am passably good at judging of heights and distances, and I fell to measuring the diameter of the crater. After considerable deliberation I was obliged to confess that it was rather over three miles, though it was hard to believe it at first. It was growing on me, and tolerably fast. And when I came to guess at the clean, solid, perpendicular walls that fenced in the basin, I had to acknowledge that they were from 600 to 800 feet high, and in one or two places even a thousand, though at a careless glance they did not seem more than two or three hundred. The reason the walls looked so low is because the basin inclosed is so large. The place looked a little larger and a little deeper every five minutes, by the watch. And still it was unquestionably small; there was no getting around that. About this time I saw an object which helped to increase the size of the crater. It was a house perched on the extreme edge of the wall, at the far end of the basin, two miles and a half away; it looked like a martin box under the eaves of a cathedral! That wall appeared immensely higher after that than it did before.
I reflected that night was the proper time to view a volcano, and Brown, with one of those eruptions of homely wisdom which rouse the admiration of strangers, but which custom has enabled me to contemplate calmly, said five o'clock was the proper time for dinner, and therefore we spurred up the animals and trotted along the brink of the crater for about the distance it is from the Lick House, in San Francisco, to the Mission, and then found ourselves at the Volcano House.
On the way we passed close to fissures several feet wide and about as deep as the sea, no doubt, and out of some of them steam was issuing. It would be suicidal to attempt to travel about there at night. As we approached the lookout house I have before spoken of as being perched on the wall, we saw some objects ahead which I took for the brilliant white plant called the "silver sword," but they proved to be "buoys"—pyramids of stones painted white, so as to be visible at night, and set up at intervals to mark the path to the lookout house and guard unaccustomed feet from wandering into the abundant chasms that line the way.
By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the lookout-house. After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark and then started to the crater. The first glance in that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty. There was a heavy fog over the crater and it was splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below. The illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly against overhanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked like.
THE VISION OF HELL AND ITS ANGELS
Arrived at the little thatched look out house, we rested our elbows on the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us. The view was a startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough.
I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The "cellar" was tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed—made them seem like the camp-fires of a great army far away. Here was room for the imagination to work! You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away—and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert—and even then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!—to the fires and far beyond! You could not compass it—it was the idea, of eternity made tangible—and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!
The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it—imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!
Here and there were gleaming holes twenty feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava—the color a dazzling white just tinged with yellow—was boiling and surging furiously; and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like the "spokes" of a lady's fan, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing—and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust broke through—split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the "thaw" maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again. During a "thaw," every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inwards by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she had just taken in sail and dropped anchor—provided one can imagine those ropes on fire.
Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very beautiful. They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged sprays of stringy red fire—of about the consistency of mush, for instance—from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks—a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snowflakes!
We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not strictly "square"), and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such a splendid display—since any visitor had seen anything more than the now snubbed and insignificant "North" and "South" lakes in action. We had been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the "Record Book" at the Volcano House, and were posted.
I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a webwork of lava streams. In its individual capacity it looked very little more respectable than a schoolhouse on fire. True, it was about nine hundred feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides it was so distant from us. We heard a week ago that the volcano was getting on a heavier spree than it had indulged in for many years, and I am glad we arrived just at the right moment to see it under full blast.
I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great, heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. It makes three distinct sounds—a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large low pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her wheels. The smell of sulfur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.
THE PILLAR OF FIRE
We left the lookout house at ten o'clock in a half cooked condition because of the heat from Pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets (for the night was cold) returned to the hotel. After we got out in the dark we had another fine spectacle. A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a pale rose tint in the depressions between. It glowed like a muffled torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith. I thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious "pillar of fire." And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic "pillar of fire" was like, which almost amounted to a revelation.
ACCOMMODATIONS FOR MAN AND BEAST
It is only at very long intervals that I mention in a letter matters which properly pertain to the advertising columns, but in this case it seems to me that to leave out the fact that there is a neat, roomy, well furnished and well kept hotel at the volcano would be to remain silent upon a point of the very highest importance to anyone who may desire to visit the place. The surprise of finding a good hotel in such an outlandish spot startled me considerably more than the volcano did. The house is new—built three or four months ago—and the table is good. One could not easily starve here even if the meats and groceries were to give out, for large tracts of land in the vicinity are well paved with excellent strawberries. One can have as abundant a supply as he chooses to call for. There has never heretofore been anything in this locality for the accommodation of travellers but a crazy old native grass hut, scanty fare, hard beds of matting and a Chinese cook.
MARK TWAIN.
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, September 4, 1866
SAM CLEMENTS.—"Mark Twain,"—which is merely his nom de plume,—has been by us advised to correspond with the HERALD in his vivid and gossipping style. We shall expect letters from him soon; and as our people are aware of the vim and pungency of his pen we look forward to an interesting addition of latest news to our columns.
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, September 5, 1866
We have just been reading over Sam Clement's [sic] last letter, and in the flowing instance he blunders on so much truth that we have a notion to countermand our order for him to communicate with us. Speaking of photographs he says they are all false, and feelingly remarks,
No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody—hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the meekest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and a fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look serious when he sits for his picture the photograph makes him look as solemn as an owl; if he smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively; if he tries to look pleasant, the photograph looks silly; if he makes the fatal mistake of attempting to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down as an ass. The sun never looks through the photographic instrument that it does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a "negative"—a contradiction—a misrepresentation—a falsehood. I speak feelingly of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Soloman, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot, and I am neither.
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, September 14, 1866
It seems that Mark Twain while here, not only borrowed "Jarves" History of Captain Cook and carried it off, vi et armis; but that he also appropriated from its pages the following synopsis of the event of the navigator's death:
Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Wherever he went among the islands he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill treatment.
When he landed at Kealakekua Bay, a multitude of natives, variously estimated at some ten to fifteen thousand, flocked about him and conducted him to the principal temple with more than royal honors—with honors suited to their chiefest god, for which they took him to be. They called him Lono—a deity who had resided at that place in a former age, but who had gone away and had ever since been anxiously expected back by the people. When Cook approached the awe-stricken people, they prostrated themselves and hid their faces. His coming was announced in a loud voice by heralds, and those who had not time to get out of the way after prostrating themselves, were trampled underfoot by the following throngs. Arrived at the temple, he was taken into the most sacred part and placed before the principal idol.
These distinguished civilities were never offered by the islanders to mere human beings. Cook was mistaken for their absent god; he accepted the situation and helped the natives to deceive themselves. His conduct might have been wrong in a moral point of view, but his policy was good in conniving at the deception, and proved itself so; the belief that he was a god saved him a good while from being killed—protected him thoroughly and completely, until, in an unlucky moment, it was discovered that he was only a man. His death followed instantly. Jarves, from whose history, principally, I am condensing this narrative, thinks his destruction was a direct consequence of his dishonest personation of the god; but unhappily for the argument, the historian proves over and over again that the false Lono was spared time and time again when simple Captain Cook of the Royal Navy would have been destroyed with small ceremony.
The idolatrous worship of Captain Cook, as above described, was repeated at every heathen temple he visited. Wherever he went the terrified common people not being accustomed to seeing gods marching around of their own free will and accord and without human assistance, fled at his approach or fell down and worshipped him. A priest attended him and regulated the religious ceremonies which constantly took place in his honor; offerings, chants and addresses met him at every point. "For a brief period he moved among them an earthly god—observed, feared and worshipped." During all this time the whole island was heavily taxed to supply the wants of the ships or contributed to the gratification of their officers and crews, and as was customary in such cases, no returns expected. "The natives rendered much assistance in filling the ships and preparing them for their voyages."
At one time the king of the island laid a tabu upon his people, confining them to their houses for several days. This interrupted the daily supply of vegetables to the ships. Several natives tried to violate the tabu, under threats made by Cook's sailors, but were prevented by a chief, who for the enforcing the laws of his country, had a musket fired over his head from one of the ships. This is related in "Cook's Voyages." The tabu was soon removed, and the Englishmen were favored with the boundless hospitality of the natives as before, except that the Kanaka women were interdicted from visiting the ships. Formerly, with extravagant hospitality, the people had sent their wives and daughters on board themselves. The officers and sailors went freely about the island and were everywhere laden with presents. The King visited Cook in royal state and gave him a large number of exceedingly costly and valuable presents—in return for which the resurrected Lono presented His Majesty a white linen suit and a dagger—an instance of illiberality in every way discreditable to a god.
"On the 2d of February, at the desire of his commander, Captain King proposed to the priests to purchase for fuel the railing which surrounded the top of the temple of Lono! In this Cook manifested as little respect for the religion in the mythology of which he figured so conspicuously, as scruples in violating the divine precepts of his own. Indeed, throughout his voyages a spirit regardless of the rights and feelings of others, when his own were interested, is manifested, especially in his last cruise, which is a blot upon his memory."
Cook desecrated the holy places of the temple by storing supplies for his ships in them, and by using the level grounds within the inclosure as a general workshop for repairing his sails, etc.—ground which was so sacred that no common native dared to set foot upon it. Ledyard, a Yankee sailor, who was with Cook, and whose journal is considered the most just and reliable account of this eventful period of the voyage says two iron hatchets were offered for the temple railing, and when the sacrilegious proposition was refused by the priests with horror and indignation, it was torn down by order of Captain Cook and taken to the boats by the sailors, and the images which surmounted it removed and destroyed in the presence of the priests and chiefs.
The abused and insulted natives grew desperate under the indignities that were constantly being heaped upon them by men whose wants they had unselfishly relieved at the expense of their own impoverishment, and angered by some fresh baseness, they stoned a party of sailors and drove them to their boats. From this time onward Cook and the natives were alternately friendly and hostile until Sunday the 14th, whose setting sun saw the circumnavigator a corpse.
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, October 6, 1866
Etiquette varies according to one's surroundings. In the mining camps of California, when a friend tenders you a "mile" or invites you to take a "blister"—vulgarly called a drink—it is etiquette to say, "Here's hoping your dirt'll pan out gay." In Washoe, when you are requested to "put in a blast," or invited to take your "regular poison," etiquette admonishes you to touch glasses and say, "Here's hoping you'll strike it rich in the lower level." And in Honolulu, when your friend, the whaler, asks you to take a "fid" with him, it is simple etiquette to say, "Here's eighteen hundred barrels, old salt." But "drink hearty" is universal. That is the orthodox reply the world over. In San Francisco, sometimes if you offend a man, he proposes to take his coat off, and inquires, "Are you on it?" If you are, you can take your coat off too. In Virginia City, in former times, the insulted party, if he were a true man, would lay his hand gently on his six-shooter and say "Are you heeled?" But in Honolulu, if Smith offends Jones, Jones asks (with a rising inflection on the last word, which is excessively aggravating,) "How much do you weigh?" "Sixteen hundred and forty pound—and you?" "Two ton to a dot—at a quarter past eleven this forenoon—peel yourself, you're my blubber!"
MARK TWAIN
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, October 17, 1866
An Epistle from Mark Twain
San Francisco, Sept. 24th
Queen Emma and suite arrived at noon to-day in the P. M. S. S. Sacramento, and was received by Mr. Hitchcock, the Hawaiian Consul, and escorted to the Occidental Hotel, where a suite of neatly decorated apartments had been got ready for her. The U. S. Revenue cutter Shubrick went to sea and received the guest with a royal salute of 21 guns, and then escorted her ship to the city; Fort Point saluted again, and the colors of the other fortifications and on board the U. S. war steamer Vanderbilt were dipped as the Sacramento passed. The commander of the fleet in these waters had been instructed to tender the Vanderbilt to Queen Emma to convey her to the Islands when she shall have concluded her visit. The City government worried for days together over a public reception programme, and then, when the time arrived to carry it into execution, failed. But a crowd of gaping American kings besieged the Occidental Hotel and peered anxiously into every carriage that arrived and criticised every woman who emerged from it. Not a lady arrived from the steamer but was taken for Queen Emma, and her personal appearance subjected to remarks—some of them flattering and some otherwise. C. W. Brooks and Jerome Leland, and other gentlemen, are out of pocket and a day's time, in making preparations all day yesterday for a state reception—but at midnight no steamer had been telegraphed, and so they sent their sumptuous carriages and spirited four-horse teams back to the stables and went to bed in sorrow and disappointment.
The Queen was expected at the public tables at dinner tonight, (in the simplicity of the American heart,) and every lady was covertly scrutinized as she entered the dining room—but to no purpose—Her Majesty dined in her rooms, with her suite and the Consul.
She will be serenaded tonight, however, and tomorrow a numerous cortege will march in procession before the hotel and give her three cheers and a tiger, and then, no doubt, the public will be on hand to see her if she shows herself.
I believe I do not know of anything further to write about that will interest you, except that in Sacramento, a few days ago, when I went to report the horse fair of the State Agricultural Society, I found Mr. John Quincy Adam Warren, late of the Islands, and he was well dressed and looked happy. He had on exhibition a hundred thousand varieties of lava and worms, and vegetables, and other valuables which he had collected in Hawaii-nei. I smiled on him, but he wouldn't smile back again. I did not mind it a great deal, though I could not help thinking it was ungrateful in him. I made him famous in California with a paragraph which I need not have written unless I wanted to—and this is the thanks I get for it. He would never have been heard of if I had let him alone—and now he declines to smile. I will never do a man a kindness again.
MISCELLANEOUS.
Charles L. Richards, of Honolulu, sails tomorrow for the Islands with a fast team he purchased here. The steamer Colorado is undergoing the alterations necessary to fit her for the China Mail Company's service, and will sail about the first of January with about all the cabin passengers she can carry. She will touch at Honolulu, as I now understand. I expect to go out in her, in order to see that everything is done right. Commodore Watson is to command her I believe. I am going chiefly, however, to eat the editor of the Commercial Advertiser for saying I do not write the truth about the Hawaiian Islands, and for exposing my highway robbery in carrying off Father Damien's book—History of the Islands. I shall go there mighty hungry. Mr. Whitney is jealous of me because I speak the truth so naturally, and he can't do it without taking the lock-jaw. But he ought not to be jealous; he ought not to try to ruin me because I am more virtuous than his is; I cannot help it—it is my nature to be reliable, just as it is his to be shaky on matters of fact—we cannot alter these natures—us leopards cannot change our spots. Therefore, why growl?—why go and try to make trouble? If he cannot tell when I am writing seriously and when I am burlesquing—if he sits down solemnly and takes one of my palpable burlesques and reads it with a funereal aspect, and swallows it as petrified truth,—how am I going to help it? I cannot give him the keen perception that nature denied him—now can I? Whitney knows that. Whitney knows he has done me many a kindness, and that I do not forget it, and am still grateful—and he knows that if I could scour him up so that he could tell a broad burlesque from a plain statement of fact, I would get up in the night and walk any distance to do it. You know that, Whitney. But I am coming down there mighty hungry—most uncommonly hungry, Whitney.
MARK TWAIN.
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, October 23, 1866
MARK TWAIN'S LECTURE.—This lecture, delivered in San Francisco on the night of October 2d, appears by the comments of the press of that city to have been a success. The Bulletin says:
The Academy of music was "stuffed," to use an expression of the lecturer, to repletion last night, on the occasion of the delivery of "Mark Twain's" (Samuel Clements') [sic] lecture on the Sandwich Islands. It is perhaps fortunate that the King of Hawaii did not arrive in time to attend, for unless he had gone early he must have been turned away, as many others were who could not gain admittance. Nearly every seat in the house had been engaged beforehand, and those who came last had to put up with the best they could get, while many were obliged to stand up all the evening.
The appearance of the lecturer was the signal for applause, and from the time he closed, the greatest good feeling existed. He commenced by apologizing for the absence of an orchestra. He wasn't used to getting up operas of this sort. He had engaged a musician to come and play, but the trombone player insisted upon having some other musicians to help him. He had hired the man to work and wouldn't stand any such nonsense, and so discharged him on the spot.
The lecturer then proceeded with his subject, and delivered one of the most interesting and amusing lectures ever given in this city. It was replete with information of that character which is seldom got from books, describing all those minor traits of character, customs and habits which are only noted by a close observer, and yet the kind of information which gives the most correct idea of the people described. Their virtues were set forth generously, while their vices were touched off in a humorous style, which kept the audience in a constant state of merriment. From the lecturer's reputation as a humorist, the audience were unprepared for the eloquent description of the volcano of Kilauea, a really magnificent piece of word painting, their appreciation of which was shown by long and continued applause. Important facts concerning the resources of the Islands were given, interspersed with pointed anecdotes and side-splitting jokes. Their history, traditions, religion, politics, aristocracy, royalty, manners and customs, were all described in brief, and in the humorous vein peculiar to the speaker. It would be impossible to do justice to the lecture in a synopsis, and as it will probably be repeated, we shall not attempt it. The lecturer kept his audience constantly interested and amused for an hour and a half and the lecture was unanimously pronounced a brilliant success. After its close, and the audience had risen to leave, he was called out again, and in his funny style apologised for "the infliction," giving as an excuse that he was about writing a book on the Sandwich Islands, and needed funds for its publication.
We are pleased that "Mark Twain" is using the data he gathered here for the purpose of advancing the interests of these Islands. Although Mr. Sam Clemens [sic] has been accused of unfairness, we think that his forthcoming work will show that he has been an industrious collator of facts.
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, November 16, 1866
CHARACTERISTIC.—The following is the conclusion of Mark Twain's advertisement for his lecture delivered lately in Grass Valley:
"After the lecture is over the lecturer will perform the following wonderful feats on
SLEIGHT OF HAND.
if desired to do so:
"At a given signal, he will go out with any gentleman and take a drink. If desired, he will repeat this unique and interesting feat—repeat it until the audience are satisfied that there is no deception about it.
"At a moment's warning he will depart out of town and leave his hotel bill unsettled. He has performed this ludicrous trick many hundreds of times in San Francisco and elsewhere, and it has always elicited the most enthusiastic comments.
"At any hour of the night, after ten, the lecturer will go through any house in the city, no matter how dark it may be, and take an inventory of its contents, and not miss as many of the articles as the owner will in the morning.
"The lecturer declines to specify any more of his miraculous feats at present, for fear of getting the police too much interested in his circus."
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, December 13, 1866
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN.
Coming down from Sacramento on the Capital the other night, I found on a centre table a pamphlet advertisement of an Accident Insurance Company. It interested me a good deal, with its General Accidents, and Hazardous Tables, and Extra Hazardous furniture of the same description, and I would like to know something more about it. It is a new thing to me. I want to invest if I come to like it. I want to ask merely a few questions of the man who carries on this Accident shop, if you think you can spare so much space to a far-distant stranger. I am an Orphan.
He publishes this list as accidents he is willing to insure people against:
Include the Travelling Risk, and also all forms of Dislocations, Broken Bones, Ruptures, Tendons, Sprains, Concussions, Crushings, Bruising, Cuts, Stabs, Gunshot Wounds, Poisoned Wounds, Burns and Scalds, Freezing, Bites, Unprovoked Assaults by Burglars, Robbers, or Murderers; the Action of Lightning or Sunstroke, the effects of Explosions, Chemicals, Floods, and Earthquakes, Suffocation by Drowning or Choking—where such accidental injury totally disables the person insured from following his usual avocation, or causes death within three months from the time of the happening of the injury.
I want to address the party as follows:
Now, Smith—I suppose likely your name is Smith—you don't know me and I don't know you, but I am willing to be friendly. I am acquainted with a good many of your family—I know John as well as I know any man—and I think we can come to an understanding about your little game without any hard feelings. For instance:
Do you allow the same money on a dog-bite that you do on an earthquake? Do you take special risks for specific accidents?—that is to say, could I, by getting a policy for dog-bites alone, get it cheaper than if I took a chance in your whole lottery? And if so, and supposing I got insured against earthquakes, would you charge any more for San Francisco earthquakes than for those that prevail in places that are better anchored down? And if I had a policy on earthquakes alone, I couldn't collect on a dog-bite, maybe could I?
If a man had such a policy, and an earthquake shook him up and loosened his joints a good deal, but not enough to incapacitate him from engaging in pursuits which did not require him to be tight, wouldn't you pay him some of his pension? I notice you do not mention Biles. How about Biles? Why do you discriminate between Provoked and Unprovoked Assaults by Burglars? If a burglar entered my house at dead of night, and I, in the excitement natural to such an occasion, should forget myself and say something that provoked him, and he should cripple me, wouldn't I get anything? But if I provoked him by pure accident, I would have you there, I judge; because you would have to pay for the Accident part of it anyhow, seeing that insuring against accident is just your strong suit, you know. Now, that item about protecting a man against freezing is good. It will procure you all the custom you want in this country. Because, you understand, the people hereabouts have suffered a good deal from just such climatic drawbacks as that. Why, three years ago, if a man—being a small fish in the matter of money—went over to Washoe, and bought into a good silver mine, they would let that man go on and pay assessments till his purse got down to about thirty-two Fahrenheit, and then the big fish would close in on him and freeze him out. And from that day forth you might consider that man in the light of a bankrupt community; and you would have him down to a spot, too. But if you are ready to insure against that sort of thing, and can stand it, you can give Washoe a fair start. You might send me an agency. Business? Why, Smith, I could get you more business than you could attend to. With such an understanding as that, the boys would all take a chance.
You don't appear to make any particular mention of taking risks on blighted affections. But if you should conclude to do a little business in that line, you might put me down for six or seven chances. I wouldn't mind expense—you might enter it on Extra Hazardous. I suppose I would get ahead of you in the long run anyhow, likely. I have been blighted a good deal in my time.
But now as to those "Effects of Lightning." Suppose the lightning were to strike out at one of your men and miss him, and fetch another party—could that other party come on you for damages? Or could the relatives of the party thus suddenly snaked out of the bright world in the bloom of his youth come on you in case he was crowded for time?—as, of course, he would be, you know, under such circumstances.
You say you have issued over sixty thousand policies, "forty-five of which have proved fatal and been paid for." Now, do you know, Smith, that that looks just a little shaky to me, in a measure? You appear to have it pretty much all your own way, you see. It is all very well for the lucky forty-five that have died "and been paid for," but how about the other fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-five?" You have got their money, haven't you? but somehow the lightning don't seem to strike them, and they don't get any chance at you. Won't their families get fatigued waiting for their dividends? Don't your customers drop off rather slow, so to speak?
You will ruin yourself publishing such damaging statements as that, Smith. I tell you as a friend. If you had said that the fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-five died, and that forty-five lived, you would have issued about four tons of policies the next week. But people are not going to get insured, when you take so much pains to prove that there is such precious little use in it. Yours,
MARK TWAIN.
DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, December 17, 1866
HONOLULU, Dec. 14, 1866
AFFLUENT MARK:—I write you in sorrow and tribulation. Since you left here, everything has gone wrong. The "season" wasn't worth shucks to ship chandlers, grog-shops or drug-stores. The only class of people who made money out of it were newspaper men, music-teachers and portrait-painters. Capt. Coffin didn't make his salt, notwithstanding he had had all his harness-casks repaired. Whitney's sales have been unprecedented. He disposed of three cases of "Josephus," Nap's "Life of Caesar," "Ecce Homo," and three cotton-gins; and Mr. Damon has cleared his shelves of all the latest sensation novels. By the way, the latter gentleman is getting anxious about his "Jarvis." He and Mr. W. had a dispute about the ownership of the volume. How it came out I am not informed; but the latter's hair has got mighty thin all of a sudden. (What's the use of their quarrelling about it? You and I know neither of them will ever see it again.)
Mark, your friends here are delighted at your pecuniary success in lecturing. They think you will not only help to establish the reputation of the Islands abroad, but that you will help them out of their pilikia (trouble) when you arrive here on the first China steamer. (Some of them are unkind enough to hint that you are giving the Islands fits, and that's the reason why you won't have the lecture published. Is it so?) Bring plenty of rhino with you when you come; you have no idea how many admirers you have here. Wear stout buckskin gloves, for the pressure of hands will be immense. The natives of this Island form a very even community, generally speaking. If you arrive here "flush," every one of them is anxious to shake you by the hand; and if you arrive "broke" they are sure to shake you, anyhow. By this you will see how uniform is the native temperament.
Speaking of temperament reminds me that our friend Bucephalus Brown has, as usual, slipped up again. Some two months since, he started a temperance society, and elected himself President, Treasurer, and all the members. Its motto was, "The greatest good to the greatest bummers," and great things were expected from it. The society flourished for a while, but I regret to say, that where it should have found its truest friend it found its most unrelenting foe. You know, Mark, that Brown always got along swimmingly, both hygienically and pecuniarily, when he took his regular "tangleleg" like a man. Impecuniosity was unknown to that confiding 'art. Your Montgomery street friends can vouch for this from the number of I. O. U.'s they have signed over to B. B. but he backslided, and as I said above, organized himself into a grand Temperance Union for the Propagation of Cold Water Habits. From that day Brown has been going down. He preached cold water and villified corn-juice—he denounced the 'appy and 'ilarious mood, and sang paeans to the Honolulu Water Works; Don Miguel Harvi (from Limerick) was his aversion, Colonel Pendergast (from Hilo) was his ne plus ultra. Now mark the sequel. Just as he thought he was getting adversity where "the har is short," cold water threw him higher than a Chinese kite. Either he was too heavy on cold water and it rebelled, or tamarind syrup with a stick in it became jealous of its competitor and fiendishly made it the dupe to compass Brown's destruction. A few nights ago the water-tap overflowed in his 'umble but gorgeously equipped hattie, and as the landlord had taken the marvellous precaution to have holes bored in the floor, just above a large invoice of most unsaleable and costly (privately, they were just out of season) articles ever imported from Injiar, his fellow-tenants' embroidered silk overcoats and Ristori crinolines got soaked. When he was called upon to examine the goods, he discovered just what he said he had anticipated, videlicet: that the water had travelled all around the store and hugged the only good on hand for which there was no market. You will appreciate poor Brown's feelings, Mark, when I privately tell you that he has a big disgust on against water—that water and he don't mix—that he is hydro-phobic. Mark, avoid it. If you must spend your money, spend it on something less liable to leak through floors than cold water. I would also advise you, whenever you rent an upper story, to see that the first floor is occupied by a lager beer merchant or a charity school. Remember Brown!
Mark, I see you are raking up the Disease and Accident Insurance Companies. As you and Smith the Insurance man seem to understand each other, use your influence with him in Brown's favor. He thinks of returning to the Coast and making another pile; but as you know he always had an irresistible desire to establish a daily newspaper at the Farallones. I fear he may invest his next fortune in that enterprise. If you could only get Smith to add to his list of articles insured the item of "hydro-scatteries," I will get Brown to remember you in his last will and testament. Ever of thee,
S. PURMOIL.
Alta California, December 14, 1866
EDITORS ALTA: I leave for the States in the Opposition steamer to-morrow, and I ask, as a special favor, that you will allow me to say good-bye to my highway-robber friends of the Gold Hill and Virginia Divide, and convince them that I have got ahead of them. They had their joke in robbing me and returning the money, and I had mine in the satisfaction of knowing that they came near freezing to death while they were waiting two hours for me to come along the night of the robbery. And at this day, so far from bearing them any ill will, I want to thank them kindly for their rascality. I am pecuniarily ahead on the transaction. I got a telegram from New York, last night, which reads as follows:
"New York, December 12th.
"Mark Twain: Go to Nudd, Lord & Co., Front street, collect amount of money equal to what highwaymen took from you. (Signed.) A.D.N."
I took that telegram and went to that store and called for a thousand dollars, with my customary modesty; but when I found they were going to pay it, my conscience smote me and I reduced the demand to a hundred. It was promptly paid, in coin, and now if the robbers think they have got the best end of that joke, they are welcome—they have my free consent to go on thinking so. {It is barely possible that the heft of the joke is on A.D.N., now.}
Good-bye, felons—good-bye. I bear you no malice. And I sincerely pray that when your cheerful career is closing, and you appear finally before a delighted and appreciative audience to be hanged, that you will be prepared to go, and that it will be as a ray of sunshine amid the gathering blackness of your damning recollections, to call to mind that you never got a cent out of me. So-long, brigands.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, December 15, 1866
Samuel Clemens, ("Mark Twain,") the talented humorist and brilliant writer, leaves San Francisco on the steamer America, to-day, and we take occasion to print the farewell address delivered on Monday night, at Congress Hall. After having kept the audience listening in rapt attention to his gorgeous imagery, in describing the scenes at the Sandwich Islands, or convulsed with laughter at the humorous sallies interspersed through the lecture, he seemed to come reluctantly to the promised "good-bye," and then his whole manner changed—the words were evidently the language of the heart, and the convictions of his judgment. He said:
"My Friends and Fellow-Citizens: I have been treated with extreme kindness and cordiality by San Francisco, and I wish to return my sincerest thanks and acknowledgments. I have also been treated with marked and unusual generosity, forbearance and good-fellowship, by my ancient comrades, my brethren of the Press—a thing which has peculiarly touched me, because long experience in the service has taught me that we of the Press are slow to praise but quick to censure each other, as a general thing—wherefore, in thanking them I am anxious to convince them, at the same time, that they have not lavished their kind offices upon one who cannot appreciate or is insensible to them.
"I am now about to bid farewell to San Francisco for a season, and to go back to that common home we all tenderly remember in our waking hours and fondly revisit in dreams of the night—a home which is familiar to my recollection, but will be an unknown land to my unaccustomed eyes. I shall share the fate of many another longing exile who wanders back to his early home to find gray hairs where he expected youth, graves where he looked for firesides, grief where he had pictured joy—everywhere change! remorseless change where he had heedlessly dreamed that desolating Time had stood still!—to find his cherished anticipations a mockery, and to drink the lees of disappointment instead of the beaded wine of a hope that is crowned with its fruition!
"And while I linger here upon the threshold of this, my new home, to say to you, my kindest and my truest friends, a warm good-bye and an honest peace and prosperity attend you, I accept the warning that mighty changes will have come over this home also when my returning feet shall walk these streets again.
"I read the signs of the times, and I, that am no prophet, behold the things that are in store for you. Over slumbering California is stealing the dawn of a radiant future! The great China Mail Line is established, the Pacific Railroad is creeping across the continent, the commerce of the world is about to be revolutionized. California is Crown Princess of the new dispensation! She stands in the centre of the grand highway of the nations; she stands midway between the Old World and the New, and both shall pay her tribute. From the far East and from Europe, multitudes of stout hearts and willing hands are preparing to flock hither; to throng her hamlets and villages; to till her fruitful soil; to unveil the riches of her countless mines; to build up an empire on these distant shores that shall shame the bravest dreams of her visionaries. From the opulent lands of the Orient, from India, from China, Japan, the Amoor; from tributary regions that stretch from the Arctic circle to the equator, is about to pour in upon her the princely commerce of a teeming population of four hundred and fifty million souls. Half the world stands ready to lay its contributions at her feet! Has any other State so brilliant a future? Has any other city a future like San Francisco?
"This straggling town shall be a vast metropolis; this sparsely populated land shall become a crowded hive of busy men; your waste places shall blossom like the rose, and your deserted hills and valleys shall yield bread and wine for unnumbered thousands; railroads shall be spread hither and thither and carry the invigorating blood of commerce to regions that are languishing now; mills and workshops, yea, and factories shall spring up everywhere, and mines that have neither name nor place to-day shall dazzle the world with their affluence. The time is drawing on apace when the clouds shall pass away from your firmament, and a splendid prosperity shall descend like a glory upon the whole land!
"I am bidding the old city and my old friends a kind, but not a sad farewell, for I know that when I see this home again, the changes that will have been wrought upon it will suggest no sentiment of sadness; its estate will be brighter, happier and prouder a hundred fold than it is this day. This is its destiny, and in all sincerity I can say, So mote it be!"
"Mark Twain" goes off on his journey over the world as the Travelling Correspondent of the ALTA CALIFORNIA, not stinted as to time, place or direction—writing his weekly letters on such subjects and from such places as will best suit him; but we may say that he will first visit the home of his youth—St. Louis—thence through the principal cities to the Atlantic seaboard again, crossing the ocean to visit the "Universal Exposition" at Paris, through Italy, the Mediterranean, India, China, Japan, and back to San Francisco by the China Mail Steamship line. That his letters will be read with interest needs no assurance from us—his reputation has been made here in California, and his great ability is well known; but he has been known principally as a humorist, while he really has no superior as a descriptive writer—a keen observer of men and their surroundings—and we feel confident his letters to the ALTA, from his new field of observation, will give him a world-wide reputation.
Alta California, January 18, 1867
Steamship AMERICA, at sea, 900 miles south of San Francisco,
December 20th, 1866.
"GOOD-BYE, my boy, take care of yourself!" said Jones, and Smith, and Thompson, and shook hands with me, and then all shouldered their way through the crowd toward the other end of the steamer, to have a farewell shake with somebody else, for the ship was just ready to leave—all was confusion—everybody in a hurry. I edged out of the surging mass of humanity and leaned on the port bulwarks, to search among the multitude on the pier for familiar faces. Then the young man with the evil countenance parted the crowd on either side of him, struggled edgeways toward me, like a hog climbing through a fence, and offered to sell me some limes. I had refused him a dozen times already, but this time I purchased, to get rid of him.
"Good-bye, my lad, take care of yourself!" I wrung the hands of Jones, Smith, and Thompson, again, and again they disappeared through the human commotion, to repeat their farewells with other friends at the other end of the ship. I turned toward the crowd on shore again, and neatly dodged an apple discharged at someone behind me, whose friend on shore took this method of shaking hands with him. Some of the faces were glad, some were listless, some were sorrowful—they belonged to people who were enjoying the distinction of being acquainted with parties on the departing ship—to people who knew no one on board, and who were sullenly hopeless of ever being able to go "home"—to people whose friends and relatives were going to distant lands, and whose pleasant faces they might never behold again in life. The cutthroat with the illustrated papers clove a passage to me, and I bought him out and got rid of him. And then I faced about and dodged an orange hurled from the shore—another good-bye that came near miscarrying.
"Good-bye, my lad, take care of yourself!" I shook Jones, and Smith, and Thompson, warmly by the hand once more, and once more, panting and perspiring, they struggled through the crowd to bid another farewell to friends at the other end of the ship. The party with the withered cigars, "yust imborted fun Hawanna," arrived, and offered his whole stock at a ruinous sacrifice—five cents a piece. I had it not in my heart to take advantage of any man's necessities, and I refused to purchase. I was grieved to see a good-bye apple from the shore cave in the side of his head as he turned away. At this point Bilgewater arrived with a keg of quartz specimens, to be delivered to his aunt in New York; Johnson brought a glass jar of fine tarantulas and scorpions for his brother, the doctor, in Brooklyn; Witherspoon brought a case of extra California wines, to be presented in his name to the Secretary of the Interior; and Elbridge brought a box of choice California fruits, to be placed on exhibition at the Patent Office. We had an outside stateroom—No. 14 and so it cost us but little trouble to receive and stow away these things; though to speak truly, they crowded our baggage somewhat.
"All ashore that's going!" It was too bad. Jones was nearly back again—was even reaching out his hand at arm's length for another farewell shake—but was wedged into the crowd and so squeezed that his eyes were well nigh bursting from his red-hot face; Smith and Thompson were close behind him. The order spoiled everything. They could not overcome the crowd, and so were borne bodily backward toward the companion-way, and disappeared.
We backed out through a pitiless storm of apples and oranges, through which I caught occasional glimpses of excited faces and flashing handkerchiefs on shore, as one sees such things through pelting hail and snow; and as it ceased, and distance intervened, and the multitude broke apart and dribbled away like a temporary human embankment, I saw Jones, and Smith, and Thompson, each shaking his own hands, and faintly heard a word or two of their good old kindly farewell. I heard the words "BYE" and "CARE," and I knew they had used the old formula, because these were naturally the only words emphasized in that formula.
Then I stood apart and soliloquized: "Green be my memories of thee as are thy hills this bright December day, O Mistress of the Occident! May no—"
"Oh, dang the Occident! There's lively times downstairs. The old man played his hand for all it was worth—the passengers raised him—the old man come back—they went him better—the old man passed out, and all things are lovely and the—"
"Say what you have got to say in plain English, Brown, and refrain from vulgar metaphor."
"Well, there was a young fellow married a girl and smuggled her aboard, and her father boarded us in a Whitehall boat with a bogus policeman, and they grabbed her and he resisted, and there was a fight, and she cried and took on and said she would go with him or die, and if she went home she'd up and die sure, and they corraled her and seized a rope round her waist, and was going to lower her away, but the passengers mixed in and shucked the old man out and made the bogus policeman jump overboard with a black eye, and said they'd hang 'em if they didn't leave quick, and so the turtles are safe in the state room, and the old son of a seacook's gone; but—you ought to have been there to hear the old man cuss, and the girl cry and hang on to him—to the young one, not the old one—and the passengers singing out. 'Bust him! heave him overboard! keel haul the old hound!' and one would take him a whack under the ear, and another would fetch him a welt in the ribs, and the policeman catching it right and left, and holding up his hands to save his mug, and about two thousand steerage women snuffling and howling, and m-o-r-e crowding and gouging, and trampling going on—Oh, blood, hair and the ground tore up!—I never see the like!"
I said, "You can go to bed now, Brown, if you feel tired," and I went forward to make inquiries. It appeared that a youth of twenty-three or four had clandestinely married a girl of fifteen, and taken passage for New York. Her father had boarded us in the stream with a pretended policeman, (discarded lover in disguise, no doubt). There was a fight; the passengers took sides with the young couple and were victorious. The girl hanging by a rope and just ready to go by the run into the small boat, was hauled aboard again. The father and his man were driven out of the ship; we were under way for America once more, and the sinking honeymoon rose up with added lustre over the rescued victims of matrimony. Long may it shine unclouded!
That was one story. Another said the policeman showed the star of legitimate authority, and the old man sat in the boat as we moved away, and cried bitterly, and shook his hand at the lover and said, "You miserable, heartless dog, you have stolen away my child!" And they said he was a worthy-looking old man too.
NOON, 16th
All the afternoon, yesterday, two or three hundred passengers paced the promenade deck, and so quiet was the sea that not half a dozen of them succumbed to sickness. But at 8 or 9 at night the wind began to rise, and from that time it steadily increased in violence until, at midnight, it was blowing a hurricane. There was a tremendous sea running, and the night was so pitch dark that a man standing on the deck would find by voices at his elbow that other persons were almost touching him, when he imagined himself alone. On deck, above the lashing of the waves, and the roaring of the winds, the shouting of the captain and his officers, and the hurried tramping of the men were scarcely to be heard.
The steerage passengers were at once imprisoned below, and the hatches battened down and canvassed over; the ship was by the head, and the seas were sweeping over the bows every now and then; every man under the ship's pay—officers, cabin crew and all—were set to work to break cargo and move it aft; a large quantity of flour was transferred to the stern, and the large boats on the after-guard were pumped full of water. These precautions eased the ship's head and saved her. It was well that the hatches were down snug before the terrific squall struck us, just after midnight, else either of the three fearful seas that swept over the ship then in quick succession must have poured thousands of tons of water into her and sent her to the bottom.
As it was, the vessel was in peril enough. She was tossed about like a plaything—climbed lofty billows, paused a moment on the crest, and then plunged down into the gulf on the other side; climbed the next wave, and while one held his breath in anticipation of the ghastly dive and the deadly sinking sensation in the chest that always accompanies it, a prodigious wave would spring upon her from some side angle, and send her stunned and staggering, broadside on, like a man struck with a club! And then the officers floundered in water up to their hips, and shouted orders that came aft reduced to hoarse, confused whispers by the howling blast! Then the gunwale, a solid timber as thick as a man's thigh, snapped like a pipe-stem—away went twenty feet of the starboard bulwarks forward—down came a dozen stanchions with a clatter—crash went a deluge of water booming aft through steerage and forward-cabin, carrying stools, carpet sacks, boxes, boots, valises, and a rattling smash-up of queens ware and crockery along with it—and on the reeling floors, amid the shrieking of the cordage and the roaring of the midnight winds and the thundering of the midnight sea down on their knees in the slush went two hundred and fifty of the ungodliest of all the ungodly crowds that ever lumbered a ship yet, to pray!
Such consternation as there was aboard this ship you have not seen in ten years, perhaps. Poor fellows, some of them were well nigh beside themselves. A man from one of the back settlements knelt down, in the middle of the forward cabin, with an arm clasping a stanchion to enable him to maintain his position; and there he knelt and prayed fervently, till an oil-skin carpet sack came washing by him, and he grabbed it—found it was not his—set it adrift again—and went on praying; and so he went on, supplicating for succor and prospecting for carpet sacks, till sea-sickness got him, and he had to drop all other considerations and attend to bailing out his stomach. But it may be said of this stranger that he meant well, and held his grip as well as any man could have done it. And any man of judgment cannot but think well of his modesty in only relying on Providence to save the ship, but looking out for his carpet sack himself. If we would always do our share many things would be accomplished that never are accomplished.
It was a heavy storm—the heaviest Captain Wakeman has seen on this coast in seventeen years, except one—and the heaviest another old sea Captain (among our passengers) of twenty-eight years' experience, ever saw in his life. [N.B.-Is there always an old skipper aboard who never saw such a storm before?] It proved the America to be a staunch and reliable vessel, however, and her commander a thoroughly competent officer, and these things will render the passengers more satisfied and confident hereafter in case we have another storm.
NOON, 19th.
I have to give the sequel to the runaway match now. Yesterday it was whispered about that our young couple, who passed in the ship as "Mr. and wife," and occupied a state room together, were really not married! Luscious sensation for a monotonous sea voyage! Capt. Wakeman exploded two or three awful salt-water oaths and ordered the Purser to produce the culprits before him at once. It was done, at 8 P.M. An explanation was demanded. They said they were married in San Jose Valley, but had lost the certificate. The Captain swore a blood-curdling oath that he'd furnish them another, and mighty quick, too; and ordered up the Rev. Mr. Fackler, an Episcopalian minister of San Francisco, to perform the ceremony, and four respectable persons to witness it. The bridegroom did not seem particularly gratified with these proceedings, and even the bride said afterwards that they had kept company together four days on shore before they shipped, and she was satisfied—thought people might mind their own business, and let theirs alone. She said they were going to be married in Brooklyn, and that was the programme from the start; didn't care anything about having any such foolishness on the ship! A child fifteen years old, and weighted down with the wisdom and experience of an infant! Another lady said she couldn't see why people wanted to meddle with other people's business. Why couldn't they let the girl alone! God help me! I am an orphan and many and many a league at sea—with such a crowd as this!
The old man had them married, though, on the spot, (at sea, 70 miles south of San Francisco,) and gave the girl a certificate, and kept one himself to give to her father in San Francisco, and the trouble was at an end and the sensation over. A fresh one was started to-day, when it was discovered that the bridegroom was spliced under a fictitious name, and so the "old man," (as all sea captains are called,) got off some more complicated and appalling blasphemy, and hauled up the young man and married him over again!
Alta California, February 27, 1867
On board steamer
COLUMBIA,
at sea.
DECEMBER 20TH.—Five days out from San Francisco. The fearful storm the first night out came near foundering the ship, and it did succeed in making everybody sea-sick. It stove in the forward bulwarks and flooded steerage and forward cabin with water, and amid a wild rush of floating boots and carpet-bags, miners from Washoe and California and "web-feet" from Oregon, who had never prayed in their lives before, perhaps, knelt down and did the best they could at it on short notice:
For three days afterward most of the ship's family brooded in sorrow and sea-sickness in their berths, and it took them all of the fourth day to get up a tolerable degree of cheerfulness. Today, however, Brown, Baker, Stribling, Smith, Kingdom, Hercules, Isaac, and several of the ladies, seem about restored to their natural selves. However, to say truly, Isaac has been his natural self from the beginning. His vanity, impudence, obsequiousness and utter imperviousness to insult trench upon the wonderful. He started in very confined quarters in the second cabin, but by sheer and persistent labor with his seductive tongue he has already worked up to a seat at the Purser's table and the choicest state-room on the upper deck—and without extra charge. He writes cards for a living, and came on board with a pack ready written and elaborately decorated with the familiar old tiresome flowers, cupids and birds of unknown species, for half the officers of the ship—and was surprised to learn that nautical etiquette forbade those gentlemen to accept of presents from passengers. He offered Captain Waxman (all the names I use—for ship, passengers, Captain and all—are fictitious,) a meerschaum pipe (bogus) and was utterly confounded at its non-acceptance. Broad-shouldered, kinky-haired Isaac receives each addition to the list of convalescent passengers with his stereotyped complacent smile, and forces upon him a luncheon from his stock of bad foreign sausage, good tasting Limberg cheese, with a death-dealing smell, and execrable Dutch herrings—all of which conduct looks kind and considerate—it really does but it certainly must mean business. He probably knows what he is about.
The weather is beyond all praise. No sea-sick passengers may hope to resist it long. It is so soft and balmy, and so grateful to lungs accustomed to the frequent fogs of San Francisco. The whole promenade deck is sheltered from the sun by awnings, and it is delightful to march up and down the breezy deck in procession and smoke, or sit on the benches and look out upon the hills and valleys of Mexico.
MIDNIGHT—have been listening to Some of Captain Waxman's stunning forecastle yarns, and I will do him the credit to say he knows how to tell them. With his strong, cheery voice, animated countenance, quaint phraseology, defiance of grammar and extraordinary vim in the matter of gesture and emphasis, he makes a most effective story out of very unpromising materials. There is a contagion about his whole-souled jollity that the chief mourner at a funeral could not resist. He is fifty years old, and as rough as a bear in voice and action, and yet as kind-hearted and tender as a woman. He is a burly, hairy, sunburned, stormy-voiced old salt, who mixes strange oaths with incomprehensible sailor phraseology and the gentlest and most touching pathos, and is tattooed from head to foot like a Fejee Islander. His tongue is forever going when he has got no business on his hands, and though he knows nothing of policy or the ways of the world, he can cheer up any company of passengers that ever travelled in a ship, and keep them cheered up. He never drinks a drop, never gambles, and never swears where a lady or a child may chance to hear him—but with all things consonant with the occasion he sometimes soars into flights of fancy swearing that fill the listener with admiration. He is—
"Who knocked?"
"Me—let me in."
The ship lurched, I unfastened the door, and the person named Brown plunged in head-foremost. It was thoughtless on my part. He stove in the middle berth and started his scalp.
"Well, what do you want, Brown?" [Here a chapter of blasphemy is omitted.]
"Why, the old man's going to cross the Gulf of Tehuantepec Christmas Day, instead of going down shore in the quiet waters, as he's been ordered. It will throw this ship more double summersets than you can see in a circus. And I know the old man's idea: he means to get up a starchy Christmas dinner, and then hold her out four points, and all the paper weights in America couldn't keep it on a man's stomach."
The Gulf of Tehuantepec is the Hatteras of the Pacific. It always blows there, and is more or less stormy out from shore. But so deep and inscrutable a mind for strategy as the Captain's dark design implied—as imputed to him by Brown—never reposed in his honest, ingenuous head. While I was explaining this to Brown, I heard the Captain's hoarse voice shout:
"Rouse out the parson, and order the first cabin aft."
Of course, we turned out to learn what such an unusual order meant at the solemn hour of midnight. In a few minutes there were as many of us in the Captain's apartments as could find room.
MARRIAGE OF THE RUNAWAY COUPLE
The "Old Man" was sitting in his arm-chair in great state, and his swart countenance and his whole bearing frowned with a portentous dignity.
"Order up the convicts!"
They came and stood before him—a very young man with a surprised look on his face, and a blushing, frightened young girl of fifteen, with tears flowing fast from her pleading eyes.
"So, youngsters, you've been running the blockade, have you? You've slipped your cables and gone to sea when nobody was on the lookout? And you've been sailing under false colors! You've been letting on that you're married, and you ain't!—and now you say you're going to splice as soon as you get to where you're going, in New Jersey. This sort of doing ain't going to do in my ship—blood and wrath, I'm outraged! Jine hands." [The Captain stood up and uncovered—all others did the same.] "Stand by, Parson—stand by for a surge! Steady—so—let 'em slide into the joys and sorrows of matrimony!"
Slowly and distinctly the clergyman asked the questions, while the witnesses looked eagerly on. As the ceremony closed, the Captain took up its parting injunction and repeated it with grave and deep-voiced impressiveness:
"Ay, lads—them whom God has spliced together, let no man put 'em asunder! A-men."
The minister prayed, then blessed the couple, and all the guests shook hands with them, and wished them well. The witnesses signed the certificate, the marriage was entered on the ship's log with marvellous ceremony, and we were all about to depart, when the Captain rose up solemnly and addressed the bride and groom in a few words of homely eloquence—words which he probably honestly considered absolutely necessary to the due completion of the marriage rites.
"Young People!—You're all right now. No more dodging—no more shirking the revenue—no more smuggling—no more sailing under false colors. You can fly your flag from the mizzen peak halliards now, where all men may see it, and sail where ye will on the broad seas. Your papers are made out correct, and nobody can ever overhaul you anymore.
"It's best for you the way it is. You love one another—I see that—we all see it. Every man and every woman was sent into the world for some fore-ordinated purpose or other. They ain't going to carry it out cruisin' around single, and packing off from this place to that place, and from that place to t'other place, never taking root anywheres, and never having any set aim in this life or hereafter. The world's got little enough fair weather in it as it is. Splice and make the most of it. Sail in company and help one another. When one's aground t'other's there to help him off; when one's stove, t'other's there to save him; when one's dismasted and drifting ashore, t'other's there to lend him an anchor. Up canvas and away! and a happy voyage to ye! The wind is fair, now, and you can carry skys'ls, r'yals, stuns'ls—every rag you've got; but by and by it'll be on your quarter, then abeam, and finally ahead. But hold your grip—don't mind it—it ain't every gale that founders a ship. You'll have sun on the line, and ice at the pole; you'll have calms that aggravate you, and head winds that drive you back; you'll have storms that'll sweep your decks as clean as a desert. But stick together—hold your grip, and stick together—and by and by, when your voyage is up, you'll ride safe at anchor, in a haven where calms, nor storms, nor breaching seas can ever distress you anymore."
DECEMBER 23D.—Gossiping has begun, scandal is in full blast, and—
"I wouldn't put that in there if I was you."
"Mr. Brown, the matter is none of your business. It is none of your business, I repeat, but, as long as you have mentioned it, why wouldn't you put it in?"
"Because it ain't any use because you've as much as said it before—because you've said that some of the women are out and healthy; and don't anybody that knows as much as a clam know that whenever a woman is out and healthy, she's going to start in and make trouble?"
"Mr. Brown, no man can sit in this state-room after making such a shameful remark as that. Go."
"Oh, certainly—that's all right. I expect maybe I'm wrong and you're right, anyway. However, it was old Slimmens that made me make the mistake. She was the first one out, and she said—old Slimmens with the-"
"Say Miss Slimmens, Brown—it is more respectful. Well, what did she say?"
"What did she say? Why there is not a solitary passenger in the ship but what that double-chinned old pelican has blackguarded. She says awful things about that pretty girl that sits at the middle of the Purser's table; and she says that poor crippled, gray-headed old grandmother in the second cabin is no better than she ought to be; and she says she knew that innocent old fat girl that's always asleep and has to be shovelled out of her room at four-bells for the inspection, and always eats till her eyes bug out like the bolt-heads on a jail door—knew her long ago up on the San Joaquin, and knows the clothes she's got on now she's travelled in eleven weeks without changing—says her stockings are awful—they're eleven weeks gone, too—and when she complained of the weather being so hot, old Slimmens said 'Why don't she go and scrape herself and then wash—it would be equal to taking off two suits of flannell'—and she blackguards the choir that's been started, and says if they come serenading those girls in her end of the ship anymore, she'll stop their caterwauling almighty quick—she swears she wishes she may never flutter her tongue again if she don't scald 'em! You bet she'll do it, too. And she says all the women in the ship are secesh, and are going to Washington to hatch up some deviltry against the Government, and she's going to show them up in the Hangtown Thunderclap of Freedom—because, you know, she's a correspondent, like you—a sister correspondent, as you may say—and my! but she's savage on that old rooster that's religious! She says if ever a man had a hangdog countenance on him, it's him; and moreover, she's satisfied he stole a bottle of cologne out of her room yesterday, when she let him go in there to borrow her prayer-book; (she calls it cologne, you know, but it's gin;) and—and—well, I believe that's all—except that she says you was very sick last night, it seemed—you was almighty sick, everybody said, but if she ain't blind and a born fool to boot, you was as drunk as the piper that played before Moses! There you are, now. Maybe you don't believe it; if you don't, you just come and hear the old sage-hen cackle for yourself. Good day."
Poor Brown, he is a man of no tact—he always leaves just as he is about to become interesting to me. I have no more curiosity than other people, but still I would like to know what else that venomous old hag has been saying about me. But we are all catching it—we are all being carefully dissected—men, women, and children. Slimmens is the chief operator, but she is not alone. Everybody takes a hand in it—fires his charge of detraction and winces under the return shot. It serves one good purpose at any rate—it makes things exceedingly lively some times, and keeps the passengers in material for conversation always.
Alta California, February 24, 1867
SUNDAY, December 23d.—Last night was magnificent—cool, balmy, breezy, an easy sea on, and all things so flooded with moonlight that each wave of the ocean, each rope and spar of the ship, and each face and form about the decks were almost as plain to the sight as if it were noonday. The six individuals who sing (think of it—only six persons out of five hundred who make the slightest pretensions to vocal talent!) organized themselves into a choir and practiced several hymns until a late hour—for we are to have religious services to-day. After that they sang "Dog Tray," and "Marching Through Georgia," and "What is Home Without a Mother," and other venerable melodies, and a few wretched volunteers joined in and completed the villainy of the performance. Home without a mother may not amount to much, but there is no use in aggravating the thing with such a tune as that. And the idea of resurrecting that infamous dog Tray at this day. That choir sang everything they ought not to have sung except one, and I trembled to think the surroundings would yet suggest it. I refer to the song called "Roll On, Silver Moon." If they had attempted that outrage I would have scuttled the ship. I can stand a good deal, but I cannot stand everything. I would rather perish than lose my reason. Altogether, ours is a very poor choir. I will remark here, that although I hummed a tune occasionally, and whistled some, I was not requested to sing.
This is a beautiful morning and all parties seem as light hearted and happy as children. In fact the pastimes of the gentlemen on the promenade deck in the shade of the awnings, for their own and the ladies' amusement, have an entirely boyish cast about them. Two men are playing "mumble-peg" with absorbing interest; a large party are trying to see which shall be able to walk ten steps, blindfolded, and place a hat on the compass; a Colonel, who greatly distinguished himself in the war, is trying to sit on a champagne bottle, with feet crossed, arms folded, and thread a darning needle without falling over—the bottle lying on its side, of course, and pointing straight astern, while he faces towards the ship's head—he has just accomplished it, after the ninth attempt, and received a boisterous round of applause—some consolation for the bursts of laughter that greeted his failures. All are engaged in this sort of nonsense, (Isaac, the Israelite, included,) except the youth they call "Shape." With hat perched jauntily on one side of his head, and hands thrust into his coat pockets, he promenades the deck fore and aft, and admires his legs. They say he is a little "cracked," I don't know—the idea may have originated with Miss Slimmens of the "Thunderclap."
Being a little under the weather, I have intruded into the Captain's room, along with the veteran Sleet, a skipper of thirty years standing, going home on furlough from his ship. The forenoon is waning fast. Enter Captain Waxman, sweating and puffing from over-exertion, and says he has "tore up the whole ship" (he scorns grammar when his mind is seething with business,) has "tore up the whole ship" to build a pulpit at the after compass and rig benches and chairs athwart the quarterdeck and fetch up the organ from below and get everything shipshape for the parson—
"And—the passengers," said he, "as soon as they found they were going to be sermonized, they've up anchors and gone to sea—clean gone and deserted—there ain't a baker's dozen left on the afterdeck! They're worse than the rats in Hon—here, you velvet-head! you son of Afric's sunny clime! go forrard and tell the mate to let her go a couple of points free in Honolulu. Me and old Josephus—he was a Jew, and got rich as Creosote in San Francisco afterwards—we were going home passengers from the Sandwich Islands, in a bran-new brig, on her third voyage, and our trunks were down below—he went with me—laid over one vessel to do it—because he warn't no sailor, and he liked to be convoyed by a man that was—felt safer, you understand—and the brig was sliding out between the buoys, and her head line was paying out ashore—there was a wood-pile right where it was made fast on the pier—when up come the biggest rat—as big as any ordinary cat, he was—and darted out on that line and cantered for the shore!—and up come another! and another! and another! and away they galloped over that hawser, each one treading on t'other's tail, till they were so thick you couldn't see a thread of the cable, and there was a procession of 'em three hundred yards long over the levee like a streak of pismires, and the Kanakas, some throwing sticks from that wood-pile and chunks of lava and coral at 'em and knocking 'em endways every shot—for?' but do you suppose it made any difference to them rats?—not a particle—not a particle on earth, bless you!—they'd smelt trouble!—they'd smelt it by their unearthly, supernatural instinct!—they wanted to go, and they never let up till the last rat was ashore out of that bran-new beautiful brig!
"I called a Kanaka, with his boat, and he hove alongside and shinned up a rope and stood off and on for orders, and says I:
"'Do you see that trunk down there?'
"'Ai.'
"'Well, yank it out of there and snake it ashore quicker'n you can wink. Lively, now!'
"Solomon, the Jew—what did I say his cussed name was? Anyhow, he says:
"'What are you doing, Captain?'
"'Doing! Why, I'm a taking my trunk ashore—that's about what I'm a doing.'
"'Taking your trunk ashore? Why, bless us, what is that for?'
"'What is it for?' says I, 'do you see them rats a leaving this ship? She's doomed, sir! she's doomed past retribution! Burnt brandy wouldn't save her, sir. She'll never finish this voyage—she'll never be heard of again, sir.'
"Solomon says—'Boy, take that other trunk ashore, too.'
"And don't you know, that bran new beautiful brig sailed out of Honolulu without a rat on board, and was never seen again by mortal man, sir! It's so—as sure as you're born, it's so. We shipped in an old tub that was so rotten that you had to walk easy on her main deck to keep from going through—so crazy, sir, that in our berths, when there was a sea on, the timbers overhead worked backwards and forwards eleven inches in their sockets—just for the world like an old wicker basket, sir—and the rats were as big as greyhounds, and as lean, sir; and they bit the buttons off our coats, and chawed our toe-nails off while we slept; and there were so many of them that in a gale once they all scampered to the starboard side when we were going about, and put her down the wrong way, so that, she missed stays, and come monstrous near foundering. But she went through safe, I tell you, because she had rats aboard." [After this marvellous chapter of personal history the Captain rushed out in a business frenzy, and rushed back again in the course of a couple of minutes.]
"Everything's set—the passengers are back again and stowed, and the parson's all ready to cat his anchor and get under way—everybody ready and waiting on that bloody choir that was practicing and squawking and blatting all night, and now ain't come to time when their watch is called."
[Out again, and back in something like a minute.]
"D—n that choir! They're like the fellow's sow—had to haul her ears off to get her up to the trough, and then had to pull her tail out to get her away again. But rats!—don't tell me nothing about the talent of rats! It's been noticed, sir!—notes has been taken of it, sir! and their judgment is better than a human's, sir! Didn't I hear old Ben Wilson, mate of the Empress of the Seas—as fine a sailor and as lovely a ship as ever rode a gale—didn't I hear him tell how, seventeen years ago, when he was laying at Liverpool docks empty—empty as a jug—and a full Indiaman right alongside, full of provisions, and corn, and everything a rat might prefer, and going to sail next day—how in the middle of the night the rats all left her and crossed his decks and went ashore every one of 'em!—every bloody one of 'em, sir!—and finally—it was moonlight—he saw a muss going on by the capstan of that other ship, and he slipped around, and there was a dozen old rats laying their heads together and chattering about something and looking down the forrard hatch every now and then, and finally they appeared to have got their minds made up, and one of 'em went aft and got a scrap of old stuns'l half a foot square, and they bored holes in the corners with their teeth, and bent on some long pieces of spun-yarn—made a sort of a little hammock of it, you understand—and then they lowered away gently for a while and stopped—and directly they begun heaving again, and up out of that forrard hatch, in full view of the mate, who was watching 'em all the time, up comes that little hammock with a poor, old, decrepit sick rat on it, all gone in with the consumption!—and they lugged him ashore, and they all went up town to the very last rat—and that ship sailed the next day for India, or Cape o' Good Hope, or somewheres, and the mate of the Empress didn't sail for as much as three weeks, and up to that time that ship hadn't been heard from, sir! Drat that choir! I must go and start 'em out—this sort of thing won't do!"
Alta California, March 15, 1867
On board steamer COLUMBIA, at sea.
CHRISTMAS EVE.—It has been an exceedingly quiet Christmas Eve, to-day. It is because a young child of one of the cabin passengers is lying very ill—suddenly taken last night—and so no one is willing to be noisy, or even passably cheerful, for that matter. All act as if they were related by blood to the child. And it is natural it should be so—a ship's passengers on a long voyage become as one family.
CHRISTMAS NIGHT.—The child died last evening, and some of the lady passengers sat up with the corpse all night. At ten this morning, we all assembled on the lower guard aft, and listened with uncovered heads, to a brief sermon by the clergyman (Rev. Mr. Fackler) and the reading of the Episcopal burial service—the capstan with a national flag over it served for a pulpit, and meanwhile the first officer and boatswain held the canvassed corpse with its head resting on their shoulders and its feet upon the taffrail—at the conclusion there was a breathless pause; then the minister said "Earth unto earth—ashes unto ashes—dust unto dust!"—a sharp plunge of the weighted body into the sea, a shudder from the startled passengers, a wild shriek from the young mother (a mere girl), and all was over.
Within three hours, with that solemn presence gone out of the ship, cheerfulness and vivacity reigned again.
DECEMBER 28th.—Isaac's upward flight culminated yesterday in a raffle, and now he is fallen! Hobnobbing with the chief officers, and hail fellow well met with everybody yesterday—to-day, degraded to the ranks, and none so poor as to take notice of him. You see he has often excited sympathy by displaying his late wife's jewelry (he said she died six weeks ago,) and mourning over it. But yesterday he got up that raffle said it grieved him to the heart to have those mementoes of his lost one about him—said her dear jewelry constantly reminded him of happy days he should never again see—and so he gathered it together and raffled it off for three hundred and fifty dollars! He feels easier after that, no doubt. His lacerated heart will be able to stand it for awhile, now, perhaps.
The reaction dethroned him from his high place among the passengers. When they reflected that he won all the jewelry himself that was worth having—that what they got was pinch beck; and that he had either been heartless enough to part with his dead wife's jewelry under shameful circumstances, or else he had no wife and had presumed to lie to his betters; they felt ashamed of themselves, and from that moment Isaac was tabu! For two days, now, he has been unmercifully snubbed at every turn, and already an act of his that won applause at first is quoted against him to further damn him. I refer to his having prevailed with the good-hearted Captain to take a modest-looking young German girl out of the steerage, where she was constantly subject to insult, and put her in the second cabin. They say now, that he was actuated by none but selfish motives, and had rascally designs against her. They do say that when a man starts downhill everybody is ready to help him with a kick, and I suppose it is so.
Last night, as usual, Isaac intruded upon the Captain's dog-watch lunch—which is, or should be, sacred to himself—and got into trouble. One of the passengers put something into his tea that came near making him throw up his boots. But some people will never learn anything. He went into the Captain's room to-day, uninvited, and fell into another trap provided for him by a passenger. He found a bottle—he always drinks from bottles wherever he finds them, whether asked to do it or not. He drank from that bottle, and then retired to his stateroom and has been patiently disgorging ever since.
We have been sailing placidly along the coast of Guatemala all day—a broad, low land, densely clad in a green, tropical vegetation, among which the cocoa-nut tree is prominent; occasionally we see a thatched native hut. In full view are three noble mountains—tall, symmetrical cones, with sides furrowed with wrinkle-like valleys veiled in a dreamy, purple mist that is charming to the eye, and summits swathed in a grand turban of rolling clouds. They say these are volcanoes, but we cannot see any smoke. No matter—it is a fairy landscape that is very pleasant to look upon.
"Do you see that ship anchored yonder?" The young lady addressed said she did see the ship.
"Well," said Captain W., "she's a whaler. She's trying out oil. The first time I ever was along here was seventeen years ago. I didn't know anything about whaling then, bless you. It was in the night, just after dark, and just where you see that ship there now, I saw a ship all on fire! I laid-to immediately and ordered out a boat's crew, and says, 'Pull, boys, for your life! Don't miss a stroke—don't you lose a minute! Tell the Captain not to lose his grip. I'll lay here a week and give him all the help I can, and then I'll take him and his crew to California, and do the very best I know how by 'em.' Well, we lay-to and waited and waited—all the passengers on deck and anxious for the boat to come back with the awful news. But nine o'clock, no boat; ship still burning, and glaring out on the black ocean like a sun dropped out of the sky. Ten o'clock—no boat; passengers beginning to get tired, and two or three quit and went to bed. Eleven—no boat; and one by one they sidled off to roost—give it up, you see all gone but me and one solitary motherly old soul—me marching slow up and down the deck and she gazing out across the water at the burning ship. We were just so until half-past 11, and then we heard the sound of oars. We closed up to the railing and stood by for them. Pretty soon the boat ranged up alongside—I tell you I felt awful—something made me hanker to look down into that boat, and yet something held me back. The officer of the boat reported: 'The ship ain't burning, sir; (I felt relieved then;) he says he's in big luck—is full of oil, and ready for home, and so they're cooking doughnuts in the fat and having a grand blow-out, illumination and jollification. But he's uncommon thankful for the good intentions you've shown, and hopes you'll accept this lot of A 1 sea-turkles.' The old woman leaned over the rail and shaded her eyes from the lantern with her hand, and she see them varmints flopping their flippers about in the boat and she says:
"'For the land's sake!—I've sot here, and sot here, and sot here all this blessed night cal'latin' you'd fetch a boat-load of sorrowful roasted corpses, and now it ain't nothing but a lot of nasty cussed mud-turkles—it's a dern thieving shame, that's my opinion of it!'"
DECEMBER 29th.—One sea voyage is ended anyhow. We have arrived at San Juan del Sur, and must leave the ship and cross the Isthmus—not to-day, though. They have posted a notice on the ship that the cholera is raging among a battalion of troops just arrived from New York, and so we are not permitted to go ashore to-day. And to the sea-weary eyes of some of our people, no doubt, bright green hills never looked so welcome, so enchanting, so altogether lovely, as these do that lie here within pistol-shot of us. But the law is spoken, and so half the ship's family are looking longingly ashore, or discussing the cholera news fearfully, and the other half are in the after cabin, singing boisterously and carrying on like a troop of wild school children.
GREYTOWN, January 1st.—While we lay all night at San Juan, the baggage was sent ashore in lighters, and next morning we departed ourselves. We found San Juan to consist of a few tumble-down frame shanties—they call them hotels—nestling among green verdure and overshadowed by picturesque little hills. The spot where we landed was crowded with horses, mules, ambulances and half-clad yellow natives, with bowie-knives two feet long, and as broad as your hand, strapped to their waists. I thought these barefooted scoundrels were soldiers, but no, they were merely citizens in civil life. Here and there on the beach moved a soiled and ragged white woman, to whom the sight of our ship must have been as a vision of Paradise; for here a vast ship-load of passengers had been kept in exile for fifteen days through the wretched incompetency of one man—the Company's agent on the Isthmus. He had sent a steamer empty to San Francisco, when he knew well that this multitude of people were due at Greytown. They will finish their journey, now, in our ship.
Our party of eight—we had made it up the night before—being the first boat-load to leave the ship, was entitled to the first choice of the ambulances, or the equestrian accommodations that were to convey us the twelve miles we must go by land between San Juan and Virgin Bay, on Lake Nicaragua. Some of the saddle-horses and mules—many of them, in fact—looked very well; but if there was any choice between the ambulances, or especially between the miraculous scarecrows that were to haul them, it was hardly perceptible. You never saw such harness in your life, nor such mules, nor such drivers. They were funny individually and funny in combination. Except the ghastly sores on the animals' backs, where the crazy harness had chafed, and scraped, and scarified—that part of it would move anybody's pity for the poor things.
We climbed into one of the largest of the faded red ambulances (mud wagons we call them in the mountains), with four little sore-backed rabbits hitched to it, and cleared for Virgin Bay. The driver commenced by beating and banging his team and cursing them like a furious maniac, in bad Spanish, and he kept it up all through that twelve-mile journey of three hours and a half, over a hard, level, beautiful road. We envied the people who were not crippled and could ride horseback.
But we clattered along pretty lively, and were a jolly party. The first thing the ladies noticed as we lost sight of the sea, and wound in among an overshadowing growth of dewy vines and forest trees, was a "dear, dear little baby—oh, see the darling!"—a vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat, making dirt-pies in front of an isolated cabin; and the first thing the men noticed was—was—but they could not make it out; a guide board perhaps, or a cross, or the modest grave-stone of some ill-fated stranger. But it was none of these. When we drew nearer it turned out to be a sign nailed to a tree, and it said "Try Ward's shirts!" There was some round abuse indulged in, then, of Ward and plantation bitters men, and all such people, who invade all sacred places with their rascally signs, and mar every landscape one might gaze upon in worship, and turn to a farce every sentimental thought that enters his brain. I know that if I were to go to old Niagara, and stand with his mists blowing in my face and his voice thundering in my ear, I would swell with a noble inspiration and say, "Oh, grand, sublime, magnificent—" and then behold on his front, "S. T. 1860 X Plantation Bitters," and be incensed. It is a shame.
THE PROCESSION UNDER WAY
The bright, fresh green on every hand, the delicious softness and coolness of the air (it had just showered a little before we started), the interest of unknown birds and flowers and trees, the delightful new sensation of the bumping and rattling of the ambulance—everything so cheery and lively, as compared with our old dull monotony and shoreless sea on board the ship—wrought our party up to a pitch of joyous animation and enthusiasm that I would have thought impossible with such dry old sticks. I ask pardon of the ladies—and even of the gentlemen, also. All hands voted "the Nicaragua route forever!" [N.B.—They used to do that every day or two—and then every other day or two they would damn the Nicaragua route forever. Such are the ways of passengers, all the world over.]
About every two hundred yards we came across a little summer-house of a peanut stand at the roadside, with raven haired, splendid-eyed Nicaragua damsels standing in attitudes of careless grace behind them—damsels buff-colored, like an envelope—damsels who were always dressed the same way: in a single flowing gown of fancifully figured calico, "gathered" across the breast (they are singularly full in the bust, the young ones), and ruffled all round, near the bottom of the skirt. They have white teeth, and pleasant, smiling, winning faces. They are virtuous according to their lights, but I guess their lights are a little dim. Two of these picturesque native girls were exceedingly beautiful—such liquid, languishing eyes! such pouting lips! such glossy, luxuriant hair! such ravishing, incendiary expression! such grace! such voluptuous forms, and such precious little drapery about them! such—tooth"—
"But you just prospect one of them heifers with a fine-tooth"—
This attempted interruption was from Brown, and procured his banishment at once. This man will not consent to see what is attractive, alone, but always unearths the disagreeable features of everything that comes under his notice.
These groups of dark maidens keep for sale a few cups of coffee, tea or chocolate, some bananas, oranges, pineapples, hard-boiled eggs, a dozen bottles of their vile native liquors, some ornamental cups carved from gourds of the calabash tree, a monkey or two—and their prices were so moderate that, in spite of all orders and remonstrances to the contrary, the steerage passengers have been overloading their stomachs with all sorts of beverages and edibles, and will pay for it in Asiatic cholera before they are many days older, no doubt.
Our road was smooth, level, and free from mud and dust, and the scenery in its neighborhood was pleasing, though not particularly striking. Many of the trees were starred all over with pretty blossoms. There was no lack of vegetation, and occasionally the balmy air came to us laden with a delicious fragrance. We passed two or three high hills, whose bold fronts, free from trees or shrubs, were thickly carpeted with softest, greenest grass—a picture our eyes could never tire of. Sometimes birds of handsome plumage flitted by, and we heard the blythe songs of others as we rode through the forests. But the monkeys claimed all attention. All hands wanted to see a real, live, wild monkey skirmishing among his native haunts. Our interest finally moderated somewhat in the native women; the birds; the calabash trees, with their gourd-like fruit; the huge, queer knots on trees, that were said to be ants' nests; the lime trees; and even in a singular species of cactus, long, slender and green, that climbed to the very tops of great trees, and completely hid their trunks and branches, and choked them to death in its winding folds—so like an ugly, endless serpent; but never did the party cease to consider the wild monkey a charming novelty and a joy forever.
Our four hundred passengers on horseback, muleback, and in four-mule ambulances, formed the wildest, raggedest and most uncouth procession I ever saw. It reminded me of the fantastic masquerading pageants they used to get up on the Fourth of July in the Western States, or on Mardigras Day in New Orleans. The steerage passengers travelled on muleback, chiefly, with coats, oil-skin carpet sacks, and blankets dangling around their saddles. Some of the saddles were new and good, but others were in all possible stages of mutilation and decay. There were not a dozen good riders in the two hundred and fifty that went on horseback, but every man seemed to consider that inasmuch as the animals belonged to "the Company," it was a stern duty to ride them to death, if possible, and they tried hard to do it. Such racing and yelling, and beating and banging and spurring, and such bouncing of blanket bundles, and flapping and fluttering of coat-tails, and such frantic scampering of the multitude of mules, and bobbing up and down of the long column of men, and rearing and charging of struggling ambulances in their midst, I never saw before, and I never enjoyed anything so much.
I never saw Brown's equanimity so disturbed as it was that day, either. The philosopher had received a charge at San Francisco—a widow, with three children and a servant girl. Every day on the trip, he had been obliged to go down among the sweltering stenches of the ship's hold, to pull and haul Mrs. B.'s trunks out from among piles of other baggage, and rummage among them for a shirt for Johnny, or a bib for Tommy, or a shawl for the mother or the maid, or a diaper for the baby, but these vexations were nothing to his Isthmus transportation troubles. He had to take his party horseback, and in order to keep them together amid the confusion of the procession, he tied his five mules together, end to end, and marched in single file—the forward horse's tail made fast to the next one's nose, and so on. He rode the leading horse himself, with the baby in his arms; Mrs. B. and the two boys came next, and the servant girl brought up the rear. It was a solemnly comical spectacle. Everything went well, though, till the racing began, and then the philosopher's mule got his ambition up and led the party a merry dance. Brown tried to hold him back with one hand for a while, and then triced the baby up under his left arm, and pulled back with both hands. This had a good deal of effect, but still the little detachment darted through the main procession like the wind, making a sensation wherever it went, and was greeted with many a whack and many a laugh. Occasionally Brown's mule stopped and fell to bucking, and then his other animals closed up and got tangled together in a helpless snarl. Of course, Brown had to unlimber the baby and straighten things out again. He swore hard, but under his breath, and sweated as no man ever sweated before. The entire procession had arrived at Virgin Bay and were stowed on the boat before he got there. But his beasts had grown tranquil enough by that time. Their heads were all down, and it was hard to tell which looked the most jaded and melancholy—themselves or their riders. It was like intruding a funeral cortege upon the boisterous hilarity of the balance of the ship's family.
ALL QUIET AGAIN
Comfortably quartered on the little steamer, we sat in the shade and lunched, smoked, compared notes of our jolly little scamper across the Isthmus, bought handsome mahogany walking-canes from the natives, and finally relapsed into pensive and placid gazing out upon the rippling waters of Lake Nicaragua and the two majestic mountains that tower up out of its blue depths and wrap their green summits in the fleecy clouds.
Alta California, March 16, 1867
Steamer SAN FRANCISCO,
New Year's Day.
Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all flecked with shadow and sunshine, whose summits pierce the billowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil—so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose. What a home one might make among their shady forests, their sunny slopes, their breezy dells, after he had grown weary of the toil, anxiety and unrest of the bustling, driving world. These mountains seem to have no level ground at the bases but rise abruptly from the water. There is nothing rugged about them—they are shapely and symmetrical, and all their outlines are soft, rounded and regular. One is 4,200 and the other 5,400 feet high, though the highest being the furthest removed makes them look like twins. A stranger would take them to be of equal altitude. Some say they are 6,000 feet high, and certainly they look it. When not a cloud is visible elsewhere in the heavens, their tall summits are magnificently draped with them. They are extinct volcanoes, and consequently their soil (decomposed lava) is wonderfully fertile. They are well stocked with cattle ranches, and with corn, coffee and tobacco farms. The climate is delightful, and is the healthiest on the Isthmus.
Our boat started across the lake at 2 P.M., and at 4 A.M. the following morning we reached Fort San Carlos, where the San Juan River flows out—a hundred miles in twelve hours—not particularly speedy, but very comfortable.
Here they changed us to a long, double-decked shell of a stern-wheel boat, without a berth or a bulkhead in her—wide open, nothing to obstruct your view except the slender stanchions that supported the roof. And so we started down the broad and beautiful river in the gray dawn of the balmy summer morning.
At eight we breakfasted. On the lake boat they fed us on coffee and tea, and on sandwiches composed of two pieces of bread enclosing one piece of ham. On this boat they gave us tea, coffee, and sandwiches composed of one piece of ham between two pieces of bread. There is nothing like variety.
In a little while all parties were absorbed in noting the scenery on shore—trees like cypress; other trees with large red blossoms; great feathery tree ferns and giant cactuses; clumps of tall bamboo; all manner of trees and bushes, in fact, webbed together with vines; occasionally a vista that opened, stretched its carpet of fresh green grass far within the jungle, then slowly closed again.
In this land of rank vegetation, no spot of soil can be cleared off and kept barren a week. Nature seizes upon every vagrant atom of dust and forces it to relieve her over-burdened store-houses. Weeds spring up in the cracks of floors, and clothe the roofs of huts in green; if a handful of dust settles in the crotch of a tree, ferns spring there and wave their graceful plumes in the tropic breeze. Filibustering Walker sunk a steamboat in the river; the sands washed down, filled in around her, built up a little oval island. The wind brought seeds thither, and they clothed every inch of it in luxuriant grass. Then trees grew and vines climbed up and hung them with bright garlands, and the steamer's grave was finished. The wreck was invisible to us, save that the two great fore-and-aft braces still stood up out of the grass and fenced in the trees. It was a pretty picture.
About noon, we swept gaily around a bend in the beautiful river, and a stately old adobe castle came into view—a relic of the olden time of the old buccaneering days of Morgan and his merry men. It stands upon a grassy dome-like hill, and the forests loom up beyond. They say that Lord Nelson once captured it and that this was his first notable feat. It cost him several hours, with 250 men, and good, hard, bloody fighting, to get it. In our time, Walker took it with 25 men, without firing a shot—through the treachery of the Commandante, they say.
There is a little straggling village under the hill, a village composed of a single rank of houses, extending some three hundred yards down the shore. There is a dangerous rapid here. It is said to be artificial—formed by man in former times to keep the pirate boats from penetrating the interior. We had to get ashore here, walk around the rapids, and get on another stern wheeler. Every house we passed was a booth for the sale of fruits and provisions. The bananas, pine-apples, cocoa-nuts and coffee were good, and the cigars very passable, but the oranges, although fresh, of course, were of a very inferior quality. Cheapness is the order of the day. You can buy as much of any one article as you can possibly want for a dime, and a sumptuous dinner for two or three for half a dollar. Bring along your short bits when you come this way. It is the grand base and foundation of all values, and is better received, and with less suspicion, than any other coin.
As we got under way and sped down the narrowing river, all the enchanting beauty of its surroundings came out. All gazed in rapt and silent admiration for a long time as the exquisite panorama unfolded itself, but finally burst into a conversational ecstasy that was alive with excited ejaculations.
The character of the vegetation on the banks had changed from a rank jungle to dense, lofty, majestic forests. There were hills, but the thick drapery of the vines spread upward, terrace upon terrace, and concealed them like a veil. We could not have believed in the hills, except that the upper trees towered too high to be on the bank level.
And everywhere in these vine-robed terraces were charming fairy harbors fringed with swinging garlands; and weird grottoes, whose twilight depth the eye might not pierce; and tunnels that wound their mysterious course none knew whither; and there were graceful temples—columns—towers—pyramids—mounds—domes—walls—all the shapes and forms and figures known to architecture, wrought in the pliant, leafy vines, and thrown together in reckless, enchanting confusion.
Now and then a rollicking monkey scampered into view, or a bird of splendid plumage floated through the sultry air, or the music of some invisible songster welled up out of the forest depths. The changing vistas of the river ever renewed the intoxicating picture; corners and points folding backward revealed new wonders beyond, of towering walls of verdure-gleaming cataracts of vines pouring sheer down a hundred and fifty feet, and mingling with the grass upon the earth—wonderful waterfalls of green leaves as deftly overlapping each other as the scales of a fish—a vast green rampart, solid a moment, and then, as we advanced, changing and opening into Gothic windows, colonnades—all manner of quaint and beautiful figures!
Sometimes a limbless veteran of the forest stood aloof in his flowing vine-robes, like an ivy-clad tower of some old feudal ruin.
We came upon another wrecked steamer turned into an emerald island—trees reaching above the great walking-beam framework, and the tireless vines climbing over the rusty and blistered old locomotive boiler. And by-and-by a retreating point of land disclosed some lofty hills in the distance, steep and densely grown with forests—each tree-top a delicate green dome, touched with a gleam of sunshine, and then shaded off with Indian-summery films into darkness; dome upon dome, they rose high into the sunny atmosphere, and contrasted their brilliant tints with the stormy purple of the sky beyond.
Along shore, huge alligators lay and sunned themselves and slept; birds with gaudy feathers and villainous hooked bills stood stupidly on overhanging boughs, and startled one suddenly out of his long cherished, dimly-defined notion that that sort of bird only lived in menageries; parrots flew by us—the idea of a parrot flying seemed funny enough—flying abroad, instead of swinging in a tin ring, and stooping and nipping that ring with its beak between its feet, and thus displaying itself in most unseemly attitude—flying, silently cleaving the air—and saying never a word! When the first one went by without saying "Polly wants a cracker," it seemed as if there was something unnatural about the bird, but it did not immediately occur to me what it was. And there was a prodigiously tall bird that had a beak like a powder horn, and curved its neck into an S, and stuck its long legs straight out behind like a steering oar when it flew, that I thought would have looked more proper and becoming in the iron cage where it naturally belonged. And I will not deny that from the moment I landed on that Isthmus, the idea of a monkey up a tree seemed so consumedly absurd and out of all character, that I never saw one in such a position but I wanted to take him and chain him to a wagon wheel under the Bengal tiger's cage, where he would necessarily feel more at home and not look so ridiculous.
"What sort of a crooked, spready, cur'us looking tree is that out yonder?"
I looked at the speaker. He was by nature, constitution and habit a Bore—I could see that. I said:
"I don't know. "I wanted to say, savagely, "How the devil should I know? Do I look like I ever was in this kind of a country before?"
"Looks like it might be an oak, or a slippry ellum, or something, but I reckon it ain't, maybe?"
"I don't know. Maybe it is, maybe it ain't."
"It's got big blossoms on it like a hollyhock."
"I don't know—it may be a hollyhock."
"Oh, no—I didn't mean that—I meant—Geeminy! see that monkey jump! What kind of a noise do they make—do they squawk?"
"Now, I don't know anything whatever about monkeys. They may squawk, or they may not—I hope to God they do!"
"Why?"
I struck my colors. This serene simplicity where I expected to make a telling shot, completely nonplussed me. I left without saying a word.
This fellow used to corner me and bore the life out of me with trivial reminiscences out of his insignificant history; with trifling scraps of information I had possessed from infancy; with decayed, worm-eaten jokes that made me frantic, and with eternal questions concerning things I knew nothing about and took no earthly interest in. One always meets such people on voyages, but I never met a specimen before that so completely tallied with my idea of a tiresome, exasperating, infernal bore.
On this second stern-wheel boat they gave us tea, coffee, and sandwiches formed by ingeniously secreting a slice of ham between two slices of bread. Truly, there is nothing like variety. It gives a zest to the simplest diet.
The boys smoked, sang, shot at alligators, discussed the lignum-vitae, mahogany, bastard-cocoa and other curious trees, and gazed at the bewitching panorama of the river the livelong happy day, and at night we tied up at the bank within 30 miles of Greytown. Those who had hammocks swung them, and those who hadn't made beds of their overcoats, and soon the two dingy lanterns, hung forward and aft, shed a ghostly glimmer over the thick-strewn and vaguely defined multitude of slumberers. As I said before, the whole boiler-deck was wide open; just before day light a chilly shower came driving in and roused everybody out. There was some complaining of sore bones by women and certain gentlemen who were unused to sleeping on hard, bare floors, but these little troubles were soon forgotten when the galley boys came up and the usual frenzied and famishing rushing and crowding and shouting of "Sandwiches! Sandwiches!" took place and disclosed the happy truth that we had not only the usual tea and coffee and sandwiches for breakfast, but also cheese! Verily, variety is the spice of life. Nobody said anything about sore bones anymore.
We got to Greytown early on the last day of the year, and saw the steamer at anchor that was to take us to New York. The town does not amount to much. There is a good deal of land around there, and it is curious that they didn't build it larger—but somehow they didn't. It is composed of two hundred old frame houses and some nice vacant lots, and its comeliness is greatly enhanced, I may say is rendered gorgeous, by the cluster of stern-wheel steamboats at the waterfront.
The population is 800, and is mixed—made up of natives, Americans, Spaniards, Germans, English and Jamaica negroes. Of course the spoken language is Spanish. Some of the negro babies do not wear any clothes at all, and the cows march through the public thoroughfares with a freedom which pen cannot describe. The inhabitants are not vain, and do not care for luxury and furniture. Most of them keep for sale small cigars called "poco tiempos"—ten cents a grab—and native brandy, tropical fruits and sea-grass hammocks. They sell everything cheap—even excellent foreign wines and such things, for import duties are light. The transit business has made every other house a lodging camp, and you can get a good bed anywhere for a dollar. It does not cost much to keep a Greytown bed in order; there is nothing to it but a mattress, two sheets and a mosquito bar. The town is ornamented with cocoa-nut trees, the outskirts are bordered with chaparral, and everywhere the pink bachelor button blossoms of the sensitive plant smile among the grass. [Smile among the grass is good.—M. T.]
The Santiago de Cuba brought the cholera to the Isthmus last trip, and thirty-five people died of it. A young man, a resident of Greytown, also died of it, which exasperated his mother very much. So the citizens got up a Board of Health, and prohibited the cholera from coming ashore there anymore. While we were up town the stern-wheeler containing our steerage and second cabin passengers arrived, and was at once warned to anchor in the stream and let no one come ashore! Not until we had been there twenty-four hours, and were ready to take final leave, did those crowded and cursing passengers discover what bred the tabu. It then came out that while Brown was drinking some native brandy in one of the saloons, he remarked that he had tasted milder stuff; but then, he said, he had escaped cholera on the Isthmus and smallpox among the steerage folks, and he guessed he could survive that drink. A citizen at once reported the remark to the Board of Health, and hence the order—and never a steerage passenger got a chance to go ashore at Greytown. There was some talk in the steerage of hanging Brown, but it never came to anything.
The Republic of Nicaragua has some populous cities in it. Leon, 48,000; Massaye, 38,000; Rivas, 30,000; Managua, 24,000; Granada, 18,000; Chinandaga, 18,000; and several other towns of 3,000 and 4,000. The total population is 320,000—all in towns and cities, nearly. Only property-holders who are declared citizens can vote. Greytown is not represented in the councils of the nation at all. The property there is held by temporary residents—foreigners—who care nothing about politics.
There are a good many gold and silver mines in the country. The Choutales—gold quartz—(English Company—cost £250,000)—is worked by rude native machinery, but has new, modern machinery on the way. It's first clean-up (my notes say) was £200,000. For the sake of our reputation we will consider that that was meant for £20,000 and it is unquestionably large enough, even at that.
A Company of Californians have bought two mines—the Albertin and Petaluma—and have just begun work. They paid $70,000 for one of them.
An English Company are just beginning work on a mine which they paid £30,000 for.
There are also coal, silver, copper and opal mines. One of the latter, near the road between San Juan and Virgin Bay, has produced opals which, in the rough, were as large as almonds.
The Republic also has, among its numerous attractions and sources of commercial prosperity, some lakes and rivers of sulphur, and some extinct volcanoes—(an American Company has bought one of these and are sinking on it—they think they can make it go again.)
Nicaragua exports parrots and monkeys, India-rubber, logwood, sugar, hides, cochineal, coffee, deerskins, mahogany, chocolate, gold, opals, sarsaparilla, tortoise shells (quite a heavy business), and tropical fruits.
The rubber trade is large; last year Greytown alone exported $112,000 worth. Rubber is worth 28 cents a pound when it starts—in Europe, 54.
One man does all the mahogany business that is done on the northern coast of Nicaragua. He had one log, worth $12,000, which was so large it had to lay several years before there was water enough to float it over the bar. He will clear $500,000 this year, they say.
There is a very heavy export trade in logwood. Also in cacao (chocolate). Some of the plantations are very extensive. One owned by the Menier Manufacturing Company, of France, cost $500,000.
They could export cocoa-nut oil profitably, but no one takes hold of it.
There is an ad valorem duty of ten per cent on imports for Greytown, and a sort of incomprehensible tariff of forty per cent for the interior.
Laborers' wages in the interior are 20 to 40 cents a day and found. But it don't cost anything to board them; they never eat anything but plantains, and they eat them green, ripe or rotten—they are not particular—they would as soon have them one way as the other.
There is an English steamer monthly from Greytown to Jamaica and one or two other points, and thence to Southampton.
The Transit Company's charter has been extended to fifty years, and now it is expected that they will improve the accommodations on the stern-wheel boats. I don't see any room for it, however, unless they can hatch out some more of those happy variations on the sandwiches. The waters of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers are to be joined together, however, dykes built, and other projects instituted tending to the improvement of the Greytown harbor, that will eventually make it possible for ships to come inside the reef, no doubt, instead of pitching and charging at anchor in the open roadstead as at present.
We slept ashore in Greytown, and for the want of something better to do, I suppose, Brown cornered the Bore and fell to instructing him that an alligator could not climb a tree. The Bore said he knew that before, but the philosopher went into elaborate details and demonstrated anyhow, unmindful of protests and interruptions, and finally wore out the victim and drove him off a frantic and vanquished man. Brown may have done it for a joke, but surely there was no semblance of it in his voice or manner. If he had not really set his heart in good faith on proving that an alligator could not climb a tree, I was not able to discover it. But I never enjoyed anything better.
Alta California, March 17, 1867
Steamer SAN FRANCISCO,
At sea, January 1st.
ALL this morning the surf-boats were busy bringing New York passengers ashore from the steamer San Francisco, and carrying us out to take their places—and all in the midst of a heavy sea and a drenching rain. We took our places in the surf-boat at 8 A.M. and with the first stroke of the oars we were soaked to the skin. Yet it was very pleasant. It was quite a picture to get a misty and momentary glimpse of the boat ahead of us through the driving rain, as it rose high upon the crest of a lofty wave, and then sank down, leaving nothing visible in all the wide horizon but the rainy sea.
It was dreary enough on the ship when we got there, squatting around on the wet promenade deck watching baggage and looking soaked, woe-begone and disconsolate. We were well satisfied, though, for the boat loads that were leaving the vessel every moment were bound for vastly drearier quarters. We sailed at noon.
MIDNIGHT—There goes that choir again:
"God save the good ship as onward she flies!
We're homeward bound! homeward bound!"
That is well enough—I like that. But usually they do sing the wretchedest old songs in the world. Think of them sitting up there, under these jeweled skies, with all the ocean around them glistening with white-caps, piping "Just Before the Battle, Mother!" and "Johnny Comes Marching Home!" and "Lily Dale!" and "Dog Tray." When they sing hymns they do well enough and make good music, but perdition catch their other efforts! "Homeward Bound" and the "Larboard Watch Ahoy!" nobody objects to, because they are in keeping with our surroundings—but what in the nation is there in common between the shoreless sea, the gemmed and arching heavens, the crested billows, the stately ship ploughing her gallant way and leaving a highway of fire behind her, the thousand thoughtful eyes gazing out upon the ocean, lost in dreams of the homes that shall soon bless their sight again—and Dog Tray! Why is Dog Tray to be intruded upon circumstances of such moral and physical sublimity as these? What has Dog Tray got to do with such matters? Confound Dog Tray!
KEY WEST (Florida), January 6th.—We soon got accustomed to the new ship and her officers, and liked them well. And, behold, we had ice-water! That was a treat. There was plenty of it, and so all hands did little else but drink it while the novelty was fresh. We could not well help liking a ship that kept plenty of ice on board. She was a good ship, but she kept breaking a bolt-head or a king-pin, or whatever its name was, every now and then. The first time it broke the passengers were in a sweat; they thought it must be something terrible that could keep the ship lying still on the water for two hours at night. Next day it broke again, and again we floated an hour or so till it was mended. Two days afterward it broke again, and again we lost several hours—the passengers getting scared for fear we should get disabled entirely—disabled! when we had canvas enough to supply two ships; but passengers are usually just about as reasonable as that. The last time the accident happened, Brown came up from his orgies in the cabin, late at night (it was storming like everything), and roused me out of my slumbers. "What the devil do you want?" "Why, I want to tell you something." "Out with it—quick!"
"Why, I know why they call this the tri-monthly line of steamers."
"Well-hurry."
"It's because they go down to Greytown one month, and then they try all next month to get back again!"
"Leave the room!"
And he left—else I would have brained him on the spot.
On the other side, when this lunatic first came in sight of the Isthmus, he gazed, and gazed, and gazed at it as if he had found something so wonderful he could hardly realize it. Finally he said, reflectively: "The Isthmus—and so this is the old, regular, simon-pure Isthmus—the place where all the butter comes from!" I suppose you can appreciate that in California.
We had a rare good time on the San Francisco. The old Captain was jolly, and a gentleman—formerly a Lieutenant Commander in the navy. The Purser was a long, gangly, first-rate fellow—perfect gentleman—and told the oldest, rattiest, last-century stories, and told them with the worst grace! We had a very jolly time. The cholera was in the ship, medicines were nearly out, and we had to be jolly. It wouldn't do to get melancholy for a moment. Brown and Smith (my room-mates) invented a harmless tropical drink (I thought I had tasted it before) which they named "west-sou'-wester;" and every day, before each meal, all the boys were drummed forward to take it. It was built thus:
R.—White sugar—lbs. 3/4
Ice.—lbs. 1 1/2
Limes—dozen 1
Lemon—1
Orange—1
Brandy—bot. 1/2
Put in 3/4 gal. ice-pitcher, and fill up with water.
The smoking room was always full of lovers, teething babies and seasick women, and so Brown and I had to take it turn about getting sick every night. The idea of this was, so that we might have a large ship's lantern in our state-room instead of the dingy little spark of a swinging lamp usually provided for passengers, and which must be blown out promptly at ten o'clock. Only sick people can have ship-lanterns, and burn them as long as they want to see how the medicine operates, and play seven up. We never worried much about the medicine—we let it operate or not, just as it came handy, because it wasn't anything but west-sou'-westers anyhow—but we used to be very regular about getting the room crammed full of cigar-smoke and boys, and listening to the purser's infamous old stories, and playing pitch seven-up till midnight.
The monkey was a well-spring of joy—one of the passengers got him at Greytown and kept him in a locker near our room on the upper deck—and we used to get him as tight as a brick occasionally, on a banana soaked in cherry brandy, and then it was fun to see him reel away and scamper up the rigging and miscalculate his jumps and fall thirty feet and catch by his tail on another rope and save himself. He was dressed up by the ladies in a gray Scotch cap and pantaloons, gray coat with cuffs and collar of brilliant red and gold, and a belt and wooden dagger, and was as comical and happy-spirited a scoundrel as ever lived. He was never idle—never still; always prospecting and rummaging in staterooms or galloping up the rigging to the very masthead. The gale, and the quivering mast, and the plunging ship, were nonsense to him on his dizzy perch. One morning when he was tight and the weather was cool, he went and got into bed with a sick woman who was asleep—drew the covers down carefully, one after the other, watching her face all the time with his sharp eyes—then turned back the sheet and sprung in! He nestled snugly up to the lady, keeping up his low, gratified squeak all the time, and drew up the bedclothes till nothing of him was visible but the brim of his cap and the end of his gray nose. His squeaking woke the woman, and she looked once at the diminutive old face on her pillow, and then she screamed like a locomotive and sprang out of bed. The next moment the monkey was at the masthead, infinitely worse scared than she was.
MISS SLIMMENS
When the monkey and all other sources of amusement failed, the passengers talked gossip. But the chief of this was the lady they dubbed Miss Slimmens. Not one soul in the cabin escaped her. She told fearful stories about everybody. And she never told one that didn't make her victim wince as if he were skinned. She is a newspaper correspondent, and I think she must be a right spicy one. Everybody was in misery on her account, but the climax that filled every heart with anguish was the poem she wrote, and into which she compressed all her monstrous stories. It scorched them! Human nature could not stand this. It had to be resented; and one of the boys in the after cabin served her up to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne." Everybody read it, but they did not want to go further than she did, and so they never sang it. There were eight verses of home-spun doggerel. I will give a brief extract:
"She gave M. T. an awful shot,
And Kingdom she did lift;
From White and Thayer the fur did fly—
Lord! how she snuffed out Smith!
"She crowded Lewis till he swore
If she would stop the war,
He'd take the cussed newspaper
She corresponded for.
"She said 'twas funny Baker's charms
No woman could withstand,
But if she saw where those charms lay,
She wished she might be destroyed."
Brown always spoke reverently of Slimmens as "the correspondent"—but it was small distinction, because he always spoke of me in the same way, and the same way of the monkey.
Most of the steerage passengers ate quantities of fruit on the Isthmus and drank aguadiente—a dangerous combination, even for a native—and we had hardly got to sea before the effects of their imprudence appeared. In my log I find these entries:
"JANUARY 2d.—Two cases cholera in the steerage reported this morning."
"4 P.M.—Surgeon has just reported to the Captain that 'two of the cases are mighty bad, and the third awful bad.' So there is a new one, it seems."
"9:10 P.M.—One of the sick men died a few minutes ago, and was at once sheeted and thrown overboard. Rev. Mr. Fackler read the prayers."
"MIDNIGHT.—Another patient at the point of death—they are filling him up with brandy. These are sad times."
"1 A.M.—The man is dead."
"2 A.M.-He is overboard. Expedition has to be used in our circumstances."
"JANUARY 4th.—Off coast of Cuba. Another man died this morning—of cholera, everybody in the ship said, of course—but it was not. Old case of consumption."
"JANUARY 5th.—We are to put in at Key West, Florida, to-day, for coal, so they say, but no doubt it is to cool down the fright of the passengers as well. Some are lively, but others are in a terrible way. Seven cases sickness yesterday—one a first cabin passenger."
"NOON.—Another man said to be dying of cholera—the young man they call 'Shape."'
"Half a dozen on the sick list now. The blockheads let the diarrhea run two or three days, and then, getting scared, they run to the surgeon and hope to be cured. And they lie like all possessed—swear they have just been taken, when the doctor knows better by their symptoms. He asked a patient the other day if he had any money to get some brandy with?—said 'no,' and so the ship had to furnish it—when the man died they found forty-five dollars in his pocket. Maybe it was all the money the poor fellow had, but then he needn't have spoken falsely about it when the chances were all in favor of his going to the bottom anyway, and then he wouldn't want it."
"'Shape' been walking the deck in stocking feet at midnight last night—getting wet—exposing himself—going to die, they say."
"The disease has got into the second cabin at last, and one case in first cabin. The consternation is so great among some of the passengers, that several are going to get off at Key West (if quarantine regulations permit it) and go north overland."
"The Captain and the Surgeon go through with the regular daily inspection of every nook and corner and stateroom in the ship, as usual. It is a good regulation, and more than ever necessary now."
"Shape is dead—sick about twelve hours."
"2 P.M.—The Episcopal clergyman, Rev. Mr. Fackler, is taken—bad diarrhea and griping. He has buried all the dead, and he is a good-hearted man and it always affected him so to see those poor fellows plunge into the sea. Pure distress of mind has made him sick—nothing else. He started out to read prayers over 'Shape,' and when he came in sight of the sheeted corpse he fainted and fell down by the capstan."
"All hands looking anxiously forward to the cool weather we shall strike twenty-four hours hence, to drive away the sickness."
"4 P.M.—The Minister has got a fit—convulsions of some kind. They are nursing him well; everybody likes him and respects him."
"Just heard the Captain give the order to Purser to put up a sign, in letters large enough for all to read: 'No charge for medical attendance whatever.' It is a good idea—we have found some more like that fellow that died and didn't want to buy brandy."
"5:30 P.M.—As the boys came to the room, one after the other, I observed a marked change in their demeanor. They report that the Minister—only sick such a short time—is already very low; and that a hospital has been fitted up in the steerage and he removed thither. Verily the ship is fast becoming a floating hospital herself—not a single hour passes but brings its new sensation—its melancholy tidings. If ever a group of earnest countenances assemble on any part of the deck, you will see everybody flock there—they know there is some more news of dire import. When I think of poor 'Shape' and the preacher, both so well when I saw them yesterday, it makes me feel gloomy.
Since the last two hours, all laughter, all cheerfulness, have died out of the ship. A settled sadness is upon the faces of the passengers."
"The last arrival says the Minister is dying. The passengers are fearfully exercised, and with considerable reason, for we are about to have our fifth death in five days, and the sixth of the voyage."
"That bolt-head broke several days ago, and we lost two hours while it was being mended. It broke again the next day, and we lost three or four hours. It broke again this afternoon, and again we lay like a log on the water (head wind,) for three or four hours more. These things distress the passengers beyond measure. They are scared about the epidemic and so impatient to get along that a stoppage of an hour seems a week to them, and gets them nervous and excited. One or two insist that we are 'out of luck,' and that we are all going to the very dickens, wherever that may be. Good many patients in the hospital. One well man is in a terrible way—can't bear the idea of dying and being buried at sea—as if his dead carcass would be more comfortable being eaten by grub-worms than sharks. Has got sixty-eight articles on cholera and its treatment—does nothing but read them. He tried hard to get the Captain to promise not to throw him overboard in case he died—offered him a hundred dollars. He is determined to quit the ship at Key West, and so are twenty or thirty others."
JANUARY 6th.—At two o'clock this morning, the Rev. Mr. Fackler died, and half an hour afterwards we landed at Key West. It is Sunday. Two of us attended Episcopal service here, and retired when they prepared to take the sacrament, and left a request at the pastor's house that he would preach the funeral sermon. We visited the cemetery in the edge of town, and then, supposing there was plenty of time, strolled through the principal streets and took some notes. When we got to the ship, a little after one o'clock, they said the funeral was already over.
Alta California, March 23, 1867
Key West,
January 6th.
THIS ranks as an excellent harbor, and looks like an open roadstead. They say the hundred little flat islands, or keys, scattered all around keep off sea and storm. It is a pretty little tropical looking town, green all over with the cocoa-nut tree peculiar to this latitude, which has a short, thick trunk and tall, curved branches, which give it the semblance of a colossal feather-brush. The gardens have a bastard-looking orange tree in them, also, and tamarinds, Rose of Sharon, and oleanders, and something that looks like the century plant; and among the chaparral in the outskirts are thousands of gigantic prickly pears. The country is level, and is precious few inches above the sea. The formation is a rock that is white, looks like limestone, and is made of infinitesimal spheres like mustard seed compacted together. There is no soil upon it of any consequence, and so I do not see how they manage to grow anything. I didn't hear of any farms or vegetable gardens around. If a man wanted to start a farm there, he would have to bring one in a ship.
The town has houses enough in it to contain 3,000 people, but many of them are not occupied. The place has no commerce with the outside world. It don't raise anything and don't manufacture anything, and there seems to be no country back of it. And so I marched through and through the place, wondering how under heaven the people got their living. Finally it struck me, though after comparing notes with the Purser and the passengers: There is a great fortification there—Fort Taylor; a lighthouse or so, a great military barrack, and a Custom House. So they live off the Government; they keep numberless whiskey mills for the soldier trade, and they make something out of the weekly New Orleans and Havana steamer that touches there; and two or three times a year a stray ship wanders in there, and is a godsend. They scorch her!
Everybody was afraid the Health Officers would not allow us to land there with our cholera. Vain delusion! If a Health Officer were to stand between them and their livelihood in that way they would discharge him. They don't mind pestilences. They have their protection in the salubrity and singular healthfulness of their climate and situation. Their Doctor called our cholera "malignant diarrhea," and cheerfully let us land and spend $3,000 or $4,000. That will last them till fortune betrays another ship into their hands. For one hundred tons of coal and a few stores and medicines, our ship paid $2,011.20. Labor bill for putting the coal aboard was $205; it would have been $25 in New York. But the funniest thing was our restaurant experience. There were ten grown persons and two children at the dinner—(we furnished the wines ourselves); had weak soup, ham and eggs, coffee, an abominable stew of some kind or other that no man could eat, and a piece of custard pie all around. The bill was two dollars and a quarter apiece. We left good fare on the vessel to go and eat such a villainous mess as that. If they keep on in that way, a Key Wester will be a curiosity in Heaven here after.
I say nothing against Key West cigars, though. We laid in a heavy stock of them at four dollars a hundred—real Havana tobacco, and a better cigar than one can get in San Francisco at any price whatever. The tobacco is imported from Havana and then made into cigars by Spaniards. The duty on raw tobacco is only one-third of its market value, but the duty on the manufactured article is just three times its value. Hence they do not import cigars, but make them.
There are few handsome or elegant dwellings in the place—none, I might almost say. The dwellings of the "plebeians" are one-story frame cottages, with cheap colored paints hung on the walls, and neither mats nor carpets on the floors, and without glass windows—nothing but great heavy board shutters, solid like a door, and an inch thick. I think I saw a hundred such. I couldn't understand it. I meant to ask why they did not use glass windows, but I forgot it. I wish I knew.
At a little distance the town looks whitewashed and very pretty, but a closer inspection discovers that the whitewash is dingy, and that the whole concern hath about it a melancholy air of decay—Ben Bolt.
The negroes seemed to be concentrated in a single corner of the town, to leeward of the whites—so their fragrance is wasted on the desert air, and blows out to sea. As this fragrance blows straight out from near the lighthouse, it has its value—because the storm-tossed mariner with a delicate sense of smell could follow it in, in case the light chanced to go out. We met very few negroes in the town proper, which might have been because it was Sunday and a holiday.
The roadways in and about Key West are in triple paths, with belts of grass growing between—a circumstance which might have been suggestive of one-horse vehicles, only there were no horse-tracks in the middle path, and no wheel-tracks in the outside ones. We did see two cows and three horses, but that is not enough to justify me in saying there are thousands of them in Key West.
I attended Episcopal service, and they gauged me at a glance and gave me a back seat, as usual. And such style! and such fashion! Why, I might have imagined myself in Grace Cathedral, or some other metropolitan temple. Three hundred and fifty elegantly dressed ladies and children, and twenty-five men! The men were out selling little groceries and things to our army of rusty looking passengers from the San Francisco, no doubt. But where all that style came from was a mystery to me, in this decaying, windowless town, guiltless of commerce, agriculture, or manufactures. They must have been families of officers of the Custom House, and of the two great military establishments. Several of the gentlemen were unquestionably Southern bloods, though—slim, spruce, long-haired young fellows, in broadcloth, black kids, whalebone canes, ruffled shirts, and funny little cravats, an inch wide, made of flaming yellow silk ribbon.
Finally, two gentlemen began to hand around plates that seemed to have large pound-cakes on them. Everybody took a slice, but still the cakes grew no smaller. I wondered at that. However, when the cake-passers got toward my end of the church, I saw that those things were only imitation cakes with holes in their tops, and that the people were putting something in them instead of taking from them. I asked a boy what it was all about. He said those were contribution boxes. That had occurred to me a moment before, but I heard nothing rattle in them. You see, they were using postal currency, and it was our first experience in that line. We got better acquainted with it before the day was over, though. In a grocery where Brown bought something, they gave him a five-cent stamp in change, with a portrait of Gideon Welles on it, but he handed it back, with many regrets, and said he couldn't make any use of the grocery-man's picture, because he "didn't keep no photograft album."
Fort Taylor, an immensely strong fortification, sits in the edge of the sea and commands the entrance to the harbor, but we did not visit it—the walk would have been too great.
Well, we are really in "the States" again, but I cannot quite realize it yet.
NEW YORK, January 12th.
We remained at Key West a day and night, and left on the morning of the 7th, and with a thinned complement of people; for twenty-one passengers had quitted the ship on account of the cholera—among them Isaac, who had latterly so fallen below all esteem or even recognition, that he had been going pretty much in a gang by himself ever since we left Greytown; and among them, also, went the man with the cholera scrapbook, who wanted to pay the Captain $100 to insure his not being buried at sea if he died.
But the ship had regained her ancient cheerfulness as by magic. Of the eighteen who were sick when we landed, eleven were already well again, and all the fright about the disease was gone—went with the twenty-one. The dismal spell was removed, and it was really jolly at breakfast that morning—laughter rang out clear and hearty everywhere. They even got to chaffing each other about the scare, and telling extravagant stories on each other about things done under the influence of fear. They accused Kingdom of being scared, but he denied it—said he had never been scared since he loaded the old Queen Anne's musket for his father once. And he told the
"You see, the old man was trying to learn me to shoot blackbirds and beasts that tore up the young corn and such things, so that I could be of some use about the farm, because I wasn't big enough to do much. My gun was a little single-barrel shotgun, and the old man carried an old Queen Anne's musket that weighed a ton and made a report like a thunderclap, and kicked like a mule. The old man wanted me to shoot the old musket sometimes, but I was afraid. One day, though, I got her down and thought I'd try her one riffle, anyhow, and so I took her to the hired man and asked him how to load her, because the old man was out in the fields. Hiram said, 'Do you see them marks on the stock—an X and a V on each side of a Queen's crown?—well, that means 10 balls and 5 slugs—that's her load. 'But how much powder?' 'Oh,' he says, 'it don't matter; put in three or four handfuls.' So I loaded her up that way, and it was an awful charge—I had sense enough to know that—and started out. I levelled her on a good many blackbirds, but every time I went to pull the trigger I shut my eyes and weakened: I was afraid of her kick. Towards sundown I fetched up at the house, and there was the old man resting himself on the porch.
"'Been out hunting, have ye?'
"'Yes, sir,' says I. "
"'What did you kill?'
"'Didn't kill anything, sir—didn't shoot her off—I was afraid she'd kick.' [ I know'd d——d well she would.]
"'Gimme the gun!' the old man says, mad as sin.
"And he took aim at a sapling on the other side of the road, and I began to drop back out of danger. And the next minute I heard an earthquake and see the Queen Anne whirling end over-end in the air, and the old man spinning around on one heel, with one leg up and both hands on his jaw, and the bark flying from that sapling like there was a hail-storm! The old man's shoulder was set back four inches, and his jaw turned black and blue, and he had to lay up for three days. Cholera, nor nothing else, can ever scare me the way I was scared that time."
THE TALE OF THE "BIRD OF A NEW SPECIE"
That reminds me of another of Kingdom's experiments as a boy. He says:
"One day when me and my brother were out in the woods, he shot a chicken-hawk and a crow, and while we were lolling in the shade under a tree, he pulled the tails out of the birds and then fooling around and talking, he finally built the crow's tail into the chicken-hawk's transom. When we saw what a neat job it was, we thought we would keep it. When we got home we were late for supper, and we just dropped it on the porch and rushed in. We had a sort of sneaking hope that the old man and our uncle would get bit with it anyway, because they were always pattering over geology or natural history, or something they didn't know anything about. While we were at supper, they came along and found the bird, and we heard them discussing it and talking all sorts of astonishment. Directly the old man came in—had the bird by the leg and says:
"'Boys, where'd you get this?'
"'Shot him in the woods, sir.'
"'Did you ever come across any more birds like this around here?'
"'No, sir—this is the first one.'
"'Boys, do you know what you've done? You've discovered something that'll make ye known everywheres. This bird's of a new specie.'
"And then he walked out, and we heard him and uncle conclude that they'd label it with their names and send it to Professor Hagenbaum, at Albany. Pretty soon, though, the old man took hold of the tail and it pulled out, and we heard both of them swear a little. When we came out, the bird was laying on one side of the fence and the tail on the other. We didn't dare to laugh nor to let on about overhearing their talk either. But about a month after this there came along the rattiest specimen of a boy you ever saw, and wanted to stop with us. He was all rags and tatters, and tired out with running away from his master somewhere. His shirt was hanging at half-mast through his trowsers, and two-thirds of the tail of it was a piece of blue flannel that had been sewed on. While the poor devil was eating his dinner, uncle and the old man were studying up what they'd better do with him. And finally they said, by George, they didn't know what to do with him. Just then the boy rose up and swung his colors into view, and brother Bob says:
"'Father, you might send him to Professor Hagenbaum, at Albany!'
"It was the first the old man knew we'd overheard the bird-talk, and so he whaled us both. He says, 'I'll learn you to play jokes on your old father!"
I go back to my log again:
"JANUARY 8th—Man named Belmayne died to-day of dropsy, and was buried at sea.
"The temperature of the Gulf Stream here (they try it every two hours for the information of the Navy Department) is 76 degrees, atmosphere 72 degrees. We are comfortable enough now, while we are in this fluid stove, but when we leave it at Cape Hatteras it will be terribly cold. The speed of the Stream varies from one third of a mile to three and one-half miles an hour. We have been making 210 to 220 miles a day heretofore, but in this current we can turn off 250, 260 and 275 miles.
"The ship has beautiful charts, compiled by Lieut. Maury, which are crammed with shoals, currents, lights, buoys, soundings, and winds, and calms and storms—black figures for soundings, and bright spots for beacons, and so on, and an interminable tangle, like a spider's web, of red lines denoting the tracks of hundreds of ships whose logs were sent to Maury—everything mapped out so accurately that a man might know what water he had, what current, what beacon he was near, what style of wind he might expect, and from which direction, on any particular day in the year, at any given point on the world's broad surface. 'They that go down to the sea in ships see the wonders of the great deep'—but this modern navigation out-wonders any wonder the scriptural writers dreampt of. To see a man stand in the night, when everything looks alike—far out in the midst of a boundless sea—and measure from one star to another and tell to a dot right where the ship is—tell the very spot the little insignificant speck occupies on a vast expanse of land and sea twenty-five thousand miles in circumference! Verily, with his imperial intellect and his deep-searching wisdom, man is almost a God!
"In the strongest current of the Gulf Stream at 4 o'clock this morning, off Jupiter Inlet—3 1/2 miles an hour. Numerous bets we wouldn't make 250 miles—made 271 in the 24 hours ending at noon. The current for the next 24 hours will not be so strong."
"JANUARY 10th.—At noon shall be off Hatteras, 26 days out from San Francisco. We shall leave this warming pan of a Gulf Stream to-day, and then it will cease to be genial summer weather and become wintry cold. We already see the signs—they put feather-beds and blankets on the berths this morning. It is warm, now, and raining.
"Eight sick—five diarrhea—two better—three convalescent.
"Passing out of the Gulf Stream rapidly. At 2 P.M., temperature of the water had fallen seven degrees in half an hour—from 72 degrees down to 65 degrees. Already the day is turning cold, and one after another the boys adjourn from the deck a moment and then come back with overcoats on. At 2:30, temperature of water two degrees lower—viz., 63 degrees. At 3, it was 61 degrees. It fell eleven degrees in an hour and a half. Then we passed out, and the weather turned bitter cold."
MORE JOURNALIZING
"11: 30 P.M.—Dark, stormy, and villainously cold. Snow blew in my face as I fought the wind, and came forward to the wheelhouse.
"JANUARY 11th—7 P.M.—Been in bed all day, trying to keep warm; can't get near the steam pipes in the smoking-room on account of the babies and the sick women. If they like it in there, they're welcome; but they'll freeze if they persist in leaving the windows open. It is Brown's turn to be sick to-night; I will turn out and find him, and drum the boys forward for seven-up.
"JANUARY 12th—1 A.M.—Man named Peterson is just dead—not cholera. We are nearing New York. He died on soundings, and so we shall not bury him in the ocean."
I captured Brown's journal, and I mean to make an extract from it, whether it be fair or not.
"MONDAY MORNING.—Found my old girl setting in her old place by the taffrail, sighing and pensive, just as she always is, and also reading poetry and picking her nose with a fork. I cannot live without her.
"TUESDAY—This purser has got his own way for making out what he calls his Custom House statement. Says they have to have it, but they never read it, so it isn't particular how it's done. He was scratching away at it, busy, in his office. I asked him how in the nation he found out every passenger's age and trade, and nationality, and all that sort of thing? 'Guess 'em, myself,' he said. 'If a man's name's Molineux, of course he's a Frenchman; if his name's O'Flannigan, of course he's an Irishman; if his name's Smith, set him down for any place that's handy; as to his age or his trade, who the devil's business is that?—put 'em down what you please—Custom House people don't read it anyway—all pursers do it this way—the law's a farce, got up by some ass of a back-country Congressman, that had never been at sea in his life. 'Well,' says I, 'let's see how you've got some of us down.' And he showed me:
"'Wm. Brown.—Missionary—age, 98—native of Timbuctoo.
"'Mark Twain—Short card sharp—age, 24—South Sea Islander.
"'Miss Slimmens—Milliner and moral philosopher—age, 62—native of Terra del Fuego.'
"That is the way that long-legged humbug prejudices Government against respectable people."
We swore the ship through at quarantine, which was right—she hadn't had any real cholera on board since we left Greytown—and at 8 o'clock this morning we stood in the biting air of the upper deck and sailed by the snow-covered, wintry looking residences on Staten Island—recognized Castle Garden—beheld the vast city spread out beyond, encircled with its palisade of masts, and adorned with its hundred steeples—saw the steam-tug and ferry-boats swarming through the floating ice, instinct with a frenzied energy, as we passed the river—and in a little while we were ashore and safe housed at the Metropolitan.
After comparing notes, all decided that the voyage had been exceedingly pleasant, notwithstanding its little drawbacks, and that we would like very well to leave the cholera ashore and take the trip over again.
The Nicaragua Steamship Company are building three splendid new steamers, all of them fast and commodious—and six weeks hence the first one will start around the Horn to do duty on the other side. They claim that she will be able to make fifteen knots right along with twenty pounds of steam. I would like to go in one of their new ships and see that beautiful scenery on the Lake and San Juan River again.
Alta California, March 28, 1867
New York,
Feb. 2d, 1867.
THE only trouble about this town is, that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call, without devoting a whole day to it—that is, what people call a whole day who do not get up early. Many businessmen only give audience from eleven to one; therefore, if you miss those hours your affair must go over till next day. Now if you make the time at one place, even though you stay only ten or fifteen minutes, you can hardly get to your next point, because so many things and people will attract your attention and your conversation and curiosity, that the other three quarters of that hour will be frittered away. You have but one hour left, and my experience is that a man cannot go anywhere in New York in an hour. The distances are too great—you must have another day to it. If you have got six things to do, you have got to take six days to do them in.
If you live below Twenty-fifth street, you are "down town;" and if you live anywhere between that and Seven Hundred and Seventy-fifth street (I don't know how far they run—have quit trying to find out), you will never get down town with out walking the legs off yourself. You cannot ride. I mean you cannot ride unless you are willing to go in a packed omnibus that labors, and plunges, and struggles along at the rate of three miles in four hours and a half, always getting left behind by fast walkers, and always apparently hopelessly tangled up with vehicles that are trying to get to some place or other and can't. Or, if you can stomach it, you can ride in a horse-car and stand up for three-quarters of an hour, in the midst of a file of men that extends from front to rear (seats all crammed, of course,)—or you can take one of the platforms, if you please, but they are so crowded you will have to hang on by your eye-lashes and your toe-nails.
I room in East Sixteenth street, and I walk. It is a mighty honest walk from there to anywhere else, and very destructive to legs, but then the omnibuses are too slow during this mixed rainy, snowy, slushy and hard-frozen weather, and the cars too full—there is never room for another person by the time they get this far down town. The cars do not run in Broadway, anyhow, and I do not like to wander out of that street. I always get lost when I do. The town is all changed since I was here, thirteen years ago, when I was a pure and sinless sprout. The streets wind in and out, and this way and that way, in the most bewildering fashion, and two of them will suddenly come together and clamp the last house between them so close, and whittle the end of it down so sharp, that it looms up like the bow of a steam ship, and you have to shut one eye to see it. The streets are so crooked in the lower end of town that if you take one and follow it faithfully you will eventually fetch up right where you started from.
When I was here in '53, a model artist show had an ephemeral existence in Chatham street, and then everybody growled about it, and the police broke it up; at the same period "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was in full blast in the same street, and had already run one hundred and fifty nights. Everybody went there in elegant toilettes and cried over Tom's griefs. But now, things are changed. The model artists play nightly to admiring multitudes at famous Niblo's Garden, in great Broadway—have played one hundred and fifty nights and will play one hundred and fifty nights more, no doubt—and Uncle Tom draws critical, self-possessed groups of negroes and children at Barnum's Museum. I fear me I shall have to start a moral missionary society here. Don't you suppose those friends of mine in San Francisco were jesting, when they warned me to be very choice in my language, if I ever lectured here, lest I might offend?
In '53 they called that horrid, immoral show I was speaking of, the "Model Artists," and people wouldn't go to see it. But now they call that sort of thing a "Grand Spectacular Drama," and everybody goes. It is all in a name. And it is about as spectacular as anything I ever saw without sinking right into the earth with outraged modesty. It is the wickedest show you can think of. You see there is small harm in exhibiting a pack of painted old harlots, swathed in gauze, like the original model artistes, for no man careth a cent for them but to laugh and jeer at them. Nakedness itself, in such a case, would be nothing worse than disgusting. But I warn you that when they put beautiful clipper-built girls on the stage in this new fashion, with only just barely clothes enough on to be tantalizing, it is a shrewd invention of the devil. It lays a heavier siege to public morals than all the legitimate model artist shows you can bring into action.
The name of this new exhibition that so touches my missionary sensibilities, is the "Black Crook." The scenic effects—the waterfalls, cascades, fountains, oceans, fairies, devils, hells, heavens, angels—are gorgeous beyond anything ever witnessed in America, perhaps, and these things attract the women and the girls. Then the endless ballets and splendid tableaux, with seventy beauties arrayed in dazzling half-costumes; and displaying all possible compromises between nakedness and decency, capture the men and boys—and so Niblo's has taken in twenty four hundred dollars a night, (seven nights and a matinee a week,) for five months, and sometimes twenty-seven hundred dollars. It is claimed that a multitude equal to the entire population of the State of California, Chinamen included, have visited this play. The great Herald newspaper pitched into it, and a sensation parson preached a sermon against it; this was sufficient to advertise it all over the continent, and so the proprietor's fortune was made.
The scenery and the legs are everything; the actors who do the talking are the wretchedest sticks on the boards. But the fairy scenes—they fascinate the boys! Beautiful bare-legged girls hanging in flower baskets; others stretched in groups on great sea shells; others clustered around fluted columns; others in all possible attitudes; girls—nothing but a wilderness of girls—stacked up, pile on pile, away aloft to the dome of the theatre, diminishing in size and clothing, till the last row, mere children, dangle high up from invisible ropes, arrayed only in a camisa. The whole tableau resplendent with columns, scrolls, and a vast ornamental work, wrought in gold, silver and brilliant colors—all lit up with gorgeous theatrical fires, and witnessed through a great gauzy curtain that counterfeits a soft silver mist! It is the wonders of the Arabian Nights realized.
Those girls dance in ballet, dressed with a meagreness that would make a parasol blush. And they prance around and expose themselves in a way that is scandalous to me. Moreover, they come trooping on the stage in platoons and battalions, in most princely attire I grant you, but always with more tights in view than anything else. They change their clothes every fifteen minutes for four hours, and their dresses become more beautiful and more rascally all the time.
I have been sitting here blushing so long that I might as well finish the subject, now. The Worrell Sisters, (at the Broadway) are playing a fairy piece, also, which enables them to undress to suit the popular taste. However, they do not take off enough, by any means, and so they cannot hope to achieve supreme success.
But our Sallie Hinckley, late of San Francisco, discounts the "Black Crook." She is playing a nude fairy piece, also, and in the last act she makes a lovely statue of herself, and stands aloft before the audience, and dressed about like the Menken. She looks very beautiful—but heaven help her assistants! She has got about thirty padded, painted, slab-sided, lantern-jawed old hags with her who are so mortal homely that nothing tastes good to them. And to see those lank, blear-eyed leathery old scalliwags come out and hop around in melancholy dance, with their cheap, ragged, nine-inch dress-tails flapping in the air—Oh, it is worth going miles to see! And when one of them finishes her poor little shindig and makes her wind up stamp in the orthodox way, sticking out a slipper like a horse trough, with a criminal attempt at grace, I want to snatch a double-barrelled shot-gun and go after the whole tribe.
Edwin Booth and the legitimate drama still draw immense houses, but the signs of the times convince me that he will have to make a little change by-and-by and peel some women. Nothing else can chain the popular taste, the way things are going now.
Who shall describe the exquisite taste and beauty of the new style of ladies' walking dresses? Taken as a class, women can contrive more outlandish and ugly costumes than one would think possible without the gift of inspiration. But this time they have been felicitous in invention. The wretched waterfall still remains, of course, but in a modified form; every change it has undergone was for the better. First it represented a bladder of scotch snuff; next it hung down the woman's back like a canvas covered ham; afterwards it contracted, and counterfeited a turnip on the back of the head; now it sticks straight out behind, and looks like a wire muzzle on a greyhound. Nestling in the midst of this long stretch of head and hair reposes the little batter cake of a bonnet, like a jockey-saddle on a race-horse. You will readily perceive that this looks very unique, and pretty, and coquettish. But the glory of the costume is the robe—the dress. No furbelows, no flounces, no biases, no ruffles, no gores, no flutter wheels, no hoops to speak of—nothing but a rich, plain, narrow black dress, terminating just below the knees in long saw-teeth, (points downwards,) and under it a flaming red skirt, enough to put your eyes out, that reaches down only to the ankle-bone, and exposes the restless little feet. Charming, fascinating, seductive, bewitching to see a lovely girl of seventeen, with her saddle on her head, and her muzzle on behind, and her veil just covering the end of her nose, come tripping along in her hoopless, red-bottomed dress, like a churn on fire, is enough to set a man wild. I must drop this subject—I can't stand it.
By permission, I visited the Century Club last night. The most unspeakably respectable Club in the United States, perhaps. It was storming like everything, and I thought there would necessarily be a small attendance, but this was not the case; the reading and supper rooms were crowded, and with the distinguished artists, authors and amateurs of New York. I averaged the heads, and they went three sizes larger than the style of heads I have been accustomed to. In one of the smaller rooms they averaged best—thirteen heads out of the twenty-seven present were what I choose to call prodigious. I never felt so subjugated in my life. And I was never so ashamed of wearing an 8 1/4 before. Many of these gentlemen were old, but very few of them bald—isn't that singular? It isn't that way in California. Most men are bald there, young and old. You know of a Sunday when it rains, and the women cannot go out, a church congregation looks like a skating pond. It is just on account of the shiny bald heads—nothing else.
Article I of the Constitution will inform you of the character of the Century Club:
"This Association shall be composed of authors, artists and amateurs of letters and the fine arts."
This has a tendency to exclude parties who have bank accounts and pedigree, but no brains. It is too thundering exclusive.
The Club is ten years old. Its membership is limited to 500, its list is full, and when vacancies occur there are always a number of candidates patiently waiting to fill them. One visitor told me he had been waiting three years, but expected to get in sometime or other. I have some idea of putting in my application—I won't need to belong till I get old.
The initiation fee is $100, and dues $3 a month. The Club owns the premises (a three-story brick) and forty feet of vacant ground adjoining, whereon they mean to build, and $40,000 in bank. Conversation there is instructive and entertaining, and the brandy punches are good, and so are the lunches. What more could a man want?
Bancroft, the historian, is President of the Club, and was on duty last night. Among the list of members I observed the following names—many others are distinguished both here and on your side of the continent, but you know these best, perhaps: Edwin Booth, Wm. H. Aspinwall, H. W. Bellows, C. Astor Bristed, Albert Bierstadt, Wm. Cullen Bryant, E. H. Chapin, J. H. Cheever, Church, the painter, F. O. C. Darley, Frederick S. Cozzens, Geo. W. Curtis, Ashar B. Durand, Cyrus W. Field, Parke Godwin, Wilson G. Hunt, Thos. McElrath, Fred. Law Olmstead, Putnam, the publisher, Edmund C. Stedman, A. T. Stewart, Stoddard, the poet, Launt Thompson, Bayard Taylor, Julian C. Verplanck, Lester Wallack, and so forth and so on. There is a constellation of celebrated names for you! I carried away some of the hats with me for specimens. They average about No. 11.
Alta California, March 30, 1867
New York,
February 18th, 1867.
MY ANCIENT FRIENDS, THE POLICE
THE police of Broadway seem to have been selected with special reference to size. They are nearly all large, fine looking men, and their blue uniforms, well studded with brass buttons, their jack boots, and their batons worn like a dagger, give them an imposing military aspect. They are gentlemanly in appearance and conduct. These remarks will apply pretty well to the police force throughout the city. I hear them praised on every hand for their efficiency, integrity and watchful attention to business. It seems like an extravagant compliment to pay a policeman, don't it? I am charmed with the novelty of it.
One cannot walk a hundred yards in any part of the city, day or night, without stumbling upon one of these soldierly officials. In Broadway, especially down below the City Hall Park, where drays, carriages, carts and pedestrians keep the great thoroughfare in a constant state of crowding, struggling, chaotic confusion, the police are as thick as they are at headquarters in San Francisco at the changing of the evening watch. And how they work!—how they charge through the tangled vehicles, and order this one to go this way, another that way, and a third to stand still or back!—how they wade through mud and slush, piloting women safely through the fearful jams. They are extremely useful—in fact, they present the anomaly of a police force that is an absolute necessity to the well-being of the city, and they earn every cent they get. From one end of town to the other they march to and fro across Broadway with women on their arms the whole day long. The women like it. I stood by for two hours and watched one of them cross seven or eight times on various pretences, and always on the same handsome policeman's arm.
You know they have got a new Excise law here, which closes up all places on Sunday where liquor is sold. You cannot get a taste of the villainous wines and liquors of New York on the Sabbath, for love or money. You cannot even keep them on private account, in your own house, if the police find it out.
And all possible places of amusement and public resort are closed up also. The town looks dead and deserted. I could not even find a bootblack yesterday, or a newsboy, or a place open where I could buy a newspaper. What was left for me to do? Simply to follow the fashionable mania, and go to church. You cannot imagine what an infatuation church-going has become in New York. Youths and young misses, young gentlemen and ladies, the middle-aged and the old, all swarm to church, morning, noon and night every Sunday. If it rains, or snows, or turns biting cold, they stay away from the theatres, but an earthquake could not keep them from the churches. They brave miles of stormy weather to worship and sing praises at the altar, and criticise each other's costumes. Concerning the weather, a bad little boy once said it was too rainy to go to school, but just about rainy enough to go fishing. When that kind of weather prevails here, it is considered too rainy to go fishing, but just about rainy enough to go to church. In the theatres, a certain new-fangled "reserved" seat system has been reduced to a state of rascally perfection; and you can enter at ten o'clock, when the place seems crowded, and get one of the reserved seats in the front part of the parquette, or the second row of the dress circle, by paying a dollar and a half for it; and you can select and buy the seat from a peddler in the streets, or in Brooklyn or Albany, and find it all correct; buy it for any night you want it—a fortnight ahead, if you want to; the theatre has been paid for it long ago by the peddler or the storekeeper who sells it. But they haven't any reserved system in the churches but the old regular one; and so, if you do not know an accommodating pew-owner, you have got to go before breakfast and sit in the gallery. Crowds cross the river on the coldest mornings to hear
I have been in a pious frenzy myself for a while. I went over two weeks ago, (the thermometer was at 180 degrees below zero, I should judge), and I walked as stiff-legged as a Chinaman, because the nerves all through me were frozen as taut as fiddle strings. I had been promised a seat in the pew of a New York editor, who told me to come 'early.' I was at the church at ten o'clock Sunday morning. I thought that was early—and I knew precious well it was earlier than any Christian ought to be out of his bed on such a morning. The pavements were crowded with people trying to get in, and when I told the usher I was accredited to pew No. 46, he answered with an offended air:
"Forty-six!—pretty time of day to come for forty-six!—full an hour ago!"
I said, apologetically:
"I tried to get over day before yesterday, sir, but—"
[Scorning the sarcasm]—"Go up stairs, where the galleries are, and when they're done praying maybe you can get a chance."
I said, humbly: "But I don't want a chance to pray—I only—"
"Now, move on—don't stand there bothering me with your cussed foolishness—there's five hundred people behind you, waiting to get in, and you're blocking the way." [He did not say that, but he looked it, with two hundred horse-power.] So I went upstairs and crowded in and captured a little stool from an usher and jammed it into a vacancy among the multitude, about large enough to accommodate a spittoon, and had the satisfaction of knowing I was the last individual that got a seat in Mr. Beecher's Church that day. The church was large, and the wide gallery extended around three sides of it. Every pew above and below was filled with elegantly-dressed people, and the aisles and odd spaces in both places occupied with stools like mine.
Mr. Beecher's altar is an elevated, carpeted, unrailed platform—a sort of stage—with a little pedestal at its front edge for a pulpit. Mr. B. sat in a chair against the wall, his head and body inclining backward, with the comfortable air of a manager who has got a good house and expected it. The choir over his head sang charmingly, and then he got up and preached one of the liveliest and most sensible sermons I ever listened to. He has a rich, resonant voice, and a distinct enunciation, and makes himself heard all over the church without very apparent effort. His discourse sparkled with felicitous similes and metaphors (it is his strong suit to use the language of the worldly,) and might be called a striking mosaic work, wherein poetry, pathos, humor, satire and eloquent declamation were happily blended upon a ground work of earnest exposition of the great truths involved in his text.
Whenever he forsook his notes and went marching up and down his stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point, I could have started the audience with a single clap of the hands and brought down the house. I had a suffocating desire to do it.
To illustrate some point in his discourse, he spoke of how he had watched a wonderful loom in Lowell once—how, all alone, and with no apparent intelligence but its own to guide it, it went steadily on about its business, weaving all manner of beautiful and intricate figures, always preserving a faultless harmony in the designs, yet never hesitating a moment or making a mistake—and then pausing impressively a second or two, he said that reflecting upon the mental calibre of some of the people to whom the elective franchise is accorded in America, he had never been able to get rid of the notion that it was a sin and a shame that that machine wasn't allowed to vote! Then the congregation let go and laughed like all possessed.
Mr. Beecher is a remarkably handsome man when he is in the full tide of sermonizing, and his face is lit up with animation, but he is as homely as a singed cat when he isn't doing anything.
I attended Bishop Southgate's matinee yesterday afternoon, in pursuance of my desire to test all the amusements of the metropolis. The ungodly are not slow to get up nick-names for sacred things here. All the pretty girls, and also all the young men who dote on them, go to the Sunday afternoon services at Bishop Southgate's Church, in Thirty-eighth street, and they call it the Bishop's "matinee;" and there is Dr. Bellows' Church, in Fourth avenue, somewhere above Twentieth street—it is the wildest piece of architecture you ever saw—gridironed all over with alternate short bars of showy red and white, like a Confederate flag—so the ungodly call it the "Church of the Holy Zebra."
It was fearfully cold yesterday, but nevertheless the Bishop's matinee was a success. There were platoons of lovely girls there—and all arrayed in the charming new street costume, with its loosely hanging jacket, its short, narrow dress, terminating well up in long bugle-fringed points over a red under-dress—trimmed with bugles all over, I should rather say—bless me, when the girls filed up the aisles yesterday, rattling their fringes against the pews, you could shut your eyes and imagine you were out in a hail-storm. When I see a pretty girl in this charming costume, I want to fall down and worship her. And yet she is bound to look a good deal like a Chinawoman when her back is toward you. This costume will provoke many a smile in San Francisco, where the Chinawomen abound.
The Bishop's church is not large, but its fancy altar, its gas-lights, and its stained windows, brilliant with yellow saints and scarlet martyrs, make it very showy. All the side windows are for memorials. They are to be painted with "Sacred to the memory of" such and such parties as may die worthy of the honor. I told this to Brown, and he said: "If I had a grudge against one of them saints, and he was to die before I got even with him, I'd break his window the first thing."
At 3 o'clock the performance commenced. The organist played a schottische first and then changed to an exquisite waltz, that set the young people's feet itching and their heads to swaying to the undulating movement of the harmony. This soon changed to the loveliest air from "Trovatore," and "the full-toned choir awoke." It was beautiful music, and the voices seemed so rich and mellow to my uncultivated ears. The Bishop sat on one side of the chancel, facing the orchestra, and looked as if he were thinking: "Now you dare to make a false note, and I'll dock your wages for you!" I know that was what he was thinking, without being told it.
The choir chanted the Litany, and a young fellow read a chapter from the Bible, another man preached a very good sermon, and then the Bishop read some verses from the Sermon on the Mount, gave out a multitude of religious advertisements about forthcoming meetings, Society assemblages, etc., pronounced the Benediction and the organist fiddled the people out of the church to a tune that sounded like the Sailor's Hornpipe, with variations. All the time the portly, complacent Bishop was reading his handful of Scripture verses, the organ accompanied him with a mixture of funeral and fandango music, to suit the sense of the text. Perhaps I can aid you in conceiving of the effect:
BISHOP—"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the earth."
ORGAN—"Maxwelton braes are bonny—(being suggestive of the property inherited by the defendant.)
BISHOP—"Blessed are the peacemakers, for—"
ORGAN—"Your little hands were never made to tear each other's eyes."
BISHOP—"Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after—"
ORGAN—"Give me three grains of corn, mother."
And so forth and so on.
I have used an extravagant simile, maybe, but it is not far out of the way. The truth was, the organ drowned the Bishop out, generally, so that you could not hear him at all. Brown said he had been ciphering on the matter, and he was satisfied the church could get along without the Bishop—that he didn't do anything to speak of except read advertisements for meetings, and so it would be economy to discharge him and set up a bulletin board. The man is not responsible for what he says. He does not know any better.
I liked the sermon. I thought some of the organ's flights of fancy were a little startling, considering the character of the place, but I shall not soon forget the beautiful music of the choir. The Bishop's matinee is well calculated to seduce the sinner into coming within the sound of the preached Gospel. There is Wisdom in the idea, no doubt.
I went to that church last night. Walked all the way from Sixteenth to Forty-seventh street in the bitter cold to do it. Behold what religious enthusiasm, just flavored with worldly curiosity, can do! Bishop Southgate's is "high church," but St. Alban's is higher. I should say that the latter was Roman Catholic in disguise. The altar is showy with bright colors and pictures, and tall wax lights towering up from seven-branched candle-sticks. It lacked a picture of the Virgin, though. Presently the organ began to murmur in soft, dreamy cadences, and a sound of distant singing floated up from below—it grew stronger and closer, and soon a dozen surpliced little boys, bearing a tall cross, and half a dozen surpliced clergymen, filed up from the basement, making all the building resound with music. They bowed as they passed the altar, and ranged themselves on opposite sides of the chancel. The boys chanted the litany, and there was something infinitely thrilling and inexpressive in the ringing bugle-tones of their young voices. It was worth a pilgrimage to hear. I must not speak further of the services—my Bishop's performances in the Sandwich Islands were as a mere side-show to a circus, in comparison.
This simple comrade of mine keeps me in hot water all the time. He takes a fancy to every sort of foolishness. He wants to hire a mulatto and put him in livery, like the nabobs of the town. He had almost consummated his diabolism when I discovered his intent. I said:
"What is that fellow doing in the hall with that blacking box label on his hat and that fantastic costume on?"
"Him? Why, he's my footman—he's in livery."
"Well, you get him out of livery just as quick as you can—that's all."
Saturday, when I was talking with a young lady in Broadway, he touched me on the shoulder and said: "How's this?" He was dressed like a Tartar chief, and was shouldering a vast rat poison sign around.
I hunted everywhere for the fellow this morning, and found him at last in full police uniform, lugging young women across Broadway, at the junction of Vesey street. I was speechless, but he chirped out in his cheerful way:
"Oh, no; this ain't no good thing, I don't reckon!" and seized a young girl and charged through the confusion of vehicles with her, ordering the drivers to stand still, and thus checking the tide of three miles of commerce, and wasting hundreds of dollars' worth of mercantile time—for you know when one cart stops there, the endless procession must wait till it moves again. I have got to kill this fellow—I foresee that.
I have been examining a machine to-day, partly owned by a Californian, which will greatly simplify, cheapen and expedite stereotyping. With a single alphabet of type, arranged around a wheel, the most elaborate book may be impressed, letter after letter, in plaster plates, ready for the reception of the melted metal, and do it faster than a printer could compose the matter. It works with a treadle and a bank of keys, like a melodeon. It does away with cases of types, setting up and distributing, and all the endless paraphernalia of a printing office. The little machine could prepare Webster's Unabridged for the press in a space no larger than a common bath-room. By this invention, a man could set up, as a stereotyper, on a large scale, on a capital of $200. It will either print or stereotype music with the utmost accuracy. An elaborate "border" may be printed in three minutes, by repeated impressions of a single type. The funniest part of it is that the inventor does not know anything about the art of printing. But then he has invented all sorts of curious machines (among them a flying-ship,) without any mechanical education, and paints well in oils, and performs on the guitar and piano without having ever received musical instruction. The stereotyping machine has been patented in the United States, England and Prussia, and is to be exhibited at the Paris Exposition. The patent rights have been sold for fabulous sums. I send a rough specimen of the machine's work.
Alta California, April 9, 1867
New York,
March 2d, 1867.
PROMINENT Brooklynites are getting up a great European pleasure excursion for the coming summer, which promises a vast amount of enjoyment for a very reasonable outlay. The passenger list is filling up pretty fast.
The steamer to be used will be fitted up comfortably and supplied with a library, musical instruments and a printing-press—for a small daily paper is to be printed on board. The ship is to have ample accommodations for 150 cabin passengers, but in order that there may be no crowding, she will only carry 110. The steamer fare is fixed at $1,250, currency. The vessel will stop every day or two, to let the passengers visit places of interest in the interior of the various countries, and this will involve an additional expense of about $500 in gold. The voyage will begin the 1st of June and end near the beginning of November—five months—but may be extended by unanimous vote of the passengers.
Outward bound, a day or two will be spent at Gibraltar, and about ten days at Marseilles, which latter will give an opportunity of looking in at the Paris fair. If desired, passengers may tarry longer at Paris, and then pass down through Switzerland and rejoin the ship at Genoa, where she will remain ten days. From Genoa, excursions will be made to Milan, the Lakes of Como and Maggiore, and to Verona, Padua and Venice. Also, the party may visit Parma, Bologna and Florence, and rejoin the vessel at Leghorn. Pisa and Lucca can likewise be added to the programme. From Leghorn to Naples the route will be along the coast of Italy, close by Caprera, Elba and Corsica, and arrangements have been made to pay Garibaldi a visit. Eight days will be spent at Naples, and visits will be made to Herculaneum, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Virgil's tomb, and the ruins of ancient Paestum. A day will next be spent at Palermo, in Sicily. Thence through the group of Aeolian Isles, in sight of the volcanoes of Stromboli and Vulcania, through the Straits of Messina, with Scylla on the one hand and Charybdis on the other, along the east coast of Sicily, and in sight of Mount Etna—along the south coast of Italy, the west and south coast of Greece, in sight of ancient Crete, up Athens Gulf into the Piraeus, Athens will be reached. A day will be given to Corinth, and then the voyage will be extended through the Grecian Archipelago, the Dardanelles, and the Sea of Marmora, to Constantinople. After a day or two at the latter place, a sail through the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea will bring the party to Sebastopol and Balaklava—thence back again and along the coasts of ancient Troy and Lydia in Asia, to Smyrna, from which point Ephesus will be visited. The steamer will stop at Beirout and time allowed to visit Damascus, and then proceed to Joppa and remain there ten or twelve days, so that the passengers can go to Jericho—I mean to Jerusalem—and to the other side of Jordan, the Sea of Tiberias, Nazareth, Bethany, Bethlehem, and other points of interest in the Holy Land.
A stop of four or five days will be made at Alexandria, in Egypt, and the ruins of Caesar's Palace, Pompey's Pillar, Cleopatra's Needle, the Catacombs, the site of ancient Memphis, Joseph's Granaries, and the Pyramids. They don't go to Cairo, but I do not mind that, because I have been to Cairo once (in Illinois), and that was enough for the subscriber.
In the remainder of the programme I find mention of such points as Malta, Cagliari (in Sardinia), Palma (in Majorca), Valencia (in Spain), Alicant, Carthagena, Palos, Malaga, Madeira, the Peak of Teneriffe, the Bermudas, and so forth and so on, to the crack of doom.
A man may stay aboard the ship all the time if he wants to. It is essentially a pleasure excursion, and so private caprices will be allowed full scope. Isn't it a most attractive scheme? Five months of utter freedom from care and anxiety of every kind, and in company with a set of people who will go only to enjoy themselves, and will never mention a word about business during the whole voyage. It is very pleasant to contemplate.
I started down with a Tribune man to make some inquiries about this trip. We met a friend and he said it was a very stylish affair, was not gotten up for a speculation, it was not intended that its projectors should make any money out of it, and that the character and standing of every applicant for passage had to undergo the strictest assay by a Committee before his money would be received and his name booked. This was an appalling state of affairs. However, we went on, and were received at the office of the concern with that distant politeness proper toward men who travel muddy streets on foot, go unshaven, and carry countenances like—like ours, for instance. My friend—Smith, for short—said:
"I suppose you are the chief officer of the European pleasure excursion, sir. We have called to make some inquiries about it. Allow me to introduce the Rev. Mark Twain, who is a clergyman of some distinction, lately arrived from San Francisco."
"I am glad to meet you, sir. Be seated, gentlemen. Twain—Twain-."
"Oh, you probably have not heard of me; I have latterly been in the missionary business—
Smith, interrupting—"Oh, devil take it, don't use those villainous slang expressions—you'll expose everything." And then he said aloud, "Yes, he has been a missionary to the Sandwich Islands during a part of the last year, but officiating in the open air has injured his health, and—"
"And my congregation concluded to start me out traveling for my health. I would like to take some stock—I mean I would like to ship—that is, book my name for this pleasure trip. I hear that Mr. Beecher is going—is that so?"
The reply was affirmative, and then Smith said:
"We felt some solicitude about that, because my friend would naturally like to take part in the services on board, and we feared that possibly Mr. Beecher might not be willing to permit ministers of other denominations to do any of the preaching."
I said, with a show of humility: "Yes, that's it—I am only a Baptist, you see, but I'd like to have a show."
"Oh, d——it!" Smith whispered, "you'll ruin everything with that slang." Then aloud: "Yes, my friend is a Baptist clergyman, and we feared that inasmuch as Mr. Beecher is a Universalist, he—"
"Universalist! Why, he is a Congregationalist. But never mind that—I have no doubt he would be sincerely glad to have Mr. Twain assist him in the vessel's pulpit at all times—no doubt in the world about that."
I had to laugh out strong, here I could not well help it. The idea of my preaching time about with Beecher was so fresh, so entertaining, so delightful. However, Smith said: "Now you are laughing again at that same old occurrence up the street—well, it was funny." This saved us from exposure, and I sat there and said no more, but listened to instructive remarks about my missionary services and my Baptist congregation in San Francisco till the misery of trying to keep from laughing was unbearable, and we left.
I went back yesterday with another friend, acknowledged my true occupation, entered my name for the voyage and paid the forfeit money required to secure a berth—the remainder of the $1,250 is not to be paid till the 15th of April, when all such accounts have to be squared. I also left references as to my high moral character, for that Committee "to chaw on," as Brown expressed it, and I do not envy them the job. They have got about all they can attend to for the next six weeks to get up a spotless character for me. If they succeed, I will get a copy of it and have it framed. Among others, I referred to Rev. Mr. Damon, of Honolulu, and it lies heavy on my conscience, because I stole a book from him, which I have not returned yet. For my other references I chose men of bad character, in order that my mild virtues might shine luminously by contrast with their depravity. There was sagacity in the idea. I expect to go on this excursion to the Holy Land and the chief countries of Europe, provided I receive no vetoing orders from the ALTA—and against all such I fervently protest beforehand.—[No veto. He has been telegraphed to "go ahead."-EDS. ALTA.]
Now that Barnum is running for Congress, anything connected with him is imbued with a new interest. Therefore I went to his Museum yesterday, along with the other children. There is little or nothing in the place worth seeing, and yet how it draws! It was crammed with both sexes and all ages. One could keep on going upstairs from floor to floor, and still find scarcely room to turn. There are numerous trifling attractions there, but if there was one grand, absorbing feature, I failed to find it. There is a prodigious woman, eight feet high, and well proportioned, but there was no one to stir her up and make her show her points, so she sat down all the time. And there is a giant, also, just her own size; but he appeared to be sick with love for her, and so he sat morosely on his platform, in his astonishing military uniform, and wrought no wonders. If I was impressario of that menagerie, I would make that couple prance around some, or I would dock their rations. Two dwarfs, unknown to fame, and a speckled negro, complete the list of human curiosities. They profess to have a Circassian girl there, but I could not find her. I think they have moved her out, to make room for another peanut stand. In fact, Barnum's Museum is one vast peanut stand now, with a few cases of dried frogs and other wonders scattered here and there, to give variety to the thing. You can't go anywhere without finding a peanut stand, and an impudent negro sweeping up hulls. When peanuts and candy are slow, they sell newspapers and photographs of the dwarfs and the giants.
There are some cages of ferocious lions, and other wild beasts, but they sleep all the time. And also an automaton card writer; but something about it is broken, and it don't go now. Also, a good many bugs, with pins stuck through them; but the people do not seem to enjoy bugs anymore. There is a photograph gallery in one room and an oyster saloon in another, and some news depots and soda fountains, a pistol gallery, and a raffling department for cheap jewelry, but not any barber shop. A plaster of Paris statue of Venus, with little stacks of dust on her nose and her eyebrows, stands neglected in a corner, and in some large glass cases are some atrocious waxen images, done in the very worst style of the art. Queen Victoria is dressed in faded red velvet and glass jewelry, and has a bloated countenance and a drunken leer in her eye, that remind one of convivial Mary Holt, when she used to come in from a spree to get her ticket for the County Jail. And that accursed eye-sore to me, Tom Thumb's wedding party, which airs its smirking imbecility in every photograph album in America, is not only set forth here in ghastly wax, but repeated! Why does not some philanthropist burn the Museum again?
The Happy Family remains, but robbed of its ancient glory. A poor, spiritless old bear—sixteen monkeys—half a dozen sorrowful raccoons—two mangy puppies—two unhappy rabbits—and two meek Tom cats, that have had half the hair snatched out of them by the monkeys, compose the Happy Family—and certainly it was the most subjugated-looking party I ever saw. The entire Happy Family is bossed and bullied by a monkey that any one of the victims could whip, only that they lack the courage to try it. He grabs a Tom cat by the nape of the neck and bounces him on the ground, he cuffs the rabbits and the coons, and snatches his own tribe from end to end of the cage by the tail. When the dinner-tub is brought in, he gets bodily into it and the other members of the family sit patiently around till his hunger is satisfied or steal a morsel and get bored heels over head for it. The world is full of families as happy as that. The boss monkey has even proceeded so far as to nip the tail short off of one of his brethren, and now half the pleasures of the poor devil's life are denied him, because he hain't got anything to hang by. It almost moves one to tears to see that bob tailed monkey work his stump and try to grab a beam with it that is a yard away. And when his stump naturally misses fire and he falls, none but the heartless can laugh. Why cannot he become a philosopher? Why cannot he console himself with the reflection that tails are but a delusion and a vanity at best.
Barnum puts a play on his stage called the "Christian Martyr," and in the third act all the mules and lions, and sheep, and tigers, and pet bulls, and other ferocious wild animals, are marched about the stage in grand procession preparatory to going through the Christian. In the final act they throw the Christian into a cage with a couple of lions, but they were asleep, and all the punching the Martyr could do, and all the cursing he could get off under his breath failed to wake them; but the ignorant Roman populace on the stage took their indifference for Providential interference, and so they let the doomed Christian slide. Barnum's lions prefer fresh beef to martyrs. I suspect they are of the same breed as those we read of that were too stuck up to eat good old Daniel.
Barnum's show is not a very good one. If he has no better show to get to Congress, he ought to draw out of the canvass.
History repeats itself, and so does romance. There is something in the "Arabian Nights," if my memory serves me, which is a little like the incident I am going to set down here, with the difference that this is true and the story in the book was doubtless an invention. Two weeks ago, a woman in great distress, applied to a Ladies' Benevolent Society here for means to bury her husband. They made due inquiry, and then gave her the necessary amount of money. One of these ladies had for a long time been praying to her Heavenly Father for a questionable blessing in the shape of a child, and contracting that if her prayers were answered she would perform some deed of notable benevolence as a stand-off. Her prayers were answered in the most complimentary manner—she had triplets. She had triplets, and naturally her husband shut down on her devotions. But that has got nothing to do with my story. She heard of this sorrowing woman, and she thought it a good time to comply with her contract. She went to the house of mourning, and counted out one hundred dollars in greenbacks on the dead man's coffin, and the weeping widow blessed her. It is considered the fair thing here to pay praying debts in greenbacks. The charitable lady had not been gone many minutes before she discovered she had left her gloves behind her. She rushed back to the abode of death, and found that infernal corpse sitting up in the coffin, examining the greenbacks with a Bank Note Reporter! They plague the benevolent lady a good deal, but she does not mind it. In fact, she is rather proud of raising the dead with a handful of greenbacks.
The grand Bal d'Opera came off at the new Academy of Music last night. I suppose there may have been ten or twelve hundred people present, but it was hard to make estimate in so large a building. The great majority of both sexes wore neither masks nor fancy costumes, and yet were allowed to come on the floor long before the hour for unmasking. This had an embarrassing effect, of course, and consequently what should have been a hilarious carnival was a good deal more like a funeral for the first two hours.
I got myself up in flowing royal robes, and purported to be a king of some country or other, but I only felt like a highly ornamental butcher. If everybody else felt as solemn and absurd as I did, they have my sympathy. I could not dance with any comfort, because I was in danger of tripping in my petticoats and breaking my neck every moment, and so I deserted soon, and went to promenading in the broad halls in the rear of the balconies. Dukes and princes, and queens and fairies met me at every turn, and I might have managed to imagine myself in a land of enchantment, but for remarks I was constantly overhearing. For instance, I heard Joan of Arc say she would give the world for a mess of raw oysters, and Martin Luther said he didn't feel well, because he had been playing poker for the last forty-eight hours. The Wandering Jew chatted and laughed like a school-girl, and vivacious Charles II. was as dismal as an owl. Dukes and Emperors called each other "Jim" and "Joe," and spoke in the most plebeian way of going out to take a drink. I even heard the Queen of the Fairies say she wished she had some cheese. These little things have a tendency to destroy the pleasant illusions created by deceptive costumes.
I did not feel happy at that ball, but I never felt so particularly unhappy in my life as I do at this moment.
Alta California, May 13,1867
St. Louis,
March 15th, 1867.
EDITORS ALTA: We took passage in the cars of the New Jersey Central at 8 P.M. of the 3d of March, and left port in the midst of a cheerful snow-storm. I call it cheerful because there is something exquisitely satisfactory in whistling along through a shrouded land, following blindly wherever the demon in the lead may take you, yet sensible that he knows the way, and will steer his unerring course as faithfully as if it were noonday; sensible also that you are as safe there as anywhere, sitting with back against the bulkhead, and feet crossed on the next seat, and hat drawn down to shade the eyes from the lamp overhead—sitting thus by the comfortable fire, smoking placidly and dreaming of other times and other scenes, taking small heed of the storm without, yet scarcely conscious that it is snowing and is blowing drearily across the bleak moor as well, and that some people are out there suffering in it, and distressed, but that you ain't; that, on the contrary, you are perfectly happy, and tranquil, and satisfied, sitting thus, and smoking, and dreaming, and being timed and soothed by the clatter of the wheels—well, you know there is something unspeakably comfortable about it.
That was the way I felt from eight till a little after twelve; (the sleeping-cars were full and I had to sit up all night.) I had been talking latterly to a young soldier who had been all through the wars, from Bull Run to Lee's surrender—a beardless veteran full of battle experiences and tales of camp and prison life and was now within a hundred miles of his home, almost, for the first time in six years—handsome, modest, honest, good-hearted boy of twenty-three, and more ready to tell about his school-boy days than his six charges at Antietam—but gone the warrior was, and I was alone. Then I began to feel crampy a little, and then chilly—and presently I noticed that the fire was very low, and remembered that I had seen no one doctor it for over three hours. I got up and tried to open the stove door, but could not do it. A drowsy neighbor said it was locked, to keep the passengers from burning too much coal! I looked again, and found the keyhole—so it was true. The man said this was done "on all them d——d Jersey monopoler roads." I grew chilly fast, then, and gradually grew peevish and fretful, also. I observed that the furniture was mean and old, and that the train moved slowly, and stopped to land a passenger every three hundred yards. After that, every time we stopped I cursed the railroad till we started again, and that afforded me some little satisfaction. I observed, also, that the usual mean man was aboard, who kept his window a little open to distress his fellows. And after that I noticed how fearfully dismal and unhappy the passengers looked, doubled up in uncomfortable attitudes on short seats in the dim, funereal light—like so many corpses, they looked, of people who had died of care and weariness. And then I said I would rather walk than travel that route again, and I wished the Company would burst up so completely that there wouldn't be money enough left to give the Directors Christian burial, but I hoped they might need it shortly.
I shall never be able to express how glad I was when the gray dawn stole over the plain, and the sun followed and cheered the scene, and the train stopped and I gave my limbs a grateful stretch, and steeped my sorrowful soul in inspiring coffee.
The conductor was pompous and discourteous, as natural wood-sawyers in office are apt to be. Your dog with a brass collar with his master's name on it, is ever prone to snub the undecorated dog. Brown plied the fellow with questions at every opportunity, and scorned all rebuffs. He asked him with fine irony, if that train ever ran by a town before they could stop it; and when he was fiercely answered "No," he said he thought such a thing might be possible, but he had not gone so far as to consider it probable. And he wanted to know if this was the country where the "Jersey lightning" of history came from, and if they had any of it aboard that train. When we finally ran over a cow, he felt better satisfied about the speed of the train, because, as he said, he knew we must be going along tolerably lively else we could not have overtaken the cow.
Brown said to the brakeman, "Your brother, the conductor, gets forty or fifty thousand dollars a year, maybe, I reckon?"
"No-he gets ten or fifteen hundred, if it's anything to you."
"Possible? Why I wouldn't have thought that a man could afford to put on forty-five thousand dollars' worth of frills for fifteen hundred without losing money and getting discouraged."
We got to Pittsburg at 2 P.M., 431 miles, 18 hours out, 25 miles an hour. Pittsburg, as we saw it, is a vast, impenetrable bank of black smoke, and two or three long bridges stretching across a river. It is very picturesque. All through Pennsylvania the houses looked old and shabby—that is, all through the country.
We supped at Alliance, Ohio, and took sleeping cars for Indianapolis. And what a luxury the berth was, both in anticipation and reality! Knowing I had a bed sure, I had no occasion to hurry. So I smoked till three in the morning and then undressed and turned in. It was a sort of palace. The berth was wide enough for three, and I had the whole stateroom to myself. I compelled Brown to sit up all night, so that he could come and tell me in case the train ran off the track.
It was worth the forty hours I had gone without sleep to feel the luxury of lying down between clean sheets and stretching out at full length—and drawing up and stretching out again—and turning over and fetching another celestial stretch. The music of the wheels was so tranquilizing, too. I dropped off to sleep, lulled by the ceaseless racket, and woke up at Indianapolis at 9 A.M.
I will mention here that one does not need a map to tell him when he crosses the boundary of one State and enters another. He can discover it in a moment by the appearance of the passengers that come on board. If they had Ohio or Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana or Illinois written on their foreheads, one could not detect their abiding places much easier.
From Indianapolis to St. Louis we did as we had from the first—stopped at some shanty or other every fifteen minutes to discharge or take in forty cents worth of passengers, and if there is anything more aggravating than that, I do not know what it is. We reached St. Louis, eleven hundred miles from New York, fifty-two hours out, and if we had come straight through we might have done it in half the time. I went straight home and sat up till breakfast time, talking and telling other lies.
I find S. R. Weed, an ancient California newspaper man, of the days when Kendall and Frank Soule, and some of the rest of you were in your frolicsome youth. He is in the insurance business now, but still corresponds with the ALTA and the New York Tribune, and sends telegrams to the Chicago Tribune, Cincinnati Commercial and New Orleans Times. He was on the Democrat here for a long time, and they say that he was war correspondent of the Herald and Tribune both for four years, and worked up his battles so differently for each, by making them rebel victories for one and Union victories for the other, that he was not suspected by his employers. He is doing quite a lively insurance trade now, and is gradually cutting loose from newspaperdom.
Mose Flannigan, formerly of San Francisco, owns considerably in the Olympic Theatre here, and built it.
This reminds me that Felix McClusky, another San Franciscan, and an innocent, matter-of-fact man, is in Washington, and holds, or did hold, an office there which did not require that its occupant should know more than thirty-five or forty men ought to know—he had charge of the heating apparatus of the Capitol. They say that he had a steam engine in his department which he was very proud of, and was always showing it and expatiating upon it to visitors. One day one of these asked him what its capacity was—how many horse-power? "Horse-power, h—l!" he says, "it goes by steam!"
And that reminds me about an anecdote concerning Gen. Sherman, who is now a resident of St. Louis. On his march down toward Atlanta, he constantly astonished the rebels with the facility with which he restored the railroad bridges they destroyed at his approach. They would annihilate a bridge just before he arrived, and the next morning there it was again, just as it had been before they touched it. At last a light dawned upon them. The original plans for the bridges had all been furnished from Cleveland, Ohio, and before Sherman started he took those plans, had each bridge duplicated in all its timbers and iron work, took the pieces in a "shook" state on his trains, and so, when he found a bridge gone, he had nothing to do but get its mate out of the freight cars, bolt it together, and put it up. This thing worried the rebels a good deal when they found it out. One day they proposed to destroy the Dalton tunnel, to hinder Sherman's march, but an exasperated Confederate said: "What in the nation's the use? That d——d old Sherman's prob'ly fetched another one along with him from Cleveland!"
Sociables appear to be the rage here. They are pretty well named. From fifty to a hundred lady members of a church meet at a private house, or in the lecture-room of a church, and all day long they sew—all day long they make pink cravats and ruffled shirts for the poor heathen in distant lands, and discuss their neighbors' characters, likely, and at night they serve up an elegant ungodly supper of cold turkey and salads and hot coffee and pies, and about that time a crowd of gentlemen arrive and each lady is privileged to choose any gentleman she pleases and escort him down to the table and wait on him. And after that they talk and get more and more sociable until an hour of unchristian lateness, and then they go home satisfied that they have been helping the poor heathen along powerfully. They go home feeling as the girl felt when the Minister asked her how she felt when he was wading out with her after baptizing her and washing her pure of the sins that had so long stained her girlish innocence. She said she felt bully. The sociables are usually held on Thursday evenings, and each congregation gives one every week or two. They are considered to be altogether the pleasantest things yet invented for the comfort of people who are debarred from the charms of the dance and the intoxicating bottle.
In San Francisco, as soon as you arrive, some friend hails: "How d'y—do?—When'd-you get down?—How's things in the mountains?—When you going back?—Howd-you like Sanfcisco?—Take a drink?—So-long; see you again."
In New York they say: "Ah, when'd you arrive?—How long you going to stay?—How do you like New York?—Good morning."
Here they say: "Hello! glad to see you, by George!—When'd you get here?—Why, you look as natural as a cow!—How do you like St. Louis since you got back?—Come, go to my room; want to have a smoke with you."
But, don't you observe, they all ask that same old question: "How do you like San Francisco?—How do you like New York?—How do you like St. Louis?" It is almighty aggravating. Cannot people think of something else besides that? It wouldn't make any difference if only one or two people asked the question; but to be bored with it twenty times a day is insufferable. It has set me to speculating about the other world. A man who has lived a long life, and been around a good deal, will probably meet as many as twenty or thirty thousand people there he was acquainted with on earth; they say we shall preserve our natural instincts—now, think of being bored all through Paradise or perdition with that same wretched old question of "how you like it." Why, it wouldn't make any difference which locality you landed in—you would get so harried and badgered that you would wish you had gone to the other place. And yet, that would not mend the matter, because communication is open between the two. You remember that Dives easily recognized Lazarus, and hailed him. I wish I knew if Lazarus asked—however, it is no matter. The subject distresses me beyond measure. I do wish they would invent a new formula to inflict on strangers, because even if it were no more interesting than the old one, it would at least bear the evanescent charm of novelty. I hate that question as I do the hackneyed topic of the weather. However, when one is tired hating anything he can always go to bed. I will.
P.S.—But I must not go to bed till I have spoken of the "Euchre Horns." This is what they would call a "stag" sociable in the mountains. Twelve to sixteen or twenty gentlemen, composing the Euchre Horns' Club, meet once a week at each other's residences and play euchre for a little of gilded and ribboned deer horns. The partners first scoring seventeen games are declared champions. Two gentlemen may then challenge them for the next meeting. Of course, all the other parties are playing in the meantime, but only for amusement. A party challenging for the horns and failing to win them, cannot challenge again for several meetings. This gives all a chance in turn. This Club has existed over two years, and its records have been strictly kept in a small minute book. One brace of gentlemen held the horns for six successive meetings.
These are the very pleasantest entertainments I have attended in a long time. There are no ladies present, and so you haven't got to be kept under the tiresome restraints of proper conduct all the time. The ladies of the house stay in the dining room, where wines and a cold collation are set out, and wait on the gentlemen, who drop in in small squads every now and then to refresh between games. You are not obliged to go in every time you finish a game, but then it is just as convenient to do it, and it makes things more uniform, you know. I never have won the horns yet, but I always beat the free lunch.
The items of each contest are published in the morning papers next day.
Suppose you try the Euchre Horns in San Francisco? You might make it the Poker Horns if Euchre is too mild.
Alta California, May 19, 1867
St. Louis,
March 25th, 1867.
EDITORS ALTA: I landed here in my old home more than three weeks ago, and have been very busy visiting old friends ever since. The changes that years have wrought in the city are not apparent to me. It is because they have chiefly been made at both ends of the town, and I have not been out of its centre yet. And, also, the buildings that have been put up all through my part of the city are so blackened and begrimed with coal smoke that I cannot persuade myself that I have not been perfectly familiar with them in the old times. When I left St. Louis she had a population of 150,000, and they called it 175,000; now she has a population of 204,000, and they call it 250,000. But you will admit that an increase of over fifty thousand in less than seven years is remarkable for an inland town.
Bremen and Carondelet are great cities now, and are so knitted to the main city that the dividing lines are obliterated. They tell me that one may ride ten or twelve miles in a straight line north and south without changing street cars—I mean to test the truth of it.
One of the things that is constantly surprising me is the way the reality diminishes sizes and distances that have been lying on record in my memory so long. In my recollection, the Court House was something prodigious—almost awe-inspiring; but when I came to look at it the other day, it had shrunken so much that I could not understand how it had ever held so large a place in my memory. The house I had always lived in had undergone the same wonderful process of seeming reduction. But you who have revisited your homes, after years of absence, understand this.
Localities which, in my memory, were long distances apart, I am astounded to find close together now. I start out for a moderate walk, and am amazed to find myself at the Mound or the Shot Tower—and right in town at that. Or I go in another direction and stumble on the Soulard Market, when I thought it was miles away. I find the Cave, and Camp Springs, and La fayette Park, when I am no more expecting them than I am expecting to stumble upon Great Salt Lake City. Why, sixteen or seventeen years ago, nobody thought of walking to these distant places; we made important Sunday excursions to them in omnibuses, at long intervals.
I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It had never occurred to me that infants grow up to be men and women in the course of years, and so I caught myself making such inquiries as, "Well, how is little Johnny; does he eat as much candy as ever?" and getting replies that made me feel inexpressibly old—such as, "No, little Johnny is married now, and is Captain of a steamboat." Infants I had not seen for twelve or fifteen years had remained infants to me during all that time. These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with. Girls I used to trot on my knee could trot me that way now, if they wanted to—but somehow they don't. I meet these infants every day; and in place of the little short dresses and bibs and neglected noses I cherished in my memory, I find stately women, and long trails, and awful waterfalls. It is perfectly stunning. However, I am generally allowed a kiss for old acquaintance sake, and I am sorry now that I didn't know all the female babies in the country when I left. One of my old sweethearts I have been dreaming of so long has got five children now. It was a great blow to me. If she had had fifty I couldn't have stood it at all.
I find the long levee bordered with steamboats its entire length, as formerly, and now that the Mobile and Ohio Railroad is mostly under water, they are doing a heavy business South. The other river trades are good also. A great daily line of splendid boats, which connects with European steamers at New Orleans, does most of the carrying, both in freight and passengers, but it has not paid, and it is thought that the company will sell out this summer and quit.
The lower river boats are being made larger and larger every year. The Great Republic, just finished at Louisville, will carry in the neighborhood of three thousand tons—possibly more; even her Custom House measurement is twenty-five hundred tons. The largest load I ever saw one steamboat take into New Orleans was eighteen hundred tons, and that was bragged about for a long time.
The women of Missouri have started a sensation on their own hook. They are petitioning the Legislature to so provide for the amending of the Constitution as to extend to them the privilege of voting (along with us and the nigs., you know). They published one of these petitions a few days ago, with about two hundred names to it, and among them were those of some of the best known and most influential ladies of St. Louis. Thirty-nine members of the Legislature have declared in favor of the movement. Don't you know that such a showing as that is amazing, in view of the colossal dimensions of the proposed innovation? It strikes me that way. If four or five hen-pecked husbands, or badgered and bully-ragged old bachelors, had been driven into a support of the measure, nobody would have been surprised; but when the list soars up to thirty-nine, it is time for all good men to tremble for their country.
I attacked the monster in the public prints, and raised a small female storm, but it occurred to me that it might get uncommon warm for one poor devil against all the crinoline in the camp, and so I antied up and passed out, as the Sabbath School children say.
I don't want to say much about this subject in the ALTA, because the ladies may take it up on the Pacific next, and I don't want to get myself into trouble there also.
I went to church twice last Sunday, and to Sunday School three times (all my folks live here, and I have got to go mighty slow, you know; I infest all the prayer meetings and church "sociables," and conduct myself in a manner which is as utterly unexceptionable as it is outrageously irksome. I have kept up my lick so far, as the missionaries say, but I don't think I can stand it much longer. I never could bear to be respectable long at a stretch). Sunday afternoon, the Superintendent of one of those populous Sunday Schools came around to my pew and asked me if I had ever had any experience in instructing the young—in addressing Sunday Schools. I said, "My son, it is my strong suit." (I was still keeping up my lick, as the missionaries say.)
He said he would be glad if I would get up in the altar and make a few remarks, and I said it would be the proudest moment of my life. So I got up there and told that admiring multitude all about Jim Smiley's Jumping Frog; and I will do myself the credit to say that my efforts were received with the most rapturous applause, and that those of the solemn deacon's to stop it were entirely unheeded by the audience. I honestly intended to draw an instructive moral from that story, but when I got to the end of it I couldn't discover that there was any particular moral sticking out around it anywhere, and so I just let it slide. However, it don't matter. I suppose those children will cipher a moral out of it somehow, because they are so used to that sort of thing. I gained my main point, anyhow, which was to make myself respected in California, because you know you cannot help but respect a man who makes speeches to Sunday Schools, and devotes his time to instructing youth.
I did not intend to lecture in St. Louis, but I got a call to do something of that kind for the benefit of a Sunday School; and as long as I had to keep up my lick anyway, I thought I had better go ahead. So I preached twice in the Mercantile Library Hall. I haven't vanity enough to print all that the newspapers said, but I will venture to extract a fourth of the Republican's notice:
"The audience was large and appreciative, and financially and every other way, the entertainment proved a complete success. In fact, Mark Twain achieved a very decided success. He succeeded in doing what we have seen Emerson and other literary magnates fail in attempting—he interested and amused a large and promiscuous audience. We shall attempt no synopsis of his entertainment. Ostensibly it was on the Sandwich Islands but while it contained not a little valuable information and many passages of felicitous description, it also embraced many other topics geographically and otherwise foreign to the matter in hand, and had many a piquant piece of humor interwoven, which, with the bright flash of genuine wit, startled with laughter and kept alive the attention of the audience."
I think that is pretty complimentary, considering that when I delivered that lecture I was not acquainted with a single newspaper man in St. Louis. I do not do anything here but gad around among old friends. But if you want to know the places where audiences are jolly, and where they snap up a joke before you can fairly get it out of your mouth, they are St. Louis, San Francisco, San Jose and Carson City.
The Mayor of St. Louis is elected by the people, and the Board of Police Commissioners is appointed by the Governor of the State. The Commissioners appoint the Chief of Police, the Street Inspector, the police force, etc. This plan pretty effectually prevents the turning of the police part of the City Government into a machine for hoisting demagogues and politicians into power, and is a good feature. But for some reason or other the Mayor and the Commissioners have fallen out with each other and do nothing but fight like cats and dogs all the time. One party accuses the other of all sorts of outrageous things in newspaper publications, and the next day out comes a furious reply from the other side. It spices our breakfast handsomely, anyhow. The Commissioners say that during the cholera season, when people were dying so fast that carts were sent around and dead bodies dumped in by the dozen without the formality of being shrouded first, the Mayor kept two hundred corpses stacked up on a sandbar at the lower end of the city, and refused for four days to let them be buried by the servants of the city—said it was the county government's place to bury them; the county held out obstinately, and so did the Mayor; so the Commissioners had to fill a detachment of policemen full of whiskey, so that they wouldn't mind the lively flavor of the departed, and stand guard over them as long as they held together, and they say that all those twenty-two policemen had to be kept full of whiskey during all that four days at a ruinous expense—and you know yourself that you could bury a whole community for less money than it would cost to keep twenty-two policemen in soak for four days. It stands to reason that you could. And finally, the citizens in the neighborhood, not being fortified with whiskey, began to consider the perfume from the dead-house as rather disagreeable, and so they went to work and burned it down, with all its fearful cargo. Since I have been in the city, the child of an indigent woman has lain four days unburied because of this quarrel between the police, the Mayor, and the county. However, the child was not dead, and so I suppose there wasn't really any occasion to bury it. But it showed the animus of the thing, you know. The Commissioners say the Mayor shelters the gamblers and thieves, protects them from arrest when he can, and gets them out of prison when they are incarcerated. In return, the Mayor says the Commissioners do not make the Street Officer do his duty; that dead-falls and pit-holes are left exposed everywhere, with not even a lantern near them at night to warn the stranger; says they lie about him, and never attend to their own duties; and he says he disguised himself one night and walked eighty squares without ever finding a policeman, except a squad of half a dozen, whom he caught warming themselves at a stove in a gin-mill. I guess that story is pretty straight. You know yourself that when a policeman is cold he is going to hunt a place to warm himself the first thing, and when he is warm he will skirmish around for a cool place; and whenever things get dull, and he can't find anything in the world to do to pass away the time, he will just get reckless and go on his beat awhile, maybe. You can't tell me anything about the police, because I know them by the back. I like the police well enough, but I don't consider it judgment to bet on them.
This Mayor here is a mighty plain-spoken man. He wrote to the Convention that he had never sought an office and never wanted one; that he had served two terms as Mayor, but never thanked the people for electing him, and never thanked the Convention for nominating him; said he didn't want the office now and wouldn't thank them to nominate him, and wouldn't thank the people if they elected him. He wanted that understood plainly beforehand—he was not going to be under obligations to anybody. And they went ahead, nevertheless, and nominated him by a vote of about ten to one. He will be elected, I suppose, and if he has got a spark of humanity in him he will start a graveyard on his own private account to bury disputed corpses in.
The public schools of St. Louis are in a far more flourishing condition than those of any other Southern city or state. A two mill tax and the revenues from ample school lands furnish all the money necessary to build or rent all the school-houses needed, and furnish them with teachers and other furniture. The total value of property used for school purposes in St. Louis is $533,440.95. The average number of teachers employed is 204; the number of pupils enrolled is 14,556—this is an increase of 5,000 in nine years. Two-thirds of the pupils were born in St. Louis. The Normal School shows a graduating class of twenty six this year. The High School graduating class numbers twenty seven. The total number of public school-houses in the city is thirty.
The Superintendent's Report, now before me, says of the colored schools ordered by State law, that "the efforts of the Board to establish schools for colored children have not as yet been successful," but that a special committee has been ordered to rent proper buildings and open such schools without any delay that can possibly be avoided. The new Webster and Carroll school-houses, just completed, rank among the finest edifices in the city. They cost respectively $35,000 and $40,000.
As to wages of teachers, the female Principal of the Normal School gets $2,000 a year; one female assistant $1,100 and one $850. The male Principal of the High School gets $2,750; one male assistant, $2,000; three male assistants, $1,700 each; one female assistant, $1,200; two female assistants, $1,000 each, and another $700. Nine male Principals of the District Schools get $1,700 each; three others $1,500 each; three female Principals get $l,000 each; eight female Principals get $900 each; and then there is a whole raft of small-fry female teachers who get from $550 to $700. Two music teachers get $1,500 each.
They don't teach French or Latin or such things in the District Schools, but they run a good deal of German and mental arithmetic, and a new-fangled study they call Moral Culture. I don't recollect it in our school.
Alta California, May 26, 1867
New York,
APRIL 16, 1867.
EDITORS ALTA: Well, I had to bid good-bye to St. Louis at last. I found it and left it the same happy, cheerful, contented old town—a town where the people are kind and polite, even to strangers—where you can go into a business house you never saw before and speak to a man you never heard of before, and get a perfectly civil answer. It reminded me of the Pacific Coast.
Of course I noticed some little unusual odds and ends of things that set me to thinking. I heard people say "prink" to express that they had been "fixing up;" and heard them say they had been "peeking" through a crack, for instance, instead of "peeping;" and heard them say "cal'late" instead of "reckon" (which latter is a perfectly legitimate word, as the ALTA readers may see by reference to the 18th verse of the 8th chapter of Romans;) and heard them say "I admire to do so and so," (which is barbarous;) and heard them say "bosket" for basket, and "gloss" for glass; and "be you goin' home" for "are you going home;"—and heard them say "she is quite pretty" when they meant "she is right pretty"—the one expressing perfection and the other merely a degree of excellence. I heard those and many other unhappy provincialisms which warned me that many New England people have gone westward and are going to mar the ancient purity of the Missourian dialect if somebody don't put a stop to it. But the funniest thing to me was to hear those same immigrants criticising our manner of speaking, and calling attention to what they honestly considered infelicities of language on our part. I couldn't stand that right well.
And I noticed and was glad to see that the Nicolson pavement was used a good deal in St. Louis.
And I also noticed that the ladies did not dress in full fashion—which is a thing that always distresses me. No woman can look as well out of the fashion as in it.
And I noticed that the children in St. Louis have thin legs as a general thing. You see they haven't any hills to climb.
And I noticed that few young men were bald-headed—which is not the case on the Pacific Coast.
And I noticed that whenever people hadn't anything to do, they washed their hands. They use a great deal of coal there, and the air is always filled with invisible coal-dust that soils everything it touches.
And I noticed that flour was nineteen dollars a barrel.
And I observed that the political bitternesses engendered during the war are still about as strong as they ever were. Individual friends and whole families of old tried friends are widely separated yet—don't visit and don't hold any intercourse with each other. If you give a dinner party for either gentlemen or ladies, or both, it is much the best policy to invite Democrats only or Republicans only. Even Church congregations are organized, not on religious but on political bases; and the Creed begins, "I believe in Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr-President of the United States," or, "I believe in Jefferson Davis, the founder of the Confederate States of America." The genuine Creeds begin that way, although to keep up appearances they still go through the motions and use the ancient formula, "I believe in Jesus Christ," etc.
And one of the pleasantest things I noticed was, that those old-fashioned twilights still remain, and enrich all the landscape with a dreamy vagueness for two hours after the sun has gone down. It is such a pity they forgot to put in the twilight when they made the Pacific Coast. And it is another pity that they forgot to put in any splendid sunsets, too, when the country is so large, and there would have been such a fine opening for them.
I went up to Hannibal, Quincy and Keokuk, on the Upper Mississippi. The first and the last named are enjoying a season of rest, but not refreshment—the railroads have stricken them dead for a year or two, and I cannot help fearing for Quincy also, now that she is going to build a bridge and let her trade cross the Mississippi, and go through without stopping. St. Louis is doing the same, and somebody has got to suffer for it some day, no doubt.
The railroads have badly crippled the trade of the Keokuk packets, too. They used to go crowded with passengers and freight all the time, but they have room and to spare now. And they don't set a good table any more, either. They never did set a very good table, for that matter, but it was at least better than it is now. Their officers are princes, though.
HANNIBAL—BY A NATIVE HISTORIAN
Hannibal has had a hard time of it ever since I can recollect, and I was "raised" there. First, it had me for a citizen, but I was too young then to really hurt the place. Next, Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, reformed, and that broke up the only saloon in the village. But the temperance people liked it; they were willing enough to sacrifice public prosperity to public morality. And so they made much of Jimmy Finn—dressed him up in new clothes, and had him out to breakfast and to dinner, and so forth, and showed him off as a great living curiosity—a shining example of the power of temperance doctrines when earnestly and eloquently set forth. Which was all very well, you know, and sounded well, and looked well in print, but Jimmy Finn couldn't stand it. He got remorseful about the loss of his liberty; and then he got melancholy from thinking about it so much; and after that, he got drunk. He got awfully drunk in the chief citizen's house, and the next morning that house was as if the swine had tarried in it. That outraged the temperance people and delighted the opposite faction. The former rallied and reformed Jim once more, but in an evil hour temptation came upon him, and he sold his body to a doctor for a quart of whiskey, and that ended all his earthly troubles. He drank it all at one sitting, and his soul went to its long account and his body went to Dr. Grant. This was another blow to Hannibal. Jimmy Finn had always kept the town in a sweat about something or other, and now it nearly died from utter inanition.
After this, Joe Dudding, a reckless speculator, started a weekly stage to the town of Florida, thirty miles away, where a couple of families were living, and Hannibal revived very perceptibly under this wild new sensation.
But then the scarlet fever came, and the hives, and between them they came near hiving all the children in the camp. And so Hannibal took another back-set. But pretty soon a weekly newspaper was started, which bred a fierce spirit of enterprise in the neighboring farmers, because when they had any small potatoes left over that they couldn't sell, they didn't throw them away as they used to do, but they took them to the editor and traded them off for subscriptions to his paper. But finally the potato-rot got him, and Hannibal was floored again.
However, somebody started a pork-house, and the little village showed signs of life once more. And then came the measles and blighted it. It stayed blighted a good while, too.
After a while they got to talking about building a plank road to New London, ten miles away, and after another while, they built it. This made business. Then they got excited and built a gravel road to Paris, 30 or 40 miles. More business. They got into a perfect frenzy and talked of a railroad—an actual railroad—a railroad 200 miles long—a railroad from Hannibal to St. Joseph! And behold, in the fullness of time—in ten or fifteen years—they built it.
A sure enough prosperity burst upon the community, now. Property went up. It was noted as a significant fact that instead of selling town-lots by the acre people began to sell them by the front foot. Hannibal grew fast—doubled its population in two years, started a daily paper or two, and came to be called a city—sent for a fire engine and had her out, bedecked with ribbons, on Fourth of July, but the engine-house burned down one night and destroyed her, which cast a gloom over the whole community. And they started militia companies, and Sons of Temperance and Cadets of Temperance. Hannibal always had a weakness for the Temperance cause. I joined the Cadets myself, although they didn't allow a boy to smoke, or drink or swear, but I thought I never could be truly happy till I wore one of those stunning red scarfs and walked in procession when a distinguished citizen died. I stood it four months, but never an infernal distinguished citizen died during the whole time; and when they finally pronounced old Dr. Norton convalescent (a man I had been depending on for seven or eight weeks,) I just drew out. I drew out in disgust, and pretty much all the distinguished citizens in the camp died within the next three weeks.
Well, Hannibal's prosperity seemed to be of a permanent nature, but St. Louis built the North Missouri Railroad and hurt her, and Quincy tapped the Hannibal and St. Joe in one or two places, which hurt her still worse, and then the war came, and the closing years of it almost finished her.
Now they are trying to build a branch railroad to some place in the interior they call Moberly, at a cost of half a million, and if that fails some of the citizens will move. They only talk Moberly now. The church members still talk about religion, but they mix up a good deal of Moberly in it. The young ladies talk fashion and Moberly, and the old ones talk of charity and temperance, piety, the grave, and Moberly. Hannibal will get Moberly, and it will save her. It will bring back the old prosperity. But won't they have to build another road to protect the Moberly? and another and another to protect each enterprise of the kind? A railroad is like a lie—you have to keep building to it to make it stand. A railroad is a ravenous destroyer of towns, unless those towns are put at the end of it and a sea beyond, so that you can't go further and find another terminus. And it is shaky trusting them, even then, for there is no telling what may be done with trestle-work. Which reminds me of
He was a stockholder in the "Daly" mine, in Virginia City, and he heard that his Company had let a contract to run a tunnel two hundred and fifty feet to strike the ledge. He visited the premises, and found a man starting a tunnel in very near the top of a very sharp hill. He said:
"You're the man that's got the contract to run this tunnel, I reckon?"
"Yes."
"Two hundred and fifty feet, I hear?"
"Yes."
"Well, it's going to be a mighty troublesome tunnel—and expensive."
"Why?"
"Because you've got to build the last hundred and sixty five feet of it on trestle-work—it's only eighty-five feet through the hill!"
The ups and downs I have exaggerated a little in Hannibal's case will fit a good many towns in the Mississippi Valley, and Marysville and one or two others on the Pacific Coast. Keokuk, Iowa, was one of the most stirring and enterprising young cities in America seven years ago, but railroads and land speculations killed it in a single night, almost, and for six years it has been sleeping. It is reviving, now, though, and a new and vigorous prosperity is promised it. Its chances are more to be depended upon than Hannibal's, I think.
But Quincy is a wonderful place. It has always thrived—sometimes slowly and steadily, sometimes with a rush—but always making an unquestionable progress. It claims a population of 25,000 now, and it looks as if the claim were well founded. It is the second city of Illinois, in population, business, activity and enterprise, and high promise for the future. I have small faith in their project of bridging the Mississippi, but they ought to know their own business.
I spent a night at General Singleton's—one of the farmer princes of Illinois—he lives two miles from Quincy, in a very large and elegantly furnished house, and does an immense farming business and is very wealthy. He lights his house with gas made on the premises—made from the refuse of petroleum, by pressure. The apparatus could be stowed in a bath-room very conveniently. All you have to do is to pour a gallon or two of the petroleum into a brass cylinder and give a crank a couple of turns and the business is done for the next two days. He uses seventy burners in his house, and his gas bills are only a dollar and a quarter a week. I don't take any interest in prize bulls, astonishing jackasses and prodigious crops, but I took a strong fancy to that gas apparatus.
Alta California, June 2, 1867
New York,
April 19th, 1867.
EDITORS ALTA: The Mormons were holding a grand pow-wow at Keokuk, when I was there a week ago, the object of which was to devise ways and means of ousting Brigham Young from office and putting young Joe Smith in his place. Four hundred of the Saints were present, from various places in Missouri and Illinois, and young Joe, a simple, well-meaning, and very dull preacher was with them. They came to town dressed in homely jeans, and bringing horns, and cymbals, and trumpets and all the ungodly paraphernalia of their choir service as I used to hear it performed in the Mormon Church in St. Louis years ago. They are good, honest people, believe thoroughly in their religion, and are earnest in their hope of getting Joe Smith placed at the head of the whole Church. They say they will accomplish it. They call Brigham a wicked imposter and his new-fangled Mormonism a swindle. They claim that polygamy is not a tenet of genuine Mormonism.
It is strange how this lost tribe has kept its faith through so many years of sorrow and disaster. These are people who were scattered in tents for miles and miles along the roads through Iowa when the Mormons were driven out of Nauvoo with fire and sword, twenty-five years ago. Their heavy misfortunes appealed so movingly to the kindly instincts of the Iowa people that they rescued them from starvation, and gave them houses and food and employment, and gradually they became absorbed into the population and lost sight of—forgotten entirely, in fact, till this Convention of young Joe's called them out, and then from every unsuspected nook and cranny crept a Mormon—a Mormon who had for many a year been taken for a Baptist, or a Methodist, or some other kind of Christian.
But young Joe had better look out, for it has been a well credited rumor in Keokuk for two years or more that Brigham has set a price upon his head and keeps a destroying angel or so on his track all the time, ready to kill him when the opportunity offers. And they say that if these Mormons were to start to Salt Lake, young Joe would never get out of sight of Council Bluffs alive.
I stopped at the Heming House in Keokuk. It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing—I used to be a good boy, for that matter. Both of us have lost character of late years. The Heming is not a good hotel. The Heming lacks a very great deal of being a good hotel. Perdition is full of better hotels than the Heming.
It was late at night when I got there, and I told the clerk I would like plenty of lights, because I wanted to read an hour or two. When I reached No. 15 with the porter, (we came along a dim hall that was clad in ancient carpeting, faded, worn out in many places, and patched with old scraps of oil cloth—a hall that sank under one's feet, creaked dismally to every footstep,) he struck a light—two inches of sallow, sorrowful, consumptive tallow candle, that burned blue, and sputtered, and got discouraged and went out. The porter lit it again, and I asked if that was all the light the clerk sent. He said, "Oh no, I've got another one here," and he produced another couple of inches of tallow candle. I said, "Light them both—I'll have to have one to see the other by." He did it, but the result was drearier than darkness itself. He was a cheery, accommodating rascal. He said he would go "somewheres" and steal a lamp. I abetted and encouraged him in his criminal design. I heard the landlord get after him in the hall ten minutes afterward. "Where are you going with that lamp?" "Fifteen wants it, sir."
"Fifteen! why he's got a double lot of candles—does the man want to illuminate the house?—does he want to get up a torchlight procession?—what is he up to, anyhow?"
"He don't like them candles—says he wants a lamp."
"Why what in the nation does—why I never heard of such a thing? What on earth can he want with that lamp?"
"Well, he on'y wants to read—that's what he says."
"Wants to read, does he?—ain't satisfied with a thousand candles, but has to have a lamp!—I do wonder what the devil that fellow wants that lamp for? Take him another candle, and then if—"
"But he wants the lamp—says he'll burn the d——d old house down if he don't get a lamp!" (a remark which I never made.)
"I'd like to see him at it once. Well, you take it along—but I swear it beats my time, though—and see if you can't find out what in the very nation he wants with that lamp."
And he went off growling to himself and still wondering and wondering over the unaccountable conduct of No. 15. The lamp was a good one, but it revealed some disagreeable things—a bed in the suburbs of a desert of room—a bed that had hills and valleys in it, and you'd have to accommodate your body to the impression left in it by the man that slept there last, before you could lie comfortably; a carpet that had seen better days; a melancholy washstand in a remote corner, and a dejected pitcher on it sorrowing over a broken nose; a looking-glass split across the centre, which chopped your head off at the chin and made you look like some dreadful unfinished monster or other; the paper peeling in shreds from the walls.
I sighed and said: "This is charming; and now don't you think you could get me something to read?"
The porter said, "Oh, certainly; the old man's got dead loads of books;" and he was gone before I could tell him what sort of literature I would rather have. And yet his countenance expressed the utmost confidence in his ability to execute the commission with credit to himself. The old man made a descent on him:
"What are you going to do with that pile of books?"
"Fifteen wants 'em, sir."
"Fifteen, is it? He'll want a warming-pan, next—he'll want a nurse. Take him everything there is in the house—take him the barkeeper—take him the baggage-wagon—take him a chamber-maid! Confound me, I never saw anything like it. What did he say he wants with those books?"
"Wants to read 'em, like enough; it ain't likely he wants to eat 'em, I don't reckon."
"Wants to read 'em—wants to read 'em this time of night, the infernal lunatic! Well, he can't have them."
"But he says he's mor'ly bound to have 'em; he says he'll just go a-rairin' and a-chargin' through this house and raise more hell, there's no tellin' what he won't do if he don't get 'em; because he's drunk and crazy and desperate, and nothing'll soothe him down but them cussed books." [I had not made any threats, and was not in the condition ascribed to me by the porter.]
"Well, go on; but I will be around when he goes to rairing and charging, and the first rair he makes I'll make him rair out of the window." And then the old gentleman went off, growling as before.
The genius of that porter was something wonderful. He put an armful of books on the bed and said "Good night" as confidently as if he knew perfectly well that those books were exactly my style of reading matter. And well he might. His selection covered the whole range of legitimate literature. It comprised "The Great Consummation," by Rev. Dr. Cummings—theology; "Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri"—law; "The Complete Horse-Doctor"—medicine; "The Toilers of the Sea," by Victor Hugo—romance; "The Works of William Shakespeare"—poetry. I shall never cease to admire the tact and the intelligence of that gifted porter. I moved to the Tepfer house next day—a hotel which is well furnished, well conducted, and altogether a satisfactory place to live in.
Is hardly worth mentioning, but there are thousands in California who know the place well, and would like to learn its fate, maybe. I find it thus described among my notes:
"Half a dozen ruined frame houses just ready to cave into the river; a ruined frame church, with roof full of holes; it has grown weak in the knees from floods and neglect, and has settled clear down till its eaves rest upon the ground, just as if it had sunk—nothing is left of it but the roof and the crazy, leaning steeple; the poor thing looks like a melancholy hen sitting on a hopeless nest of eggs. Marion City used to be an important shipping point. The railroads killed it."
We came East in an express train this time. It had fewer inconvenient features about it than that gravel train we went West in. It had one important one, though. We never could get a complete meal. We could eat a few minutes at a time, very often, but there was not a great deal of satisfaction about that. About the time you get fairly to eating, they yell, "All aboard for Cleveland!" and you have to start. Brown said he ate eleven dollars' worth the first day and then got into the sleeping car hungry.
And there were the peddlers. I bought out the pop-corn boy to get rid of him, because I was trying to compose a poem for a young lady's album. But he came right back with a stock of peanuts. I took a few and hurried him away and he returned with some ice-cream candy. I do not like ice-cream candy and peanuts together, but I invested at once because a lucky rhyme had been born to me and I wanted to set it down before it slipped me. Then the scoundrel came back with tobacco and cigars, and afterwards with oranges, imitation ivory baby-whistles, fig-paste and apples, and then he went away and was gone some time, and I was encouraged to hope the train had run over him. Such was not the case. He was only keeping his most malignant outrage for the last. He was getting his literature ready. And from that time onward that degraded youth did nothing but march from one car to the other and afflict the passengers with specimen copies of the vilest blood and thunder romances on earth—"Lionel Warburton, or the Perjurer's Doom;" "Godfrey de Langley, or the Carnival of Blood;" "One-Eyed Bill, or the Desperado's Revenge"—those were some of his mildest works; and on their backs were pictures of stabbing affrays, and duels, and people shoving other people down precipices, and wretched wood cuts of women being rescued from terrific perils of all possible kinds—and they were always women who were so disgracefully homely that any right-minded man would take a placid satisfaction in seeing them suffer a sudden and a violent death. But that peddler peddled those books right along for hours together, and I gave up my poem and devoted all my energies to driving him away and trying to say things that would make him unhappy.
Such wonderful cities as we saw, all the way through Ohio, New York and New Jersey. It seemed to me that every fifteen minutes we passed through a Sacramento, and every hour and a half through a San Francisco—and verily I believe we did. And they looked so flourishing, and so cheerful and handsomely built, and so fiercely busy. Ah, my boy, it is good to come to the States occasionally, and see what a great country it is. Now I always thought that Cleveland, and Columbus, and Newark, and Paterson, were only villages, and so do thousands of other people but they are great cities. And we passed through many a city like Sacramento that I had always imagined was little more than a blacksmith shop and a Post Office, and we saw any number of towns of 5,000 to 8,000 inhabitants that I honestly believe I had never heard of before. I was just in a condition of lively astonishment all through those three States. No wonder Englishmen make mistakes about America when we know so little about it ourselves.
And speaking of Cleveland reminds me that I saw flaming posters there announcing "Miss Lotta's Last Night!" A man who got on the cars there told me that Miss Lotta was the best actress that ever lived, and he didn't care a cent where the next one came from. Well, she is a California girl, and I hope she will make everybody think as that man did. I heard Lotta's acting well spoken of in St. Louis.
But isn't it funny that there are no drinking saloons in the depots? I have no recollection of seeing a solitary gin-mill in a depot-building from St. Louis to New York—a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the route I came. At Cincinnati there were 250,000 people moderately drunk, but that was an accident. At a great fire, a large number of barrels of whiskey had been bursted open, and the stuff ran down to the river, got into an eddy, was pumped into the water-works and was distributed throughout the city in the form of weak whiskey punches. It was said that there was more water drank in Cincinnati that day than was ever drank there in one day before. It is likely.
George Butler has been working hard at Washington to get the Consulship at Panama, but did not succeed because his uncle, Gen. Butler, is so unpopular at the White House. George said he worked all possible purchases, but they failed; he proved himself a good Democrat at the White House, and a good Radical at the Capitol, and became so expert in duplicity at last, and so admirably plausible that he couldn't tell, himself, when he was lying and when he wasn't. Somebody told him to keep up the dodge of pretending to belong to both parties—it was first-rate Washington policy to carry water on both shoulders. George said as long as he only had to carry the water on his shoulders, he could stand it, but he was too good a Democrat to carry any in his stomach! Good, wasn't it? He said that at first he tried to buy off all candidates for the Consulship, but they came so fast he found it would break a mint to succeed in that way; next he tried moral suasion on them, and that failed; and finally he concluded to whip all the applicants that came, but he soon found that there were not hours enough in the day or days enough in the year for that. So the office has gone into other hands, and I am not the only man who is sorry George did not get it.
Maguire is here, and his Japs are playing in Philadelphia and Washington. Hingston is making great preparations for their reception in London, and says they will draw $1,500-houses every night for a good many weeks.
Webb ("Inigo") has fixed up a volume of my sketches, and he and the American News Company will publish it on Thursday, the 25th of the present month. He has gotten it up in elegant style, and has done everything to suit his own taste, which is excellent. I have made no suggestions. He calls it "THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG, AND OTHER SKETCHES, by 'Mark Twain.' Edited by C. H. Webb." Its price is $1.50 a copy. It will have a truly gorgeous gold frog on the back of it, and that frog alone will be worth the money. I don't know but what it would be well to publish the frog and leave the book out. Mail your orders either to C. H. Webb or the American News Company, New York.
As per order of the ALTA, just received by telegraph, I have taken passage in the great pleasure excursion to Europe, the Exposition and the Holy Land, and will sail on the 8th of June. You could not have suited me better. The ship is the Quaker City, and she is being sumptuously fitted up.
Alta California, June 10, 1867
New York,
April 30th, 1867.
ONE of the most praiseworthy institutions in New York, and one which must plead eloquently for it when its wickedness shall call down the anger of the gods, is the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Its office is located on the corner of Twelfth street and Broadway, and its affairs are conducted by humane men who take a genuine interest in their work, and who have got worldly wealth enough to make it unnecessary for them to busy themselves about anything else. They have already put a potent check upon the brutality of draymen and others to their horses, and in future will draw a still tighter reign upon such abuses, a late law of the Legislature having quadrupled their powers, and distinctly marked and specified them. You seldom see a horse beaten or otherwise cruelly used in New York now, so much has the society made itself feared and respected. Its members promptly secure the arrest of guilty parties and relentlessly prosecute them.
The new law gives the Society power to designate an adequate number of agents in every county, and these are appointed by the Sheriff, but work independently of all other branches of the civil organization. They can make arrests of guilty persons on the spot, without calling upon the regular police, and what is better, they can compel a man to stop abusing his horse, his dog, or any other animal, at a moment's warning. The object of the Society, as its name implies, is to prevent cruelty to animals, rather than punish men for being guilty of it.
They are going to put up hydrants and water tanks at convenient distances all over the city, for drinking places for men, horses and dogs.
Mr. Bergh, the President of the Society, is a sort of enthusiast on the subject of cruelty to animals—or perhaps it would do him better justice to say he is full of honest earnestness upon the subject. Nothing that concerns the happiness of a brute is a trifling matter with him—no brute of whatever position or standing, however plebeian or insignificant, is beneath the range of his merciful interest. I have in my mind an example of his kindly solicitude for his dumb and helpless friends.
He went to see the dramatic version of "Griffith Gaunt" at Wallack's Theatre. The next morning he entered the manager's office and the following conversation took place:
Mr. Bergh—"Are you the manager of this theatre?"
Manager—"I am, sir. What can I do for you?"
Mr. B.—"I am President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and I have come to remonstrate against your treatment of that pig in the last act of the play last night. It is cruel and wrong, and I beg that you will leave the pig out in future." "That is impossible! The pig is necessary to the play."
"But it is cruel, and you could alter the play in some way so as to leave the pig out."
"It cannot possibly be done, and besides I do not see anything wrong about it at all. What is it you complain of?"
"Why, it is plain enough. They punch the pig with sticks, and chase him and harass him, and contrive all manner of means to make him unhappy. The poor thing runs about in its distress, and tries to escape, but is met at every turn by its tormentors and its hopes blighted. The pig does not understand it. If the pig understood it, it might be well enough, but the pig does not know it is a play, but takes it all as reality, and is frightened and bewildered by the crowd of people and the glare of the lights, and yet no time is given it for reflection—no time is given it to arrive at a just appreciation of its circumstances—but its persecutors constantly assail it and keep its mind in such a chaotic state that it can form no opinion upon any point in the case. And besides, the pig is cast in the play without its consent, is forced to conduct itself in a manner which cannot but be humiliating to it, and leaves that stage every night with a conviction that it would rather die than take a character in a theatrical performance again. Pigs are not fitted for the stage; they have no dramatic talent; all their inclinations are toward a retired and unostentatious career in the humblest walks of life, and—"
Manager—"Say no more, sir. The pig is yours. I meant to have educated him for tragedy and made him a blessing to mankind and an ornament to his species, but I am convinced, now, that I ought not to do this in the face of his marked opposition to the stage, and so I present him to you, who will treat him well, I am amply satisfied. I am the more willing to part with him, since the play he performs in was taken off the stage last night, and I could not conveniently arrange a part for him in the one we shall run for the next three weeks, which is Richard III."
Mr. Bergh does everything in the behest of the Society with the very best of intentions and the most honest motives. He makes mistakes, sometimes, like all other men. He complained against a Jewish butcher, and required his arrest, for cutting the throat of an ox instead of knocking it on the head; said he was cruelly slow about terminating the animal's life. Of course, people smiled, because the religious law which compels Jewish butchers to slaughter with a consecrated knife is as old as the Pyramids of Egypt, and Mr. Bergh would have to overthrow the Pentateuch itself to accomplish his point.
This is peculiarly New Yorkish. The Midnight Mission is composed of sincere and zealous religious men who, in a good work, are ironclad against jeers and insult, and they go about these streets at dead of night, trying to rope in the prostitutes that infest the alleys and byways of this teeming hive of humanity, and bring them back to the walk of virtue. Talk about courage! I had rather face the guns of Fortress Monroe than brave the tongues of those foul-mouthed she-dragons. Such dauntless intrepidity smacks of the crusading days of Coeur de Lion and his mailed legions.
The Midnight Mission flourishes, and accomplishes actual results. It has reclaimed many girls, and set them to earning honest livings, as servants in respectable families and in other capacities. It seems wonderful, and very improbable, too, but it is true, nevertheless. The office of the Mission is in the same building as the Cruelty Society I have been talking about, and I visited both on the same day. I had some notion of joining the Mission, but then I thought I had better continue to hold on to my position as a Sandwich Island Missionary and let these people worry along the best way they can. I wish them well, though. Their main depot is next door to one of the largest houses of ill fame in the city, and so you can see they mean business.
SINGULAR
Considering the gigantic war the country has just passed through, I am constantly surprised at the utter absence of military beggars. I fully expected to find legless heroes begging their bread at every corner. I haven't seen the very first one so occupied yet—not one. I see a cripple with a soldier-coat on occasionally, but always working for a living—never begging. We import our beggars chiefly. By some wonderful process or other, the soldiers of both armies have been quietly and mysteriously absorbed into civil life, and can no more be distinguished from the children of peace. It is hard even for an American to understand this. But it is a toiling, thinking, determined nation, this of ours, and little given to dreaming. It appreciates the fact that the moment one thing is ended, it must be crossed out and dropped, and something else begun. Our Alexanders do not sit down and cry because there are no more worlds to conquer, but snatch off their coats and fall to shinning around and raising corn and cotton, and improving sewing machines.
A Herald's war correspondent told me he was in Richmond when the rebel forces were disbanded, and that a party of Confederate officers discarded their uniforms and got up a great express company within twenty-four hours afterward; and that three days only had transpired when he saw rebel Colonels, Majors and Captains, connected with the new express enterprise, helping the porters handle heavy boxes and barrels, and with their coats off and sleeves rolled up, too! He said that sort of thing came easy enough in America, and could occur in France, but that an English Colonel could not come down to such a thing as that without many a heart-ache and many a twinge of wounded pride.
I saw this harmless old humbug in Broadway yesterday. His knee-breeches are gone, his black velvet coat is seedy, his long white hair waves in the wind all guiltless of powder or queue, his cocked hat has given place to a battered plug, from head to foot he is seedy and dilapidated, and his ancient self-complacency has departed out of his countenance, and age and weariness and a sort of dreary sadness reign there instead. Poor old fellow, it made me feel sorry when I contrasted his desolate figure of yesterday with the gay and gorgeous Washington II of San Francisco, so picturesque in his faultless legs and his benignant dignity.
Old Uncle Freddy has outlived the day of his pride, outlived his usefulness, outlived all those whom he cared for or who cared for him—and to-day he stands solitary and alone, in the midst of this unpitying city, a helpless, hopeless, melancholy old man.
"The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has pressed
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear,
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb."
He still goes about in an absent sort of way, tracking up Tom Maguire, and proclaiming, as formerly, that Maguire owes him forty thousand dollars; but I fear me that death will soothe away all his sorrows and bring peace to his troubled spirit before many months shall pass away.
Webb has gotten up my "Jumping Frog" book in excellent style, and it is selling rapidly. A lot of copies will go to San Francisco per this steamer. I hope my friends will all buy a few copies each, and more especially am I anxious to see the book in all the Sunday School Libraries in the land. I don't know that it would instruct youth much, but it would make them laugh anyway, and therefore no Sunday School Library can be complete without the "Jumping Frog." But candidly, now, joking aside, it is really a very handsome book, and you know yourself that it is a very readable one. I have sent a copy to Honolulu for my old friend, Father Damon.
Our ship in which we are to sail for the Holy Land, is to be furnished with a battery of guns for firing salutes, by order of the Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Seward has addressed a letter to all foreign powers, requesting that every attention be shown General Sherman and his party. We have got a piano and a parlor organ in the cabin, and a snare drummer, a base drummer and a fifer, and the passengers are instructed to fetch along all their old guitars, fiddles, Hutes and sheet music. If they have a choir in that ship I mean to run it. I have got a handsome stateroom on the upper deck and a regular brick for a roommate. We have got the pleasantest and jolliest party of passengers that ever sailed out of New York, and among them a good many young ladies and a couple of preachers, but we don't mind them. Young ladies are well enough anywhere, and preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty. We sail the 8th of June, positively.
I am to lecture here, at the Cooper Institute, next Monday evening.
Alta California, June 16, 1867
New York,
May 17th, 1867.
IT WAS just a lucky circumstance that I happened to be out late night before last, else I might never have been permitted to see the chief of the late Confederacy in life. I was standing in front of the New York Hotel at midnight, or thereabouts, talking with a clerk of the establishment, when the Davis party arrived, and I got a tolerably good look at the man who has been raising such a dust in this country for years. He is tall and spare—that was all I could make of him—and then he disappeared.
There was no crowd around, no torchlight processions, no music, no welcoming cannon—and better than all, no infuriated mob, thirsting for blood and vengeance. The man whose arrival in New York a year or two ago would have set the city wild with excitement from its centre to its circumference, had ceased to rank as a sensation, and went to his hotel as unheralded and unobserved as any country merchant from the far West. He was a fallen Chief, he was an extinguished sun—we all know that—and yet it seemed strange that even an unsuccessful man, with such a limitless celebrity, could drop in our midst in that way, and go out as meekly as a farthing candle.
Yesterday it was the same. There were no lion-hunters gaping around the hotel doors, inquiring in infamous grammar, "Which is him?" The autographers were not on hand. A few personal friends called on the ex-President. That was all. The newspapers gave column after column of songs of praise to the old worn-out, played-out, ragged, and threadbare sensation of eight months ago—Ristori—the wretched foreign woman who has come over here and humbugged the people into the notion that because sweet music is sweet music still, whether one can understand the words to it or not, a good story must be a good story also, even if the audience can't comprehend a word of it, and don't know what in the mischief the teller of it is driving at—the newspapers, I say, gave the usual acres of laudation to Ristori yesterday, and only a dozen meagre lines to Jefferson Davis, head, and heart, and soul of the mightiest rebellion of modern times—and with the fact patent that the one was an old sensation and the other a brand new one. Verily, some things are stranger than others, and man is but grass, and a very poor article of grass at that. I am glad I am not Jefferson Davis, and I could show him a hundred good reasons why he ought to be glad he ain't me.
Mr. Davis is going to Canada in a day or two.
Wm. C. Fall, well known in San Francisco, Marysville and Carson, and whom we all call "Billy" for short, got into a quarrel with Harry Newton, an old citizen of Esmeralda in the palmy days of that camp, in Broad street, day before yesterday, and they fired several pistol shots at each other, but without wounding anybody but a telegraph operator, who had nothing to do with the matter, and was both surprised and mortified when he received a bullet in his ribs.
Two eye-witnesses of the fracas told me that Fall and Newton met in a crowd, and commenced abusing each other, when Newton struck Fall with his fist, and immediately drew his pistol and fired. Fall followed suit, and they fired four or five shots between them in very quick succession, but damaged nobody but the telegraph operator, as above mentioned. The crowd was very large—it always is in Broadstreet—but they took no interest in bombardments, and went away—and all went first, as near as they could come at it.
Newton made his escape, and Fall tried to, but failed. He hid in the fourth story of a neighboring building, but was ferreted out by the police, and imprisoned. All I can learn of the cause of the quarrel is that Fall wrote Newton a letter about a matter of business, and Newton returned no reply. His conduct exasperated Fall, and he sought the opportunity of expressing his opinion personally to Newton.
To fire pistols at people, or even to carry such furniture about the streets, is a grave offence in New York; and both these men are in a very unenviable situation at present.
A newspaper friend has been showing me some photographs, taken in Paris, of Alexandre Dumas, the novelist, and Adah Isaacs Menken, the poor woman who has got so much money, but not any clothes. In one of them Dumas is sitting down, with head thrown back, and great, gross face, rippled with smiles, and Adah is leaning on his shoulder, and just beaming on him like a moon—beaming on him with the expression of a moon that is no better than it ought to be. In another picture, the eminent mulatto is in his shirt-sleeves, and Adah has her head on his breast, and arms clasping his neck, and this time she is beaming up at him—beaming up at him in a way which is destructive of all moral principle. On the backs of these photographs is written, in French:
"To my dearest love,
"A. DUMAS."
And Menken's note accompanying the pictures betrays that she is extravagantly well pleased with the photographer for publishing and selling thousands and thousands of these pictures to the Parisian public. She knows the value of keeping herself before the world in new and startling situations.
Somehow I begin to regard Menken's conduct as questionable, occasionally. She has a passion for connecting herself with distinguished people, and then discarding them as soon as the world has grown reconciled to the novelty of it and stopped talking about it. Heenan suited her caprice well enough for a while, and then he had to vacate; the same was Orpheus C. Kerr's experience; and the same was the Davenport Brother's; and the same was the experience of some less notorious favorites of hers. And now comes the great Mulatto in the Iron Mask, and he is high chief for the present. But can he hold his position against all comers? Would he stand any chance against a real live gorilla from the wilds of Africa? I don't know. Menken is mighty shaky. Menken can't resist a splendid new astonisher. Menken is a good hearted, free-handed, charitable soul—a woman who does white deeds enough, kindly Christian deeds enough, every day of her life to blot out a swarming multitude of sins; but, Heaven help us, what desperate chances she takes on her reputation!
The latest news is that Dumas is prosecuting the photographer for publishing those pictures, but maybe that is only a regular part of the sensation programme. These photographs are to be reproduced here.
I have attended social reunions of various kinds since I have been here, but one of the pleasantest was a club dinner with a party of Nantucket people. A good many good things were said during the evening, but the thing that struck me most was a bit of ancient Nantucket history dropped by one of the gentlemen.
He said that in our old wars with Great Britain, Nantucket was the object of a vast amount of solicitude on the part of both nations—more, in fact, than the importance of the place really justified. It contained a population made up pretty equally of English and Americans, and of course neither Government could gracefully desert its own children—and yet the place was so situated that it would have required all the ships of one navy to besiege it, and all of the other to defend it. That wouldn't pay, of course. And so the two countries wisely agreed to just leave Nantucket clear out of the quarrel, remove all implements of war from it, disarm its citizens, and consider the place neutral ground entirely. So the middle-aged waxed old and died—as neutrals; and the young grew up and flourished—as neutrals. All were imbued with the neutral spirit; all respected the ancient compacts and none desired to do anything to impair the time honored, hallowed good faith.
Years swept by, and Nantucket felt within herself one day a yearning to do as other communities did, and have a fine squad of militia to show off on great days. They raised one. They armed it and equipped it. But when they came to frame the by-laws, the honest reverence for the spirit of neutrality, which had lived in their bosoms so long, cropped out in gravest phrase in their Military Constitution, thus:
"ARTICLE I.—This Company shall be called the Nantucket Guard.
"ARTICLE II.—It shall be kept at all times completely armed and equipped and ready for service in the field.
"ARTICLE III.—In case of war, it shall immediately disband!"
No member of the Nantucket Guard ever seemed to understand that those by-laws read wonderfully like a broad joke. They dropped that absurd third article, as a matter of course, and nothing more than an earnest of their fidelity to the ancient good faith of their fathers.
Another gentleman present said that Nantucket horses were celebrated for their general worthlessness, imbecility, and marvellous slowness. He said a citizen sold one to a cavalry officer during the war, and warranted him to be a good war-horse. The soldier came back afterwards in a towering passion and said he had been swindled.
"As how?" said the Nantucketer.
"Why there's not a bit of 'go' in him—and yet you warranted him as a good war-horse."
"Yes, I did, and by George he is a good war-horse—he'd sooner die than run!"
Well, it is a marvel to me. It shows what determined newspapers and shrewd managers can do. Max Maretzek drew upon himself the hostility of several of the city newspapers, and among them that colossal power, the New York Herald. The consequence is, that those papers take a genuine pleasure in giving any manager a lift who is a rival of his. So Ristori, who had been a great light in Europe, but had long ago begun to burn dimly and had almost flickered out, latterly, is brought over here by Mr. Grau, and straightway the newspapers fall to work and set every man, woman and child in the country crazy about her jam, her houses at three or four dollars a head, with people who don't know any more about what she is raving about in her unearthly Italian than if she were talking Chinese—people who gape, and stare, and wish to Heaven they knew what she was up to, till an incomprehensible harangue winds up with a grand climax of sound and fury and foreign jabbering, and then the house comes down!
And so heralded, she goes abroad into the innocent interior—besieges Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Rochester, St. Louis, Memphis—goes everywhere and charges just what she pleases, and deceives the people into the belief that they have been blessed with a bliss beyond all price in being permitted to listen for three hours to a frenzied clattering of words that carried no possible meaning under the sun to their dazed understandings.
And yet these same Americans flock to the Academy of Music here and show no appreciation of the able Japanese speeches of the manager of the wonderful jugglers. It is a shame. They understand that eloquent Jap just as much as they understood Ristori, and yet, if he were to play Queen Elizabeth, ten to one they would complain of his incomprehensible language, and even go so far as to say it was a radical defect.
It beats me, entirely. I believe the newspapers can do anything, now. Without them, Ristori would not have made her board in America; with them, she has made a fortune. She can command. She says noone who is not in full evening dress shall enter her sacred theatre to-night, and she will be obeyed. The place will be crowded, and not a soul, except it be some newspaper man who knows his strength and scorns all laws of men's making, will dare to present himself there in any unholy costume.
It is curious. The newspapers could have set the city boiling and surging about Jeff. Davis, but they did not choose to do it, and so Jeff. Davis is powerless to make a stir on his own account—a thing he is very glad of, no doubt, for if any man longs for rest and quiet and oblivion, it is he, we can all believe.
Now there is a preacher for you. There is a man who can just seize a congregation and hold on to it as many hours as he wants to. There is an invisible wire leading from every auditor's soul straight to a battery hidden away somewhere in that preacher's head, and down those wires travels in ceaseless flow the living spirit of words that might fall cold and empty and meaningless from other lips. I do not know that I ever looked upon faces so eager, so wrapt, so fascinated as those I see in Chapin's church.
I have wondered what it was that chained the congregation so, (because I couldn't believe that every Tom, Dick and Harry who came there had sense enough to appreciate his magnificent orations,) but at last I have concluded that it must be Mr. Chapin's strong, deep, unmistakable earnestness. There is nothing like that to convince people. Nobody can have confidence in cold, monotonous, inanimate utterances, though they were teeming with truth and wisdom. Manner is everything in these cases—matter is nothing. The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might. Now there is Governor Nye—however, I will not go into particulars.
Mr. Chapin is large, and rather stout; is about forty five, or thereabouts; is full of action and energy, and has a noble voice, and knows how to use it. His eloquence is genuine, free from show and unsubstantial flummery, meant for use, not ornament. I think one of his own illustrations of a point in his sermon last Sunday might not describe it ungracefully. He said:
A King and an Italian Knight were riding together upon a lonely road, in the old crusading days, and the King could not refrain from remarking upon the rusty, battered old sword the Knight wore, and calling attention to his own, which was brightly burnished and brilliant with precious stones. The Knight said quietly:
"Mine is the more beautiful, Sire."
The King smiled, and drew his splendid weapon, and flashed it in the sun. "Behold! Sir Knight!"
"Behold! Sir King!" The Knight drew his, and in the self-same instant six hundred men-at-arms sprang from an ambush, and said: "Command us to the death, my lord!"
"I yield. Thy sword is more beautiful, Sir Knight!"
There is no fuss and nonsense about Chapin's eloquence. It is the true steel. It is a power, and he knows well how to wield it. He has a large and handsome church at the corner of Fifth avenue and Forty-fifth street, and a full congregation. He is a man of wide-spread and potent influence, and a recognized leader in all the progressive movements of the day. He never moves till his mind is made up for good and all, and then he moves like an avalanche.
Make your mark in New York, and you are a made man. With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over, like Ristori, without fear—but without it you are speculating upon a dangerous issue. Our old San Francisco Minstrels have made their mark here, most unquestionably. They located themselves boldly in Broadway, right opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, and their very first performance gave them a hold upon the popular favor which has never loosened its grip to this day. Every night of their lives they play to packed houses—every single seat full and dozens of people standing up. I have good reason to know, because I have been there pretty often, have always paid my way but once, and I had to buy a box the last time I went. They go straight ahead from month to month, like the "Black Crook," and their receipts for the last twelve months, as furnished to the Revenue officers, were only a fraction under $110,000. What do you think of that? The firm remains the same—Birch, Backus, Wambold and Bernard. They have made an extraordinary success, and wisely they try to keep up with the spirit of the times and deserve a continuance of it.
Tom Maguire's Japanese Jugglers have taken New York by storm. They threw all the other popular sensations completely in the shade—shed a perfect gloom over them. It has to be a colossal sensation that is able to set everybody talking in New York, but the Japs did it. And I got precious tired of it for the first few days. No matter where I went, they were the first subject mentioned; if I stopped a moment in a hotel, I heard people talking about them; if I lunched in a Dutch restaurant, there was one constantly recurring phrase which I understood, and only one, "das Japs;" in French restaurants, it was "les Japs;" in Irish restaurants, it was "thim Japs;" after church the sermon was discussed five minutes, and then the Japs for half an hour. Maguire plays them in the great Academy of Music, and charges heavy prices; but the first night he turned hundreds away after finding accommodations for three thousand spectators. And the seventh day, at eight in the morning, I saw fifty people strung down the pavement, Post Office fashion, waiting to secure seats, each in his regular turn, when they knew the box-office would not open till nine o'clock. The Japs are a prodigious success.
The Worrell girls have come back and taken the New York Theatre, a sort of half-frog, half-tadpole affair, which used to be a church, and hasn't got entirely over looking like a church yet. I am told the girls have fine houses, are doing well, and are as popular as they were at the Broadway. At the Broadway—those were great days for them—they turned the heads of half the young men in the country—not in New York alone, but all around. Lovesick youths from far in the interior of Jersey, Connecticut, New York, and everywhere about, came in on the trains and basked in the beauty of their idols every night, and went sleepless to work next day, drivelled along through it, and fetched up in the Broadway again at night, as far gone as ever. There was even an institution called the "WORRELL BRIGADE—a great company of devoted youths and young men who wore a handsome badge, composed of red, white and blue enamel, upon which was wrought the cipher "W." in fancy work of some kind. They were faithful attendants of the theatre every night, were a regularly organized military sort of institution, with officers bearing such titles as Colonel, Captain, Lieutenant, etc., and were always suffering for a chance to destroy somebody by way of showing and proving their devotion. They were always on hand to assist the Worrells from their carriage before the evening's performance, and hand them back to it when the play was over. I have first-rate authority for all this, otherwise I should be inclined to doubt it. The Worrels must have done well, because I know of a fabulous offer that was made them and they refused it. Also, that they had bought the dwelling 209 1/2 Ninth street—so one good authority said, and another good authority said they had only rented it—but in either case liberal money would have to be forthcoming, because I have been in the house often, last January, and know that to buy it or rent it either would break me easy enough.
I saw little Miss Lotta yesterday. She is stopping at the Metropolitan with her father and mother. Her voice is very husky and she says she cannot sing at all, hardly, but hopes to be able to appear shortly again. She has an engagement at one of the city theatres. Lotta looks as young as ever, and just as pretty.
I am talking pretty freely about our show-people, and pretty strongly, too, but I am telling only the truth. I so seldom speak of them at all, that I don't like to mince matters when I do speak of their first-rate successes.
I had a first-rate success myself at the Cooper Institute the other night, but I am not going to say much about that, because you can get it out of the newspapers. The Californians worked the thing up, and got about twenty-five hundred people into the house—which was well, because on my own merits I could not have accomplished it, perhaps. I lectured once in Brooklyn afterwards, and here again last night, and came out handsomely, notwithstanding I managed to get everything wrong end foremost and hopelessly tangled in the matter of announcing last night's performance. It will keep me jumping, now, to write up promised sketches and correspondence in time to sail on the 8th of June, and so I shall not lecture anymore, except perhaps in one or two neighboring towns where engagements have already been made, and to which I can go and return to New York the same night.
But I do want to say one thing. Governor Nye promised to introduce me to my audience at Cooper Institute, and I published it; but he was not at his hotel when the carriage went for him, has not been seen since, and has never sent a word of explanation. However, it is a matter of no consequence. Introduced myself as well as he could have done it—that is, without straining himself.
Alta California, June 23, 1867
New York,
May 18th, 1867.
"RIP goes another shirt!"
"Why, Brown!"
"Buy your clothes in Paris! buy your clothes in Paris! Blame my cats, the next man that tells me to buy my clothes in Paris, I'll break him in two! I've been trying to hold on and buy 'em in Paris, just as all these thieves tell me, but that Quaker City ain't ever going to sail, I don't believe, and by the time she does I won't have nary rag left—"
"Brown, calm yourself-your grammar is infamous."
"Don't talk to me about grammar! I'm fit to cuss or cry, or anything that comes handy now. I was going to get a pair of boots built two weeks ago, and that snivelling Baxter said hold on and buy 'em in Paris—cheaper and better every way—and I've held on till these boots are letting go everywheres, and it rains here every four hours, and I fetch home a bucket of water in 'em every night, and socks can't stand it, and they get caked to my feet, and the bottoms pull out every night, and I wish I may die if I haven't wore out a hundred and fifty pair in—"
"Be reasonable, son."
"I know what I've done. I ain't got but just one sock left, and the bottom of that'll fetch away when I pull that starboard boot off; and don't you see that old corn hanging out at that hole in the port boot? Buy your clothes in Paris! I've hung on, and hung on, and hung on, till my coats are all gone to seed, and my pants are all frizzled out at the bottoms, and my boots are busted all out, and my hat is a perfect outrageous old ruin—it is, by George it looks like the picture of that there ratty old ancient Colosseum at Rome all sick, and sorrowful, and rusty, and battered up, and gone in generally. Confound the confounded."
"Brown, Brown, go slow, lad."
"Buy your clothes in Paris! There's my last solitary shirt come back from the wash with all the after guard clean gone, flush to the waist! and there used to be a thousand buttons on that shirt, and now there ain't nary one of 'em left! I wisht I had a chance to eat a washerwoman once, I do. I'd clean her up so good that they couldn't any more identify her at the resurrection than——"
"Brown, you can't think how it pains me to hear you talk so."
"I don't care—I don't care for nothing, the way I am now. I want to make trouble. I want to do something that's outrageous. I want to set a house a-fire—I want to start a riot—I want to commit a nuisance, anything that will make Rome howl is what I'm fixed for at this present writing. Buy your clothes in Paris! All the scoundrels I know have told me that, and now I ain't got any more clothes than they wear in the 'Black Crook,' and I'm a living shame and a degraded lunatic. That's me. Here, you, black them boots, and black the holes in 'em particular."
I am glad he has gone to see that the fellow blacks the holes in his boots "particular," because I can have some peace now. But between you and I, this thing of swallowing everybody's advice has got one or two drawbacks about it. I have been holding on myself, to buy my clothes in Paris, and I have held on so faithfully that I havn't got a rag of every-day clothing left that is fit to wear in the public street, hardly—and yet the ship will not sail for three weeks yet. And when we get to Paris, suppose they tell us to buy our clothes in Constantinople—how shall we feel then?
The advice we have received from travelled people would fill a volume. We must buy veils for Egypt, saddles for Palestine, field-glasses for landscapes, books for the ship—Oh, a thousand and one things we must do, when I wouldn't give a cent for anything but a Shakespeare, and a deck of cards, and a couple of shirts. Perdition take the advice—I will none of it.
You are aware that in New York, after twelve at night, on week days, you cannot buy a glass of wine or liquor for love or money, and you cannot buy it on Sunday at any time. It is a great thing for the morals of New York, but it is demoralizing to the vicinage. It inflicts twenty thousand beer-swillers upon Hoboken every Sabbath. You remember the pious girl who said, "I found that my ribbons and gew-gaws were dragging me down to hell, and so I took them off and gave them to my sister." Well that is the way we are doing for Hoboken. We found that beer drinkers were debauching our morals, and so we concluded to turn them over to our neighbor. The ferry-boats go over packed and crammed with people all day Sunday, and the beer and such stuff drank in Hoboken on these occasions amounts to oceans, to speak liberally. They say that they are going to inaugurate an excise law over there, next Sunday, and then what will thirsty New York do?
Well, it suits me. The excise has made a sort of decent, orderly place out of this once rowdy, noisy, immoral town. You don't hear ribald songs in beer cellars at dead of night now. You don't hear lawless roughs prowling and howling through the streets at midnight anymore. You don't hear shouts, and curses, and blows, and the watchman's shrill whistle and the clatter of flying feet under the sorrowing moon in these better times that are upon us. At one o'clock in the morning you may walk fifty blocks, sometimes, and not see fifty persons other than policemen—and such citizens as you do see will be orderly, and quiet and proper. It used to be very different here.
Some of the people growl bitterly because the country governs the city through the Legislature, but I cannot see but that the country does it much more wisely than ever the city would. New York, in some respects, is a big, overgrown, rascally place; but it improves—it improves all the time.
Why, they had an election here a week or two ago, and kept the gin-mills closed all day, and I never heard of three fights in the twelve hours, and never a sign of a riot. How does that sound, for a village with a round million of inhabitants?
That is a human institution. Its President is a Californian, and its members hail from more places than there are on the Atlas. They have kindly complimented me with the privileges of the place for a month, and I went up the other night at ten and spent a very pleasant evening till two or three o'clock in the morning.
Of course I met pleasant people, because nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people. An Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotchman, an Italian or so, several Frenchmen and a number of Americans were present, and you couldn't ask a question about any possible country under the sun, but some fellow in the crowd had been there and could give the information from personal experience. The Club occupies a worshipful five-story brownstone front on ineffable Fifth Avenue, far up town in the midst of the odor of sanctity that prevails in that thoroughfare, which is so peculiarly sacred to greenbacks and fashion. The drawing-rooms are luxuriously furnished and decorated, and the premises are supplied with a library, reading-rooms, billiard tables, supper saloons, and a couple of elegant grand pianos. Of course there is a sufficiency of wines and liquors there, and within those charmed walls the unholy excise intrudeth not.
They said they were going to send me a formal invitation to make a speech before the Club, as Du Chaillu did, and I said I would be glad to accept it, but I did not know then that they go and invite a whole raft of ladies to be present on such occasions, to look at a poor victim and make him lose his grip, and so I hope they will forget to send the invitation, now.
You ought to start a Travellers' Club in San Francisco. You have got an abundance of material, and that sort of an organization is much pleasanter than political one-idea affairs, such as clubs generally are.
The iron bridge over Broadway and Fulton streets is finished at last, and the people troop over it in crowds now, while it is a novelty. It is really only a necessity in the slushy, snowy winter time, but must be a great convenience at any and all times. There is never a season in daylight when it is not a troublesome job to ferry yourself across Broadway or Fulton street, at that point, through the swarming vehicles.
Somehow, the young ladies haven't taken kindly to it, yet, but I suppose they will after a while. But the men and boys and old women hang around it, and tramp over it, and loiter on it to gaze up Broadway, and so it does a very respectable amount of business. Curiosity runs high here. I saw a washerwoman coming along with three or four hundred pounds on her back to-day, and eyeing the bridge with great interest, and I said, principally to myself, I wonder if that old scalliwag really meditates lugging that clothing-store up that tiresome stairway now, when the street below is comparatively free from vehicles? And she not only meditated it, but did it! She tugged, and sweated, and climbed, till she reached the top, cast a critical eye up Broadway, went down on the other side, toiled up again, crossed over to her original point of departure, and went off about her business. There is a great deal of human nature in people.
I have not been by that bridge for a month without yearning to cross it. I have abused the tardy workmen in my heart for keeping this pleasure from me. I have fairly ached to cross it, and have thought I would give anything in reason or out of reason for the privilege, but the entrances were pitilessly closed, and I had to move on and sigh and suffer in silence. But to-day all obstructions were gone and no soul was there to forbid me. I was free to cross as often as I wanted to. But I didn't want to. As soon as the obstructions were gone the desire went also. Verily, there is a large amount of human nature in people.
Crowds stand around all day long and criticise that bridge, and find fault with it, and tell with unlimited frankness how it ought to have been planned, and how they would have built it had the city granted them the $14,000 it cost. It is really refreshing to hang around these and listen to them. A foreigner would come to the conclusion that all America was composed of inspired professional bridge builders.
I have tried to be odd, and refrain from criticism, but it isn't human nature and I cannot do it. I am bound to say it was absurd to paint such portions of the structure as were untouchable a good substantial brown, and paint the hand-rails white, when anybody might know that any inky printer's devil, with a spark of proper human nature in him, would go four blocks out of the way just for the luxury of defiling those stainless railings with his dingy hands. Why, the things are all black as a hat already. And I could not forbear criticising the absurdity of putting four grand costly lamps on the corners of the bridge, when everybody knows that that locality is the most desolate and deserted in New York after nightfall, and that no soul will ever have need of either bridge or lamps between the setting and the rising of the sun, from now till doomsday. I have nothing to say against the shape and general style of the bridge, though. Both are good, I think, both are ornamental, and certainly both are in every way satisfactory to me.
I have been in the Station House. I staid there all night. I don't mind mentioning it, because anybody can get into the Station House here without committing an offence of any kind. And so he can anywhere that policemen are allowed to cumber the earth. I complimented this police force in a letter some time ago, and felt like a guilty, degraded wretch when I was doing it, and now I am glad I got into the Station House, because it will teach me never to so far forget all moral principle as to compliment a police force again.
I was on my way home with a friend a week ago—it was about midnight—when we came upon two men who were fighting. We interfered like a couple of idiots, and tried to separate them, and a brace of policemen came up and took us all off to the Station House. We offered the officers two or three prices to let us go, (policemen generally charge $5 in assault and battery cases, and $25 for murder in the first degree, I believe,) but there were too many witnesses present, and they actually refused.
They put us in separate cells, and I enjoyed the thing considerably for an hour or so, looking through the bars at the dilapidated old hags, and battered and ragged bummers, sorrowing and swearing in the stone-paved halls, but it got rather tiresome after a while. I fell asleep on my stone bench at 3 o'clock, and was called at dawn and marched to the Police Court with a vile policeman at each elbow, just as if I had been robbing a church, or saying a complimentary word about the police, or doing some other supernaturally mean thing.
We sat on wooden benches in a lock-up partitioned off from the Court Room, for four hours, awaiting judgment—not awaiting trial, because they don't try people there, but only just take a percentage of their cash, and let them go without further ceremony. We were a pretty cheerful crowd, but a rather haggard and sleepy one. Three first-rate young fellows, and well dressed, were in the lot—one a clerk, one a college student, and one an Indiana merchant. Two had been soldiers on the Union side, and one on the other, and all had battled at Antietam together. The merchant was arrested for being drunk, and the other two for assault and battery. An old seedy, scarred, bloated and bleeding bummer was present, who had been kicked out of a gin mill by the barkeeper, he said, and got arrested for it. He said he had been in the Station House a good many times before. I said: "What will they do with you?"
"Ten days, likely," (with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder, and an expressive shrug). A negro man was there, with his head badly battered and bleeding profusely. He had nothing to say.
A bloated old hag sat in the corner, with a wholesome black eye, a drunken leer in the sound one, and nothing in the world on but a dingy calico dress, a shocking shawl, and a pair of slippers that had seen better days, but long enough ago to have forgotten them. I thought I might as well prospect my company thoroughly while time dragged along, and so I went over and started a conversation with her. She was very communicative; said she lived in the Five Points, and must have been particularly drunk to have wandered so far from home; said she used to have a husband, but he had drifted off somewhere, and so she had taken up with another man; she had had a child, also—a little boy—but it took all her time to get drunk, and keep drunk, and so he starved, one winter's night—or froze, she didn't know which—both, maybe, because it snowed in "horrible" through the roof, and he hadn't any bedclothes but a window-shutter. "But it was a d——d good thing for him, anyway," said she, "because he'd have had a miserable rough time of it if he'd a lived"; and then she chuckled a little, and asked me for a chew of tobacco and a cigar. I gave her a cigar and borrowed the tobacco for her, and then she winked a wink of wonderful mystery and drew a flask of gin from under her shawl, and said the police thought they were awful smart when they searched her, but she wasn't born last week. I didn't drink with her, notwithstanding she invited me. She said she was good for ten days, but she guessed she could stand it, because if she had as many dollars as she had been in limbo she could buy a gin-mill.
Two flash girls of sixteen and seventeen were of our little party, and they said they had been arrested for stopping gentlemen in the street in pursuance of their profession, but averred that the charge was false, and that the gentlemen had made the first advances; and then they cried—not because they felt ashamed of having been locked up in a Station House, but because they would have to suffer in jail for several days, in company a little rougher than they were used to. I felt sorry for those two poor girls, and thought it was a pity that the merciful snow had not frozen them into a peaceful rest and forgetfulness of life and its weary troubles, too.
Towards 8 o'clock fresh jail birds began to arrive, and my three young gentlemen grew cheerful, and sang out to each newcomer, "Another delegate! Your credentials, if you please, sir. The clerk will enter the gentleman's name on the records and make honorable mention of it—assault and battery, sir?—or disorderly?—theft? arson? highway robbery?—ah, drunk, is it?—set him down drunk, but pertinent. Room, gentlemen and ladies, room for the honorable delegate from the purlieus of the Five Points!"
And so we chaffed the cheerful hours away. At last I beheld a hand-writing on the wall that made me start! I felt as if an accusing spirit had been raised up to mock me. The legend read (how familiar it was!) "THE TROUBLE WILL BEGIN AT EIGHT o'clock!"' How well I remembered inventing that sentence in the Morning Call office when I was writing the advertisement for my first lecture in San Francisco—and behold how little did I think then that I should live to see it inscribed upon the walls of a prison-house, many and many a hundred miles away! I smiled at the conceit when I first wrote it, but when I thought how sad hearted and how full of dreams of a happier time the poor fellow might have been who scribbled it here, there was a touching pathos about it that I had never suspected it possessed before. I am not writing a fancy sketch, now, but simply jotting down things just as they occurred in that villainous receptacle for rascals and unfortunates down town yonder.
At 9 o'clock we went out, one by one, under guard, and stood up before the Judge. I consulted with him about the practicability of contesting my case on the ground of unjust imprisonment, but he said it would be troublesome, and not worth the bother, inasmuch as nobody would ever know I had been in the Station House unless I told it myself, and then he let me go. I staid by and watched them dispense justice a while, observed that in all small offences the policeman's charge on the books was received as entirely sufficient, and sentence passed without a question being asked of either accused or witnesses—and then departed, glad I had been in the Station House, because I knew all about it now from personal experience, but not anxious to pursue my investigations any further in that line.
I am to visit two more of the great churches next Sunday, in company with a California preacher, and Monday night I am to go through the hardest and vilest underground dens and hot-beds of crime round about the Five Points, with two detective policemen. I may chance to stumble upon some of my late fellow-lodgers there, possibly. It is well. They were pretty good sort of people, anyhow, though a little under the weather as to respectability. But even the worst in the lot freely offered to divide her gin with me. It isn't everybody without a cent that would do so much.
Alta California, June 30, 1867
New York,
May 19th, 1867.
CALIFORNIA wines are coming more and more into favor here in the East, and are to be found on sale pretty much everywhere. I see the sign about as often as I see the signs for shoe stores or candy shops. The Catawba wines had a great hold on public favor several years ago, but it seems to be conceded now that all native American brands must yield precedence to the California wines.
Some of the wholesale California wine establishments here are quite extensive. One of the largest, if not the largest, is that of Messrs. Perkins, Stern & Co., which is the New York department of the Kohler & Frohling house in San Francisco. The two houses were formerly distinct from each other, but are united now. It looks like business, here, to go through their wine vaults, and see the mighty array of boxes, barrels, casks and hogsheads, all filled with California wines, and note the machinery they bring into play for handling it with facility and filling orders with alacrity.
Last year this house sold California wines to the amount of $250,000, and nearly as great an amount the year before. They say that this year the New York agencies will sell the whole California crop, and continue to do it every succeeding year without fail. It is destined to become a very important article of trade, and the firm I speak of hope to get it all into their own hands eventually. It is certainly worth the effort.
The people are leaving here by ship-loads for France. It is a perfect exodus. Every sailing vessel goes out full, a thing which is a pleasant novelty to them, no doubt, for they have long been unused to it, and if you want to travel by the great steamer lines you must engage your state-room a month before hand and pay for it. The idea of the Exposition proving a failure, as was the talk a while back, is absurd, if other countries are rushing money and people over there as fast as we are doing. We are shipping ten and maybe even twelve thousand persons a month from the port of New York alone, and if all our other ports together are doing half as much, America will have sent considerably over a hundred thousand persons to Europe, (chiefly to Paris,) this year before the time for travel in that direction is up. It is as much as I can do to scare up an individual who will acknowledge in a calm, unprejudiced manner that he is not going to Paris this year. I cannot begin to estimate the number of people to whom I have given the probable date of my arrival in the French capital, and who said I must hunt them up there. It is Wonderful! Thought I had run across about all acquaintances who were going, and yet when I took a lady friend down last Saturday, to ship her on the Ville de Paris, I found quite a number housed on board who never had said anything about going.
Mr. Brown, of whom you have heard, has come finally to consider the whole nation as packing up for emigration to France. He bought a handkerchief yesterday, and when the man could not make change, Brown said:
"Never mind, I'll hand it to you in Paris."
"But I am not going to Paris."
"How is—what did I understand you to say?"
"I said I am not going to Paris."
"Not going to Paris! Not g—well then, where in the very nation are you going to?"
"Nowhere at all."
"Not anywhere whatsoever?—honest Injun, now—not any place on earth but this?"
"Not any place at all but just this—stay here all summer."
I looked for an explosion here—a boisterous display of admiration on Brown's part, a wringing of the man's hand, and all that sort of thing. But nothing of the kind occurred. My comrade took his purchase and walked out of the store without a word—walked out with an injured look upon his countenance. Up the street apiece he broke silence and said impressively: "It was a low, mean, disgraceful lie—that is my opinion of it!"
Sometimes it makes me mad—sometimes it makes me fearfully mad—but as a general thing, I like it. When May dawned upon us, I said, behold there is no gainsaying that this is genuine spring-time, with a good two months margin to back it, and now of course we can shed our overcoats. That was three weeks ago, and yet, if I have seen one evening since then which could pass muster without an overcoat, and a heavy one at that, I have no recollection of it now. I went out to-night without one, and shivered all the way downtown and shivered all the way back. It is wretchedly cold every night, and a good many of the days, too—most of them, I think. And, as for rain—well, it is California in winter all over again, and all the time; only with this difference, that there you know when it is going to rain, and here you don't know when it isn't. When it don't know anything else to do here, to put in the time, it rains. If you haven't got an umbrella, it rains. If you have got an umbrella, and leave it at home, it rains. You cannot keep it from raining in any way but just to carry an umbrella along with you all the time. The sun will dog you then until you are sick of it. If there was a cloud overhead with fifty oceans of rain in it, then, it would go off and rain in Pennsylvania somewhere. These things aggravate me beyond measure, sometimes. I have got an umbrella at the Everett House. It is a very fine one. I bought it from a peddler to stop a thunderstorm with. He said he could recommend it because he got it of a man who had used it twelve years; but whenever it rains, I am a mile downtown, and when I go up after my umbrella it always stops before I can get there. It has only rained once to-night; but there is nothing in that, it is probably just fixing.
And yet when you come to add it all up, this uncertain climate has its pleasant features. All life demands change, variety, contrast—else is there small zest to it. Here you have rain, snow, bleakness; but after it is all gone, what an imperial green all vegetation puts on! It is worth a winter of suffering to see the rich coloring even these city-bred trees and lawns robe themselves in. No feeble, dingy grass and dusty leaves, but dewy, dense, luxurious carpets, and a gleaming magnificence of foliage, fit to shelter the beloved of God in the bowers of Eden. And perhaps you know how sick one gets of the eternal fair weather of San Francisco, and how he longs for lightning, thunder, and tempest! how he feels as if he wanted to tear the glaring sun out of the sky, and blot the firmament with a purple pall, and cleanse it down from zenith to horizon with shafts of fire!
"Ah, me! this lifeless nature
Vexes my heart and brain;
Oh! for a storm and tempest,
And lightning, and wild, fierce rain."
I don't suppose I have quoted that right, because remembering verses is not my strong suit. It is good poetry, though, and carries well the idea of that impatient Egyptian wench, Cleopatra, who has grown tired of lolling in a hammock, gazing out upon a dreamy, listless summer landscape, and stirs herself up and gets off an explosion to the above effect.
You may sit in a New York restaurant in the morning for a few hours, and you will observe that the very first thing each man does, before ordering his breakfast, is to call for the Herald—and the next thing he does is to look at the top of the first column and read the "Personals." Such is the fascination mystery has for the human race! Your man has not the least idea in the world that there is ever going to be a Personal in the paper that will be of private individual interest to himself, and he knows very well that he cannot make head or tail of those he finds there, and that as a vehicle for fun they do not amount to much—yet, as I have said, he is bound to read those "Personals" the very first thing. There is such a toothsome flavor of mystery about them! It is the whole secret. The advertising public appreciate the value of a word under that "Personal" head, and many are the dodges they invent to get an airing for their wares there. But it don't succeed. The ingeniously-worded squibs are ruthlessly set aside and buried in the midst of solid cases of advertisements in the desert wastes of the paper, where a man might hunt them with a blood-hound and not find them. True, I have seen three of these dodges win, lately, but they never hinted at a single attraction in the matters they were meant to advertise—mentioned places of business—that was all—nothing but the barest mention. For instance:
"CAROLINE—Be in the same place, at Worrell Sisters' performance, to-night. White rose, left temple. Do not fail, dearest.
ROBERT."
And again:
"IF THE GENTLEMANLY MANAGER OF THE NEW YORK Theatre, who was smiled upon by a lady in the dress circle last night, and who was generously befriended by him in Philadelphia two years ago, will approach the footlights again to-night, he will recognize her by the lily in the parting of her hair."
And get smiled on again, likely, poor devil. Here is the third:
"THE LADY WHO LEFT A PAIR OF GLOVES AT MRS. MILLS' Mammarial Balm and Bust Elevator establishment, Washington place, can have them returned by calling or sending address."
I will bet a million dollars, seller ten, no deposit, that that advertisement read "Celebrated Mammarial," etc., etc., etc., originally, and the Herald people scratched it out. That worried Mrs. Mills, no doubt. It must have made the old bust elevator feel a little humiliated. [Which reminds me that I have not been through the mammarial bust establishments yet. I must make a note of that. I might as well go there and get busted as anywhere else.]
The "sick" kind of personals are very frequent. For instance, this:
"BLACK EYES—OH, DEAR, HOW ANXIOUS I AM TO HEAR from you!
W. DE ANGELO."
And this:
"HENRY—DON'T KILL ME. REMEMBER, FOURTH AVENUE car runs all night.
SWEET KATE."
That is suggestive, to say the least. She don't want to be killed, but if he is determined to do it, why, he knows where she puts up, and the Fourth avenue car offers every facility for murder.
'And how is this?'
"H.—HAVE RECOVERED FROM ACCIDENT. WILL SEE YOU at the old place in Thirteenth street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, on Friday, at half-past four, rain or shine.
EMMA FRANCIS W.
She calls it an accident. Well, accidents will happen, even in the best regulated families.
But this is the usual style, and altogether the most nauseating:
"SIX P.M., BLEECKER STREET CAR, UP FROM FULTON Ferry. Will the lady who was embarrassed in making change and was kindly assisted by a gentleman, whom she smiled upon and who smiled upon her and bowed when she got out, please address Harold, Herald office, stating where an interview may be had?"
There seems to be a pack of wooden-headed louts about this town, who fall in love with every old strumpet who smiles a flabby smile at them in a street car, and forthwith they pop a personal into the Herald, beseeching an "interview"—a favor they could have had with infinitely less circumlocution if they were half as full of gab as they are of self-complacency. And behold, if a respectable woman dares to look at one of these by accident, or to see if he has got hind legs and a brass collar on, up comes the inevitable personal, with a lot of stuff in it about "the lady who kindly took notice of a gentleman," and so forth and so on, and the equally inevitable supplication for an "interview." Perdition catch these whelps! But how is this one?
"MR. WM. F. LAWLER, LATE LANDSMAN, U.S. NAVY, WILL call at 271 Broadway, to receive some money.
"CHIPMAN, HOSMER & Co."
That has got a very comfortable ring about it, after all that gruel and nonsense. Only a landsman in the Navy, yet they call him "Mr." Lawler? That appears to me to suggest that Lawler is to receive something more than a month's back wages. These Broadway firms do not call a plebeian Mr. without due and sufficient cause.
And here is a sad one; it tells its own story:
"MARY—COME BACK HOME, AND ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN. My old heart is breaking.
"YOUR MOTHER."
Many a New Yorker is proof against the seductions of the Cable's despatches, but none of them can resist the Herald's "Personals."
The Philadelphia Commercial List says that California will have exported 230,000 tons of flour and wheat during the statistical year which will end on the 30th of next month. This sounds like an astonisher to me, and I guess, on the whole, it isn't so. I know that California has been shipping flour to the States ever since I landed here, and I know, also, that I have heard four or five bakers and restaurant people say that they preferred California flour to any other, but when we come to talk about such figures as those I have quoted, I have to confess that I think someone has been imposing upon that Philadelphia paper. If that were all flour, instead of flour "and wheat," it would make two million and three hundred thousand barrels. I wish the statement were correct, because there is a fine opening here for flour, and I would like to see California prosper; and, besides, they cut their bread mighty thin in New York, and I would like it if something could induce them to liberalize the slices some.
Flour brings me easily and comfortably to the subject of hotels. New York has inaugurated a new fashion in the way of hotels—at least, it is new for America. She has adopted the European system: Room in the house and eat where you please. If you choose to eat in the hotel, very well. Ring for a servant, specify the dishes you want for breakfast, and by the time you are washed and dressed it will be on the table. And in the cheerfulest breakfast room you can imagine, too. Not a great public square in the second story, with an army of hyenas camped around you, grinding bones and clattering spoons and forks, but an elegant little apartment, richly furnished, glistening with burnished silver-ware and bright warm colors, a few little round tables clad in snowy cloths and garnished like a jeweller's window, and everything quiet, and genteel and orderly. And you are on the main floor, too, and close to beautiful plate-glass windows, only one pane to the whole side of the house, (I stretched it a little, then,) and you can read your paper and sip your coffee and look out at the fellows caught far from home in the rain, and enjoy it ever so much!
That is the style. It is costly, but it is comfortable—prodigiously comfortable. The great caravan hotels do an immense transient business (try to get a room at one of them if you doubt it,) but when a man of good sound judgment gets ready to settle down and live and be happy, he goes to one of the dozen little palaces kept on the European plan.
I have got a flattering lot of invitations to lecture before various and sundry literary societies, but I have to forego the pleasure, and what is more, the profit, of complying, because literary contracts have got to be fulfilled, and I have got rather more of that kind of work (together with laying in cider and other supplies for the Mediterranean,) than I can get through with anyhow, between this and the 8th of June.
Alta California, July 7, 1867
New York,
May 20th, 1867.
I WAS to have gone with a detective policeman through all the underground dens of vice and rascality in the Five Points and other and still more infamous localities of New York, last night, but orders from headquarters employed the officer otherwise, and we had to put off the expedition until next Saturday night. So, as human nature delights in contrasts, and I have considerable human nature in me, I thought I would go through one of the chief among the fountain-heads of civilization in this great city, (if not the chief,) and then compare to-day's experiences with next Saturday's, and see which I like best. I wandered through the great Bible House for nearly three hours, to-day, in company with one of its officers, and without meaning to be irreverent, I can say that I enjoyed the time more than I could possibly have done in any circus.
The Bible House is a huge, handsome brick structure five stories high, and fills up one small block by itself. It was built by the American Bible Society out of funds secured by special donation for that particular purpose, and therefore the Association's regular finances were in no way concerned in the matter.
The American Bible Society is fifty years old, having been organized in 1816. Its first President was Elias Boudinot, of New Jersey, and its seventh and present President is James Lennox, of New York. Its business is to translate, print, publish and distribute Bibles to all the nations of the earth, and at cost price, no penny being made on any volume. They print the Bible, now, in nearly fifty different languages and dialects. Some of these lingoes are curious enough. For instance, they print Bibles in the Arrawack (South America,) Hawaiian, Hindu, Hindi, Urdu, Zulu, the Shikh, the Hindustanee, the Tamil, the Telugu, Creolese, the Syriac, the Arabic, Micronesian Islands, the Esthonian, the Benga, the Grebo, Fuh-Chau colloquial and Mandarin colloquial, and the Armeno-Turkish, and now are stereotyping Bibles to print in Slavonic and also the ancient Bulgarian. The Arabic plates now being prepared under the supervision of the translator, Rev. Dr. Van Dyck, will give the Bible to a hundred and twenty millions of people! When I tell you that over a million Bibles a year are now printed in the Bible House, and that a large portion of these are for our private home consumption, and that the supply cannot possibly be kept up to the demand, with all their immense facilities, you will easily understand that while this is the case with our little 40,000,000 of population, it would hardly be worthwhile to try to supply those thirsty myriads of Arabs with the water of life without outside help. So, the Society are making electrotype plates for the Bible House, also for the establishment in Beirout, and also for the British Society in London. When they all get started, then let the Arabs stand from under.
Now I will give you another dose of languages in which the Bible is printed at the Bible House and its branches: Modern Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Turkish, Mahratta, Armenian, Gujerattee (some kind of Irish, I suppose,) Sanscrit, Portuguese, Persian, Siamese, Malay, Bujis, Dyack, Japanese, Marquesas, Mpongwe, Dikele, Zulu-Kaffir, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Osage, Ojibbewa, Ottawa, Seneca, Abenequis, Sioux or Dakota, Pawnee, and three languages in Oregon. On the first floor of the building is the Bible Society's Library (it is very extensive,) and, appropriately enough, there isn't a solitary thing in it but Bibles! I shall send them a copy of my book, so as to make a little variety. In that library they have got Bibles in every tongue that was spoken at the Tower of Babel, and some that have been invented since; Bibles in all sorts of crooked characters; Bibles in raised letters for the blind; and even Bibles in short-hand. It makes a man cross-eyed to go through it. I suppose, next, they will get up a Bible loud enough for the deaf and dumb to use. They have got Bibles there which were printed when Caxton was an apprentice, and other Bibles (Hebrew rolls on vellum,) musty and yellow with age, that may have been used in Solomon's Temple—who shall be able to say they were not? But the handsomest of all are the beautiful Arabic and Armenian Bibles, beautiful as Italian script. The Armenian ones have been compared with fine manuscripts in the Astor Library, 800 years old, and found to be in no wise inferior to them in execution. The Arabs consider it profanation to put their language in vulgar print for a Bible, but the Arabic Bible I have mentioned so fascinates them by its wonderful elegance that they gracefully yield and eagerly read it. And, in truth, born Christian as I am, it fascinated me rather more than the old regular Bible I am accustomed to does. I have got an Arabic Bible, and it has its little drawbacks—but it has its advantages, too, because you have to begin at the fag end of it, and read it backwards and left-handed. It was a sort of a fresh, new sensation to see the last end of the good book, because I hadn't been there before for some time. [Sift out the nonsense, and go after the wholesome facts. I have necessarily got to comment some.]
Since its organization, the American Bible Society has printed and distributed 22,640,404 Bibles, and the British Society in London, twelve years older, has printed and distributed 50,000,000. The two Societies work a good deal together, and together they have sent out over 70,000,000 Bibles! And now at this day, with the demands from the old regular quarters fearfully augmenting all the time, comes this new Arabic contract for about 100,000,000 more, and when they are fully under way with China I suppose there will be a call for three times as many more! Has the world gone mad after Bibles? It looks like it. Suppose the descendants of the sacred historians still held the copyrights! Dividends?
The war brought the Bible House an immense business—a prodigious business added to the already colossal labors of the Bible House presses. The Christian Commission ordered and distributed to rebels, freedmen and United States soldiers, fifteen hundred thousand Bibles!—and during the pressure of 1863, '64, and part of '65, the Bible House printers turned out, all bound and ready for shipment, TEN BIBLES A MINUTE! It looks large—it is 6,000 a day, counting ten hours to the day—but with their present increased facilities they turn out 5,000 a day and do not run late at night. They had to go night and day then, however, and probably produced 10,000 or 12,000 a day. They have got to go to working harder than ever, now, though, because orders flow in faster than their nineteen great Adams' steam presses can print the books. And yet the Society has branches in Germany, India, China, Beirout—everywhere, almost—whose presses are chattering all the time.
THE DEPARTMENTS
Two hundred and fifty women and one hundred and fifty men—four hundred operatives in all—are employed in the Bible House.
In the fifth story I found all sorts of compositors setting type in all manner of barbarous languages. Among them the Rev. Father Agapius, a Cossack by birth, and a priest of the Greek Church, was setting up the Gospels in tangled-up Arabic type. A printed page of his work looks like ever so many elegant fishing-worms out on a spree. A Circassian—a scholar of mighty learning, and in former times a soldier of the Emperor Nicholas's Body Guard—was setting up the Bible in Russian. In a room close by, Rev. Dr. Van Dyck was reading proofs of the Arabic Bible. Japs and Indians and Kanakas all around.
In a great hall adjoining, vast piles of paper were being wet down for the presses.
In a small room on the same floor they were making matrices and moulding Arabic type. One man can mould about a thousand an hour. They have to have 1,100 matrices for the Arabic characters;—our alphabet and accompanying points only requires about fifty. Fancy an Arab printer prowling around through a case with eleven hundred boxes in it and hoping to live the allotted years of man!
Still on this fifth floor is a huge room with nineteen large Adams' steam presses, all manned by women (four of them confounded pretty, too), snatching off Bibles in Dutch, Hebrew, Yamyam, Cherokee, etc., at a rate which it was truly fructifying to contemplate. (I don't really know the meaning of that word, but I heard it used somewhere yesterday, and it struck me as being an unusually good word. Any time that I put in a word that doesn't balance the sentence good, I would be glad if you would take it out and put in that one.)
Adjoining was another huge room for drying the printed sheets, (very pretty girls in there, too, and young,) and pressing them, (the sheets, not the girls.) They use hydraulic presses, (the three prettiest of them wore curls and never a sign of a waterfall,—the girls, I mean,) and each of them is able to come down with the almost incredible weight of eight hundred tons of solid, simon-pure pressure (the hydraulics I am referring to now of course,) and one has got blue eyes and both of the others brown, ah, me! I have got this hydraulic business tangled a little, but I can swear it is no fault of mine. You needn't go to blaming me about it. You have got to pay for this letter just the same as if it were as straight as a shingle. I can't afford to go into dangerous places and then get my wages docked into the bargain.
On the fifth floor is likewise the electrotyping department. Nobody but men in there.
On the fourth floor is the immense folding-room. Eighty girls there (some of them very pretty), folding book-sheets at the rate of over 5,000 forms a day apiece. Book-folding is one of the most interesting operations I ever witnessed. I staid there about four hours and a half.
In the next room was the "gathering" department. A woman stands inside of a long oval pen, the top of which looks enough like a bar-counter to rivet the interest of even the most thoughtless. On this counter are laid piles of folded chapters of the Bible, side by side—piles of the Books of Esau, Isaac and Jacob, Matthew, Mark and Genesis, Chapter 1, 2, 3, and so on, each chapter to itself—and that woman shins around inside of that counter and snakes off a chapter from each pile as fast as a printer picks up types, and before you could ask her out to drink she has stacked up a complete Bible straight through from Exodus to Deuteronomy! It went ahead of anything that ever I saw. There were about a dozen of these book-stackers in as many pens (but they don't allow outsiders to go in the pens—you have to stay on your own side of the fence and keep your hands off), and when a Bible is properly stacked together it is pressed in another lot of those same hydraulic arrangements (1,300 tons pressure), and conveyed to the adjoining
STITCHING ROOM,
Where, of course, the volumes are stitched together, and where you don't see anything but waterfalls, waterfalls, waterfalls. They don't turn around when you pass through. That is, only in a very general sort of way.
On the third floor was the place where they put the covers on the books; next to it was the room where they put on the gold-leaf in the rough, and in another room they add the gorgeous finishing touches, with all sorts of furnaces and complicated instruments; and down on the
Second floor was the Repository—dead loads of books all piled up ready for shipment to all quarters of the globe.
On the first story is the packing and shipping department, sales-rooms, offices, library, convention-room of the Society officers, and so on.
The Bible House is a wonderful institution, truly. It turns out the cheapest books in America, and the most of them. You can buy a Bible there of any size, from a flag-stone down to a cake of soap, and buy it cheaper than you can let it alone, too. Their highest price Bible, a splendid affair, in morocco, on exquisite paper, beautiful letter-press and gilt edges, is sold at $14—worth $40 if anybody else published it. And they will sell you a complete Bible, well bound in sheep, for forty-five cents. Therefore, why need men be ignorant of the Word? The great city of New York has within her limits no institution she has more reason to be proud of than this colossal Bible Association.
I had almost forgotten to mention that the heavy pressure now crowding the presses is occasioned by unlimited orders from the South. The orders are received faster than they can be filled. They appear to have run pretty short of Bibles down there, especially among the freedmen. The freedmen are literally voracious for Bibles. They are feeding them upon shiploads of St. John, now, till they can get ahead far enough with the presses to let loose a freshet of New Testaments entire upon them.
While I am on this religious subject, I might as well make a clean deal of it, I suppose. There are thousands of Christians on the Pacific Coast, and they will read it. I don't write for the sinful altogether.
In the Bible House are the headquarters of the American Church Missionary Society, the Children's American Church Missionary Society, and the Evangelical Knowledge Society.
The object of the American Church Missionary Society is to send preachers around, wherever they may be needed. It was established in 1860, and is a creation of the Evangelical portion of the Protestant Episcopal Church. A yearly membership in it costs $3, and a life membership $100. A donation of $500 lifts a man to the dignity of Patron. Admiral Dupont was President of the Society at the time of his death. Jay Cook holds the office now. Geo. D. Morgan is Treasurer. Rev. Franklin S. Rising, well known and esteemed in California and Nevada, is Financial Secretary and General Agent—office, 3 Bible House, where orders for missionaries will be attended to with promptness and despatch, either in small lots or by the cargo. The latter preferred, of course. At present the Society is engaged only in supplying orders for home consumption. However, the facilities afforded by the Government for exporting, duty free, may induce them to enlarge their business and embark in the foreign trade to some extent hereafter.
The Society publishes a monthly pamphlet periodical called the "American Church Missionary Register," price 50 cents a year. She used to be issued sometimes every now and then, sometimes bi-monthly and occasionally seldom, but they have got her regulated down to a monthly now, and they can depend on her. She don't miss fire any more. Mr. Rising edits her, and she is a credit to him. I do not write for her, but would, if so requested. Her circulation is extending rapidly. She has added nearly 3,000 paid subscribers to her lists in the last five months.
The receipts of the Society, the first year, were $4,000. Last year they were $50,000. This year, from last October to the end of this month of May, they foot up $67,000. It is good stock.
Mr. Rising got up the Children's American Missionary Society himself, and it is flourishing. A yearly membership costs 50 cents, and a life membership $10. To each is given an exquisite chromo-lithographic certificate worth double the money. Every three months a children's illustrated paper is issued and forwarded to the members of the Society gratis. The membership is immense, naturally enough, because nothing pleases a child so much as to be a member of something or other. Your rightly constituted child don't care shucks what it is, either. I joined the Cadets of Temperance, once, when I was a boy. That was an awful take-in; no smoking or anything allowed—not even any bad language; but they had beautiful red scarfs. I stood it three months, and then sidled out. I liked the red scarfs well enough, but I could not stand the morality.
But, as I was saying about this Children's Missionary Society, (Bishop Lee, of Iowa, is the President of it,) they just turn out the Society every now and then for drill and to recruit, and the young people come forward in armies. They filled Steinway's Hall here on the 24th of April; on the 17th of May they filled Concordia Building, in Baltimore; and on the 18th they crammed the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. And what do they do? Sing! Sing like all possessed—2,000 voices in chorus! They sing—and they join the Society—and they badger their parents for pennies to contribute. Because you know a child likes to contribute to things. I know about these things, because when I was young I never could keep a cent; I used to bet it away on the missionaries and come home broke every Sunday regularly. And so with these children. It is well. The pennies come from their fathers, and go to a good and worthy cause, instead of being spent for liquors and other luxuries. There is good sense in it. These unthinking children—however, that is a slander, for I believe they do think some, and feel more heartily, and take a warmer, a hotter interest in their benevolent enterprises than the large majority of adults do—are doing much to send the gospel abroad into the waste places of the land, and will do vastly more yet, for this flourishing new Society is nothing, either in numbers, ability or influence, to what it will be a few years hence. Come, do your share towards moving it along.
Now I have got down to the Evangelical Knowledge Society. (How these Societies slather the syllables around, don't they? If the Prodigal Son's fortune consisted of seven jointed words, he could have come to New York and run through his property precious soon putting up names for religious Societies.) I haven't got the half of that name up there—I couldn't recollect it. The object of the Society is to publish and distribute books and all sorts of tracts for the use of the Evangelical something or other; my notes are blurred—but the books are for the use of the Church. The people I am writing for will understand what I mean. I am rusty on these matters, but I am doing the best I can.
Rev. Dr. Dyer is Secretary of the Society. The organization is twenty years old, and during that time has printed and published some six hundred different works—large editions of each. It publishes the Book of Common Prayer in several different sizes, and also a book called the Mission Service, which is a prayer-book with the Church service attached, and is intended for the use of straggling communities in out-of-the-way places, where people become unfamiliar with the routine of the service. Last year the Society issued 10,500 copies of the Prayer Book, and 10,000 copies of the Mission Service. They began to publish these books eight years ago, and since that time they have issued over 140,000 copies of the former and 100,000 of the latter.
This Society works in harmony with the American Church Missionary Society, and Dr. Dyer is Corresponding Secretary for both. One association sends out the printed Word, and the other forwards a man to preach it.
The particular institution I am writing about publishes a couple of monthly periodicals—the Parish Visitor, for adults, and the Standard Bearer, for children. Their combined circulations reach somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 copies.
The total cash receipts of the Society last year, from all sources, were $40,000.
I believe I am done. I haven't had such a moral siege for a year. I will now go out and blackguard somebody till I begin to feel natural again.
P.S.—I am growing more worthy every day. I have mailed to Father Damon, in the Sandwich Islands, the Hawaiian History I stole from him a year ago. Everywhere I have been here in the States, the papers have mentioned my arrival in complimentary terms, and then published that crime against me—so as to put the hotel-keepers on their guard, I suppose. The consequence was I haven't been able to carry off a solitary spoon yet. But I have yielded to the pressure, and sent the book home.
Alta California, July 14, 1867
New York,
May 2nd, 1867
IT IS a huge, castellated granite block of buildings, with a broad grassy yard in front, situated in the Ninth avenue, between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth streets. I was loafing around that part of town this afternoon and stumbled upon it. I recognized it in a moment. I went out there once when I was stopping near the City Hall, thirteen years ago. It was a great journey, then, those two and a half miles, and my recollection of it is that the place was isolated, and had a seeming as of belonging to the country, rather than to the city. It is in the heart of the town, now, though, and is walled in with elegant brown-stone dwellings of the first-class.
It was unrulable to admit me, to-day, because it was not visiting-day, but they let me in because I was a newspaper reptile and a stranger. A young woman, quick of gesture and speech, and a nimble walker, conducted me through the school-rooms, music-rooms, work-rooms, map-rooms, chapel, sleeping-wards, dining-room, factories, and so forth, and I never suspected that she was blind until it was all over. She was not entirely blind, but might as well have been. They said she would not run over a chair in daylight, because she would detect a dark shape in her way, though she would not be able to say what it was without feeling it. And this reminds me that throughout that large establishment everything that one could run over seemed carefully kept out of the way.
I watched a dozen boys weaving mats, some on looms and some by hand. They worked fast and with decision, and as they generally seemed to look at what they were doing, I could not feel satisfied, somehow, that they were sightless.
We stopped at the foot of a stairway, and the girl told me to go up and see the boys making brooms. I went up softly, and stood on the landing without having made a noise. The work men were noisy, and all were gossiping freely and chaffing each other. Presently one of them, half-a-dozen steps in front of me, and with his back to me, leaned over, and looked intently at some object at the other end of the room, and also seemed to be listening. Then he shook his head and fell to work again. Presently he took another long look, and then went softly and spoke to his neighbors and then stopped talking; so did they all, a moment after; and I said, to myself, surely this fellow sees me in a mirror somewhere, though I don't see one. I felt like a detected eaves-dropper, however, and went up and asked him what he had been looking at? "At you," he said. "But you looked almost in the opposite direction from where I was," I said. He smiled and made no reply. I spoke to the girl about the matter when I went down, and she said he probably could see a little out of the extreme back corner of his eye, but was blind to all objects before or beside him. She said such a case was not unusual.
In another place I talked some time with three women and a man who were making hair mattresses, and I thought they were gifted with sight. The fact is, one needs to be reminded all the time that he is among blind folks. Their dreadful eyes shock him once, and after that he looks at those organs no more; and so there is nothing left save a stoop in the shoulders, a painful one-sided twist in the face and a sort of sideways inclination of the head, to suggest to him that there is something unusual the matter with these people; but at the same time, these things need not necessarily suggest to him that their trouble is blindness.
They walk about the rooms freely, go from place to place and lean over and speak to each other, and yet never grope, or hesitate, or stumble, or bump their heads. They act a good deal as other people do.
We went into a room where fifteen or twenty girls, from nine years to sixteen, were making little fancy bead baskets and such things. Most of them were cheerful and chatty, but some looked very sober and were silent; one or two looked sad, I thought, and one child, sitting by a window, with her tedious basket in one hand half finished, had dropped her head upon her arm and forgotten all her troubles in slumber.
Those little ornamental open-work baskets look simple enough, but when you come to understand how they are made, and how the little wire must wind its devious course and be passed many times through the same mustard-seed of a bead, you comprehend that the workmanship is wearisome and intricate. One girl had arrived at a point in her labors where the wire had travelled its course many times through handles and sides and top and bottom, and had to be thrust for the fourth time through a tiny bead. And every time she tried, she failed; the wire bent, or the bead slipped, or something else happened that prevented the consummation. But patiently and without a word, the girl tried and tried again, and in anxiety and tribulation I watched the operation, and my spirits rose as she almost succeeded, and fell again when the cursed bead slipped—and when at last she did get it through, I wanted to give a good round three cheers with a will!
In another part of the house a dozen or so of blind young ladies were knitting all manner of elaborately-figured tidies, and such things. One of them was pretty—the only pretty girl I saw, except the wide-awake one at the office down below who admitted me. It seemed strange to me that Nature should have so sorely afflicted these unfortunate girls, and then made them so fearfully and wonderfully homely into the bargain—a thing in itself which the sex hold in proper horror. The knitters were talking with all their might, and seemed perfectly jolly and contented—at least the majority of them did. But it didn't cheer me up a particle. It was the saddest place I ever got into. I don't mind blind boys—they ought all to be blind, for that matter—and deaf and dumb, and lame and halt and paralyzed, and shaken up by earthquakes and struck by lightning—just to make them behave themselves, you know—but I felt so sorry for those girls. They could not see the sun, or the moon, or the ocean, the green trees, or the flowers, the gilded clouds or the rainbow—they could not even see the faces they loved. It were better to be dead and buried. They seemed to be happy, but I could not understand how they managed to come at it.
A matron gave a girl a needle, in order to show how deftly she could thread it—a girl who was as blind as a brick bat. The needle was a No. 6, the matron said, and I judged that the thread was about No. 14. It was thick enough to be. The girl did it, and quickly. Then the same service was required at the hands of another girl, and she performed it, too, but in an unusual way—she put the end of the needle in her mouth and worked the thread through the eye with her tongue. The matron said either of them could thread a No. 10 needle with great facility. I expressed cordial surprise at that, although my admiration was modified some by the fact that I didn't know just what style of a needle a No. 10 might be.
Several methods of teaching the blind to write are used. In some cases the paper is placed upon a board in which groove like depressions have been made, and these grooves prevent the pen from wandering abroad. But this is but a shabby system at best, because after the poor devil has spent months and years in learning to write, he cannot read his own work when it gets cold, because he cannot see it. A new method has come into vogue in the New York and Missouri asylums, which is in high favor with the blind. By it they learn to write in a few months, and another blind person can read the manuscript easily. It consists in punching a series of letters and signs (they were suggested by the telegraphic signs) with a blunt awl; then they turn the paper over and spell out the sense of the raised perforations with the finger ends. But see how many difficulties the blind have to labor under anyhow: of course when they turn the paper over to read, all the writing is reversed; so, the pupil must learn to write one way and read another—must write upside down and read right side up. Still, this new system, which is called the Braille, is immensely popular with these unfortunates.
The blind have books to read, of course—books printed on coarse paper in heavy raised lower-case sharply-angular letters (no capitals,) without ink. They have a Bible, in eight monstrous volumes, each one a heavy load for a school-girl, and the whole set a cargo for a pack-mule. And they have the History of England and of America—but that seems to be about all. The deaf and dumb scholar can smouch a poem or a sensation novel and revel in it in secret, but they have got the blind child in the door. It has to confine itself to the most substantial literature.
One of the girls read the ninth chapter of Second Corinthians for me. She spelled the words rapidly with her fingers, and when she came to familiar biblical words like wherefore, therefore, lo, behold, etc., she recognized them with a single nervous touch and went on. She made no mistakes.
One room was hung with great maps of all parts of the globe, carved out of wood—with raised knobs for islands, nail heads for cities, veins or grooves for rivers, etc., but no names written anywhere. On a table was a great map of the United States, all sawed to pieces—each State sawed apart and the whole put together like a puzzle. A little girl pulled this map to pieces and jumbled the States up like a pile of bricks, and then the young disunionist repented of her work, and quickly reconstructed her country again—did it about as fast as she could pick up the several States, pass her hand across their faces and lay them down again. And she mentioned the capital of each State and described its location correctly. I was granted the privilege of questioning her and testing her geographical knowledge, but did not try it. Those blank wooden maps were little more intelligible to me than a flag-stone pavement would have been.
Another girl played on the piano, and played very sweetly and without any flourishes. They use no written music in the asylum, but are taught bar after bar, till they know a piece by heart. It is a tedious process.
There are 124 pupils on the books of the asylum—about half boys and half girls. The statistics which show the various causes of their blindness are curious enough. Out of 844 blind persons who have been cared for at the asylum, 150 inherited blindness from their parents. The cases of apthalima number 196; amourosis, 77; cataract, 21; small pox, 22; scarlet fever, 16; measles, 16; syphilis, 19; mal-practice, 10; overdose of arsenic, 1; vaccination, 1; pen-knife wounds, 11; gun-shot wounds, 16. Then we have blindness resulting from all sorts of accidents. Blowing glass; blow of an arrow; blow of a stone; blow of a hammer; blast; fall; kick of a horse; looking at the sun; pitchfork wound; run over; sawdust in the eyes; sand in the eyes; silver in the eyes; sting of insect; scissors wound; singing broadcloth; sun stroke; whip-lash; verdigris.
SINGULAR INSTANCES
In two cases, repulsive sights seen by mothers caused their infants to be born blind. In one case the mother frequently saw a house servant who had very sore eyes, and in the other the mother looked at the skinned head of a calf, with the eyes in it. In both instances the eyes of the children were like those of the objects of dislike.
That is the new word for "dead beat" and the other slang expressions used to express the same thing. If any slang term can have a merit, this one has, in that it may succeed in entirely expelling two or three frightful vulgarisms from our dialect as spoken outside of drawing-rooms, (yes, and sometimes in them) "You are a fraud"—he is a fraud—they are frauds—you hear the term used here every day and at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes drunken men get it "You're a frog"—and then it sounds funny. If you cannot get along without adopting Eastern slang, adopt this; and if you must invent slang yourselves, invent none that is more repulsive.
It was reported, years ago, that this writer was dead—accidentally shot in a Tennessee doggery before the war; but he has turned up again, and is a conductor on a railway train that travels somewhere between Charleston, S.C., and Memphis. His real name is George Harris. I have before me his book, just forwarded by Dick & Fitzgerald, the publishers, New York. It contains all his early sketches, that used to be so popular in the West, such as his story of his father "actin' hoss," the lizards in the camp-meeting, etc., together with many new ones. The book abounds in humor, and is said to represent the Tennessee dialect correctly. It will sell well in the West, but the Eastern people will call it coarse and possibly taboo it.
Sometimes, down about the City Hall Park, it does seem to me that every little ragamuffin in New York has bought a brush and a foot-box, and gone in the boot-blacking business. "Blackin', sir, blackin' I" "Shine, sir?—nice shine, sir, only five cents!" So they assail a man at every step, and persecute him from the rising of the sun till the going down thereof. If you give one of them a job, half a dozen of them will crowd around and sit on the ground to see it done and criticise it; and to blackguard each other in a slang that no Christian can understand; and make remarks about the sensation of the day; and speak familiarly and disrespectfully of the gentlemen of the City Government, and abuse their stupidity; and drop critiques concerning "the Japs," discuss the leaders in the Herald, the Tribune and Times, and even find fault with Mr. Seward's statesmanship, and the general conduct of the National Government. I notice that they usually speak of great personages as "old" Seward, "old" Johnson, etc. It is because these free-souled young blackguards scorn to be respectful to anything or anybody. After they have got through discussing the new Russian Possessions purchase, they fall to pitching pennies and engaging in other disreputable species of gambling, and combine business with it as before, in the matter of persecuting passers-by.
I saw a sign on a house in an obscure street, yesterday, which read, "Boot-Black Brigade Chapel," and found out that some well meaning enthusiast is in the habit of drumming a lot of these gamins de New York together two or three times a week, and preaching to them and praying for them, under the extraordinary impression that he can save their souls. I certainly wish him well, but I bet nothing on his success.
I went in, and found a preacher earnestly exhorting about two hundred of the rattiest lot of little outlaws that any city can produce. Most of the time they listened pretty intently, but critically—always critically, for behold, the bootblack is nothing if not critical. Part of what the preacher said they seemed to receive as square and proper enough, and part they seemed to receive under mild protest—but when he said that Lazarus was brought to life after he had been dead three days, there was a pretty general telegraphing of incredulity from eye to eye about the assemblage, and one boy with a shock head and rags all over to match nudged his neighbor, and said in a coarse whisper, "I don't go that, Bill, do you?—'cause he'd stink, wouldn't he?"
And when the preacher told how the five thousand were miraculously fed with twelve loaves and several little fishes, a boy said:
"Say, Jimmy, do you suck that?"
"Well, I do'no. It mought a ben, mebbe, if they warn't many of 'em hongry. I see the time, though, when I could a et them twelve loaves myself, I could, less'n they was busters."
And so they criticised all the while, and cast disrepute upon every statement that seemed a little shaky to them, and the longer I staid the less confidence I had in the speculation of trying to get material for salvation out of the bootblack brigade.
I attended the Old Bowery Theatre in the evening, and there, in the pit, I found the whole tribe. I suppose there were three hundred of them present, closely packed together in their rags and dirt, and the way they guyed the actors and criticised the performance was interesting. They applauded all the "ranting" passages furiously, and hurled uncompromising scorn and contempt upon the sentimental ones.
I asked one of them what he thought of the leading man as an actor?
"Oh, he ain't no force. You'd ought to hear Proctor—Oh, geeminy!—why, you can hear Proctor f'm here to Central Park when he lays hisself out in Richard Third."
Up in the fifth tier—the gallery—there was a multitude of negroes, and a sprinkling of bootblacks and women of the town. There was a bar up there, and two of the women came forward and asked us to treat. A bootblack, who had just blacked my boots and perhaps felt a personal interest in my welfare on that account, tipped at me a wink of wonderful complexity and mystery, and I went and asked him to translate it. He said:
"You keep away f'm them women. I've been around here four years, and I know all about 'em. Don't you go no wheres with that curly-headed one, nor 'tother one either—they'd go through you for everything you've got. That's their style. You ask any cop (policeman,)—they'll tell you. Why, that curly girl's rid in the Black Maria (conveyance for prisoners) oftener'n she's rid in the street cars. And don't you touch that liquor in there—don't tell anybody I told you, 'cause they'd highst me out of this, you know—but don't you drink that dern swipes—it's pison."
I thanked the philosopher for his advice, and followed it. The bootblacks and newsboys, who did not happen to be present at the play, were all outside in front of the theatre, I think. There were dozens of them—all holding out their hands for checks, when we started home between the acts. We delivered up ours, and a noisy, struggling scramble ensued for their possession. They are a wild, lawless, independent lot, those bootblacks and street boys, and would make good desperado stuff to stock a new mining camp with.
It was a cultivated bootblack—a bootblack who had attended the chapel I spoke of above, and become learned in sacred history and felicitous in explaining and expounding it—who so happily accounted for the absence of all apparent fear on the part of both Daniel and the lion, in a picture representing the prophet in the den. Another bootblack could not understand what it was that gave both so much confidence—could not understand what made each seem so serenely indifferent to the other. This wise boy explained it. He said:
"Humph! the lion don't give a d—n for Dan'l, and Dan'l don't give a d—n for the lion—both of 'em relies on the protection o' Prov'dence."
Alta California, July 21, 1867
New York,
May 26th, 1867.
EDITORS ALTA: They do not treat women with as much deference in New York as we of the provinces think they ought. This is painfully apparent in the street-cars. Authority winks at the overloading of the cars—authority being paid for so winking, in political influence, possibly, for I cannot bring myself to think that any other species of bribery would be entertained for a moment—authority, I say, winks at this outrage, and permits one car to do the work of at least two, instead of compelling the companies to double the number of their cars, and permits them, also, to cruelly over-work their horses, too, of course, in the face of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The result of this over-crowding is to set the people back a long stride toward semi-civilization. What I mean by that dreadful assertion is, that the over-crowding of the cars has impelled men to adopt the rule of hanging on to a seat when they get it, though twenty beautiful women came in and stood in their midst. That is going back toward original barbarism, I take it. A car's proper cargo should be twenty-two inside and three upon each platform—twenty-eight-and no crowding. I have seen fifty-six persons on a car, here, but a large portion of them were hanging on by the teeth. Some of the men inside had to go four or five miles, and naturally enough did not like to give up their seats and stand in a packed mass of humanity all that distance. So, when a lady got in, no man offered her a seat—no man dreamt of doing such a thing. No citizen, I mean. Occasionally I have seen a man, under such circumstances, get up and give his place to a lady, but the act betrayed, like spoken words, that he was from the provinces. I have seen negroes sitting stuck up comfortably in a car, and lovely young white ladies standing up before them, block after block, clinging to the leather supports that depended from the roof. And then I wanted a contraband for breakfast.
When I am with the Romans I try to do as the Romans do. I generally succeed reasonably well. I have got so that I can sit still and let a homely old maid stand up and nurse her poodle till she is ready to drop, but the young and the blooming, alas! are too many for me. I have to get up and vacate the premises when they come. Someday, though, maybe, I shall acquire a New York fortitude and be as shameless as any.
The other day an ill-bred boy in a street-car refused to give up his seat to a lady. The conductor very properly snatched him out and seated the lady. Consequence: Justice Dowling fined that conductor a month's wages—sixty dollars—and read him a lecture worth sixty dollars more. Now, I think that was shameful. I think that was perfectly shameful, if the lady was young and beautiful. And it was just as shameful if the woman was old and feeble, too, no doubt.
In other cities men make way for women to their own discomfort, but complain that they get no thanks for it—not even a smile or a bow—but they don't make way here. I suppose the sex in New York have learned by hard experience how to value a concession from a strange gentleman. They thank one in unmistakable terms for such a kindness, even at the risk of being called on for a "personal interview" through the Herald's "Personals" the next day for it. A lady must not so far forget herself as to "kindly notice" a human puppy in a street car here if she does not want to figure in the "Personals."
Now I hate to say it, but women even have to stand up in omnibuses here when those vehicles are over-crowded—especially if she be so dead to all principle as to be sinfully homely. New York is fast arriving at a state of things. That is my opinion. I have no business to express it, perhaps, and I may get myself in trouble by it; but I care not; even though I perish, I shall still say it and stick to it, that this town is arriving at a state of things. And in that day, what will become of the wretched place? Verily, no man knoweth.
HARRIS
Well, surely, there is no accounting for things in this world. It is published that Harris—His Excellency C. C. Harris, of Honolulu—is to visit Washington as a sort of Envoy Extraordinary to engineer a Reciprocity treaty between the Hawaiian Government and ours. I have got to call on Harris. I owe it to my country to do it. I must conjure Harris by the new dignity that has been conferred upon him of the Grand Cross of the Legion of something or other; and by this other dignity of being by far the most extraordinary Envoy Extraordinary that ever was created by any Government history hath mentioned; and by the love and the respect he once bore this land of his nativity before he was born again as a royalty-worshipping Kanaka, not to lay his unsanctified hand upon anything here that he can't carry. It is his unhappy instinct to gobble, gobble, gobble—gobble up and carry off. Whether it be to gouge native chiefs, or seek distinction on high as an Elder in Bishop Staley's Church and pass around the hat, (oh, blind and deluded congregation that would trust him with it) or grab all the heavy offices, from Minister of Finance down to Attorney-General-by-brevet, and try to run the whole Hawaiian Government by himself, his instinct is the same, and it is always to gobble. So I must warn him.
And he must not swell around Washington and make eloquent speeches that seem to be splendid flights of oratory, but won't stand a fire-assay for sense, and won't wash for coherence, either, because we have got people in Congress who are just as good as he is at that, and so he won't attract any attention.
I must tell him to mind his own business—to mind his reciprocity treaty, and keep his hands off the things. If he does his work just exactly as he wants to do it, and as only his tireless industry and his marvellous cheek can do it, he can succeed in clinching a treaty that will make American interests very sick in the Sandwich Islands. The Herald's Honolulu correspondence of this morning rather warns Congress to look out for Harris, and I am inclined to think the warning was very well put in, and would find an echo from every American in the Islands. I still continue in my set opinion that Harris won't do.
Californians talk wickedly about the beaching of the Santiago de Cuba a day or two ago, and the passengers by that ship are loud in their denunciations of the mismanagement that caused that accident. They say it is on record that the Santiago had a narrow escape off Hatteras, and actually touched bottom—and further, that she touched on her two preceding trips. Some say that Captain Behm was drunk; all agree that the ship was running a curious course, considering that the weather was foggy, and that there was considerable room in the Atlantic Ocean further eastward and no shoals to imperil her. The Captain himself says that the ship was steering a proper course, but that an unknown current must have carried her in those nineteen miles from where she ought to have been. A miss is as good as a mile, we all know—but it is questionable whether a miss is as good as nineteen miles.
They say the Captain was below, drunk, and not attending to his business. Part of that charge is rather far-fetched—because the accident occurred out of the Captain's watch, and at a time when he had a right to be below, or in bed, or anywhere else he pleased. I suppose the ship's log will show where the vessel was at noon, and the courses she was put upon at eight in the evening and every few hours in the night; so if there was anything wrong about the direction the Captain ordered that she should be steered, it is easy to determine it.
I sailed with Captain Behm, in the San Francisco, from Greytown to New York, and saw a good deal of him. I never saw him drunk, or any approach to it. I did see him eternally figuring at his navigation books and charts, though, or looking up his subordinates and keeping them to their duties. It seemed to me at the time that he was a singularly faithful officer, and I know that no one thought of such a thing as feeling concerned for the safety of the ship while she was under his management. What they may say now, however, when he is unfortunate, is another matter.
I have talked with several of the Santiago's passengers, but of course no satisfactory solution of the problem of this curious accident could be arrived at. I expect, though, that if the truth were known, the officer on watch, or the man at the wheel, misunderstood the instructions by a point of the compass, or possibly even a couple of points; and it is also possible that the wheelsman may have been drowsy (it was the sleepiest watch in all the six), and didn't steer by instructions or anything else. A sleepy steersman often gets so far off his course on a sailing vessel that the sails flap in the wind and stir up the heedless officer of the deck—but on a steamer he might drowse on for hours if no warning canvas were spread. I hope Captain Behm will come out of this difficulty with a clear record, and somehow I cannot help but think he will. All who have sailed with him would be glad to see him found blameless in this matter.
Dull times begin to tell. The monstrous rents I spoke of some time ago are diminishing. Mayday told the story. Everybody offered to remain in rented houses and apartments at reduced rates, and were refused—and so everybody moved. Where the mischief they went to, nobody knows, but certainly rooms to rent and houses and even stores to let are quite plenty, now, whereas they were wonderfully scarce three months ago. Rents of rooms and dwellings have fallen off forty per cent. since the first of this month of May, and if business does not grow better there must be a still further reduction. Even stores are renting considerably cheaper now than they were before the 1st inst. "For rent," and "To let," are getting to be quite common signs, now, about the city.
The old Washoe instincts that have lain asleep in my bosom so long are waking up again here in the midst of this late and unaccountable freshet of blood-letting that has broken loose in the East. The papers, all of a sudden, are being filled with assassinations, and second-degree murders, and prize-fights, and suicides. It is a wonderful state of things. From a careless indifference to such matters, I have been roused up to an old-time delight in them, and now I have to have my regular suicide before breakfast, like a cocktail, and my side-dish of murder in the first degree for a relish, and my savory assassination to top off with while I pick my teeth and smoke. A breakfast would be insipid, now, without these condiments. If I were to order a beef-steak rare and a murder in the first degree, and only got the former, I believe I would have to retire and wait for the evening papers.
All the air is filled with blood and crime. In this morning's paper is a suicide, with bloody details; a stabbing affray; a tremendous forgery case; two prize fights; a church robbed; a grave desecrated; a lot of minor crimes, and a continuation of the evidence in the case of Bridget Dergan, who is charged with murdering her mistress, some time ago in Jersey. A day or two ago an ex-policeman stepped out from behind a tree-box in a lonely place in Brooklyn, and blew a hole through a worthy citizen with a sinful air-gun, and for ten days we have been assailed with paragraphs charging our detectives with being partners with a gang of thieves and rascals, and helping them commit sundry great crimes (but which it couldn't be, you know). It is a dreadful state of things. I do not know whether I am in the heart of morality and civilization, or not. I begin to waver. All things look shaky to me, and I sigh for a Holier land.
But that Dergan case is a curious one. Mrs. Corriell's husband left her at home with her young child and the servant, Bridget Dergan, on a snowy winter's night. Toward midnight, neighbors heard sounds of struggling, and of beating, and banging, and smashing of furniture, and cries as of someone in mortal distress. They covered up their heads with the bed clothes to shut out these horrid noises; some took a frightened glance toward Mrs. Corriell's house, saw the shadow of figures darting hither and thither athwart the window curtains, and ran shuddering to bed again. Finally, Bridget, in her stocking feet and half dressed, came with the baby in her arms, after all was still, and called for admission at a house, and said there was trouble at Dr. Corriell's. Then she went to a preacher's house and waited dismally, and they let her in, and she said, before she was asked, that she believed Mrs. Corriell had been murdered—she didn't know, but she thought so—but she didn't know whether the house was on fire or not! [She made a pretty good stagger at it in the way of a guess, though, for it had been set on fire by somebody.] Bridget sat down in her night-dress, and when she noticed that the astonished preacher was staring at a great splotch of blood, as big as two hands, upon its front, she quietly rose up and folded that portion under her and sat down on it. The poor baby's eyes were fixed and it made no sound—was scared, the preacher's wife thought. Well, when the neighbors gathered in Mrs. Corriell's house they found her lying gashed and battered, and sweltering in her blood—dead; and the furniture was smashed and turned upside down, and the bed had been saturated with camphene and set on fire and was still burning. The points of bloody fingers were upon the door-facing—fingers that had been cut in three places with a knife, and corresponding wounds were found upon Bridget's fingers.
The savage murderer had bitten the dead woman's cheek. The thoughtful preacher took a neat cast of the wound, and, afterwards, a plaster-cast taken of Bridget's teeth was found to be exactly like it, and exactly like nobody's else. Snow was on the ground, and Bridget's shoeless tracks were in it, but not anybody's else. Yet Bridget says two men came at 8 in the evening and scared her mistress, and then came later, and her mistress told her to seize the child and run, and she did so, and that is all she knows about the matter.
It is in evidence that Bridget is a mild, amiable, well conducted girl, who loved her mistress and her household, and bore a blameless character among all who knew her. I suppose the world has never produced so strong a case of pure circumstantial evidence against any creature as is against Bridget Dergan, (for mind you there is none whatever but circumstantial evidence, and will not be, as the prosecution has closed its case,) and I suppose that stronger evidence of temporary insanity on the part of the accused has seldom been met with—and yet Bridget's counsel announces his intention to prove that she did not commit this murder—is utterly innocent of having had any hand in the killing, and sets this forth as his line of defence. He remotely hints at weak-mindedness, or idiocy, on her part, and barely mentions her having speculated in fits to some extent, but says never a word about trying to clear her on the ground of insanity. That looks very singular. I don't know how he is going to get around that bite, and those teeth, and that bloody hand on the door, and the absence of all tracks going from the house or approaching it, save Bridget's. This line of defence, this claiming of innocence where a plea of insanity would fit so much better, gives this trial a splendid interest, and all the East will watch it closely to the end. It is perfectly invaluable to me since I have become so bloodthirsty.
By an Inspector's report for 1864, it was shown that one-half the population of New York city—in round numbers 500,000 souls—lived in tenement houses—lived in 15,000 tenement houses—an average of eight families to a house, though some houses contained fewer and some swarmed with two or three hundred persons. The city is said to contain over a million inhabitants, now, and half of them are packed away in these holes and dens and cellars of tenement houses, where unimaginable dirt is the rule and cleanliness is a miracle—would be a miracle, I mean, but they don't have it.
They are going to have these tenement houses all white washed inside, but that will hardly save the occupants when the cholera comes. It will be here soon, and it will sweep those sinks of corruption like a conflagration. You know how the telegraph thrilled us every day, a year ago, with accounts of the scourging of the great plague here, in Cincinnati, St. Louis and other places. I find now—at least they tell me—that respectable people did not die from it. The term is a hard one, but it describes well. Only the poor, the criminally, sinfully, wickedly poor and destitute starvelings in the purlieus of the great cities suffered, died, and were hauled out to the Potter's field—the well-to-do were seldom attacked. It seems hard, but truly humiliation, hunger, persecution and death are the wages of poverty in the mighty cities of the land. No man can say aught against honest poverty. The books laud it; the instructors of the people praise it; all men glorify it and say it hath its reward here and will have it hereafter. Honest poverty is a gem that even a King might feel proud to call his own, but I wish to sell out. I have sported that kind of jewelry long enough. I want some variety. I wish to become rich, so that I can instruct the people and glorify honest poverty a little, like those good, kind-hearted, fat, benevolent people do.
But, as I was saying, there is a place here for the cholera—its lodgings are set apart and made ready for it—and in the fullness of time it will enter in and occupy them. It is no need to growl at the Government, either State or municipal, about the pestilence-breeding tenement-houses, for they cannot help the matter much. They are doing all they can. They are making the landlords go to the expense of whitewashing the tenement-houses throughout, and when the landlord has done that he will gently raise the rent, and that will raise some of the tenants out, and then how much better off will they be? The cholera will follow them to the street.
PERSONAL
R. L. Ogden, ("Podgers"), San Francisco correspondent of the New York Times, arrived here yesterday from Panama, and is at the Metropolitan. Also, Johnny Skae, and many other Californians and Washoe people, whom I have not yet met. They are all going to Europe, of course. So is everybody else. I am afraid the French language will not be spoken in France much this year. I shall feel mighty sick if, after rubbing up my rusty French so diligently, I have to run the legs off myself skirmishing around Paris, hunting for such a sign as "Ici on parle Francais."
Marshall, the painter of the famous Lincoln portrait (and the engraver of it also), is hard at work on a portrait of General Grant, now, from life. It is to be engraved on copper, and I suppose it will be published by Ticknor & Fields, the publishers of the Lincoln picture.
Alta California, July 28, 1867
New York,
May 28th, 1867.
EDITORS ALTA: I am thankful that the good God creates us all ignorant. I am glad that when we change His plans in this regard, we have to do it at our own risk. It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art, and ignorant also of surgery. Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes, and surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghastly stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease. The very point in a picture that fascinates me with its beauty, is to the cultured artist a monstrous crime against the laws of coloring; and the very flush that charms me in a lovely face, is, to the critical surgeon, nothing but a sign hung out to advertise a decaying lung. Accursed be all such knowledge. I want none of it.
The art critics have been so diligently abusing everything in and about the Academy of Design, for weeks past, that I was satisfied that a visit there could produce nothing but unhappiness. I wandered into the place by accident to-day, how ever, and staid there three hours. I could have staid a week. I was not cultivated enough to see the dreadful faults that were so glaring to others' eyes. There were some three hundred pictures on exhibition, and, to me, about thirty or forty were very beautiful. I liked all the sea views, and the mountain views, and the quiet woodland scenes, with shadow-tinted lakes in the foreground, and I just revelled in the storms.
There was a dreamy tropical scene—a wooded island in the centre of a glassy lake bordered by an impenetrable jungle of trees all woven together with vines and hung with drooping garlands of flowers—the still lake pictured all over with the reflected beauty of the shores—two lonely birds winging their way to the further side, where grassy lawns, and mossy rocks, and a wilderness of tinted foliage, were sleeping in a purple mist. I thought it was beautiful, but I suppose it wasn't. I suppose if I were not so ignorant I would have observed that one of the birds' hind legs was out of line, and that the coloring was shaky in places, and that some of the "effects" were criminal transgressions of the laws of art.
And I know I ought to have admired that picture, by one of the old masters, where six bearded faces without any bodies to them were glaring out of Egyptian darkness and glowering upon a naked infant that was not built like any infant that ever I saw, nor colored like it, either. I am glad the old masters are all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner.
There were two pictures that suited me, but they were so small and so modest that I was ashamed to let the other visitors see me looking at them so much, so I gazed at them sidewise, and "let on" to be worshipping the "old master" rascalities. I had no catalogue, and did not want any—because, if a picture cannot tell its own story to us uncultivated vagrants, we scorn to read it out of a book. One of these pictures represented two libertines of quality teasing and jesting with a distressed young peasant girl, while her homely brother, (or sweetheart, maybe,) sat by with the signs of a coming row overshadowing his face. The other was racy. In a little nook in a forest, a splendid gray squirrel, brimful of frisky action, had found a basket-covered brandy flask upset, and was sipping the spilled liquor from the ground. His face told that he was delighted. Close by, a corpulent old fox-squirrel was stretched prone upon his back, and the jolly grin on his two front teeth, and the drunken leer of his half-closed eye told that he was happy, and that the anxious solicitude in the face of the black squirrel that was bending over him and feeling his pulse was all uncalled for by the circumstances of the case.
More than half the paintings in the Academy are devoted to the usual harmless subjects, of course. You find the same old pile of cats asleep in the corner; and the same old party of kittens skylarking with a cotton ball; and the same old excited puppy looking out of a window; and the same old detachment of cows wading across a branch at sunset; and the same old naked libels marked "Eve;" and the same old stupid looking wenches marked "Autumn," and "Summer," etc., loafing around in the woods, or toting flowers, and all of them out of shirts, in the same old way; and there were the everlasting farmers, gathering their eternal squashes; and a "Girl Swinging on a Gate;" and a "Girl Reading;" and girls performing all sorts of similar prodigies; and most numerous and most worn-out of all, there was the usual endless array of vases and dishes full of grapes and peaches and slices of watermelon, and such stuff; and the same tiresome old tom cat "laying" for a gold-fish. However, I ought to be circumspect in the matter of these fruit-pictures, because those are the first things the young ladies look at when they come in, and the last they examine before they go out.
Now, after four or five years of terrible warfare, there is only one historical picture in the Academy—Lincoln's entry into Richmond—and that is execrable. There isn't a single battle piece. What do you suppose is the reason?
There is one fine piece of statuary—Eve—but she had three apples—two in her left hand, and one in her right, which she was getting ready to bite. I thought our common mother only plucked one apple. When this sculptor makes another Eve he had better get her a basket.
Now, I suppose I have gone and done the very same thing the art critics do—left unmentioned the works I liked, and mentioned only those I did not like. However, let it go. I must abuse the building these things are in, though. Outside, it is barred, and cross-barred, and streaked, and striped, and spotted, and speckled, and gilded, and defiled from top to bottom, with infamous flummery and filagreed gingerbread, to that degree that the first glance a stranger casts upon it unsettles his mind for a week. First, he thinks it is a church—but then it flashes upon him that no God-fearing Christian would worship in such a church; then he thinks it is a hotel—and forthwith it occurs to him, that a man that has got sense enough to keep a hotel has got more sense than to build such a house as that; next, he thinks it is a huge dwelling house—but he acknowledges in a moment that no man could keep his brains straight who tried to live in such an architectural nightmare of a mansion as this; then he thinks it may be a lunatic asylum, built upon plans furnished by the inmates—but immediately he is ashamed of this mean insinuation against the helpless and unfortunate; at least he concludes that it is a preposterous stable, invented by some vulgar sporting man who has grown suddenly rich—but never, never, never, does he become so lost to all honorable feeling as to conceive that that wretched pile of marble, paint and gold-leaf was created for the National Academy of Design. No man could fall so low as that. I speak only the truth when I say that the architecture of this Academy of Design is more atrocious than that of young Dr. Tyng's new church, and several other new churches that have sprung up here, and somehow are left undestroyed by the lightnings of heaven. The Academy people call their costly stack of architectural deviltry "the Moorish style"—as if the atmosphere of antiquity and poetry and romance, that cast a charm around that style in its ancient home beyond the seas, could be reproduced here in the midst of railroads and steamboats, and business rush and clamor, and acres of brownstone fronts—and as if it could be anything but clownish and repulsive without that atmosphere! They might as well have put up a wigwam there, and expected it to be romantic and picturesque without its natural surroundings of flowers and grass and brooks, and the solemn silence of dim old forests.
Mr. Greeley has put his foot in it, in the Jeff. Davis bail bond matter, but with characteristic courage and independence he stands up for what he has done and refuses to go back an inch. He is catching it on all sides, and in language that despises elegant forms of speech, but goes straight to the matter in hand with a meat-axe earnestness and bluntness. Mr. Greeley has shown conclusively enough that his motives were good and worthy, that his record has been clear from the first, and that his conduct in this transaction was not in any respect inconsistent with that record. So far, so good. That part of Mr. Greeley's case is strong, and those who argue against it lose their labor. The Nation says that for the leader of the Northern sentiment that for six years has charged all manner of atrocities upon Davis, to come forward at the last and take this arch-criminal to his arms, was repulsive—and in that light, no doubt, the people view it. After convicting a man, by argument and testimony, of murder, and robbery, and perjury, and treason, and other acts of an indelicate character, it is ungraceful to shake hands with him and ask him home to dinner.
It is contended that if Davis had been so friendless and forlorn that no man would come forward and bail him, it would have been a grand and magnanimous deed for his ancient enemy to save and succor him—but considering that Davis had a thousand friends at his back and could have got millions of dollars on his bond if necessary, there was no call for that ancient enemy to compromise with him at all—especially as that enemy was a representative man and his action might be taken as a compromise endorsed by the millions of men he represented. I think the very strongest argument that could be made in this thing, against Mr. Greeley, would be that he had no right to go on Jeff. Davis' bond because the millions he represented would not have done it—because he was not, and could not be, merely Mr. Horace Greeley, under such circumstances, but was the embodiment of a nation or a national sentiment—because he was Public Opinion, and had no right to misrepresent his character. Horace Greeley's position and antecedents render it impossible for him to act in great public matters as a private individual—he cannot shed his representative character as he could his coat. Mr. Jones, or Mr. Brown, or Mr. Smith might go on Jeff. Davis' bond, if they chose, because, being obscure and unknown, they could not implicate a nation, and because, being essentially private individuals, they have a right to do their own private will—but representative men possess no such rights. Mr. Greeley ought to have let the majority rule in a momentous matter like the bailing of Jeff. Davis. He ought to have sunk his character as one unimportant private individual, and assumed his public one as the representative of a great party and a wide-spread political sentiment, and acted as that character would have made it proper for him to act.
They are making a great fuss in Springfield, Mass., because a young lady school teacher has unmercifully flogged one of her boy pupils. Now, that is a nice subject for a public excitement, isn't it? Why, I used to catch it that way three times a day when I went to school, and nobody ever thought of getting up a general indignation about it. I never got any sympathy. It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during the school term. They whipped boys, then, for every little thing; for throwing "spit-balls" at the teacher; for fixing pins in the benches for boys to sit down on; for catching flies during morning prayers, and even for throwing rocks at passing strangers, in recess, when the motive was in no wise dishonorable, the only object in view being to surprise the stranger. For these things they whipped boys, and, what was more degrading still, every boy had to furnish his own hickories. Boys had no friends in those dark days. They were persecuted on all occasions, and there was never any popular excitement about it. We pulled down a stable once (it was only an old stable, and very shabby, and the cow that was in it could have got out if she had wanted to—she had plenty of time), and once we burned a carpenter's shop—it was an ugly, shameful old affair, and spoiled the looks of the town—and merely for doing these things we were punished. As usual, no popular excitement. They took outrages like these very easy in those barbarous times.
But now things are different. School-marms cannot be such bloody pirates nowadays. They haul them up before the Courts and put them under $200 bonds to appear and answer. Oh, unfeeling Greeley that would sign one of them! But schoolmarm instincts have not changed. The boy was getting the best of this one in Springfield, but she called for reinforcements, and another teacher came. They doubled teams on him. It is the old, old story. We had one of our old maids nearly flaxed out once—we had her to the edge of the well, and we would have got her in in another minute, but the unprincipled old harridan piped for assistance.
The times are changed. The world progresses. It is but another evidence of advancing civilization when public sympathy speaks up for the persecuted school-boy.
An application by Mr. Edwin Forrest, yesterday, for an injunction to restrain his divorced wife from collecting the alimony awarded her in the celebrated divorce suit fifteen years ago, was denied. The award was $4,000 a year, but Mr. Forrest has managed, by appealing and re-appealing the case from time to time, to stave off payment, till the alimony bill has at last run up to about $60,000. It is supposed that all the various legal subterfuges for escaping payment have been exhausted, and that Mr. Forrest will have to liquidate, now. There is no telling, however. There may be some more holes in the legal net large enough for a man of Mr. Forrest's size to get through.
This unsightly pile, with its once white but now dingy filagree columns and pilasters boarded up with unpainted planks, still mars the beauty of the noblest street in America—the Fifth Avenue. They say it has already cost two millions of dollars, and that when it is finished and furnished it will have cost three. There are two hundred and fifty dwellings in the same street that are handsomer, more graceful, more elegant and richer in appearance than Stewart's is, and not one of them cost a twentieth of the money. Verily it is one thing to have cash and another to know how to spend it. The man ought to die a violent death that put it into people's heads to try to make cherished, beloved, sacred homes out of such cold, ghostly, unfeeling stuff as marble a material which God intended only for gravestones. You can build a house out of it, and put a door-plate on it, and call it a dwelling, but it isn't any use, it is bound to look like a mausoleum, after all. Stewart's house looks like a stately tomb, now, and after it is finished it will never look entirely natural without a hearse in front of it.
Stewart's dwelling is calculated to mislead people. It looks like the new Herald building, diminished in size, just enough like it to make poor, unoffending drunken men, when they stumble on it, think they have got nearly to the foot of Broadway, in some unaccountable way, and start them out on a weary march towards Central Park. It is shameful to impose upon the helpless.
Nothing could be more beautiful, more refined, more elegant, than the brown stone used in facing buildings here; and for light, graceful architecture, nothing could be more charming than the rich, cream-colored Portland stone which has lately come into vogue, and which so fascinates the eye of a stranger, as he saunters up the new end of the magnificent avenue. But these didn't suit Mr. Stewart, and so he had to send to Italy and get some dismal ornamental tombstones, carved out at immense expense by those foreigners, and have them brought over here and piled on high in the midst of that cheerful street, to dampen people's spirits, and set them to thinking of the grave, and death, and the hereafter. It is all wrong. He could have beautified the city and yet spent his money right here in America, if he had chosen to do it.
I believe he is trying to see how much money he can spend on that mausoleum. He has put $10,000 worth of gas and water piping into it, and not a yard of it is visible to the eye. And after all, it is just possible that he is disappointed in his fine house, for they say he has given it, or is going to give it to the Ladies' Society for the Reclamation of Abandoned Women. It is a good idea. If anything could make a lost woman feel miserable and set her to reflecting, it would be to shut her up in that awful tomb.
MISCELLANEOUS
Eighty-five passengers are booked for the Palestine excursion in the Quaker City, and more are to join at Marseilles. The ship is newly painted and handsomely fitted up throughout. I have got a nice moral room-mate, and he has got many shirts, and a History of the Holy Land, a cribbage-board and three thousand cigars. I will not have to carry any baggage at all. Gen. Sherman is not going. That is lucky. His state-room is fitted and furnished like a palace. I will naturally get that, now, because I stood No. 2 in the schedule, and come first in the order of promotion. There will be room for more baggage, then, if necessary.
Miss Maggie Mitchell and her mother have joined the expedition. There were to be amateur theatrical performances on the ship, anyhow, and now we shall have a star. Scenery is being prepared, and a stage will be erected in one end of the ship and a pulpit in the other. I will have a chance now. Young Beach, of the Suns is going to publish a newspaper on board. This will afford me an opening for a berth.
Massachusetts is getting shaky on the subject of compulsory temperance, and is going to submit the question of licensing people to sell rum to a popular vote again. Evidence has been brought forward which proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it. In one town in New Hampshire, the hotel-keepers have shut up their houses, and almost brought business to a dead stop, very much to the consternation of the community. The landlords say they will not open till they can sell liquor, and the people have thus been forced to entertain the motion, and are now discussing it with powerful interest. Excise is a rife subject all over the land, and it does so exercise the people that I think they ought to add that middle syllable to the word.
Alta California, August 4, 1867
New York,
June 2d, 1867.
THAT is the name of Bierstadt's last picture. The art critics here abused it without stint when its exhibition began, a month ago. They ridiculed it so mercilessly that I thought it surely could not be worth going to see, and so I staid away. I went to-day, however, and I think it is very well worth going to see. It is very beautiful—considerably more beautiful than the original.
You stand twelve hundred feet above the valley, and look up it toward the east, with the North Dome on the left and the South Dome on the right. The rugged mountain range beyond the latter sweeps round to the right and shuts up the valley, and, springing up among the clouds in the distance, you see one or two great peaks clad in robes of snow. Well, the bird's-eye view of the level valley, with its clusters of diminished trees and its little winding river, is very natural, and familiar, and pleasant to look upon. The pine trees growing out of clefts in a bold rock wall, in the right foreground, are very proper trees, and the grove of large ones, in the left foreground, and close at hand, are a true copy of Nature, and so are the various granite boulders in the vicinity.
Now, to sum up the picture's merits, those snow-peaks are correct—they look natural; the valley is correct and natural; the pine trees clinging to the bluff on the right, and the grove on the left, and the boulders, are all like nature; we will assume that the domes and things are drawn accurately. One sees these things in all sorts of places throughout California, and under all sorts of circumstances, and gets so familiar with them that he knows them in a moment when he sees them in a picture. I knew them in Bierstadt's picture, and checked them off one by one, and said "These things are correct—they all look just as they ought to look, and they all belong to California." But when I got around to the atmosphere, I was obliged to say "This man has imported this atmosphere; this man has surely imported this atmosphere from some foreign country, because nothing like it was ever seen in California." I may be mistaken, for all men are liable to err, but I honestly think I am right. The atmospheric effects in that picture are startling, are full of variety, and are charming. It is more the atmosphere of Kingdom-Come than of California.
The time is early morning; the eastern heavens are filled with shredded clouds, and these afford the excuse for the dreamy lights and shadows that play about the leftward precipices and the great dome—a rich blending of softest purple, and gray, and blue, and brown and white, instead of the bald, glaring expanse of rocks and earth splotched with cloud-shadows like unpoetical ink-blots which one ought to see in a Californian mountain picture when correctly painted. Some of Mr. Bierstadt's mountains swim in a lustrous, pearly mist, which is so enchantingly beautiful that I am sorry the Creator hadn't made it instead of him, so that it would always remain there. In the morning, the outlines of mountains in California, even though they be leagues away, are painfully bold and sharp, because the atmosphere is so pure and clear—but the outlines of Mr. Bierstadt's mountains are soft and rounded and velvety, which is a great improvement on nature.
As a picture, this work must please, but as a portrait I do not think it will answer. Portraits should be accurate. We do not want feeling and intelligence smuggled into the pictured face of an idiot, and we do not want this glorified atmosphere smuggled into a portrait of the Yosemite, where it surely does not belong. I may be wrong, but still I believe that this atmosphere of Mr. Bierstadt's is altogether too gorgeous.
In one of the libraries here I have found an edition of 1621 of the Apochryphal New Testament. It is rather a curious book, as one may judge by the titles to some of the chapters:
"Christ kissed by a bride made dumb by sorcerers, cures her. A leprous girl cured by the water in which the infant Christ was washed, and becomes the servant of Joseph and Mary. The leprous son of a Prince cured in like manner.
"A young man who had been bewitched and turned into a mule, miraculously cured by the infant Savior being put on his back, and is married to the girl who had been cured of leprosy. Whereupon the bystanders praise God."
[Extract.] "33. After the marriage of this girl, Joseph and Mary tarried there ten days, then went away, having received great respect from those people:
"34. Who, when they took their leave of them and returned home, cried,
"35. But especially the girl."
This book has many chapters devoted to the infancy of the Savior and the miracles he wrought. For instance:
"Chapter 15. Jesus and other boys play together and make clay figures of animals. Jesus causes them to walk; also makes clay birds which he causes to fly, and eat and drink. The children's parents are alarmed and take Jesus for a sorcerer, and order them to seek better company. He goes to a dyer's shop and throws all the clothes into the fire and works a miracle there with. Whereupon the bystanders praise God."
It appears that Joseph had a shop and was regularly in business as a carpenter, although his work was not remarkable for its excellence. The infant Savior was of great assistance to him, sometimes:
"Chapter 16. Christ miraculously widens or contracts gates, milk pails, sieves or boxes, not properly made by Joseph, he not being skillful at his carpenter's trade. The King of Jerusalem gives Joseph an order for a throne. Joseph works on it for two years and makes it two spans too short. The King being angry with him, Jesus comforts him—commands him to pull one side of the throne while he pulls the other and brings it to its proper dimensions. Whereupon the bystanders praise God."
"Chapter 19. Jesus charged with throwing a boy from the roof of a house, miraculously causes the dead boy to speak and acquit him; fetches water for his mother, breaks the pitcher and miraculously gathers the water in his mantle and brings it home; makes fish-pools on the Sabbath, and causes a boy to die who broke them down; another boy runs against him, whom he also causes to die. Whereupon the bystanders, etc., etc."
"Sent to a schoolmaster, refuses to tell his letters and the schoolmaster going to whip him, his hand withers and he dies."
"Kills a boy; causes blindness to fall upon his accusers, for which Joseph pulls him by the ear."
The young Savior's resentments were so frequent, and always of so exceedingly prompt and practical a turn, that Joseph finally grew concerned about the matter and gave it his personal attention:
"16. Then said Joseph unto Mary, henceforth we will not allow him to go out of the house, for everyone who displeases him is killed."
His society was pleasant, but attended by serious drawbacks.
Further on in this quaint volume of rejected gospels is an epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians, which was used in the churches and considered genuine fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago. In it this account of the fabled phoenix occurs:
"1. Let us consider that wonderful type of the resurrection, which is seen in the Eastern countries, that is to say, in Arabia.
"2. There is a certain bird called a phoenix. Of this there is never but one at a time, and that lives five hundred years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near, that it must die, it makes itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices, into which, when its time is fulfilled, it enters and dies.
"3. But its flesh, putrefying, breeds a certain worm, which, being nourished with the juice of the dead bird, brings forth feathers; and when it is grown to a perfect state, it takes up the nest in which the bones of its parent lie, and carries it from Arabia into Egypt, to a city called Heliopolis:
"4. And flying in open day in the sight of all men, lays it upon the altar of the sun, and so returns from whence it came.
"5. The priests then search into the records of the time, and find that it returned precisely at the end of five hundred years."
Well, business is business, and there is nothing like punctuality, especially in a phoenix.
The few chapters relating to the infancy of the Savior contain many things which seem frivolous and trifling, and not worth preserving. A large part of the remaining portions of the book read like good Scripture, however, and one is inclined to wonder why the conclave of 318 Bishops who compiled our New Testament in the fourth century, from a mass of ancient manuscripts, rejected them. One Sabinus, a plain-spoken Bishop of Heraclea, explains the matter in this wise: He says that that conclave of compilers was composed of "a set of illiterate, simple creatures, that understood nothing!" Well, of course we do not know anything about that, and besides, Sabinus was doubtless prejudiced. But there is one verse in the back part of the book that ought not to have been rejected, because it so evidently prophetically refers to the general run of Congresses of the United States:
"199. They carry themselves high, and as prudent men; and though they are fools, yet would seem to be teachers."
A few months ago "puzzles" were all the rage with the street peddlers. A man could not walk three blocks without having some new invention of a ten-cent puzzle offered him to tangle his brain with. There were puzzles consisting of iron rings with handles to them, and iron rings strung on a stick, and iron rings linked together, and forty other puzzle nuisances. People bought these things—thousands and hundreds of thousands of them—and figured at them till they got them apart, and then figured at them till they got them together again; and then they saw the vanity of such things and did no more invest in them. And so the puzzle mania died.
Then there was an irruption of blind people from somewhere. Blind people led by a friend; blind people led by dogs; blind people who felt their way with a stick; blind people who sat on doorsteps with horrid poetry labelled on their hats, and a tin cup alongside, with a penny nest-egg in it; blind men who tortured charity from foot passengers by grinding dismal music out of a thing like a mud turtle. The blind business was immensely popular—for three days. Everybody who had a blind friend borrowed him and trotted him out. It was a short-lived excitement, but it was fine while it lasted.
Next came a villain who shrieked and whistled like a mocking bird, and who almost split people's ears when he happened upon them unawares. He carried a basket full of vile inventions, which were able to make other people as capable of dispensing his kind of misery as himself. I have lost sight of him, latterly. He is dead, maybe. I hope so.
The popular rage now runs to little painted horses, clowns, chickens, etc., suspended from India-rubber strings. On every corner is a vagrant peddling these wonderfully trifling toys. No invention, since the game of croquet, has reached such miraculous triviality. And, by-the-way, this toy-on-a-string business had its origin in a thing invented by a Brooklyn man about two years ago, and which consisted of nothing more extraordinary than a ball attached to an elastic cord. Its sole virtue was that when expelled from one's hand, it returned again, provided the end of the string was firmly held. This gave great satisfaction to the performer. Everybody bought this toy and played with it—men, women and children—everybody neglected graver pursuits, and revelled in the fierce intoxication of this amusement. The happiness it occasioned was universal. The inventor found himself suddenly famous and as suddenly wealthy. But mark you the moral. The fates favored him only to deceive. They promised him a long life blessed with the comfort and the serenity that go with a competence honestly earned. But behold, an ex-policeman waylaid the favorite of fortune in the streets of Brooklyn at dead of night a week ago, and shot him to death with an air-gun. Riches will still take wings and fly away, and so also will life—and nothing can assist them in their flight better than an ex-policeman.
It takes all kinds of people and more to make a world. We all know that. The world would not have been entirely complete, I think, without Capt. Summers of the navy. He is very old, now, and very proud of his long and honorable career, too, in the service of his country. He entered the navy "through the hawse-holes," as the phrase goes, and worked himself up to his present high rank by hard labor and close attention to duty. He is just a little illiterate, is eminently practical, has no poetry in his composition, and can abide no nonsense. He is entirely free from everything in the shape of sentiment. I had heard a good deal of him, and went to his favorite saloon, last night, purposely to hear him talk—you see he is on the retired list, and has nothing to do but spin yarns and sip away his pay in hot whiskey punches. I spent a pleasant evening and picked up many a queer item which I mean to print after a little, and did intend to in this letter, but it has already grown too long. Still, as I have mentioned the old Captain, I must tell one story they have on him, at any rate.
Twenty or thirty years ago, when missionary enterprise was in its infancy among the islands of the South Seas, Capt. Summers anchored his sloop-of-war off one of the Marquesas, I think it was. The next morning he saw an American flag floating from the beach, union down. This excited him fearfully, of course, and he sent off a boat at once to inquire into the matter. Presently the boat returned, and brought a grave-looking missionary. The Captain's anxiety ran high. He said:
"What's the trouble out there?—quick!"
"Well, I am grieved to say, sir," said the missionary, "that the natives have been interrupting our sacerdotal exercises."
"No!—blast their yaller hides. I'll—what—what was it you said they'd been doing?"
"It pains me, sir, to say that they have been interrupting our sacerdotal exercises."
"Interrupting your—your—h—l! Man them starboard guns! Stand by, now, to give 'em the whole battery!"
The astounded clergyman hastened to protest against such excessive rigorous measures, and finally succeeded in making the old tar understand that the natives had only been breaking up a prayer-meeting.
"Oh, devil take it, man, is that all? I thought you meant that they'd stopped your grog!"
The body of poor Artemus Ward arrived here per steamer to-day, from England, and was received by Chas. Dawson Shanley, and the other American executors of the deceased, and will be forwarded to the old homestead in Maine on Monday, for final interment.
Artemus stipulated in his will that his little valet should be apprenticed for two years to the best printer in America, to "learn the value of learning," and then sent to college.
Alta California, August 11, 1867
New York,
June 5th, 1867.
EDITORS ALTA: I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that it is a splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race. A man walks his tedious miles through the same interminable street every day, elbowing his way through a buzzing multitude of men, yet never seeing a familiar face, and never seeing a strange one the second time. He visits a friend once—it is a day's journey—and then stays away from that time forward till that friend cools to a mere acquaintance, and finally to a stranger. So there is little sociability, and, consequently, there is little cordiality. Every man seems to feel that he has got the duties of two lifetimes to accomplish in one, and so he rushes, rushes, rushes, and never has time to be companionable—never has any time at his disposal to fool away on matters which do not involve dollars and duty and business.
All this has a tendency to make the city-bred man impatient of interruption, suspicious of strangers, and fearful of being bored, and his business interfered with. The natural result is, that the striking want of heartiness observable here, sometimes even among old friends, degenerates into something which is hardly even chilly politeness towards strangers. A large party of Californians were discussing this matter yesterday evening, and one said he didn't believe there was any genuine fellow feeling in the camp. Another said: "Come, now, don't judge without a full hearing—try all classes; try everybody; go to the Young Men's Christian Association." But the first speaker said: "My son, I have been to the Young Men's Christian Association, and it isn't any use; it was the same old thing—thermometer at 32 degrees, which is the freezing notch, if I understand it. They were polite there, exasperatingly polite, just as they are outside. One of them prayed for the stranger within his gates—meaning me—but it was plain enough that he didn't mean his petition to be taken in earnest. It simply amounted to this, that he didn't know me, but would recommend me to mercy, anyhow, since it was customary, but didn't wish to be misunderstood as taking any personal interest in the matter."
Of course that was rather a strong exaggeration, but I thought it was a pretty fair satire upon the serene indifference of the New Yorker to everybody and everything without the pale of his private and individual circle.
There is something about this ceaseless buzz, and hurry, and bustle, that keeps a stranger in a state of unwholesome excitement all the time, and makes him restless and uneasy, and saps from him all capacity to enjoy anything or take a strong interest in any matter whatever—a something which impels him to try to do everything, and yet permits him to do nothing. He is a boy in a candy-shop—could choose quickly if there were but one kind of candy, but is hopelessly undetermined in the midst of a hundred kinds. A stranger feels unsatisfied, here, a good part of the time. He starts to a library; changes, and moves toward a theatre; changes again and thinks he will visit a friend; goes within a biscuit-toss of a picture-gallery, a billiard-room, a beer cellar and a circus, in succession, and finally drifts home and to bed, without having really done anything or gone anywhere. He don't go anywhere because he can't go everywhere, I suppose. This fidgety, feverish restlessness will drive a man crazy, after a while, or kill him. It kills a good many dozens now—by suicide. I have got to get out of it.
There is one thing very sure—I can't keep my temper in New York. The cars and carriages always come along and get in the way just as I want to cross a street, and if there is anything that can make a man soar into flights of sublimity in the matter of profanity, it is that. You know that, yourself. However, I must be accurate—I must speak truth, and say there is one thing that is more annoying. That is to go down West Tenth street hunting for the Art building, No. 51. You are tired, and your feet are hot and swollen, and you wouldn't start, only you calculate that it cannot be more than two blocks away, and you almost feel a genuine desire to go and see the picture on exhibition without once changing your mind. Very well. You come to No. 7; and directly you come to 142! You stare a minute, and then step back and start over again—but it isn't any use—when you are least expecting it, comes that unaccountable jump. You cross over, and find Nos. 18, 20, 22, and then perhaps you jump to 376! Your gall begins to rise. You go on. You get on a trail, at last, the figures leading by regular approaches up toward 51—but when you have walked four blocks they start at 49 and begin to run the other way! You are perspiring and furious by this time, but you keep desperately on, and speculate on new and complicated forms of profanity. And behold, in time the numbers become bewilderingly complicated: on one door 18 a3 on a little tin scrap, on the next a 17 in gold characters a foot square, on the next a 19, a5 and a 137, one above the other and in three different styles of figuring! You do not swear any more now, of course, because you can't find any words that are long enough or strong enough to fit the case. You feel degraded and ignominious and subjugated. And there and then you say that you will go away from New York and start over again; and that you will never come back to settle permanently till you have learned to swear with the utmost fluency in seventeen different languages. You become more tranquil, now, because you see your way clearly before you, how that, when you are properly accomplished, you can live in this great city and still be happy; you feel that in that day, when a subject shall defy English, you can try the Arabic, the Hungarian, the Japanese, the Kulu-Kaffir, and when the worst comes to the worst, you can come the Hindostanee on it and conquer. After this, you go tranquilly on for a matter of seventeen blocks and find 51 sandwiched in between Nos. 13 and 32,986. Then you wish you had never been born, to come to a strange land and suffer in this way.
Well, I intended, when I started out, to give my views of the pleasant side of New York, but I perceive that I have wandered into the wrong vein, and so I will stop short and give it up until I find myself in a more fortunate humor. I do not think that I could twist myself around now any easier than I could turn myself inside out.
They left out the insanity business in this woman's case and tried her on the plain guilty-or-innocent merits of the charge against her. Of course they brought her in guilty of murder in the first degree and without any recommendation to mercy. After the verdict was rendered, she went out of the Court-room smiling, and seemingly in excellent spirits. The woman is either a fiend or a fool. Her case is utterly incomprehensible. The circumstantial evidence shows that she cut and hacked and stabbed her victim in many places, and bit her on the neck, and then wore out some of the furniture beating her with it. And yet, not the shadow of a motive can they discover that she had for harming her mistress at all! Unless Bridget Durgan goes and spoils everything by confessing, before they hang her, this dark and bloody murder will be the most relishable mystery of the age. It is said, however, that she has intimated that in due time she will confess, not that she did the deed, but that she saw it done, and will furnish to the world all the dread particulars of the assassination. The story would be read here with a ravenous interest. Another woman is to be tried shortly, as her accomplice.
It is said that a sumptuous banquet was given to Gen. Sutter by the gentlemen of the Traveller's Club on the night of May 31st. They must have kept it very quiet. The cards of invitation gave out that the reception would take place on the evening of June 1st, and I went there to report the proceedings, along with a Herald man. But it was a fraud on us newspaper men—there was nothing whatever going on, and so we were just unfeelingly gouged out of a dinner. I think they dated the cards ahead on purpose to impose on us and escape a famine. That may be fair, but we do not so regard it. It might have been excusable but that utterly innocent parties had to suffer for it eventually—because we went and took dinner at a restaurant which had just been opened and had not yet acquired a lucrative run of custom. How ought the Travellers' cheeks to burn with shame when this fact comes to their ears!
General Sutter is said to be in excellent health and spirits, and has been receiving many and distinguished marks of attention at the hands of the citizens of New York.
I wonder if you are in as much distress about the Indians as we are? We talk Maximilian and his possible execution some, but our main dependence for solid conversation is the Indians. The Herald, Tribune, and World attend to the Indians in editorials, and the Times gives three columns of statistics which really show that all the fuss is made up out of very slender material; yet the talk goes on, and the telegrams, and official orders, and the sundry other notes of preparation that fill the air with warnings serve to swell the interest of the thing and constantly augment its importance. An educated and highly-cultivated American lady, who speaks French and Italian, and has travelled in Europe and studied the country so faithfully that she knows it as well as another woman would know her flower-garden, said to me yesterday that she had some very dear friends in San Francisco and other parts of Idaho, and these Indian rumors gave her unspeakable uneasiness; she believed that for seven nights she had hardly slept at all, with imagining the horrors which are liable at any moment to fall upon those friends; and she said she had friends in Santa Fe and Los Angeles, but she did not feel so worried about them because she believed the Indians did not infest the Cariboo country as much as they did the Farrallone Mountains and other localities further West. I tried to comfort her all I could; I told her I honestly believed that her friends in San Francisco and other parts of Idaho were just as safe there as they would be in Jerusalem or any other part of China.
Here she interrupted me, and told me with a well-bred effort to keep her countenance, that Jerusalem was not in China. I apologized, and said it was a slip of the tongue—but what I had meant to express was that her friends would be just as safe in Santa Fe and other parts of Cariboo as they would be in Damascus, or any other locality in France.
And she interrupted me again, and this time she did laugh a little bit, and told me modestly and in a way that could not hurt anybody's feelings, that Damascus was not in France.
I excused my stupidity again, and said that what I was trying to get at was, that her people might be even in the perilous gorges of the Farrallone Mountains and districts further west, and still fare as well as if they were in Hongkong or any other place in Italy.
And then she did not laugh, but looked serious and said, "Are you so preposterously ignorant as all this amounts to, or are you trying to quiz me?" And I said, "Don't you go to Europe anymore till you know a little something about your own country." I won.
It is funny, the absurd remarks people make about the Far West, and the wild questions they ask about it when they are discussing the Indian difficulties. It is humiliating to me to consider how high an opinion we have of our importance out there in the Pacific regions, and then to discover how very little some people know about us. A late number of Blackwood spoke of Andrew Jackson as being still alive, and I wondered at it at the time, but I do not wonder at it so much now. Why, I have seen one man who possessed ordinary intelligence, who was under the impression that silver bricks came from the mine just as they were. He could understand that, easily enough, because it looked reasonable—but how the assayer's stamp came there was what worried him! It surprises me to reflect how much I taught that man in the next fifteen minutes, and I did not charge him anything for it.
I meet people occasionally, poor fellows, who wish to inquire after unknown and unheard-of mines in all manner of impossible places, and who bought at round prices a year or two ago, and somehow have not heard from their mines or anybody connected with them for many months. They uniformly wound up by asking what they had better do. I always advise them to sell. Now I consider that a deep and a subtle joke, but in their wretched ignorance they never know enough to laugh at it.
I am waiting patiently to hear that they have ordered General Connor out to polish off those Indians, but the news never comes. He has shown that he knows how to fight the kind of Indians that God made, but I suppose the humanitarians want somebody to fight the Indians that J. Fenimore Cooper made.
There is just where the mistake is. The Cooper Indians are dead—died with their creator. The kind that are left are of altogether a different breed, and cannot be successfully fought with poetry, and sentiment, and soft soap, and magnanimity.
The strong effort being made to break down the Excise law has aroused the temperance societies to renewed activity. They hold meetings, they have lectures, print addresses, circulate petitions, project processions—do everything they can, in fact, to keep the interest of temperance devotees from flagging or failing. They feel that their cause and their Excise triumph are in some peril, and appreciate the necessity for union and energy. Their ingenuity culminated a few days ago in a grand picnic, but alas! the picnic culminated in a grand drunk! Some miscreant invaded the camp with whiskey, and many of the crusaders fell. New converts could not resist their old love, and some of the elder knights that did resist courageously were overcome at last. Then there was a fight, and several very Good Templars blacked each other's eyes and flattened each other's noses.
It was very sad. The enemies of temperance were beginning to grow hopeless again, and a few more processions and proclamations would have sent them cowering to their dens, nevermore to brave the cause of right and virtue, perchance, when these Good Templars forgot themselves and their great work and got drunk! Why is it that Good Templars will always go and get drunk when they have picnics? Why is it? It is such a public occasion that a temperance society cannot get drunk at a picnic without exciting remark. I have uniformly noticed that when temperance societies get drunk at picnics, people speak of it. Why cannot such societies choose their officers with some judgment? Unhappily, it is too often the case that these officers are chosen by partiality, and not by personal merit. The consequence is that the affairs of the organization are conducted in a loose, slipshod way, and every day exposes the inefficiency of the chief officers. What result must inevitably follow this official poverty of judgment? Plainly this, that instead of getting drunk in the privacy of the meeting-room, the society goes off and gets drunk at a vile public picnic. This is all wrong, and has a bad effect. It does more to retard the cause of temperance than can well be estimated. It is because the example it sets is questionable. Organizations of this kind should jealously guard against any conduct, as a society, which can be considered questionable. No temperance society which is well officered and which has the real good of our fellow-men in view, will ever get drunk save in the seclusion of its temperance hall. I speak feelingly upon this subject, because I have seen so much of this thing. I have been a member of three zealous, hard-working, and sincere temperance organizations, whose influence for good, in each case, became permanently impaired through their persisting in getting drunk in public every Saturday night. I warned them repeatedly that this was bad judgment, but they could not comprehend how this could be, and so the result was as I have stated. A little self sacrifice on their part would have saved the cause and saved the societies themselves much adverse criticism. But no, they refused to get drunk in private.
With my experience, I know what is to befall these societies here that are arrayed against the Excise law. The example of that one ill-officered organization will entrap them all into the error that public debauches are proper, and so they will now proceed to ruin their great cause by getting drunk at their picnics instead of in private. I grieve to contemplate this unfortunate state of things, and would willingly do everything to avert the disaster these people are about to bring upon themselves, but now that they have got started I know of no way to do it, and therefore must hope against hope and sadly leave them to their destiny.
Alta California, August 18, 1867
New York,
June 6th, 1867.
HARRY HILL'S
AMONG the many attractive and fashionable places of resort with which New York is so well stocked, I wish to call particular attention to Mr. Harry Hill's Club House in Crosby street, two or three blocks from Broadway. It is a retired spot, and is cheerful and peculiar. I was coming down street with a couple of friends last night, and they suggested that we drop in at Harry Hill's. It was in my head somehow that Harry Hill's was where the savants were in the habit of meeting to commune upon abstruse matters of science and philosophy—men like Agassiz and Ericsson and people of that stamp. I felt in a reflective mood, and I said I would like to go to Harry Hill's and hear those great men talk much better than to trifle away the time in the follies of gayer localities.
We started through a little sawdusted den of a tenth rate rum-hole, and I said: "This is just like the eccentricities of those wonderful intelligences—we never find them surrounded by gilded trappings and pretentious display."
As we passed through a door at the other end, a mashed-nosed athlete in his shirt-sleeves shouted to some one whom I could not see: "Now's yer time, gents, the wizard of the mountings is on next in his inimicable feats of magic!"
The wise men are seeking to sound the capabilities of human ingenuity, I thought, and I admired this evidence of their sympathy with matters of mere minor importance when they could busy themselves with abstruse problems in mechanics and astronomy, if they chose.
We went upstairs, and found a great many gentlemen, and also a great many ladies. I was glad to see ladies encouraging science with their inspiriting presence. I like to pick out great men in a crowd by the sign and seal of superiority which nature imprints upon their features. In this case I was troubled to select Agassiz, and hesitated long. Finally I said: This man is he—this must be he, though, to say truly, he hath all the seeming of a murderer; and this is Ericsson—this surely is Ericsson, albeit in another place I might take him for a burglar; and this must be Professor Morse, I think, notwithstanding the sneaking villainy in his eye; and this—
Here there was a sound of music, and I marvelled greatly to see the wise men take each a lady and spin her in the giddy waltz. The ladies, too, did spin around with such thoughtless vehemence that I was constrained to place my hat before my eyes. When they had finished, the great Ericsson embraced his lady publicly, and kissed her; Professor Morse sat down, and took his lady on his lap (she not observing that her hoops were mightily elevated), and Professor Agassiz conveyed his lady to a small bar which I had not before noticed, and called for drinks for the crowd! I shuddered. I could not help it, because these things seemed so out of keeping with the grave characters I had thought all philosophers possessed. So I turned me away, and perused certain placards that hung upon the walls. One read:
"OBSCENE LANGUAGE AND PROFANITY NOT PERMITTED HERE."
Another read:
"PEOPLE WHO ARE DRUNK MUST LEAVE THE PREMISES.
And still another read:
"LOVERS NOT WANTED HERE."
And yet another:
"ALL EQUALITY HERE—ALL TREATED ALIKE—ALL SOCIABLE—NO LOVERS ALLOWED.
Then, in big letters:
"OBSCENE LANGUAGE AND PROFANITY MOST POSITIVELY FORBIDDEN."
These are all good, wholesome rules, I said within myself—surely I can find no fault with them. But how dreadfully irregular these philosophers must be to render such ordinances necessary. There were also large placards adorned with verses of poetry, but the excellence of it seemed questionable to me, though I could not believe otherwise than that Mr. Longfellow or Mr. Bryant must have written it, of course. It was chiefly laudatory of the merits and attractions of the place.
Presently a man came out on a stage and sang "'Twas a Cold Winter's Night, and the Tempest was Snarling," and several parties accompanied him upon violins and a piano. After him came a remarkably black negro, whose clothes were ragged, and danced a boisterous dance and sang "I'm a happy contra band," though all his statements regarding himself would have warranted a different condition, I thought.
After him came a man who mimicked fighting cats, and the buzzing of mosquitoes, and the squealing of a pig. Then a homely young man in a Highland costume entered upon the stage and danced—and he ought to have danced moderately, because he had nothing in the wide world on but a short coat and short stockings. This was apparent every time he whirled around. However, no one observed it but me. I knew that, because several handsomely dressed young ladies, from thirteen to sixteen and seventeen years of age, went and sat down under the foot-lights, and of course they would have moved away if they had noticed that he was only partly dressed.
I had a great desire to become acquainted with Professor Agassiz, and so I went over and spoke respectfully to a young lady, a very charming girl barely out of her teens, and said:
"Pardon me, Mademoiselle, but—I suppose that gentleman yonder is the great philosopher, the renowned Agassiz?"
She gazed upon me with great interest awhile, and then she said:
"You're sick, ain't you, sonny?"
I was surprised at the remark. I hesitated a little, and then I said:
"I—I am not well, as you have deigned to observe, but if that is Mr. Agassiz—"
"Oh, that be—. It's Bladder-nose Jake."
I thought I should sink through the floor with mortification. I was going to excuse myself and bid the young person good evening, when she interrupted with great spirit, and said:
"Oh, if you want to shoot your gab, take me up to the bar, and pizen me, and then you can yelp till you rot."
I never felt so badly in my life. I purchased her a drink—it was nothing more harmful than soda-water—and then she wanted me to buy her an orange, which I did; next she desired me to waltz with her, but I excused myself because I began to have some suspicions about her; and finally she asked me to see her home, which I refused to do.
I wanted to go away from there, and my friends consented. When we got outside, I said,
"Is it possible that old Agassiz and those philosophers go to that place and carry on that way every night?"
"Philosophers?" said they; "why, there was never a philosopher there in the world! That is Harry Hill's, one of the worst dens in all New York. Those men were a very hard lot, except those country bumpkins that were skirmishing around there—flies in the web, and didn't know it—and the young girls were street-walkers, and the most abandoned in the city."
When I found that I, a newspaper man, had been drawn into such a place as that, my indignation knew no bounds, and I said we would go and hunt up another one.
Everything is ready, and to-morrow, at 3 P.M., the ship will sail. To-night all the passengers are to gather themselves together at the house of Mr. Beecher, in Brooklyn, to consult concerning the voyage, and to get acquainted. I hope we shall have a pleasant time of it. My creditors held a social reunion last night, and I am sure that they had a pleasant time of it at any rate—at least it was as cheerful as the circumstance of parting with me could make it—and you know I have been an old stand-by with them. I was the salvation of one of those people. He was a collector. His business became reduced till he hadn't a bill left to collect except one against me. That kept him in employment till a brighter day dawned for him. But all through the long night of his distress that one solitary wash-bill was a beacon of hope that never, never went out. Never showed any signs of going out. Never even flickered, I may say. Naturally, that man reveres my name and looks upon me as his benefactor. I have been a benefactor to a good many of his class. I have never mentioned it before. I have gone about doing good in this unostentatious way, and have never said one word about it until this moment.
These people drank wine and made merry, last night, until I was ready to go; then they wept, and presented me with the following beautiful memorial, wrought upon parchment:
MR. MARK TWAIN.
To Mrs. O'Shaughnessy and 9 children.
To washing, which the same has not been paid for—$18.45
To Hope Restaurant for sustenance—$68.25
To subscription to dinner for benefit of Orphan's Fund, 50 cents, and to difference between subscription and amount of dinner consumed by subscriber—$6.30
Several more items of this nature were in the memorial, and also a nice blank place for "RECEIVED PAYMENT." The blank mars the beauty of the thing to some extent, but still I suppose it will answer the way it is. Usually, blanks are unsightly because they are so meaningless, but this one is full of expression.
I can give you a specimen of our passengers, if you like, but I am glad to say he is the only specimen of the kind on the list at least he is the only one left now. When he heard that General Sherman was going to remain in the States, he howled fearfully. Indeed, he almost shed tears. He said:
"There, I just thought so, all along. I just knew how it would be. I tell you the trip has lost all its charms! I wouldn't give two straws to go now. I had rather have lost my right arm than that this should have happened."
This fellow had tried to stipulate that his wife should be introduced to Miss Sherman early, and have a seat next her at table, and that he should be permitted to sit next the General himself! And next, I suppose this flunkey would have waited to hold the General's hat while he washed his teeth. General Sherman ought to congratulate himself upon his escape from five months' worship by this bred-and-born slave. If that man goes in the ship and you hear that somebody has fallen overboard in a dark and mysterious manner, some night, you can calculate that it is he.
Another passenger—a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity, as Henry Clapp said of Rev. Dr. Osgood—walked in the other day and stood around for some time, and finally said he had forgotten, when he took passage, to inquire if the excursion would come to a halt on Sundays. Captain Duncan replied that he hardly expected to anchor the ship in the middle of the Atlantic, but that on shore everybody would be free—no restrictions—free to travel on Sunday or not, just as they saw fit; and he had no doubt that some would do one and some the other. The questioner did not groan audibly, but I think he did inwardly. Then he said it would be well for people to calculate their chances before doing wrong; that he had always got into trouble when he travelled on the Sabbath, and that he should do so no more when he could avoid it; that he lately travelled with a man in Illinois who would not lay by on Sunday because he could not afford the time, but he himself laid by and still beat the sinner and got to the end of the journey first.
Now I respected that man's repugnance to violating the Sabbath until he betrayed that he would violate it in a minute if he were not afraid the lightning would strike him, or something else would happen to him, and then I lost my reverence for him. I thought I perceived that he was not good and holy, but only sagacious, and so I turned the key on my valise and moved it out of his reach. I shall have to keep an eye on that fellow.
I have a large share of curiosity, but I believe it is satisfied for the present. I have seen the horse "Dexter" trot a race but then I know but little about horses, and I did not appreciate the exhibition; I was present at the great annual meeting of the Quakers a week ago, but between you and I it was excessively dull; I went to a billiard tournament where Phelan and McDevitt played, but I knew beforehand what to expect, and so there was no chance to get up a revivifying astonishment; I have been to three Sunday Schools and have heard all the great guns of the New York pulpit preach, and so that department is exhausted; I have been through the dens of poverty, crime and degradation that hide from the light of day in the Five Points and infinitely worse localities—but I, even I, can blush, and must decline to describe them; I have been in the Bible House, and also in the Station House—pleasant experiences of a day, but nothing worth for a second visit; I have gone the rounds of the newspaper offices and the theatres, and have contrasted the feverish turmoil of Broadway with the still repose of Greenwood Cemetery; I have seen Barnum's Museum, and time and again have looked upon the summer loveliness of Central Park and stood upon its high grounds and wondered how any landscape could be so beautiful as that which stretches abroad right and left over Jersey and far up the river, and yet have no sign of a mountain about it; I have seen Brooklyn, and the ferry-boats, and the Dunderberg, and the bootblacks, and Staten Island, and Peter Cooper, and the Fifth Avenue, and the Academy of Design, and Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair; and have compared the noble architecture of Old Trinity church with the cluster of painted shower baths, they call young Dr. Tyng's church (they don't dare to call it the church of God, notwithstanding it has got a safety-iron fence on its roof, and sixty-two lightning rods,) and behold I have tried the Russian bath, and skated while the winter was here, and did contract to go up in a balloon, but the balloon didn't go. I have seen all there was to see even the "Black Crook"—and yet, I say it, that shouldn't say it—all is vanity! There has been a sense of something lacking, something wanting, every time—and I guess that something was the provincial quietness I am used to. I have had enough of sights and shows, and noise and bustle, and confusion, and now I want to disperse. I am ready to go.
The departure of Capt. Mikes for Europe on a life-raft was the sensation of the week. This raft is a thing made of three cylinders, 25 feet long, each, and 26 inches in diameter, made fast together, side by side. We have all heard of shipwrecked men drifting for days and days together, in midocean, on such contrivances not very dissimilar to this, but why any man should want to start to Europe on one, when he could travel in a ship and still have a reasonable hope of never getting there, is a mystery to me. If Capt. Mikes thought this would be a shrewd method of beating the life insurance companies he missed it a good deal, because they promptly barred the life-raft. The Captain rigged five sails on his little hen-coop, and took forty days' rations of water and provisions for himself and his two men. He expects to reach Havre in twenty-five to thirty days, but somehow the more I looked at that shaky thing the more I felt satisfied that the old tar was on his last voyage. He is going to run in the usual route of the ships, and somebody will run over him some murky gray night, and we shall never hear of the bold Prussian anymore.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
I shall write very often to the ALTA on this Palestine excursion, of course. The various issues of the ALTA have a very wide circulation on the great Plains, the Pacific Coast, the islands of the South Seas, and in China and Japan, and through my efforts I trust that these diversified peoples will yet know more about the Holy Land than the Holy Landers do themselves. I am peculiarly fitted to deal with that patriarchal country because of my personal experience of life in Great Salt Lake City. Good-bye, MARK TWAIN.
[Twain for the next few months was on the famous voyage of the Quaker City and the other Innocents Abroad]
Alta California, January 8, 1868
New York, November 20th.
The steamer Quaker City arrived yesterday morning and turned her menagerie of pilgrims loose on America—but, thank Heaven, they came ashore in Christian costume. There was some reason to fear that they would astound the public with Moorish haiks, Turkish fezzes, sashes from Persia, and such other outlandish diablerie as their distempered fancies were apt to suggest to them to resurrect from their curious foreign trunks. They have struggled through the Custom House and escaped to their homes. Their Pilgrim's Progress is ended, and they know more now than it is lawful for the Gods themselves to know. They can talk it from now till January—most of them are too old to last longer. They can tell how they criticised the masterpieces of Reubens, Titian and Murillo, in Paris, Italy and Spain—but they, nor any other man, can tell precisely how competent they were to do it. They can give their opinion of the Emperor of France, the Sultan of Turkey, the Czar of Russia, the Pope of Rome, the King of Italy, and Garibaldi, from personal observation—but, alas! they cannot furnish those gentlemen's opinion of them. They can tell how they ascended Mont Blanc—how they tried to snuffle over the tomb of Romeo and Juliet—how they gathered weeds in the Coliseum, and cabbaged mosaics from the Baths of Caracalla—how they explored the venerable Alhambra, and were entranced with the exquisite beauty of the Alcazar—how they infested the bazaars of Smyrna, Constantinople, and Cairo—how they "went through" the holy places of Palestine, and left their private mark on every one of them, from Dan unto the Sea of Galilee, and from Nazareth even unto Jerusalem and the Dead Sea—how they climbed the Pyramids of Egypt and swore that Vesuvius was finer than they; that the Sphynx was foolishness to the Parthenon, and the dreamy panorama of the Nile nonsense to the glories of the Bay of Naples. They can tell all about that, and they will—they can boast about all that, but will they tell the secret history of the trip? Catch them at it! They will blow their horns about the thousand places they have visited and get the lockjaw three times a day trying to pronounce the names of them (they never did get any of those names right)—but never, never in the world, will they open the sealed book of the secret history of their memorable pilgrimage. And I won't—for the present, at any rate. Good-bye to the well-meaning old gentlemen and ladies. I bear them no malice, albeit they never took kindly the little irreverent remarks I had occasion to make about them occasionally. We didn't amalgamate—that was all. Nothing more than that. I was exceedingly friendly with a good many of them—eight out of the sixty-five—but I didn't dote on the others, and they didn't dote on me. We were always glad to meet, but then we were just as glad to part again. There was a little difference of opinion between us—nothing more. They thought they could have saved Sodom and Gomorrah, and I thought it would have been unwise to risk money on it. I never failed to make friends on shipboard before—but maybe I was meaner than usual, this trip. Still, I was more placable than they. Every night, in calm or storm, I always turned up in their synagogue, in the after cabin, at seven bells, but they never came near my stateroom. They called it a den of iniquity. But I cared not; there were others who knew it as the home of modest merit. I bear the pilgrims no malice, now, none at all. I did give them a little parting blast in the Herald, this morning, but I only did that just to see the galled jade wince.
People always jump to the conclusion that passengers of diverse natures, occupations and modes of life, thrown together in great numbers on board a ship, must infallibly create trouble and unending dissatisfaction for each other. This idea is wrong. Diverse natures (when they are good, whole-hearted human natures,) blend and dove-tail together on shipboard as neatly as the varicolored fragments of stone in an exquisite mosaic—it is your gang of all-perfection, all-piety, all-economy, all-uncharitableness—like ancient mosaic pavements in the ruins of Rome, the stones all one color, and the cracks between them unpleasantly conspicuous—it is a gang like this that makes a particularly and peculiarly infernal trip. I am tired hearing about the "mixed" character of our party on the Quaker City. It was not mixed enough—there were not blackguards enough on board in proportion to the saints—there was not genuine piety enough to offset the hypocrisy. Genuine piety! Do you know what constitutes a legal quorum for prayer? It is in the Bible: "When two or three are gathered together," etc. You observe the number. It means two (or more) honest, sincere Christians, of course. Well, we held one hundred and sixty-five prayer meetings in the Quaker City, and one hundred and eighteen of them were scandalous and illegal, because four out of the five real Christians on board were too sea sick to be present at them, and so there wasn't a quorum. I know. I kept a record—prompted partly by the old reportorial instinct, and partly because I knew that their proceedings were null and void, and ought not to be allowed to pass without a protest. I had seen enough of Legislatures to know right from wrong, and I was sorry enough to see things going as they were. They never could have stood a call of the house, and they resented every attempt of mine to get one.
But I am wandering from my subject somewhat. I was only going to say that people of diverse natures make the pleasantest companionship in long sea voyages, and people all of one nature and that not a happy one, make the worst. If I were going to start on a pleasure excursion around the world and to the Holy Land, and had the privilege of making out her passenger list, I think I could do it right and yet not go out of California. This thought was suggested by a dream I had a month ago, while this pilgrimage was still far at sea. I dreamed that I saw the following placard posted upon the bulletin boards of San Francisco:
Passenger List
of the Steamer 'Constitution,'
Capt. Ned Wakeman
Which leaves this day on a pleasure excursion around the world, permitting her passengers to stop forty days in London, forty in Vienna, forty in Rome, ten in Geneva, ten in Naples, ten in its surroundings, twenty in Venice, thirty in Florence, fifty in the cities of Spain, two days in Constantinople, half a day in Smyrna, thirty days in St. Petersburg, five months in the Sandwich Islands, six in Egypt, forever in France, and two hours and a half in the Holy Land:
Rev. Dr. Wadsworth,
James Anthony,
Archbishop Alemany,
Paul Morrill,
Rev. Horatio Stebbins,
John William Skae,
Bishop Kip,
T. J. Lamb,
Gen. W. H. French,
Asa Nudd,
Emperor Norton,
Lewis Leland,
Old Ridgeway,
John McComb,
George Parker,
Frank Pixley,
Barry & Patten,
Admiral Jim Smith, late of Hawaiian Navy,
Captain Pease,
Louis Cohn,
Aleck Badlam,
Charles Low,
Colonel Fry,
Jo. Jones,
Pete Hopkins,
General Drum (absent),
Colonel Catherwood,
Squarza, Stiggers' Citizen Sam Platt,
Jim Coffroth,
Frank Soule,
R. B. Swain,
One dozen Doctors, chosen at large,
Five delegates from San Quentin,
And Frank Bret Harte,
George Barnes,
Mark Twain and 300 other newspaper men, in the steerage.
It was a dream, but still it was a dream with wisdom in it. That tribe could travel forever without a row, and preserve each other's respect and esteem. Keep the steerage passengers out of sight, and nothing could be said against the character of the party, either. The list I dreamt of, as above set down, could travel pleasantly. They would certainly make a sensation wherever they went, but they would as certainly leave a good impression behind. And yet this list is made up of all sorts of people, and people of all ages. Against the impressive solemnity of Jim Coffroth, we have the levity of Dr. Wadsworth; against the boisterousness of R. B. Swain, we have the graveyard silence and decorum of Alex. Badlam; against General Drum's fondness for showing military dress, we have the Emperor Norton's antipathy to epaulettes and soldier-buttons; against the reckless gayety of Bishop Kip, we would bring the unsmiling, puritanical straight-lacedness of Anthony & Morrill; against the questionable purity of the five delegates from San Quentin, we would array the bright virtue of the 300 steerage passengers. Such was the pleasure party I saw in my dream. There was a crowd for you that could swing round the circle for six months, and never get home-sick—never fall out—never mope and gossip—never wear out a Napoleon carrying it in their pockets—never show disrespect to honest religion—never bring their nationality into disrepute—never fail to make Europe say, "Lo! these Americans be bricks!"
To Washington
I am going to Washington to-morrow, to stay a month or two—possibly longer. I have a lot of Holy Land letters on the way to you that will arrive some time or other.
Alta California, January 15, 1868
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA]
Prospects of the Hawaiian Treaty—A Model Treaty—Putting Officials Out of the Way—Dark Hints and Surmises—Personal Items—New Postmaster for San Francisco—Office-Seekers
WASHINGTON, December 10, 1867.
I have talked frequently with General McCook, United States Minister to the Sandwich Islands, since I have been here. As you are aware, his business in Washington is to get the reciprocity treaty between Hawaii and this country through the Senate. It has been slow work, and very troublesome, but a fair degree of progress is being made. General McCook has been to Boston, and procured an endorsement of the proposed treaty by the Board of Trade of that city; a similar endorsement by the Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco was received by telegraph a few days ago. These things have aided matters considerably. The Senate Committee, which has the affair in charge, called for a concise statement of the advantages to be gained by the United States through this treaty, and the Minister has furnished, in reply, what seems to me to be an able and convincing paper. Yesterday they demanded minute statistics of the commerce between the two countries, and also a legal opinion as to the constitutionally of the proposed treaty. Gen. McCook has the materials at hand for the commercial estimates, and will immediately prepare them. He asked Associate Justice Field to post him upon the constitutional points of the case, and received a cordial assent at once. Judge Field looked up all the authorities that bear upon it, and delivered the memorandum this morning. This leaves the framing of the legal opinion an easy task, as Gen. McCook was a lawyer before he was a soldier. I think the treaty is doing well, now, and is likely to be happily born before long. The Committee have got the general statistics and will shortly have the particular ones; they will soon have the legal opinion on the constitutional points; they can have Harris' opinion any time, if they want it, because he is here from Honolulu; they have the endorsements of the Boston and San Francisco Chambers of Commerce; the treaty does not conflict with the Plymouth Collection of Hymns, nor the Sunday liquor law. What more these gentlemen can possibly want, is a matter that is beyond human foresight. I do not see why they don't take to it instantly, and with enthusiasm. It has got more statistics and more constitutionality in it than any document in the world. That treaty has grown and grown upon my reverence until, in my eyes, it has become a perfect monument of mathematics and virtue. General McCook is getting a little tired of the delays and vexations of his position—tired of waltzing around the President, the Secretary of State and the Senate Committee with arguments and statistics, but he will see the end of it before he retreats. I have a sort of vague idea that he will begin to taste constitutionality in his food, and smell of statistics before long. In concluding these remarks I will observe that I have not said the treaty is sure to pass; I only say that nothing has been left undone that could conduce to that end, and that success looks very promising.
It seems a curious idea to me, but at the hotel table the other evening I overhead two high Government officials express the opinion—in fact, almost assert—that the Presidents of the United States who have died in office were "put out of the way." They were put out of the way, not by their successors, but by parties seeking contracts or offices who were unpopular with the regular incumbent, but could realize their desires if the Vice-President were to rise to the throne. They did not even imagine for a moment that the Vice-Presidents who succeeded were privy to the taking off, or remotely suspected that it was going to transpire. They said that our form of government offered the same inducement to an ambitious or covetous man to put the President out of the way that is offered by the monarchical form. If he perfectly knew that his fortunes would be advanced by the Vice-President if he were in power, it was a strong temptation to a bad man to procure the taking of the President's life. This conversation was as interesting to me as it was startling. I had never dreamt of such a thing before as a President's sacred life being in danger from the knives and poisons of assassins in times of profound peace. These gentlemen mentioned several curious circumstances that bore upon the subject. They said that for several days before President Taylor was taken sick, a restless, uneasy stranger hung about the White House grounds so much, and acted so singularly as to excite remark. The day the President fell ill, this person was found in his bed room. No one could tell how he got there. His own story was full of contradictions. It was supposed he came there to steal; he was searched, and a curious powder found on his person, which, when removed, proved to be dirt. So there is every reason to believe President Taylor was poisoned.
And then, there was the man—dark, and hairy, and malignant of expression—who was found at midnight under President Harrison's bed. He had a keg of powder with him, and a fuse. Nothing saved the President but this man's stupidity—the providential stupidity of a remark he made, and which betrayed him. He said: "Could your Excellency lend me a match? I can't make these d—d things go." That fortunate piece of carelessness on the stranger's part unquestionably saved the President's life. He confessed afterwards that he was not there for any good purpose; considerations which he would not name, he said, had prompted him to wish that the President were out of the chair. Through anonymous letters he had tried to frighten him out; by the same means he had tried to coax him out; when these had failed, he saw with pain that it was necessary to blast him out. He had come for that purpose; he was sorry it had not succeeded. This man was quietly pardoned and set a liberty, and advised to leave the country. He did not do it, however, and significant circumstances afterward aroused a strong suspicion that he had procured the President's death by poison, through one of the White House servants.
The subject is interesting, notwithstanding the incidents above related have something of an improbable cast about them. That a President's life is always in very great danger, however, is a truth that cannot be doubted. That any President ever died in office by a natural death is a matter that is disbelieved by very wise men in Washington.
Personal.
I have met the California Senators, Messrs. Conness and Cole, and also Hon. Mr. Axtell, of the Lower House. I believe I have nothing special to report concerning them.
I have seen Jump, also. He has just returned from Paris, and is here making caricatures for Frank Leslie's publications.
Mr. Haggin and C. F. Wood are here, and Mr. Chamberlain (late partner of Mr. Hayward, in his mine) was until yesterday. He has gone away on an extensive Southern tour.
General Ance McCook, brother to the Hawaiian Minister resident, is stopping here for a few days. He was formerly an honest miner, and lived at Nevada City. He is very young, but like the other members of the McCook family, made a handsome record during the war.
I came across one of the lions of the country to-day at the Senate—General Sherman. The conversation I had with this gentleman has considerable political significance, and therefore ought to be reported, I suppose. I said the weather was very fine, and he said he had seen finer. Not liking to commit myself further, in the present unsettled condition of politics, I said good morning. Understanding my little game, he said good morning, also. This was all that passed, but it was very significant. It reveals clearly what he thinks of impeachment. I regard this manner of getting at a great man's opinions as a little underhanded, but then everybody does it. People do it every day, as you can see by the papers, and find out as much as I did, and then rush off and publish it.
The Postmaster for San Francisco has been appointed by the President, but I am not at liberty to mention his name. His name will come before the Senate for confirmation shortly. There were twenty-seven applicants for the position.
Speaking of applicants reminds me that the population of Washington, even now, seems to be made up of people who want offices. What must it be when a new President comes in! These office-seekers are wonderfully seedy, wonderfully hungry-eyed, wonderfully importunate, and supernaturally gifted with "cheek." They fasten themselves to influential friends like barnacles to whales, and never let go until they are carried into the pleasant waters of office or scraped off against a protruding hotel bill. Their desires are seldom as modest as their qualifications. There was a fellow here the other day who had been Consul to some starvation unexplored region of South America (we notoriously use only indifferent talent in the stocking of Consulships,) and having graduated in that little business, had come to Washington to beg for the post of Minister to Mexico! Another, who has been Postmaster of some village in Arkansas where they have a mail every four weeks, and it miscarries, then, oftener than it is safely delivered, is here—drawn hither by a report that the Postmaster General intended to resign. He wants the berth! I have only heard of one modest office seeker yet. He came here to apply for the post of Secretary of War, but General Grant was ahead of him there. So he wants to be Governor of Alaska, now. That is a retrograde movement that speaks well for him. It shows a disposition that is competent to adapt itself to circumstances. If any man can enjoy icebergs, this is he; if any man can maintain his serenity in the company of polar bears, this is the person; if any man can sustain the dignity of the Gubernatorial office in spite of such company and such surroundings, this is certainly that man. He ought to be appointed.
A. J. Moulder,
formerly of the San Francisco Herald, was married the other day in Philadelphia, and will shortly arrive here to be chief of the Associated Press for Washington.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, January 21,1868
LETTER FROM "MARK TWAIN"
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA.]
Concerning Government Salaries—Female Clerks—Distribution of the Places—Secretary Seward's Real Estate Bargains—A Shaky Piece of Property—The Sutro Tunnel.
WASHINGTON, December 14, 1867.
Our Government pays the poorest salaries of any first-Power in the world, no doubt. She invites her servants, by poor salaries, to steal; she persuades them, by great opportunities, to steal; she forces them, by the necessity of keeping up some degree of state, and lack of the means to do it with, to steal. With poor salaries, she procures the services of men of second-rate standing and seventeenth-rate ability, and then debauches their little modicum of honesty, and turns them adrift considerably worse than they were before.
Members of the President's Cabinet, heads of all great Departments of the Government, get $8,000 a year—something over $7,000 after the income tax is subtracted. House rent is $2,500 to $3,000; carriage, horses, servants, champagne blow-outs and other necessaries, $6,000 (with purchase of vehicle, etc.); wife, daughters, oysters and other luxuries—well, anything, from $3,000 up to $10,000 a year, according to the style of your wife and the quality of your oysters. These gentlemen of the Cabinet represent the great Ministers of State of a monarchy, and of course are obliged to live in a style somewhat in keeping with the high dignity of their positions. Not one of them can make his salary keep and clothe himself and family a year. Here is a temptation to steal. Have they the opportunity? Probably not one of them is without opportunities, and most seductive ones withal. I am aware of two cases where the head of a Department, by rendering a decision in favor of two great companies, could have profited them to the amount of $7,000,000, and would have received a "present" of a matter of $600,000 for doing it. His decision would have been final—from it there would have been no appeal. The parties benefited would have praised him, the parties not benefited would have abused him; the general public would not have cared much about the matter one way or the other. It was a cruel temptation to set before a man who was striving hard to make his salary support him and not by any means succeeding. The heads of the great Departments are assailed by these dazzling temptations every day. Is not an inadequate salary a bid for corruption? At least is it not a stronger bid than a full belly and a comfortable livelihood would be?
We pay our European Consuls just enough to keep them out of the poorhouse, and then we add an exquisite cruelty to this by giving the majority of them no chance to steal. The necessary consequence is that we get little, cheap pot-house politicians and other people who—are just worth the money, and no more. They are not paid to add to the country's reputation abroad; with the utmost fidelity they don't do it. Great Britain gets better men for such offices, for she pays better prices. She educates her servants, and promotes them as they deserve it. When a French Envoy to Turkey acquits himself well, he becomes a great Minister of State, next. He has that reward before him all the time. When a representative of ours learns, after long experience, how to conduct the affairs of his office, we discharge him and hire somebody that don't know anything about it.
But the clerkship business in Washington seems to me to be the chief wonder of this metropolis. The heads of Departments are harassed by Congressmen to give clerkships to their constituents until they are fairly obliged to consent in order to get a little peace. I heard one of these gentlemen say that if he dared dismiss one-third of his clerical force, he could transact the business of his department infinitely better with the other two thirds. In one or two of these Departments, crowded as they are with officers, everything is at odds and ends, and paper that ought to be found in a moment, by reference to properly kept indexes, is often chased for miles through the vast Circumlocution Office and found at last in a basket of loose documents! I have this from men who have proven it by personal experience.
They tell hard stories about these Departments which employ women. The women tell these things themselves. I will not enter largely into this subject. I will only mention a suggestive conversation said to have occurred lately between a Chief Clerk of a Bureau and a friend of a lady office-seeker. The clerk excused himself—was sorry, etc., but declined to make the appointment.
"But," the gentleman said, "the place is vacant, and I have shown you that the lady is thoroughly competent."
"Competent!—why she is as homely as an oyster!"
This may be a fabrication—I don't know. I only know that the several hundred girls in the Treasury Seraglio and in the other Government harems (I get these terms on the street—they are not mine) average astonishingly well in the matter of youth and beauty. And yet experience teaches us that young and beautiful clerks are seldom the most valuable. Forty-two women applied for a vacant clerkship in one of the Departments, all within three hours, a day or two ago. They were of the oyster style of comeliness; they didn't get the clerkship; whether the one fact were the cause and the other the effect of that cause, is a question I cannot decide. But seriously, very many of the female clerks are faithful to their duties and bear spotless reputations. If a different class creep in, it cannot be helped. The labor they have to perform is better suited to them than to sturdy, able-bodied men, and the Government has done an act that is not more generous than just in extending their sphere of usefulness and their opportunity of earning a livelihood. No man can go into the Departments and pick up hair-pins and gaze upon the beauty there without being kindly disposed toward the innovation.
This brings me easily and comfortably to an interesting feature of this subject. These Departments are crowded with clerks and other small Government fish. Illinois heads the list. She furnishes four hundred and fifty of them! Whenever an official tooth needs filling, Mr. Washburne always stands ready with an Illinois plug, and the thing is done. He is the most inveterate dentist of them all, and the most successful.
Pennsylvania comes next. She furnishes four hundred. Indiana comes next; then Ohio, then Massachusetts, and then the great State of New York! Rhode Island, which is so small that the inhabitants have to trespass on other States when they want to take a walk, furnishes more than the whole Pacific Coast put together. Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Washington Territory furnish twelve, all told. There are plenty of people from those districts who would like well to sit at the official feast, but they cannot get the chance.
But Mr. Newcomb, of Missouri, has just introduced a resolution into Congress, inquiring how many clerks are employed in the various Departments, how long they have held their offices, what salaries they get, and what Congressional Districts they were recommended from. This will make a stir; and if there were an inquiry added of how much these clerks do, and how much they don't do, the stir would become an absolute flutter. As it was, Mr. Washburne jumped to his feet and objected to the measure, and so it had to lie over under the rule. But it will come up again.
All Washington is laughing about our unfortunate purchases of territory. We bought the Island of St. Thomas not long ago. We may have got it at a bargain, for its inhabitants were all dying off with the fevers of the country, and it promised to be nothing more than a cemetery in a little while, and an eligible place to die in. Young Seward was sent down to pay all the property, and the sailors stole all the money while he was ashore. More was procured and the business completed; and then began a series of catastrophes such as never astounded an unsuspecting purchaser before since the world was created. A storm arose, and the sea swept the island as clean as a ship's deck. A few days afterward an earthquake shook it up in a most outrageous way. Before the people had had a chance to recover their tranquillity, a volcano started up in their midst and threatened to hoist them all into eternity. The Secretary of the Navy sent two men-of-war down there to reconnoitre, and another earthquake rushed them ashore and shook half the timbers out of them. For thirty days the unhappy island has been torn and drenched and scorched by earthquakes, by storms, by malignant volcanoes! The inhabitants that are not too sick with fevers to be astonished, are astonished as they never were in all their lives before, and distressed beyond all possible description. Porto Rico is undergoing a similar siege of supernatural disasters, and the people of Washington begin to suspect, from these signs, that we must have purchased Porto Rico too, through some secret treaty that has not yet transpired. Whether the adventures of the St. Thomas purchase have set the Senate against territorial speculations or not, I cannot say, but certainly a number of its members refuse to entertain the idea of paying for our former acquisition—Walrussia. If the Senate should refuse to pay for it, they would do a very absurd thing. To offend so powerful a friend as Russia for the trifle of $7,000,000 would be unwise. Russia, by her simple attitude of friendship, and without lifting a hand, is able to save us from wars with European powers that would eat up the price of Walrussia in four days. But perhaps we had better hold on to that money and buy some more earthquakes with it.
Return of the Sutro Tunnel from Europe.
Mr. A. Sutro, of the great Sutro Tunnel scheme, arrived yesterday from Europe, in the Russia. He brought his tunnel back with him. He failed to sell to the Europeans. They liked the tunnel—they said it was a good tunnel!—they said it was a good tunnel and a long tunnel, and appeared to be a straight tunnel, but that they would look around a little before purchasing; if they could not find a tunnel to suit them nearer home, they would call again. Many capitalists were fascinated with the idea of owning a tunnel, but none wanted such a long tunnel or one that was so far away that they could not walk out, afternoons, and enjoy it. Evidently these Europeans think a tunnel is some kind of a curious ivory-handled ornament suitable for a philopene present.
But seriously, the Europeans said they were afraid of American stocks. That was it. Sutro was received with distinguished courtesy by the savans and official dignitaries of half a dozen nations, and by the chiefs of all the great mines in those countries; he showed his ores and his certified maps and statistics, and astounded them with the wonderful productiveness of the Comstock, a lode they had never heard of, and whose richness and extent they would not have believed but for the attested facts and figures. But they said capital was afraid of American stocks.
Sutro visited all their little mines, and gathered a mass of information which will always be interesting if never useful. In all the mines of Europe he found American pupils. In the great school of mines of Frieberg he found one hundred and four students, and forty-three of them were Americans! This is something of an argument in favor of Senator Stewart's recent bill for the founding of a national mining school in Nevada.
Mr. Sutro is not discouraged about the great tunnel enterprise, but has come straight to Washington to see if he cannot get Congress to grant the corporation some aid, in grants of land or otherwise. Sutro ought to succeed with his great enterprise. Energy and everlasting industry and tenacity like his, deserve a generous success. Any other man would have lost heart and abandoned this thing long before this time.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, January 28, 1868
MARK TWAIN IN WASHINGTON
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA.]
Stealing a March on Congress—Who Was He?—How State Secrets Leak Out—Colonel Parker's Little Difficulty—Hawaiian Harris.
WASHINGTON, December 17.
A week or two ago, Congress was surprised—and incensed as well—to wake up one morning and find that the President's Message was being read in every newspaper in the land, from Rhode Island to California, long before the official document had had an opportunity to reach the clerical desk of the Capitol. Angry speeches were made in both Houses. Members aired their opinions very freely about this breach of confidence, breach of decorum, contempt of Congress, or whatever it might be, and talked of arraigning the reporters and correspondents—talked of punishing the wretch who had forestalled the national legislature—talked vaguely of Presidential leakiness and lack of decorum in the matter. Gentlemen connected with the Associated Press came out in newspaper cards and explained that whatever connection they had had with the affair was fair and honorable—but did not tell how they got hold of the document. Individual correspondents published cards in which they denied being guilty; conventions of correspondents framed similar cards, and all signed and sent them to the Speaker of the House—but still the one guilty man could not be found. He failed to come forward. Everybody knew what he got for the message and who he sold it to, but there all knowledge ceased. Who he was, remained a dark and bloody mystery. A printer was suspected; then a chambermaid of the White House; then a cook—and each of these individuals in turn was a lion in a small way—a mysterious lion that nobody saw but everybody believed in. But it turned out that the chambermaid had left town two weeks before the crime was committed, the printer was in the hospital, deaf, dumb, blind and an idiot, and the cook was dead—been dead a year. At any rate he had been dead some time. These were exciting days. But every sign failed, every suspicion proved at fault. The culprit could not be discovered, and so, reluctantly, the search was discontinued, and the wonder passed from the public mind.
But, behold, only a few days ago, when the people knew that a message from the President was to go to the Senate, to be acted upon in secret session, (a message concerning Mr. Stanton's removal), and everybody, Senators and all, were full of curiosity as to what its character would be, out bursts an elaborate synopsis of the document in the newspapers! And not only that, but on the day appointed for the session, and before any Senator had had a chance to hear the official message read, the document in full made its appearance in the public press! Congress was puzzled more than ever. The people were surprised almost as much as they were gratified. Now, how can such things be, and overcome us like a summer's dream, without our special wonder? There is mystery all about us. There are dreadful leaks somewhere in the old Ship of State. Dozens of people know (they don't tell how,) who is to be appointed to an office, days before the appointment is made—weeks before it is sent to the Senate for action. Synopses of evidence in great secret inquests are published long before the Government is ready to make them public. Intentions of the heads of the Government that will affect the gold market are known in Wall street long enough before those intentions are done into deeds to enable the brokers to buy gold or sell it, as the case shall demand. Now, who is the man? That is the question. Speaking of these things reminds me of an incident of old-time newspaper enterprise. It will dovetail into this theme very well. It is true in every particular. I get it from excellent authority.
How a Mystery was Solved.
During Mr. Madison's Administration the President and the Cabinet were periodically astonished to find all their little secret state affairs faithfully reported in a certain New York paper, two or three days after they had transpired—this was in the old times, when stage-coaches were used, you will remember. If a line of policy was determined on, in secret council, the facts appeared in that paper without fail; if a foreign Minister's conduct was criticised; if somebody was to be turned out of office; if the conduct of Congress was overhauled; if the most private and important matters affecting foreign relations were discussed—no matter, it was all fish for that New York newspaper's net; and somehow it all found its way there. And what was particularly surprising, was the accuracy and attention to minute details displayed in these mysterious reports. At first prying servants were suspected, but when it was remembered that even long conversations had been reported, word for word, and at a time when no servant was present, that idea was cast away as absurd. The upshot of it was, that a coolness ensued in the Cabinet. The President began to suspect his great advisers, and they began to suspect him. Things came to such a pass that these gentlemen sat coldly at the Cabinet meetings, with important public matters distressing their minds, yet not daring to speak out freely and honestly, lest some Judas in the party should print his words in that haunting friend of a newspaper. Matters could not go on in this way. Neither human nature nor governmental nature could bear it. At last, one fortunate day, in the midst of one of these dreary silences of the Cabinet, the mystery was revealed; a suppressed sneeze was heard beyond a door that was there present—a door that had been unused and triple-locked for years! Every man sprang to his feet; an armorer was summoned to unfasten the door; and when it swung open, lo, a well known stenographer, named Davis, was exposed, wedged into a recess in the wall, taking notes!
The wall was very thick, and the recess in it had a door opening into the Cabinet Council room, and another opening into an unused ante-room. Both doors had been locked for several years, everybody supposed. Davis had procured a key, and, by feeing a servant, had gained admission to the recess from the ante-room. For a long time he had been in the habit of getting himself locked into this place early in the morning, and remaining there until the Cabinet business was finished. Terrible threats were made, and there was talk of making an example of him; but Davis tranquilly invited them to show wherein he had been guilty of misdemeanor, manslaughter, or any other grave offence against the law, and they—let him go. It was all they could do. He had the weather-gauge of them.
Col. Eli Parker, of Gen. Grant's staff, was to have married an accomplished young lady of distinguished family in this city yesterday morning, but the wedding did not come off, owing to the mysterious disappearance of the bridegroom on Saturday night. It is feared that he has met with foul play. Parker was a favorite with Gen. Grant, and was with him all through the war. Great preparations had been made for the wedding; cards were issued for it; cards were also issued for receptions here and in New York; an extensive bridal tour had been mapped out; General Grant was to have given away the bride in the presence of a large and select company. The company was duly assembled at the appointed time. The General was ready. Everybody waited—waited—waited. The slow minutes dragged heavily along, the guests wondered, the bride grew distressed. Still the bridegroom did not come. The party broke up at last, and went home.
Up to this time, more than three days, Col. Parker has not been found or heard of. The last that was seen of him, he went to Gen. Grant's house on Saturday night to borrow a military scarf to add to his wedding outfit. Mrs. Grant brought three downstairs; he selected one, and went away, and has not since been seen. Col. Parker was an educated, cultivated gentleman—a thorough gentleman—and therefore no one suspects him of carelessness or criminal intent in this matter. His name is perhaps familiar to your readers. It has long been a noted one. He was an Indian and a Chief; and by the same token a lineal descendant of old Red Jacket, the friend of Washington. A sketch of his own career and that of his great ancestor was published in Harper's Monthly two or three years ago. He was with Grant, and in his confidence, all through the war, and made a brave record for himself. [Col. Parker subsequently turned up, and the marriage was duly consummated.—EDS. ALTA.]
Harris is here yet. Harris is Lord High Minister of Finance to the King of the Sandwich Islands when he is at home and it don't rain. But he is "His Royal Hawaiian Majesty's Envoy to the United States" now, and no man is sorrier than I am that his wages are stopped for the present. I met him and conversed with him at the house of a mutual friend a night or two ago, and that is how I happen to know how to spell his title all the way through without breaking my neck over any of the corduroy syllables. I never saw Harris so pleasant and companionable before. He is really very passable company, until he tries to be funny, and then Harris is ghastly. He smiles as if he had his foot in a steel trap and did not want anybody to know it. I can forgive that person anything but his jokes—but those, never. While Harris continues to joke there will be a malignant animosity between us that no power can mollify.
Harris' business here is to get our Government to remove our man-of-war from the Sandwich Island waters. To give this enterprising devil his due, he has done everything he possibly could do to accomplish his mission, and it was ungraceful in the King to stop his salary. He could not accomplish it and I suppose nobody could. It is a good place out there for a man-of-war; she is not doing any harm; she is not going to do any harm; and until a fair, reasonable reason is given for banishing her, she will remain. In placing her there, no offence whatever was meant to the King or the country, any more than we mean to offend the Sultan when we anchor a frigate in the harbor of Smyrna.
I have missed Harris during the last day or two. I wonder what is become of him. I grieve to see a man fail in an honest endeavor; and now that his King has turned against him, I even wish that Harris could succeed in his mission.
Personal.
Governor Curry, of Oregon, is here, at Willard's. General Kiernan, recently United States Consul to some port in China, called a day or two ago. He spoke of his intention of delivering an address before the New York and Boston Chamber of Commerce concerning the great and growing importance of our trade with China. I hear that he wishes to be Minister of Mexico. His ambition ought to be realized. Those people down there are of a kind to keep a man moving around pretty lively, and General Kiernan is accustomed to travelling. I suppose he has learned how to pack his trunk and dictate his will at the same time. If he went to Mexico, though, I should think it would be a good idea to go "flying light"—put his will on record and travel without any baggage at all.
Senator Stewart's family sailed for France last week.
I was at a dinner in the early part of the week, given by Mr. Henry D. Cook, to the Newspaper Correspondents' Club, of Washington, where Ben. Perly Poore, a noted writer, said something which gave offence to General Boynton, late of the Army, but now of the press, and yesterday the parties quarrelled in the ante-room of the House reporters' gallery. A duel was talked of all day, but I hear to-night that Mr. Poore has apologized. It is a great pity. I never have seen a dead reporter.
A. D. Richardson is making a fortune out of his last book, "The Mississippi and Beyond." He and Swinton ("Twelve Decisive Battles.") have published the most saleable books, I believe, that have issued from the press this year. MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, February 5, 1868
MARK TWAIN IN WASHINGTON
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA.]
The Great Dickens—An Honest Criticism—Political Gossip—Caning the President—Winter Festivities—Jump in Washington.
WASHINGTON, January 11th.
I only heard him read once. It was in New York, last week. I had a seat about the middle of Steinway Hall, and that was rather further away from the speaker than was pleasant or profitable.
Promptly at 8 P.M., unannounced, and without waiting for any stamping or clapping of hands to call him out, a tall, "spry," (if I may say it,) thin-legged old gentleman, gotten up regardless of expense, especially as to shirt-front and diamonds, with a bright red flower in his button-hole, gray beard and moustache, bald head, and with side hair brushed fiercely and tempestuously forward, as if its owner were sweeping down before a gale of wind, the very Dickens came! He did not emerge upon the stage—that is rather too deliberate a word—he strode. He strode—in the most English way and exhibiting the most English general style and appearance—straight across the broad stage, heedless of everything, unconscious of everybody, turning neither to the right nor the left—but striding eagerly straight ahead, as if he had seen a girl he knew turn the next corner. He brought up handsomely in the centre and faced the opera glasses. His pictures are hardly handsome, and he, like everybody else, is less handsome than his pictures. That fashion he has of brushing his hair and goatee so resolutely forward gives him a comical Scotch-terrier look about the face, which is rather heightened than otherwise by his portentous dignity and gravity. But that queer old head took on a sort of beauty, bye and bye, and a fascinating interest, as I thought of the wonderful mechanism within it, the complex but exquisitely adjusted machinery that could create men and women, and put the breath of life into them and alter all their ways and actions, elevate them, degrade them, murder them, marry them, conduct them through good and evil, through joy and sorrow, on their long march from the cradle to the grave, and never lose its godship over them, never make a mistake! I almost imagined I could see the wheels and pulleys work. This was Dickens—Dickens. There was no question about that, and yet it was not right easy to realize it. Somehow this puissant god seemed to be only a man, after all. How the great do tumble from their high pedestals when we see them in common human flesh, and know that they eat pork and cabbage and act like other men.
Mr. Dickens had a table to put his book on, and on it he had also a tumbler, a fancy decanter and a small bouquet. Behind him he had a huge red screen—a bulkhead—a sounding-board, I took it to be—and overhead in front was suspended a long board with reflecting lights attached to it, which threw down a glory upon the gentleman, after the fashion in use in the picture-galleries for bringing out the best effects of great paintings. Style!—There is style about Dickens, and style about all his surroundings.
He read David Copperfield. He is a bad reader, in one sense—because he does not enunciate his words sharply and distinctly—he does not cut the syllables cleanly, and therefore many and many of them fell dead before they reached our part of the house. [I say "our" because I am proud to observe that there was a beautiful young lady with me—a highly respectable young white woman.] I was a good deal disappointed in Mr. Dickens' reading—I will go further and say, a great deal disappointed. The Herald and Tribune critics must have been carried away by their imaginations when they wrote their extravagant praises of it. Mr. Dickens' reading is rather monotonous, as a general thing; his voice is husky; his pathos is only the beautiful pathos of his language—there is no heart, no feeling in it—it is glittering frostwork; his rich humor cannot fail to tickle an audience into ecstasies save when he reads to himself. And what a bright, intelligent audience he had! He ought to have made them laugh, or cry, or shout, at his own good will or pleasure—but he did not. They were very much tamer than they should have been.
He pronounced Steerforth "St'yaw-futh." This will suggest to you that he is a little Englishy in his speech. One does not notice it much, however. I took two or three notes on a card; by reference to them I find that Pegotty's anger when he learned the circumstance of Little Emly's disappearance, was "excellent acting—full of spirit;" also, that Pegotty's account of his search for Emly was "bad;" and that Mrs. Micawber's inspired suggestions as to the negotiation of her husband's bills, was "good;" (I mean, of course, that the reading was;) and that Dora the child-wife, and the storm at Yarmouth, where Steerforth perished, were not as good as they might have been. Every passage Mr. D. read, with the exception of those I have noted, was rendered with a degree of ability far below what his reading reputation led us to expect. I have given "first impressions." Possibly if I could hear Mr. Dickens read a few more times I might find a different style of impressions taking possession of me. But not knowing anything about that, I cannot testify.
They import wines from Europe, now, into New York, and sell them for California wines. That is complimentary, isn't it? The California wines seem to be well liked in the East here, but they cannot compete in price with the bogus article from the Old World. They told me in New York that once, lately, the market was so overstocked with the latter that a cargo of genuine California had to be shipped back—it was worth more in San Francisco than it would bring on this side. This Italian stuff can be sold wholesale in New York at twelve cents a gallon after freights and duties are paid, a wine merchant tells me. It don't cost anything to call it California wine, and it sells better, and so they christen it accordingly.
All of a sudden the President has grown mightily in favor, and everybody that can raise money enough buys a present for him and goes up to the White House and inflicts it on him. I believe he has received eleven different kinds of canes in the last three weeks. He got one from that same old inexhaustible Charter Oak, day before yesterday. Do you suppose that that relic will ever give out? They have already taken more wood out of it than would build a couple of steamboats, but still it holds out.
It all comes from the fact that the Democracy are talking pretty freely of running the President for reelection. About six others are talked of, and so it mixes a man up a good deal as to who he ought to send canes to. Such as are able, supply the whole gang, which is probably the safest thing to do. Mr. Johnson is willing to be reelected. In fact he is working hard for the nomination. If you will notice the papers for a short time back, you will observe that he is getting his "consistency" record up as well as possible. He is showing that the same political virtues that made him the people's choice for Vice-President are still undimmed, and in sufficiently good repair to make a proper and righteous Chief Magistrate of him.
Jump, the caricaturist, of San Francisco, is here as artist for Frank Leslie's. He has made a water-color sketch of Pennsylvania Avenue, which is attracting a deal of attention. It hangs in the window of the principal bookstore, and has a cluster of amused folks around it all the time. It has twenty or thirty portraits in it. This is just the city for Jump, where the faces of the nation's distinguished men are so familiar. In this picture he has portraits of Seward, Welles, Banks, Spinner, Horace Greeley, General Butler, Charles Sumner, Grant, Sherman, Stanton and others, whose features are well know everywhere. The execution is excellent, and the hits are good.
Jump recently married a handsome young lady in New York.
Festivities, Etc.
The receptions, weekly, at the President's, Mr. Colfax's and others of the great officers of the Government are getting under full blast now, and are beginning to make this slow town look sociable. They had a grand Eighth of January banquet at the Metropolitan Hotel night before last, a purely Democratic celebration, with the President of the United States at the head of it. It is said that a good many things were said there, but, according to Riley, the best was the unstudied effort of a negro waiter. He said, "Dey didn't talk 'bout nuffin but nigger—dey 'bused de nigger all de time—but dey didn't none of 'em give us a cent!"
The Newspaper Correspondents' Club will have its annual banquet this evening, and a royal affair it will be. The boys have been making great preparations for it for some time. They tell me I am expected to respond to the regular toast to Woman. I don't care whether I am expected or not—I shall respond anyhow. It is my best hold. On all occasions, whenever woman is mentioned, I am ready to make a statement.
I delivered a lecture here night before last—a new lecture. It went off well, but it was only a happy accident that it did, for there was nobody to attend to business. The newspapers are all exceedingly kid and complimentary, but one of them published a synopsis of the discourse. I was sorry for that, although it was so well meant, because one never feels comfortable, afterward, repeating a lecture that has been partly printed; and worse than that, people don't care about going to hear what they can buy in a newspaper for less money. I beg that the Coast papers will not print any synopsis of my sermons they may find floating around.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, February 11, 1868
MARK TWAIN IN WASHINGTON
[DELAYED LETTER]
The Presidential Question—The Hancock Vote of Thanks—Washington Message—British Impudence—The Prince of Wales—Good Advice to a Senator—Sundry Items.
WASHINGTON, December 23rd [1867]
The President and Vice President.
EDITORS ALTA: The high and growing consideration in which the Pacific States are held here is evidenced in the fact that both of the great political parties seem to have an idea that a candidate for President or Vice President, in the next canvas, ought to be selected from that part of the country. The latest political gossip is to the effect that Senator Nye may chance to be the Republican nominee for Vice President.
Then, on the Democratic side of the fence, Judge Field, of California, is talked of more and more every day in connection with the Presidency of the United States. Indeed, there is no question that a movement in his favor has been going on quietly over a wide extent of country; and that, without a mention in the newspapers, hardly, as a candidate, he probably stands foremost in the list of candidates to-day. The Democrats are aware that to run a race with General Grant, with any hope of success, they must bring out a competitor that is sound in wind and limb; flaws that were merely damaging in the days of Pierce and Polk would be damning now. They have decided that there is a bill to be filled, and that that bill must be utterly and completely filled, even to the last item. They must have a man whose record as a Union man is unblemished; whose record as a war man is spotless; and one whose conservatism cannot be gain-said. Thus far, Judge Field is the only man they have found who fills this bill. He was a war man and a Union man; his decisions on the test oath and the decrees of the military commissions are quoted in proof of his conservatism. The test oath decision untied the hands of the lawyers all over the South, and restored to them the privilege of earning a livelihood. This secures to him a friendship of unquestionable value. Ultra peace men like Pendleton and Vallandigham are no longer considered at all available by the Democracy—in the peculiar language of Democracy, "that cat won't fight." McClellan destroyed many Southern Democrats with bullets and cold steel, and embittered the lives and wore out the patience of many more with waiting for him to make up his mind to being to commence to get ready to make a start to ultimately do something at some dim, indefinite time or other. Therefore McClellan will not do. General Hancock fought; and more than this, he hung Mrs. Surratt. Hancock will hardly do. Nasby will not do. Nasby's Democracy is too genuine and too straightforward in these piping times of policy. At this present moment—not next week, but at this present moment—Judge Field stands fairest on the Democratic list of names for the Presidency. Whether it will remain so to the end, or whether expediency shall displace him for another man conceived to be still more available, is a thing which modern prophecy may not hope to determine.
The President's Last.
The President's last communication, asking Congress to vote a compliment to Gen. Hancock, has provoked some comment. And not without reason. It glorifies a servant of the Government!—a subordinate of the glorifier, the supreme head of the nation's military forces—for what? Simply for magnanimously conceding to citizens of New Orleans rights which are guaranteed to every citizen of the United States by the Constitution! Has a faithful discharge of imperative duty become so rare a thing in the land that its occurrence is matter for glorification? Is it so rare that it astonished the President of the United States and makes him haste to call public attention to the wonder? Is a discharge of duty become so sublime an event that Congress and the President must celebrate it with a national hurrah? Truly, it seems so. But the President loves to be known as the "Defender of the Constitution;"—it is possible that this is the first time his defence of it has resulted in a success? The whole affair is funny, when you come to look squarely at it.
Congress has not yet voted the thanks the President requested for Hancock. There is a reason, but it has not leaked into print yet, I believe; nor yet into common conversation. But that reason is a potent one, and may possibly hold back the vote of thanks for all time. The facts, as they exist behind the scenes are these: The message and the suggested thanks were intended to do duty as electioneering guns for Gen. Hancock. The Republicans had no interest in their success in that capacity. So it transpired that two resolutions of thanks were drawn up and canvassed by the two political parties in the House. One of these resolutions killed the other before either ever came up for action. One resolution offered the thanks of Congress for the General's faithful discharge of his onerous duties in New Orleans. The other read:
"And be it further Resolved, That the grateful acknowledgments of Congress are also tendered to Gen. Hancock for his able and efficient services in superintending the execution of Mrs. Surratt!"
The Democrats concluded that the vote of thanks which was to have been such a fine stroke of strategy in behalf of the President's candidate had better perish unexpressed than go forth with this appalling compliment dangling to it.
Cannot the California Legislature manage somehow to give to that variety of trees which we delight to call the "Washingtonia," a name which will stick?—a name which the nations will receive?—a name which even England will respect? Of all the "cheek" that ever I heard of, the information that England (and through her, Europe,) has abolished the title "Washingtonia," conferred upon the Big Trees by America, and renamed them "Wellingtonia," does strike me as the sublimest effrontery that has transpired recently. That is English, all over. After Dr. Kane, steadily and surely destroying his life in a search among polar icebergs for a lost Englishman, yet doing it earnestly and unselfishly, came back a dying man, and showed the great English savans his map of the notable discoveries he had made in those mysterious solitudes of the north, they showed their gratitude for the suffering he had endured for the behest of an Englishman, and their appreciation of his great services in behalf of science and the enlargement of the world's knowledge, by scratching his American names from his discoveries and substituting the names of a gang of British bloods and princes! It was eminently English. Wherever they can stick a name so that it shall glorify anything pertaining to England, there they stick it. You never hear of an Englishman speak of the Hawaiian Islands—no, he calls them the Sandwich Islands; Cook discovered them second-hand, by following a Spanish chart three hundred years old, which is still in the British Museum, and named them for some one-horse Earl of Sandwich, that nobody had heard of before, and hasn't since—a man that probably never achieved any work that was really gorgeous during his earthly mission, excepting his invention for confining a slice of ham between two slices of bread in such a manner as to enable even the least gifted of our race to eat bread and meat at the same time, without being bewildered by too elaborate a conjunction of ideas. I suppose, if the real truth were known, some foreigner invented the Sandwich, but England gave it a name, in her usual cheerful fashion. They never even speak of the whale that swallowed Jonah merely as a whale, but as the Prince of Wales. They think it suggests that he was an English whale. If he was that, that is sufficient. That covers up any probable flaws in his character. It is nothing to them that he went about gobbling up the prophets wherever he found them; it is nothing that he interfered with their business—nothing that he put them to infinite delay, discomfort and annoyance; it is nothing that he disgorged prophets in such a condition, as to personal appearance, that they might well feel a delicacy about preaching in a strange city. No—being an English whale was sufficient to make this infamous conduct excusable; and being English, they are willing to let the "great fish" pass for a whale, notwithstanding a whale's throat is not large enough to let a man go down. But to come back to the original question, cannot the California Bear make the British Lion put down our bone? or are the bears in our coat-of-arms too busy grabbing the potatoes the Goddess of Liberty is spilling out of her sack?
I telegraphed you a morsel of Washington gossip, to-day, to the effect that Mr. Casserly is not eligible to the U.S. Senate for the same reason that General Shields was not, in his day—namely, that he has not been an American long enough.
Premising that this gossip may be without foundation, and that Mr. Casserly may yet take his seat in the Senate, I wish to give him some fatherly advise, viz.:
That he ought to come by the Isthmus and collect mileage around the Horn.
He ought not to spend millions in the purchase of volcanoes and earthquakes, and then "retrench" by cutting off the Senate's stationery supplies.
He ought not to keep mean whiskey at his rooms and tell his constituents it is forty years old.
He ought not to draw a salary for his pet Newfoundland dog, under the name and style of "Clerk of the Senate Committee on So-forth and So-forth.
He ought not to get the handsome girls places in the Treasury Department, and tell all the homely ones the places are full.
He ought not to palm off old speeches from the Congressional Globe for 1832 as original, for behold, old speeches are even a more shameless fraud than new whiskey.
He ought not to shirk important votes and then plead those threadbare "sick relatives" in expiation and explanation. Something fresh must be tried—sick relatives are regarded as wild-cat, now.
He ought to write a signature that another man can read, without direct inspiration from heaven.
And finally, let him never make a speech until he has something to say. This last is about the hardest advice to follow that could be offered to a Senator, perhaps.
Miscellaneous.
A. D. Richardson is here, writing a biography of General Grant.
Mary Harris, the young woman who shot her former lover, a Treasury Clerk, named Burroughs, eighteen months ago, was acquitted on the plea of insanity. The Insane Asylum report, just published, establishes that she has been insane ever since. Once she got out of bed in the night and broke up all her furniture, and on another occasion she tried to stab a man and did succeed in cutting his clothes. She manifests a strong disposition to commit suicide, and she says she has no desire to live.
John C. Fremont has brought suit for the restoration of stock in the Union Pacific Railway of six million dollars, par value, which he alleges he put into Edward Leonard's hands, with the stipulation that it should not be sold until the plaintiff was paid $225,000. He alleges that Leonard has violated the contract and sold the stock.
By the report of the Superintendent of Colored Schools for the cities of Washington and Georgetown, it appears that there are, in all, 55 free colored schools, 57 teachers, 2,748 pupils—average attendance, daily, 2,500.
The following said to be from a Western paper, is going the rounds:
"KIPOO, nov the 24 1867
"Deer Zur: Kin you inform me wheather nigger suphrage Was carried at the late lection. If such ignernat pepul is to voat I want to leav this God forsaking State and go back to Suthern illinois.
"Yrs trooly." [Twain used this in Huckleberry Finn in the person of Huck's 'Pap' who vowed "I'll never (hic)vote again." Ed.]
Miss Adelaid Phillips arrived here to-day. She is with Madame La Grange's opera troupe.
The Christian Statesman, a Philadelphia religious paper, is lending all its energies to the solution of the question, "Is alcohol food?" The editor could save himself a deal of trouble by tarrying in Washington a spell.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, February 14, 1868
MARK TWAIN IN WASHINGTON
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA]
Fernando Wood's Speech, and Censure by the House—A California Humbug Abroad—General Grant Receives His Friends—Some of the Notables—Political Portents.
WASHINGTON, January 16th.
The Wood-Cutters.
I stepped into the reporters' gallery of the House of Representatives, yesterday, just as Fernando Wood rose to begin a speech, which is famous all over the land, from here to the Pacific, this morning. I thought, from the tone of his remarks, that he was nearing a precipice, and that he would say something directly, in all human probability, that would pitch him off it. But as usual, the members of Congress all about the House were reading papers, or holding private conversations with each other (it is a favorite swindle of theirs, to pretend they are not listening, no matter who is speaking,) and nobody seemed to be paying any attention to Mr. Wood. But they were paying attention, though—the strictest attention. As he proceeded, they began to start occasionally, and sometimes to wince very perceptibly. They found it hard to keep up their counterfeited indifference. And when at last that sentence fell from the speaker's lips that closed with the reckless words:
"The most infamous of the many infamous acts of this infamous Congress,"—about a hundred of those listless Congressmen sprang suddenly to their feet! The speaker's gavel struck.
It was a fine sensation. There were hundreds of people in the galleries, and they stretched their necks forward to see, while all that could, crowded down to the front seats. A score of voices shouted "Order!" The body of members who had risen remained standing, while Mr. Bingham, of Ohio, who seemed to have been the first upon his feet, stated his point of order, to wit, that Mr. Wood's words were a gross insult to the House, etc. In accordance with the rule, the language objected was written down and sent to the Clerk to be read. The Chair ruled that such language was out of order. The final question was then put, "Shall the member be allowed to proceed in order?" [Cries of "No! no!" from every part of the House, Mr. Wood still standing in his place meanwhile.] A vote immediately settled it that he could not proceed. It was moved that he be censured, and publicly reprimanded before the bar of the House. Kerr, of Indiana, moved to lay the motion on the table. [Cries of "No!—no!—put it to a vote!—call the ayes and nays!"] The motion to table was lost; the motion to censure was carried, by 114 ayes to 39 nays, amid great excitement. At the command of the Speaker, Mr. Wood then walked calmly down to the foot of the aisle, and while he was censured and reprimanded, no sound disturbed the stillness of the House but the Speaker's voice. The culprit was ordered to his seat, and went back and took it as comfortably as if he had done his country some mighty service and was entirely satisfied with his performance. He was told that the properest reparation he could now make would be to offer his explanation and a full apology to the House. He simply rose and said he had no explanation to make. ["Then sit down!" came from twenty voices, and he sat down.] A suggestion was now made by someone that he be allowed to go on with his speech, but it was received with a storm of "Noes!"
I am perfectly satisfied that Mr. Wood had already said all he wanted to say—that he had come to the House all prepared to heave that bombshell into its midst, and never expecting to be allowed to go any further. It was a coup d'etat, which had for its object to gain the applause of the Democracy of the nation—it was a brilliant piece of strategy, a purposed martyrdom of himself for political capital—a bid for reelection, or for the Vice Presidency—even the Presidency itself, possibly, for what that presumptuous and unprincipled old political hack would not aim at is unknown to human knowledge. He played for what he considered would be a valuable notoriety. He cared nothing about the expense. I think his speech was finished.
This serene old humbug still infests the Eastern cities. A year ago he was looking very seedy, but latterly his lines have fallen in pleasanter places, and he crops out occasionally in his fullest San Francisco bloom, and displays his legs on the street corners for the admiration of the ladies. In Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington and New York, he drives a brisk trade in the sale of his own photographs at 25 cents apiece—especially in New York, where nothing whatever is totally unsalable, I think. Washington II. had "cheek" enough before the Pacific Coast had yet come to mourn his loss, but he has more of it now. When it was proposed to tear down the old Wm. Penn mansion in Philadelphia to make room for some modern improvements, he actually had the effrontery to carry around a petition praying the authorities to let it stand, or confer it on him, during life, on account of his resemblance to Washington, Franklin and two or three others of America's great men. He had his photograph taken standing pensively by Franklin's grave, with a bust of Franklin in his arms, and laurel wreaths encircling his own and the brows of the bust. The idea was not a bad one, for the pictures sell well. As Washington failed to get the Penn mansion, it is said that he proposed to ask Congress to give him the Washington Monument. Congress might as well do it, for the ungainly old chimney that goes by that name is of no earthly use to anybody else, and certainly is not in the least ornamental. It is just the general size and shape, and possesses about the dignity, of a sugar-mill chimney. It may suit the departed George Washington—I don't know. He may think it is pretty. It may be a comfort to him to look at it out of the clouds. He may enjoy perching on it to look around upon the scene of his earthly greatness, but it is not likely. It is not likely that any spirit would be so taken with that lumbering thing as to want to roost there. It is an eyesore to the people. It ought to be either pulled down or built up and finished; and if neither of these is to be done, it ought to be turned over to one or the other of our Washingtons the Second, viz, Uncle Freddy Coombs or General Hancock—the former, Washington II by his own election, and the latter created the "Second Washington" by Andrew Johnson, in his curious Hancock Message to Congress.
We went there, last night, to see what these great receptions are like. A crowd of carriages was arriving, and a procession of gentlemen and ladies pouring in at the door. We found a "good house" within, already, but evidently the reception had not begun. A band of uniformed Dutchmen were playing brass instruments, and ladies were flitting about from parlor to parlor like the little busy bee that improves each shining hour. We removed overcoats, up-stairs, where the gentlemen were corralled, and at the proper time followed down with the rest. General and Mrs. Grant stood in one of the back parlors, and the people were filing past them and shaking hands. At intervals, some lady or gentleman well known to them, halted for a moment and spoke a few words, and occasionally some lout that did not know as much as a large dictionary stopped to say the dozen sentences he had gotten by heart for the occasion—and he always got pushed along by the crowd, and never had a chance to finish them; then he felt awkward, and backed on somebody's feet, and turned to apologize and lowly bowed his head into somebody's intervening back, and at the same moment stepped on somebody else's toes—and so, butting, and crushing, and apologizing, he would shortly be swallowed from sight in the crowd. I stood against the wall, close by, and watched the reception ceremony for an hour, and I cannot tell when I enjoyed anything so much. Poor, modest, bored, unhappy Grant stood smileless, anxious, alert, with every faculty of his mind intensely bent upon the business before him, and nervously seized each hand as it came, and while he gave it a single shake, looked not upon its owner, but threw a quick look-out for the next. And if for a moment his hand was left idle, his arm hung out from his body with a curve that was suggestive of being ready for business at a moment's notice. And so he seized each hand, passed it on, grabbed for the next, passed it, grabbed again, with his soul in his work and that absorbed anxiety in his eye; and it reminded me irresistibly of a new hand catching bricks—a new hand that was full of misgivings; fearful that he might make a miss, but determined to catch every brick that came, or perish in the attempt. He is not a large man; he is a particularly plain-looking man; his hair is straight and lustreless, his head is large, square of front and perpendicular in the rear, where the selfish organs of the head lie; he is less handsome than his pictures, and his face, at this time, at any rate, lacked the satisfied, self-possessed look one sees in them; he is broad of beam, and his uniform sat as awkwardly upon him as if he had never been in it before.
General Grant had all my sympathies—I had none for the visitors. The stylishly dressed old stagers who had been at receptions before, and knew all about them, moved complacently up, with many a smirk and stately obeisance, shook hands, laughed pleasantly, said a word, and swept on, composedly—perfectly well satisfied with themselves. But the towering boys from the interior, with a kind of human vegetable look about them, and a painful air of discomfort about their gloved hands and their unfamiliar Sunday clothes, were in a constant flutter of uneasiness; they seized the General's hand, gave it a wring and dropped it suddenly, as if it had been hot, then staggered, in a bewildered way, discovered Mrs. Grant, came to the scratch again, got tangled as to the etiquette of the business, thrust out a paw, drew it back, thrust it out again, snatched it back once more, bent down, far down, in a portentous salaam, and then reeled away giddily and ground somebody's foot to pulp under their responsible No. 13's. Every one of them came with his mind made up as to what he was going to do and say, and then forgot it all, failed to do it or say it either.
Bye and bye the parlors were crowded. Old Dowagers were there with marketable daughters; little maids in the blushing diffidence of girlhood; imperious dames of the F. F. V. in the imposing costumes of a former generation; chattering young ladies of fashion, with elaborately painted faces and uncovered bosoms; General officers in uniform; foreign Ministers with orders upon their breasts; gold-laced naval heroes; and half a dozen young masculine noodles in white kids a size too small, scarf-pins that were dazzling, claw-hammers without dust or wrinkle, hair fearfully and wonderfully done up, and faces whereon were written—nothing. About one-half the company had the old complaint—they could not think of anything to say—they could not determine upon an attitude that was satisfactory to them—they did not know what on earth to do with their hands. They were an aimless, uneasy, unhappy lot, and deserved compassion.
General Sheridan was there—a little bit of a round-headed, broad-breasted, short-legged young Irishman, with hair cropped down to plush on his large, ungainly head, and with nothing in him that is in his features save the bright spirit that is in his eye and the bravery that is in his lip. He is very homely. And Seward was present also, with his splendid beak, and a scar and an ugly protuberance on his port cheek that come of the murderous attempt upon his life the night Mr. Lincoln was shot. The reception was still under headway and Grant was still wearily "shaking" the old crowds and shaking hands with the new ones when we departed. His gloves that were so white and smooth at first, were worn and soiled and greasy then. His exhausting watch was only half over—it was but little after nine o'clock.
More Sensations.
The most exciting one is the Senate's coup d'etat in the Stanton matter yesterday. Before the President could make a move to prevent it, General Grant had resigned the portfolio and Stanton was in possession of the War Department. Ever since then the air has been thick with rumors of what the President was going to do, but nothing has yet transpired of a startling nature. "Data," of the Baltimore Sun, who speaks always "by authority," (he being the President's Private Secretary,) has published a paragraph in his correspondence which would make it appear that Mr. Johnson thinks Grant took snap judgment on him; the suggestion is that the President had an explicit understanding with Grant that he was not to give up the War Office to Stanton without first consulting with the Chief Magistrate upon the subject—yet about the first the President heard of the surrender of the portfolio was from Grant's official notification of the fact. General Grant's statement, published to-day, is to the effect that he has acted precisely as he told the President he would act, and has not acted in bad faith with him.
There is talk among Congressmen of bringing up impeachment again if the President refuses to recognize Mr. Stanton as Secretary of War—it having been stated that the President meant to adopt such a course.
General McClernand has published a card abusive of Badeau, Grant's biographer, and reflecting upon Grant himself—saying among other things, that through Grant's interference, he was lately prevented from getting an office under Government. Grant denies these things also. And immediately McClernand's name is sent to the Senate for the ministry to Mexico. It looks very like the President and General Grant would fall out next. It is considered by all, that the country is at this moment struggling through the greatest crisis that has ever come upon her since her birth; and all men are troubled, sorely troubled, to know what fate is in store for her. For the past few days the strongly radical papers have been praising the rampant attitude of Congress, and urging it to continue in the same spirit till the victory is won; the milder Republican papers say that all this zeal and earnestness have come too late—the present attitude should have been assumed long ago. Congress is firm, however, and pays little attention to comments. The members say they are going to rule this country, and they will break down every barrier that is placed in the way of it.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, February 19, 1868
MARK TWAIN IN WASHINGTON
[SPECIAL TRAVELLING CORRESPONDENT OF THE ALTA.]
The Latest Political Sensation—The McCardle Case—Congress and the Supreme Court—The Newspaper Correspondent Symposium—How to Keep Ahead of Time—Crime in Washington.
WASHINGTON, January 12th, 1868.
The Last Sensation.
The chief sensation here at present is a political one entirely, but it is a lively one. It is exercising both parties a good deal. It is talked, talked, talked—all the time. In saloons, on the street, at hotel tables—pretty much everywhere and by pretty much everybody interested in politics, of whatsoever politics he may be. The shape of this sensation is as follows: The supremacy of the famous Reconstruction Acts is threatened. Of course the Democrats want them swept from existence, and of course the Republicans do not. The Democrats believe that if the Supreme Court should decide them unconstitutional, and thus kill negro suffrage, they could carry the Presidency at the next elections. The Republicans are perfectly satisfied that their own candidates will win if those acts are sustained by the Court. A case is now before the Supreme Court, and will doubtless come up for trial very shortly, that will decide this important question. One McCardle, a ferocious Vicksburg editor, published certain articles in his paper, some time ago, denouncing a Convention which was to be held under the Reconstruction Laws, and advising all white men to stay away from the polls and not vote. He was arrested and brought before a Military Commission, charged with printing articles calculated to obstruct the peaceable operation of the laws. He applies to the Supreme Court of the United States, and claims that by the terms of the Constitution no Military Commission has a right to arrest and restrain him of his liberty in time of peace for expressing his opinions. If the Court sustains his position and sets him free, the laws which created the Military Commission that arrested him fall to the ground, and negro suffrage along with them. The case is far down on the calendar, but its advancement has been moved by Judge Black and as it is one which affects the personal liberty of a citizen, it takes precedence. So it will be heard from soon.
It has been suggested that Gen. Grant come forward and quash the whole proceedings and set the man free. But this is not favored, because it would be regarded as an evidence of fear on the part of the Republicans to submit the constitutionality of the Reconstruction Laws to a test, amounting even to a sort of virtual acknowledgment of that unconstitutionality. There are eight Judges of the Supreme Court. The concurrence of five of them upon a case has always constituted the decision of the Court. Congress proposes now to make a law requiring that the concurrence of six Judges shall be necessary to constitute a decision. The Democracy claim that the Republicans only feel sure of three of the judicial votes in sustaining the Reconstruction Acts, and that the object of the proposed new law, for its effect would plainly be to make a decision of a minority of the Court overrule that of a majority! The Democrats also argue that the Supreme Court was created by the Constitution—not by Congress; that its old-time fashion of deciding by a majority vote is derived from the old common law; that Congress has no shade of power to make rules for the government of the Supreme Court, the Constitution having left it nothing whatever to do with the Court's affairs save to specify the number of its members. They argue further that if Congress passed the proposed law, the Court would doubtless declare it unconstitutional and go on and try McCardle's case after its own fashion.
That Grant will quash the proceedings is not believed; that the Supreme Court will permit the Congress to dictate rules for its government, is not believed either, by Democrats or Republicans; that there are votes enough among the Judges to sustain the Reconstruction Acts, is a thing that Democrats strongly doubt, and neither Republicans nor anybody else can really be sure of, of course. Hence all men are in a state of the liveliest anxiety to have that most important problem solved, and at the earliest possible moment. If McCardle loses his case, up goes Republican stock; if he wins it, it necessarily goes down. It is a splendid sensation, and is most palatable food for newspaper correspondents. I have stated the bald facts in the case, and my duty in the matter is done. You can consult authorities, build stately edifices of opinion, and grind out portentious editorials until you are tired of it—until you hang McCardle and break up the Supreme Court, if it shall please you to do it.
If I had your permission to suggest anything concerning this matter, it would be simply this. It is disgraceful, in Congress, or anybody at all, to question the honor and virtue of the highest tribunal in our country. If we cannot believe in the utter and spotless purity of the Judges of so sacred a tribunal, we ought at least to have the pride to keep such a belief unexpressed. I cannot conceive it possible that a man could occupy so royal a position as a Supreme Judge, and be base enough to let his decisions be tainted by any stain of his political predilections. I hate to hear people say this Judge will vote so and so, because he is a Democrat—and this one so and so because he is a Republican. It is shameful. The Judges have the Constitution for their guidance; they have no right to any politics save the politics of rigid right and justice when they are sitting in judgment upon the great matters that come before them. If the Reconstruction Acts are Constitutional, we ought to believe they will sustain them; if they are not, we ought to hope they will annul them. When we become capable of believing our Supreme Judges can so belittle themselves and their great office as to read the Constitution of the United States through blurring and distorting spectacles, it will be time for us to put on sackcloth and ashes.
The annual banquet of the Washington Correspondents' Club, last night, was altogether the most brilliant affair of the kind I ever participated in. Everything connected with it was masterly. Everything moved as by clock-work. There were forty-six persons present, and yet there was no hurry, no bother, no getting things mixed up or wrong and foremost, no jealousies, no mal apropos episodes. It was wonderfully well conducted. There were fifteen regular toasts, and every single one of them was ably responded to. Not a man made an excuse or said he was unprepared. Such a thing never occurred before. The great majority of the speeches were far above ordinary excellence. There were no invited guests present except such as had been newspaper correspondents (save only Jump, the artist). They were nine in number: Speaker Colfax, Senator Anthony, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Faxon, Congressmen Blain, Robinson, Getz and Brooks, and Henry D. Cook, banker and the Marquis de Chambrun. Riley, of the ALTA, responded to the toast to the Press of the Pacific, and I to the toast to Woman. I did what I could to elevate her in the respect and esteem of the newspaper people. I think the women of San Francisco ought to send me a medal, or a doughnut, or something, because I had them chiefly in my mind in this eulogy.
At 12 midnight, it was announced from the chair that the Sabbath was come, and that a due regard for the Christian character of our country demanded that the festivities should now come to an abrupt termination. The regular toasts were not finished yet. The fun was at its zenith. Here was a scrape. How would you have gotten out of it? I will tell how we managed it, and it will be worth your while to lay the information away for private use hereafter. It was gravely moved and as gravely seconded and carried, "That we do now discontinue the use of Washington time, and adopt the time of San Francisco!" and then we bowled along as serenely as ever. We gained about three hours and a half by the operation! How is that for ingenuity? It was easy sailing after that. When we had used up all the San Francisco time, and got to crowding Sunday again, we took another vote and adopted Hongkong time. I suppose we would have been going west yet, if the champagne had not given out.
This reminds me of a remark of Johnson ______, of San Francisco, who was a responsible hand at a spree. Somebody mentioned that away up in Lapland their nights lasted six months sometimes. Johnson said, feelingly, "How nice it would be to go up there on a little bender, and have a night of it with the boys!"
A hit was made by Mr. Adams of the World, last night, at a recent slashing piece of newspaper enterprise, that was good. He said: "When the gentleman on my left, the Hon. Mr. Brooks, was Washington correspondent for a New York paper twenty-five years ago, he gained high applause for rushing the President's Message through so far ahead of time as to get it out, in New York, twenty-four hours in advance of the other papers; but nowadays a correspondent is slow if he don't get the Message published twenty-four hours before it is delivered to Congress! This speaks volumes for the progress the profession has made."
There is plenty of it, but the two latest cases are peculiar. Night before last a negro man collided with a white man in the street; the negro apologized, but the white man would not be appeased, and grew abusive, and finally stabbed the negro to the heart. Yesterday, in open Court, while Judge Olin was sentencing a man named McCauley, the latter sprang at the principal witness, a boy twelve years old, and made a savage lunge at his breast with a knife. The Judge remanded him at once, of course, to be cited before the Grand Jury. What is your general opinion of the morals of the Capital now? When people get to attempting murder in the Courts of law, it is time to quit abusing Congress. Congress is bad enough, but it has not arrived at such depravity as this. This man who attempted the murder is not in any way connected with Congress. The fact is in every way creditable to that body. I do not deny that I am fond of abusing Congress, but when I get an opportunity like this to compliment them, I am only too happy to do it.
On New Year's morning, while Mr. George Worley's front door was standing open, a cow marched into the house—a cow that was out making her annual calls, I suppose—and before she was discovered she had eaten up everything on the New Year's table in the parlor! Mr. Worley was not acquainted with the cow, never saw her before, and is at a loss to account for the honor of her visit. What do you think of a town where cows make New Year's calls? It may be the correct thing, but it has not been so regarded in the circles in which I have been accustomed to move. Morals are at a low stage in Washington, beyond question.
Personal.
Colonel Poston, formerly in the Indian Affairs Department for Arizona, is a practicing lawyer here, now.
His partner is Judge Botts, formerly of California. Judge B. went out there in 1848, before gold was discovered, and afterwards was very rich, at one time, and owned a great deal of property in Stockton street, San Francisco. He has held the office of State Printer in California, and has also been Judge of the Sacramento District.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, March 3, 1868
MARK TWAIN ON HIS TRAVELS.
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA]
The New Sensational Play—A Glimpse of Hartford—Sundry Connecticut Sights—Charter Oak—"Home Again."
WASHINGTON, February 1st.
"The White Fawn."
I have been to New York since I wrote last, and on the 21st of January I went with some newspapermen to see the new spectacle at Niblo's, the "White Fawn," the splendid successor of the splendid "Black Crook." Everybody agrees that it is much more magnificent than the Crook. The fairy scenes are more wonderfully dazzling and beautiful, and the legs of the young women reach higher up. Whole armies of actors appear on the stage at once, and ninety carpenters and twenty gas-men are on duty all the time. The dresses of the actors and actresses are perfectly gorgeous, and when the vari-colored lights fall upon them from secret places behind the scenes, the effect is almost blinding. I think these hundreds of princely costumes are changed every fifteen minutes during half the night; splendid pageants are filing about the stage constantly, yet one seems never to see the same dress twice. The final grand transformation scene is a vision of magnificence such as no man could imagine unless he had eaten a barrel of hasheesh. There are such distances, too, such marvellous counterfeits of perspective. It is a luxuriant jungle of colossal flowers, stretching ever so far away—a mass of riches coloring, burning and flashing and blazing as with the glories of a hundred suns—and out of every flower crops a beautiful woman (apparently naked, for the most part,) and so ingeniously have these rascally angels been "sized," to perfect the perspective, that the smaller ones seem swimming high in air in the midst of a tinted mist in the distance. It is a vast wilderness, a tropic world of giant flowers and tangled vines and fairy female forms, sleeping in a flood of dazzling fires. The women seem a part and parcel of the flowers they repose among; wherever you look closely you find one, or two, or a group; the curtain falls before you have hunted out a third of them. America has not seen anything before that can equal the "White Fawn."
But the "Black Crook" gave birth to a state of things that may well be regarded as appalling. It debauched many a pure mind itself, and it has bred a species of infamous pictorial literature that will spread the same effect over a far wider field. Papers and pictures that would have been regarded as obscene, and shunned like a pestilence a few years ago, are displayed on every bookstand, now and sell by tens and hundreds of thousands. Boys and girls can buy them when they please, and they do buy them, and so prepare to go as straight to the devil as they possibly can. I took the role of prophet for one day only, a year ago, and foreshadowed some of these results in a newspaper article. The best thing New York can do, now, and the other cities and towns of America as well, will be to go to building—not warehouses and dwellings, but houses of ill-fame—let them build thousands and tens of thousands of them, and the Black Crook, the White Fawn and the infernal literature they have bred will stock them all.
I am in Hartford, Connecticut, now, (January 25th), but I am confident I shall get this letter finished yet, if I keep at it. I think this is the best built and the handsomest town I have ever seen. They call New England the land of steady habits, and I see the evidence about me that it was not named amiss. As I came along the principal street, to-day—smoking, of course—I noticed that of the two hundred men in sight at one time, only two were smoking beside myself. I had to walk three blocks to find a cigar store. I saw no drinking saloons at all in the street—but I was not looking for any. I hear no swearing here, I see no one chewing tobacco, I have found nobody drunk. What a singular country it is. At the hospitable mansion where I am a guest, I have to smoke surreptitiously when all are in bed, to save my reputation, and then draw suspicion upon the cat when the family detect the unfamiliar odor. I never was so absurdly proper in the broad light of day on my life as I have been for the last day or two. So far, I am safe; but I am sorry to say that the cat has lost caste. She has steadily decreased in popularity since I made my advent here. She has achieved a reputation for smoking, and may justly be regarded as degraded, a dishonored, a ruined cat.
They have the broadest, straightest streets in Hartford that ever led a sinner to destruction; and the dwelling houses are the amplest in size, and the shapeliest, and have the most capacious ornamental grounds about them. But I would speak of other things. This is the centre of Connecticut wealth. Hartford dollars have a place in half the great moneyed enterprises in the Union. All those Phoenix and Charter Oak Insurance Companies, whose gorgeous chromo-lithographic show-cards it has been my delight to study in far away cities, are located here. The Sharp's rifle factory is here; the great silk factory of this section is here; the heaviest subscription publication houses in the land are here; and the last, and greatest, the Colt's revolver manufactory is a Hartford institution. Some friends went with me to see the revolver establishment. It comprises a great range of tall brick buildings, and on every floor is a dense wilderness of strange iron machines that stretches away into remote distances and confusing perspectives—a tangled forest of rods, bars, pulleys, wheels, and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism. There are machines to cut all the various parts of a pistol, roughly, from the original steel; machines to trim them down and polish them; machines to brand and number them; machines to bore the barrels out; machines to rifle them; machines that shave them down neatly to a proper size, as deftly as one would shave a candle in a lathe; machines that do everything but shape the wooden stocks and trace the ornamental work upon the barrels. One can stumble over a bar of iron as he goes in at one end of the establishment, and find it transformed into a burnished, symmetrical, deadly "navy" as he passes out at the other. It did not seem to me that in all that world of complex machinery there were two machines alike, or designed to perform the same office. It must have required more brains to invent all those things than would serve to stock fifty Senates like ours. I took a living interest in that birth-place of six-shooters, because I had seen so many graceful specimens of their performances in the deadfalls of Washoe and California.
They showed us the new battery gun on wheels—the Gatling gun, or rather, it is a cluster of six to ten savage tubes that carry great conical pellets of lead, with unerring accuracy, a distance of two and a half miles. It feeds itself with cartridges, and you work it with a crank like a hand organ; you can fire it faster than four men can count. When fired rapidly, the reports blend together like the clattering of a watchman's rattle. It can be discharged four hundred times in a minute! I liked it very much, and went on grinding it as long as they could afford cartridges for the amusement—which was not very long.
You may have heard of the Charter Oak. It used to stand in Hartford. The Charter of the State of Connecticut was once hidden in it, at a time of great political tribulation, and this happy accident made it famous. Its memory is dearly cherished in this ancient town. Anything that is made of its wood is deeply venerated by the inhabitants, and is regarded as very precious. I went all about the town with a citizen whose ancestors came over with the Pilgrims in the Quaker City—in the Mayflower, I should say—and he showed me all the historic relics of Hartford. He showed me a beautiful carved chair in the Senate Chamber, where the bewigged and awfully homely old-time Governors of the Commonwealth frown from their canvasse overhead. "Made from Charter Oak," he said. I gazed upon it with inexpressible solicitude. He showed me another carved chair in the House, "Charter Oak," he said. I gazed again with interest. Then we looked at the rusty, stained and famous old Charter, and presently I turned to move away. But he solemnly drew me back and pointed to the frame. "Charter Oak," said he. I worshipped. We went down to Wadworth's Atheneum, and I wanted to look at the pictures, but he conveyed me silently to a corner and pointed to a log, rudely shaped somewhat like a chair, and whispered, "Charter Oak." I exhibited the accustomed reverence. He showed me a walking stick, a needlecase, a dog-collar, a three-legged stool, a boot-jack, a dinner-table, a ten-pen alley, a tooth-pick, a——
I interrupted him and said, "Never mind—we'll bunch the whole lumber year, and call it—"
"Charter Oak," he said.
"Well," I said, "now let us go and see some Charter Oak, for a change."
I meant that for a joke. But how was he to know that, being a stranger? He took me around and showed me Charter Oak enough to build a plank road from here to Great Salt Lake City. It is a shame to confess it, but I did begin to get a little weary of Charter Oak, finally, and when he invited me to go home with him to tea, it filled me with a blessed sense of relief. He introduced me to his wife, and they left me alone a moment to amuse myself with their little boy. I said, in a grave, paternal way, "My son, what is your name?" And he said, "Charter Oak Johnson." This was sufficient for a sensitive nature like mine. I departed out of that mansion without another word. I said to myself, "Let whatsoever shall come of this be laid to other souls than mine. I go hence a vengeful and a desperate man. My mind is made up. I will return to 'N____ Farm' again, and damn the reputation of that cat forever."
Hartford has a population of 40,000 souls, and the most of them ride in sleighs. That is a sign of prosperity, and a knowledge of how to live—isn't it?
I got back to Washington this morning (January 30th,) after tarrying two or three days in New York. I find nothing going on here of particular import, except that J. Ross Browne's nomination to the Chinese Mission has been sent to the Senate by the President, and there is very little doubt that it will be confirmed. I cordially hope so, partly because he is a good man and a talented one; a literary man and consequently entitled to high honors; and also because he has kindly invited me to take a lucrative position on his staff in case he goes to China, and I have accepted, with that promptness which so distinguishes me when I see a chance to serve my country without damaging my health by working too hard. Present engagements will keep me in the East for five or six months yet; but no matter, I shall follow him out there as soon as I am free, anyhow, if he is sent, and so none of you newspaper men need to go fighting for my secretaryship. I am the only man that can fill the bill. I am able to write a hand that will pass for Chinese in Peking or anywhere else in the world.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, September 6, 1868
LETTER FROM "MARK TWAIN."
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA]
Shipboard Amusements—At Panama without a Revolution—A Monkey Sharp—From Aspinwall to New York—Some Personal Notes—A Picture of Hartford, Conn.—Evading the Blue Laws—Novel Views Concerning Mountains—A Central American Yarn.
HARTFORD, Conn., August, Recently, 1868
EDITORS ALTA: I think the middle of summer must be the pleasantest season of the year to come East by sea. Going down to the Isthmus in the Montana, in the very geographical centre of July, we had smooth water and cool breezes all the time. We enjoyed life very well. We could not easily have done otherwise. There were a hundred and eighty-five quiet, orderly passengers, and ten or fifteen who were willing to be cheerful. These latter were equally divided into a stag party and a Dorcas Society. The stag party held its court on the after guard, and the Dorcas Society, presided over by a gentleman, amused itself in the little social hall amidships. There was considerable talent on the after guard, and some of our little private entertainments were exceedingly creditable. Read one of our programmes—it speaks for itself:
PORT GUARD THEATRE.
New Bill, New Scenery, New Cast.
Powerful Combination.
Dazzling Array of Talent.
The management take pleasure in informing the public that on this evening, July 10, will be presented, for the first time on any ship, the thrilling tragedy of the
Programme:
Dominie, Mr. J. L.
Oration—You'd Scarce expect one of my age ... Mr. G. W.
Recitation—The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck, with his Baggage Checked for Troy... Mr. M.
Duett—Give me Three Grains of Corn, Mother ... Messrs. L. & H.
Composition—The Cow... "M.T."
Declamation—Patrick Henry on War... Mr. R. R.
Poem—Mary Had a little Lamb... Mr. O. G.
Chorus—Old John Brown had One little Injun ... School
Instrumental Duett—Comb and Jewsharp... Messrs. J. B. & J. T.
Poem—Twinkle, twinkle, little Star... Mr. H. M. T.
Recitation—Not a leaf stirred... Mr. W. W. J.
Any pupil detected in catching flies or throwing spit-balls at the Dominie during the solemnities will be punished. The making of mud pies during school hours is strictly prohibited. Pop-guns and potato-quills are barred. No pupil will be allowed to "go out," unless he shall state what he wants to go out for.
I have seen many theatrical exhibitions, but none that equalled the above. If any of your sea-going friends imagine it is barren of fun, let them get themselves up in boys' costume and try it on the quarter-deck some dull night when other amusements are worn out—or in the way of private party performances in town. The hint is worth a good deal of money. We had a spelling, a reading and a geography class, but their performances were too execrable for complimentary mention. The spelling class spelt cow with a K, and the other two classes were not behind it much in ignorance.
When the Pacific voyage drew to a close, a large delegation of the passengers were sent, with a spokesman, to thank Captain Caverly, with all due ceremony but very heartily, for his watchful care of the comfort and well-being of the people on board, and likewise to thank his officers, through him, for their unfailing politeness, patience, and accommodating spirit toward the passengers (when they did not get a cent more for it than if they had never gone beyond the strict line of their official duties to do kindnesses and favors to the strangers within their ship). Was not that a neater and a more graceful thing to do than it would have been to publish one of those tiresome, stupid newspaper cards, signed by unknown people, and filled with cheap flattery of Captain and officers for "efficiency and attention to duty"? We owe no officers a deluge of compliments for being efficient and minding their business—they are paid in cash for all that and we expect it of them; but distinguished urbanity and gentlemanly conduct are rare and precious things on land and sea, and are not to be had for mere wages or estimated by any standard of dollars and cents, and these it is a pleasure to compliment; only these can make a long sea voyage cheerful and comfortable; and these were the subject of our well-meant and well-received speech-making on board the P.M.S.S. Montana at the time I have mentioned.
We found Panama in the same place. It has not changed perceptibly. They had no revolution while we were there. I do not know why, but it is true that there had not been a revolution for as much as two weeks. The very same President was at the head of the Government that was at the head of it a fortnight before. It was very curious. I suppose they have hanged him before this, however. While I was standing in the bar of the Grand Hotel talking with a citizen about Admiral Shubry (who is one of the most enterprising Americans on the Isthmus), and has had a steamer built in New York at a cost of $100,000 for the purpose of bringing live stock down from his ranch for the steamers, I heard a familiar voice holding forth in this wise:
"Monkeys! don't tell me nothing about monkeys, sir! I know all about 'em! Didn't I take the Mary Ann through the Monkey Islands?—snakes as big as a ship's mainmast, sir!—and monkeys!—God bless my soul, sir, just at daylight she fetched up at a dead stand-still, sir!—what do you suppose it was, sir? It was monkeys! Millions of 'em, sir!—banked up as high as the cat-heads, sir!—trying to swim across the channel, sir, and crammed it full! I took my glass to see thirteen mile of monkeys, two mile wide and sixty fathom deep, sir!—counted, ninety-seven million of 'em, and the mate set 'em down, sir—kept tally till his pencils was all used up and his arm was paralyzed, sir! Don't tell me nothing about monkeys, sir—because I've been there—I know all about 'em, sir!"
It is hardly possible, but still there may be people who are so ignorant as not to know that this voice belonged to Captain Ned Wakeman, of the steamship America. Cheerful as ever, as big-hearted as ever, as splendid an old salt as walks the deck of any ship—this is Wakeman. But he is failing under that Panama sun. They have had him lying up for months in charge of a spare ship, and it has been pretty severe on him. They ought to let him go to sea a while, now, and recuperate. He says the sun gets so hot in Panama, sometimes, it is as much as a man can do to tell the truth.
Aspinwall looked the same as usual—the same combination of negroes, natives, sows, monkeys, parroquets, dirt, jiggers, and groceries in the small shops far up town; the same clusters of steamships in the harbor; the same business stir about the steamship office; the same crowded sidewalk of the main street, and, alas! the same dissipation prevalent. Why will these people persist in drinking? There is no enemy so insidious as intemperance—none that sooner robs us of the esteem of our friends or the respect of the world—none that leads so surely to the destruction of health, good name, and happiness. It is a pregnant subject.
On this side we came up with Captain Gray, and had fine weather all the voyage except the first two days out. Very singularly, all those people who did not get sick in the smooth Pacific, and who had ventured to say, toward the last, that they never did get sea-sick, got a very great deal in that condition during the first two days on this side. Somehow, the best of people will lie about seasickness when they get a chance. Even our three gentlemen from China—Boyd, Dolan and Captain Simmons—after crossing the entire Pacific, got dreadfully sick on the Atlantic, while God permitted mean men to escape entirely. However, all of us arrived in good condition in New York, and found the superb new steamer we ought to have come up in, the Alaska, just ready to go to sea on her first voyage. She is the largest ship that sails out of New York, and probably the finest, also. Captain Gray commands. All the Chauncey's officers are transferred to the Alaska.
Personal Items.
One of the first things that fell under our notice was one of Lotta's posters, which bore the information that she would begin a star engagement at Wallack's within a few days. It is wonderful what a firm hold that young girl has secured upon the good will of the people and the press of the metropolis—I might say, of the rest of the country also, but you know that that follows, of course. Critics speak guardedly of other actresses, but they praise her without stint. The Tribune and the other great dailies are her friends. She draws surprisingly. I see nothing and hear nothing of her enterprising father. Lotta is to appear in a new play, "The Fire-Fly," written especially for her. After speaking of her former successes in New York, the Tribune says:
"She is aptly typical of that luminous and erratic insect, glancing and gleaming in the night air of summer. The fact the new drama in which she will appear comes from the practiced pen of Mr. Edmund Falconer, is a guarantee of its theatrical merit. 'The Fire-Fly' is the novelty of the week, moreover, in theatrical life, and public attention naturally centres upon it. Mr. Moss, the manager, is understood to have got up the new play with uncommon care. Should it prove a success, it will undoubtedly run along till the close of the summer season."
The seats are secured six days in advance.
Mr. Hooper, Utah Delegate to Congress, was in New York, getting ready to start over the Plains with Senator Stewart. Hooper's contestant, Mr. McGrorty, made a failure of his attempt to oust him from his seat. I remember the McGrorty war in Washington last winter, but did not suppose there was anything serious in that gentleman's pretensions. I thought he was considered crazy at the time—a lunatic of the harmless kind. However, it seems that he was in earnest in claiming Hooper's seat. He failed, and left it in the possession of an able, honest and hard-working man—the best representative Utah has had yet.
Mr. Stenhouse was in New York. Several other distinguished Salt Lakers are cruising around here in the East, on business and pleasure combined.
Jake Smith, formerly of Virginia City, latterly of Montana, is sojourning in New York for the present.
I have been here several days. Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief. It is a city of 40,000 inhabitants, and seems to be composed almost entirely of dwelling houses—not single-shaped affairs, stood on end and packed together like a "deck" of cards, but massive private hotels, scattered along the broad, straight streets, from fifty all the way up to two hundred yards apart. Each house sits in the midst of about an acre of green grass, or flower beds or ornamental shrubbery, guarded on all sides by the trimmest hedges of arbor-vitae, and by files of huge forest trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud. Some of these stately dwellings are almost buried from sight in parks and forests of these noble trees. Everywhere the eye turns it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.
I am able to follow Main street, from the State House to Spring Grove Cemetery, and Asylum street and Farmington avenue, from the railway depot to their terminations. I have learned that much of the city from constant and tireless practice in going over the ground. These streets answer the description of Hartford which I have given above. The large dwellings all stand far apart, each in the centre of its great grass-plat and its forest trees. There is not a mean building or slovenly piece of ground to offend the eye in all the wide area I have traversed as above. To live in this style one must have his bank account, of course. Then, where are the poor of Hartford? I confess I do not know. They are "corralled," doubtless—corralled in some unsanctified corner of this paradise whither my feet have not yet wandered, I suppose.
The reason for this uniform grandeur is easily explained. The Blue-Law spirit is not utterly dead in Connecticut yet. The law prohibiting the harboring of sinful playing-cards in dwelling houses was annulled only something over a year ago. Up to that time, conscientious people whose instincts forbade them to break the law, would no more think of keeping an entire pack of cards in their dwellings than they would have thought of driving for pleasure in these beautiful streets on the blessed Sabbath. Therefore, they never entered into a friendly game of "draw," "old sledge," or anything of that kind, without first taking a couple of cards from the pack and destroying them. There was not a whole pack of cards in any house in Hartford. Thus was the majesty of the law upheld—thus was its purity secured against taint. Another blue-law of the city preserves the beauty and uniformity of the streets and buildings. By its terms you must obtain permission from the city government before you build on your lot—before you construct an addition to your house—before you erect a stable. You cannot build a house just when you please, and you cannot build just any sort of a house you please either.
If you propose to put up a plain brick dwelling, 25 by 40, on your ground, the lord of the palace next you may complain to the Aldermen that your small enterprise will spoil the appearance of the street and diminsh the value of his property. That finishes you. If you propose to build an addition to the rear of your house, your neighbor may complain that it will obstruct his view of the railway, or the church, or the river, or something, and thus bring down his gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. And that closes out that proposition. If you decide to build a stable on your premises for your horses and your carriage, the party next door may affirm "with many holiday and lady terms," that the fragrance of a stable doth offend his nostrils unto death—and then you will find that you must build your blasphemous stable elsewhere. You must get permission of the authorities before you attempt to build—and that you cannot get permission to build an edifice that will detract from the comeliness of the street, is a thing you may safely set in your mind beforehand. By this means hath Hartford become a most beautiful city. People accustomed to large liberties will call this an unjust, unrighteous law. Very well, they are entitled to their opinion, and I to mine. I don't care how unrighteous a thing is, so long as it is pleasant—I like this law. I exult in it every time I walk abroad in these delightful streets. I hope it will never be repealed.
I never saw any place before where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here. I do not know which has the ascendancy. Possibly the huckleberries, in their season, but the morality holds out the longest. The huckleberries are in season, now. They are a new beverage to me. This is my first acquaintance with them, and certainly it is a pleasant one. They are excellent. I had always thought a huckleberry was something like a turnip. On the contrary, they are no larger than buckshot. They are better than buckshot, though, and more digestible. The farmers' boys and girls in the mountains near here turn out in their full strength, at this season of the year, and devote their whole talents to the gathering of huckleberries. They bring them to town and sell them for fifteen cents a quart. This is not a sudden and violent means of acquiring wealth. I spoke just now of the mountains near here, and if I had done it on my own responsibility I would apologize—but I get the term from the public—they call them mountains, and I think they do it with a deliberate intent to deceive. I think so because those mountains are not six hundred feet high. There is an amount of sin in this world that a man could hardly conceive of who had never been in it.
But the morality of this locality is something marvellous. I have only heard one man swear and seen only one man drunk in the ten days I have been here. And the same man that did the swearing was the man that contained the drunk. It was after midnight. Everybody else was in bed—otherwise they would have hanged him, no doubt. This sample gives you the complexion of male morality in Hartford. Young ladies walk these streets along as late as ten o'clock at night, and are not insulted. That is a specimen of both male and female morality, and of good order. I meet young ladies marching cheerfully along in the loneliest places, in the obscurity of the night and the added darkness of the sombre shadows of the trees—but I don't dare to speak to them. I should be scalped, sure. I see the whole female element of the community apparently—hundreds and hundreds of pretty girls marching arm-in-arm—turn out about eight o'clock in the evening and swarm back and forth through Main street with a happy effrontery that is in the last degree entertaining to a stranger. What would you think of respectable young girls marching back and forth at night and unattended, from the head of Montgomery street to the top of the hill, or from the wharves of the city front half way to the Mission San Dolores? It is said that ladies of the highest respectability go freely to lectures and concerts at night in this city of 40,000 souls, without other escort than members of their own sex. We may expect the lion and the lamb to lie down together shortly in Connecticut, if it be constitutional for the Millenium to come in small doses. To me, a sinner, the prospect is anything but inviting.
Two or three of the churches here have massive steeples—or what were originally intended to be steeples—run up a few feet above the roof and then chopped square off. The natives call them "stump-tails." These churches would be exceedingly attractive edificies if they were finished, but in their present condition they are the saddest looking affairs you can imagine. A departed Christian must feel absurd enough, reporting himself in Paradise from a stump-tail church. But I suppose the people go on the principle of not standing on small matters so they get to Paradise—getting there being the main thing. If such be the case, they are something like the Minister of the Navy of one of those one-horse Central American Republics—a republic with a hundred thousand inhabitants, grand officials enough for a hundred millions, an "army" of five hundred ragamuffins and a "navy" consisting of one solitary 60-ton schooner. In Panama I heard
In this connection. There was war in one of those little republics—the one I have been describing. The General-in-Chief asked the President for three hundred men; the President ordered the Minister of War to furnish them; the forces—just the number wanted—were down on the sea coast somewhere; the Minister of War requested the Minister of the Navy to place the navy of the republic at the disposal of the troops, so that they might have transportation to the seat of war; the Minister of the Navy (an official who had seen as little of ships and oceans as even Mr. Secretary Welles,) sent a courier to where the schooner was, with the necessary order for the Lord High Admiral. The Lord High Admiral wrote back:
"Your Excellency: It is impossible. You must be aware that this is a 60-ton schooner. There is not room for 300 men in her."
The stern old salt in the Navy office wrote back:
"Impossible—nonsense. Make room. Heave the tons overboard and bring the sailors."
Any way to get them there so they got them there, was all this brave sea-horse cared for.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, November 15,1868
LETTER FROM "MARK TWAIN."
[FROM THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE ALTA]
A Lively Boat Race—The Wicked "Wickedest Man"—On the Wing—Something About Chicago—Story of a Rail—Personal Gossip
HARTFORD, October 22, 1868.
I went up to Springfield, Mass., yesterday afternoon, to see the "International boat race" between the Ward brothers and the "St. Johns" crew, of New Brunswick. We left here at noon, and reached Springfield in about an hour. It was raining. It seems like wasting good dictionary words to say that, because it is raining here pretty much all the time, and when it is not absolutely raining, it is letting on to do it. I assembled on the bank of the river along with a rather moderate multitude of other people (moderate considering the greatness of the occasion), and waited. A flat-boat was anchored in midstream, and on it were collected the judges, the boats' crews, and some twenty of their friends. A dozen skiffs and shells were hovering in the vicinity. The conversation of the crowd about me seemed to promise that I had made this journey to little purpose, since all the talk was to the effect that the idea of anybody attempting to conquer the Ward brothers on the water was simply absurd. Everybody appeared to think that the St. John's gentlemen would be so badly beaten that it could hardly be proper to speak of the contest as a race at all. My sympathies always go with the racer that is beaten, anyhow, and so I began to warm toward those New Brunswick strangers in advance. The cries of "Two to one on the Wards!" "Ten to one on the Wards!" "Hundred to five on the Wards!" I felt like resenting as so many personal affronts. Shortly two "shells" were brought to the front—long, narrow things like telegraph poles shaved and sharpened down to oar blades at both ends. The contestants took their places—the four St. John's boys dressed in pink shirts and red skull-caps, and the four Ward's in white shirts and with white handkerchiefs bound round their heads. They were all fine looking men. They rowed away a hundred yards, easily and comfortably. I had never seen such grace, such poetry of motion, thrown into the handling of an oar before. They ranged up alongside each other, now, abreast the judges. A voice shouted
"Are you ready?"
"Ready!" and the two shells almost leaped bodily out of the water. They darted away as if they had been shot from a bow. The water fairly foamed in their wake. The Wards had a little lead at the start, and made frantic exertions to increase the advantage but it was soon evident that, instead of gaining, they were losing. The race was to be a very long one—three miles and repeat. When the shells were disappearing around a point of land, half a mile away, the St. John's were already a trifle ahead. The people in my vicinity made light of this circumstance, however. They said "them Ward's" knew what they were about. They were "playing" this thing. When the boats hove in sight again "them Ward's" would be in the lead. And so the betting against my martyrs went on, just as before. Finally, somebody suggested that appearances seemed to indicate that the race was "sold." It had its effect. The most enthusiastic shortly began to show a failing confidence, and to drop anxious remarks about the chances of the race having really been betrayed and sold out by the Wards. But, notwithstanding all this talk was so instructive, the next twenty minutes hung heavily on my hands. There was nothing in the world to look at but five hundred umbrellas and occasionally a fleeting glimpse of the water—and even umbrellas lose their interest in the long run, I find there is nothing exciting about umbrellas—nothing thrilling. One's pulse beats just as calmly in the presence of umbrellas as if they were not there. And they don't really amount to anything for scenery, being monotonous when there are so many. But in the midst of these reflections someone shouted:
"Here they come!"
"Whoop! St. John's ahead!"
"For fifty dollars it's the Wards!"
"Fifty to twenty-five it's the Wards!"
"Take them both!—hundred to a hundred it's ______"
"Three cheers for—Oh, the suffering Moses, the St. John's are ahead!"
It was so. It was easy to distinguish the pink shirts, now, flashing back and forth. On they came, dividing the water like a knife, and the white shirts far in the rear. In a few minutes they came flying past the judge's stand, every man of them as fresh and bright and full of life as when they started, and handling the oars with the same easy grace as before. A cheer went up for the gallant triumph, but there was little heart in it. The people on the shore were defeated, in pride and in pocket, as well as the opposing contestants. The Wards came in rather more than a hundred yards behind—and they looked worn and tired. The race was over, and Great Britain had beaten America. Time, 39:38. there was but one consolation, and that was, that in a six-mile race on the same water, last year, the Wards made it in 39, thus beating the present time by 38 seconds. The Wards went into the contest yesterday in inferior condition. Their mainstay, Joshua, had been sick and was still unwell. However, these boys behaved in an entirely becoming manner. They said that they were badly beaten, and fairly beaten, and they wanted no excuses made to modify their defeat or diminish the brilliancy of the St. John's victory.
I do not know whether you have taken as much interest in the "Wickedest Man in New York" as the people in the States have, but of course you have given him some of your attention. If you remember, he was a creation, or rather a discovery, of Mr. Oliver Dyer in Packard's Monthly. He was represented as being descended from excellent stock; the son of a minister, I think, and the brother of several ministers, and as being an educated man himself, and one who remembered feelingly the home teachings and Christian precepts of his youth; a man who made it his voluntary business to keep order at street-corner preachings, and was always ready to enforce respect for the Word and its messengers with his puissant fist. Yet this lost ram—let us be consistent, if we are nothing else, and surely there was little of the "sheep" in John Allen, lost or otherwise—this lost ram kept one of the vilest sailor dance-houses in all Water street; a den where congregated women so low that it would be complimentary to them to class them with the beasts of the field and the sty, and where sailors came to caress them and pant out upon them maudlin endearments from hearts swimming in gin and reeking with affection and blasphemy, and then get entirely and unspeakably drunk and be shanghaied. This magazine article showed John Allen up in all his depravity, and all his native goodness of heart which was concealed under it. The article was copied, praised, discussed far and near, and in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, John Allen was famous. His den was crowded day and night with citizens and strangers curious to see what manner of man the very wickedest in a city of a million people could possibly be. Mr. Dyer came out promptly while the excitement was up, with a new article in which he showed how the wickedest man's heart was touched, his pride humbled, his depravity shaken to its very foundations; how he had not only allowed the city missionaries to pray and sing in his dance-house, but had sung with them himself, his women had sung, also, and had even shed tears when the familiar hymns brought home and old friends and a sinless childhood back to their sorrowing memories. What must naturally follow these things? John Allen's conversion, of course. It was announced. Also the closing of his den and his resolve to elevate his rescued life to the reclamation of Water street. Then there were daily and nightly prayer meetings, exhortations and sermons at John Allen's, and the daily papers duly reported them and kept up the excitement. Reformation became popular. Kit Burn threw open his dog-pit in its interest, and in the afternoon, day after day, petitions to the throne of grace ascended from the arena where five hundred rats had met their fate an hour before, and where the blood of the slain still mottled the sawdust. Another person, hungry for fame and jealous of Jno. Allen's brilliant fortune, advertised in ill-tempered language that in the matter of awful and deliberate wickedness the boasted John Allen was an innocent lamb to him, and proceeded to prove it by a series of evidences, either one of which ought to be sufficient to damn him without even a glance at the others. This man was naturally incensed at the injustice that had been done him, and outraged by the spectacle of another man wearing laurels to which he himself was alone entitled, as the guardian of a long lifetime earnestly and unselfishly devoted to the commission of peculiarly revolting crimes. To such a mind, the reflection that after all his life had been a failure, could not be other than agonizing. He invited attention to his case—insisted on throwing his doors open to prayer—flaunted his superior sins before the public, and went on railing at the feeble impostor John Allen.
What was the natural result of all this state of things? Simply that religion was dragged in the dirt. Where one person was brought seriously to read his Bible, fifty non-combatants were made mockers and scoffers. I will venture to say that even Elder Knapp, in all his long and well-meant war against sin, has hardly done as much harm as this "revival" in Water street, New York. A religion that comes of thought, and study, and deliberate conviction, sticks best. The revivalized convert who is scared in the direction of heaven because he sees hell yawn suddenly behind him, not only regains confidence when his scare is over, but is ashamed of himself for being scared, and often becomes more hopelessly and malignantly wicked than he was before.
I was coming down the street in New York the other day, when I met Mr. Packard. He was innocently proud of the convert made by his magazine, and proposed that we go and see the animal. So we went down to John Allen's. He was not in. An old man sat at one side of a table in the front room, and a young man at the other side of it. There were only two rooms, and both were small, and rude enough in appearance for any wicked man's den. All the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with white canvas on which were painted hymns in large letters, and precepts from the Testament which were suited to the place—if there be any precepts in the Testament suited to such a place. A prayer meeting had closed about an hour before. The old man had been present and was still mad about it. He said:
"Do you know this Mr. Dyer, as he calls himself?"
I said I had not met him yet.
"Well, when you do meet him you'll meet a man that's put himself out of the way in the vilest and most malignant manner to traduce and vilify, and hold up to public abuse and derision, a better man than he ever dared to be!—the wickedest man in New York! He never saw the day when he was worthy to unloose the latches of John Allen's shoes. Out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaketh—and those are my sentiments about this Dyer. He has made a man a reproach and a by-word who never had done any crime greater than the modest minding of his own affairs. He has ruined him in estate, in prospects and in reputation. He has broken up his business and turned him adrift upon the world. I wish I could get my eye on this precious Mr. Dyer! And after doing all this—which he did out of pure speculation, and with the hope of putting money in his pocket, by lecturing around the country and trotting John Allen out as his "frightful example"—he put his foot in it. Because, I wouldn't let John Allen make an ass of himself. I said if there was money in it, let John Allen play frightful example on his own hook, and pocket the flimsy. So Mr. Oliver Dyer had to run his little swindle by himself, and take his chances—and he took Cooper Institute and filled it full of head-head missionaries and made a whooping failure of it, and be d—d to him and all that are like him, I say. John Allen went to Bridgport and Stamford to lecture on his own account, and he'd have done well enough only he got drunk as a piper and knocked the whole thing h—l—west, you know. I was afraid of it—I was, really—I was afraid of it. And the last thing I said to John Allen, with my arms around his neck and the tears in my eyes, was, 'John, if you love me; John, don't come the frightful example too strong.' But he did, you know, and busted—rot them missionaries!"
The young man at the other side of the table remarked that he had acted as Allen's agent, and that the Tribune had accused him of being drunk also, and likewise another Water-street convert who had gone along to introduce Allen to the audiences, but these statements were untrue.
About this time the Wickedest Man himself arrived—a tall, plain, bony fellow with a good-natured look in his eye, a Water street air all about him, and a touch of Irish in his face. He stood in the door, and a crowd of vagabonds on the sidewalk gaped and stared at him in stupid admiration. He said:
"Don't this sort of thing ever stir up the devil in you—or maybe you don't mind it, being used to being notorious?"
I thanked him for the compliment, and said I wasn't notorious enough to have become an object for people to stare at.
[One line of text missing from microfilm]...at me till I want to knock their heads off. Why, they come here and march right in and ask me—well, you stand off there and I'll show you how they do. There, now, that's about right."
Then the speaker stepped into the street and returned with his hat in his hand, and walked up gingerly and said:
"Are you the wickedest man in New York?"
"Yes."
"John Allen?"
"Yes."
"You?"
"Yes."
"Good God!"
And then they walk around me, this way, and then sidle around t'other way, and examine the back of my head, and stoop down and feel my legs. And then they go off mumbling to themselves, as if they can't possibly understand it, anyhow. Now you know that bothered me like sin, at first, but it don't now. I've learned a trick. When they ask me questions, I ask them another. I'm like the Irishman. The priest met him one day, and says:
"How's this, Paddy, that you've not been to the church of late?"
"Be me sowl, seein' it's yer riverence, I can't answer ye—but if 'twere the Protestant blaggard over beyent, I could do't.
"Very well, then, Paddy," says the priest, walking away a bit; "now, I'm coming toward ye a ripresintive of the Protestant minister, and so ye can answer me. Paddy, how is it ye've not been to the church of late?"
"Moind you own business, and get out of this, ye d— ould Protestant limb of the divil!"
We are instructed to judge not, but I still question the genuineness of Jno. Allen's conversion. The ways of the worldly sit easy upon him yet.
And now I pick up a New York paper, and find that he has been up before the Police court for keeping a disorderly house—and from what I can gather from the tenor of the article, he seems to have opened his dance-house again. If so, the belongings of religion have been innocently prostituted by its own servants to the advertising of one of the worst sin-factories in all New York—one which has now ten-fold power to attract idlers and breed depravity. The wisdom of this Water street "revival" may be gravely questioned.
I have spent six weeks moving from city to city lately, doing nothing whatever but visiting friends. It is very, very pleasant work, and not hard. If there was a salary attached I would never do anything else. What a world of valuable information I could furnish about New York, Brooklyn, Elmira, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis if I had only been on a tour of observation. But I observed nothing, except that Chicago changes so fast that every time you visit it it seems like going to a new city. They are erecting many fine buildings in St. Louis, but they are erecting many more and finer in Chicago. Chicago is a wonderful place. It probably numbers among its citizens more active, bold, thoroughly enterprising men than any city in the Union save New York. It is the centre, as you know, of a vast railway system, which drains the country in every direction. Other communities have what they consider their own legitimate country about them to back them up, and they regard their sovereignty over such regions as unimpeachable. Chicago recognizes no such sovereignties. She marches right into the enemy's country with her railroads, with an audacity which is delightful, and in a very short time she breaks down the "divine right" prejudices of that region and takes the trade. It is a maxim in less feverish communities that whenever a railroad to any place makes itself a necessity it will be built—that is, whenever there shall be trade enough to warrant it. Chicago has changed all that. Wherever she finds a place to build a railroad to she builds a railroad to that place. She creates trade there afterwards easily enough. Three out of every five men you meet in Chicago have a live, shrewd, cosmopolitan look in their faces. These are the sort of people who have made the city what it is, and will yet double its wealth, its population and its importance.
I will remark, in passing, that the Sherman House is a good hotel, but I have seen better. They gave me a room there, away up, I do not know exactly how high, but water boils up there at 168 degrees. I went up in a dumb waiter which was attached to a balloon. It was not a suitable place for a bedchamber, but it was a promising altitude for an observatory. The furniture consisted of a table, a camp stool, a wash-bowl, a German Dictionary and a patent medicine Almanac for 1842. I do not know whether there was a bed or not—I didn't notice. However, I was glad I got that room, for I stayed there an hour and took notes of an instructive conversation which was going on in an adjoining apartment. I overhead the following
No, she wouldn't marry me. You were misinformed. It was broken off, and in the saddest way. I was not in the least to blame, upon my word and honor, though neither the girl nor her father the deacon ever believed me or ever forgave me. It was during the big election canvass when Lincoln ran the first time. Two-thirds of the deacon's honest soul were in religion and the other third was in politics—Lincoln man. I never was a scoffer at religion in my life, but he half believed I was. Well, there was to be a political pow-wow in the village church where he lived, on a Thursday night, and he was to preside. I never thought anything about the matter, but Williams hailed me one afternoon, offered me a seat in his buggy, and away we started. It was Wednesday—curse the almanac!—but we never thought of it. Going into town, some devilish instinct put it into my head that it would help my case along if I marched into church with a rail on my shoulder, seeing that the deacon and the girl would both be there. So I got a rail and we came into town shouting and making a grand to-do generally. As we went by the church windows I caught a glimpse of her bonnet and plenty other bonnets, and I was happy. I shouldered my rail and marched in. The houseful of men and women were all quiet, and the old deacon was standing up in the altar saying something. Splendid! I went a booming up the aisle with my rail, swinging my hat and whooping:
"Hoo-ray for Old Abe—hoo-ray for the Illinois rail-splitter!"
But never a yelp out of that audience. I quit, right in my tracks. The deacon said:
"Sir, we were engaged in addressing the Throne of Grace. This unseemly exhibition is ill-fitted to the solemnities of a prayer-meeting!"
I never felt so sick in my life, John. I never felt so much like taking a walk. And don't you know, as I stood up there before that congregation, I'd have given a million dollars for somebody to take that rail out for me. But no—I had to sneak out with it myself. I threw it down and went up to where there was a board fence and practiced climbing backwards and forwards through a knot hole for as much as an hour. But my goose was cooked, you know. It was all up between me and that family.
And so endeth the legend. Perhaps I had no right to listen to it, but I did, anyhow.
I've visited the tomb of Washington, in Chicago, and also the birth-places of Homer, and Michael Angelo, and then adjourned to Cleveland, a stirring, enterprising young city of a hundred thousand inhabitants. Did you know that they claim 300,000 for Chicago? Cleveland is the center of a great coal, iron and petroleum trade, and this is necessarily bound to move steadily onward, being impelled by such stable and long-winded helpers as commerce and manufactures. Cleveland contains one of the finest streets in America—Euclid avenue. Euclid is buried at one end of it—the old original Euclid that invented the algebra, misfortune overtake him! It is devoted to dwelling-houses entirely and it costs you $100,000 to "come in." Therefore none of your poor white trash can live in that street. You have to be redolent of that odor of sanctity which comes with cash. The dwellings are very large, are often pretty pretentious in the matter of architecture, and the grassy and flowery "yards" they stand in are something marvellous—being from one to three hundred feet front and nine hundred feet deep!—a front on the avenue and another front on Lake Erie.
I had a very good time, visiting. In another city I fell out of a wagon backwards and broke my neck in two places. Another time I fell in the river, and when I was coming up the bank I got kicked by a horse. Altogether I had a splendid time. I have to lecture a great deal in the West this winter, and I expect to have some more fun.
The New York Tribune of this morning has double-leaded sensation despatches about the earthquakes in California, and from the way they read I think the matter must have been much more serious than the great 8th of October earthquake of '65. I shall be uncomfortable and anxious till the morrow's papers arrive, for our latest intelligence is that more shocks are anticipated. The California earthquakes are all the talk to-day.
Webb (C. H.) is pegging away at his patent "adding machine." A New York wholesale merchant of sense, standing and character, tells me that the machine is so simple, so quick with its work, and so manifestly useful, that it will be in every counting room in the city in less that five years. He says there cannot be any question but Webb will make a fortune out of it. I have not seen Webb to speak to him since I have been back to the States, but I hear of him occasionally. He still corresponds with the Springfield Republican. I saw Mr. Sam Bowles in Springfield yesterday. He is just back from his trip to the Mountains. He says his interest in the Pacific Coast remains unabated. E. R. Sill, who was a Californian—don't know what or where he is now—is widely spoken of in the Eastern press as the rising young poet of the day; and his name is already so familiarized to the public ear as to enable the papers to print little news paragraphs concerning Mr. Sill's movements, without adding an explanation of who Mr. Sill is. Frank Fuller, ex-Acting Governor of Utah, is located at 19 Park place, New York, and is making money hand over fist in the manufacture and sale of a patent odorless India rubber cloth, which is coming greatly into fashion for buggy-tops and such things. He has a great many friends on the coast, and this news will not grieve them.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, November 22, 1868
LETTER FROM "MARK TWAIN."
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA]
Some Personal Explanations—A Connecticut Legend—A Revolutionary Newspaper Relic—Curious Souvenirs of Old Times—Concerning McGrorty—Who is McGrorty?
HARTFORD, October 28th, 1868
I have a boil on one side of my nose and a cold on the other, and whether I sneeze or blow it is all one; I get the lockjaw anyhow. I never fully comprehended before how inscrutable are the ways of Providence. For my feeble finite wisdom is utterly stumped with the simple problem of what great and good end is to be accomplished by the conferring of this boil and this cold on me both at the same time, but Providence understands it easy enough. The ways of Providence are too inscrutable for the subscriber.
I have not been working very hard, but I have got this book of mine ready for the engravers and electrotypers at last, though it will not be issued from the publishing house till March. Not knowing what else to name it, I have called it "THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS," I am told that Bancroft is to be the agent for it on the Pacific Coast and in China.
This reminds me that I see by the papers that I am going to China in the spring. I was not quite certain of it before, but I am now, I suppose. I start out lecturing the 15th of November, and as my engagements extend far into March, I shall have ample time to think it all over.
I have seen a New England forest in October, and so I suppose I have looked upon almost the fairest vision the earth affords. The first trees to change were the maples, which doffed their robes of green and took to themselves a brilliant bloody red—and shortly the long walls of shining emerald that bordered the roads were splendid with these random bursts of flame. A distant prospect gave to a forest the resemblance of a garment splotched with blood. The chestnuts changed next, but more slowly, and day after day their rich green panoply fainted away and dissolved into a soft sunset blending of dainty tints—of gold and purple, touched with a crimson blush here and there—and finally, some frosty morning, came out in the imperial yellow of China, and stood ready, with the mistaken wisdom of trees the world over, to undress for winter. A great forest mottled from end to end with these changing splendors, these opaline minglings of exquisite dyes, subdued and softened by distance, seems etherealized, stripped of the grossness of earth and suffused with the tender grace of pictures we see in dreams.
Don't direct any more letters to me at Hartford until I find out which Hartford I live in. They mix such things here in New England. I think I am in Hartford proper, but no man may hope to be certain. Because right here in one nest we have Hartford, and Old Hartford, and New Hartford, and West Hartford and East Hartford, and Hartford-on-the-Hill, and Hartford-around-generally. It is the strangest thing—this paucity of names in Yankee land. You find that it is not a matter confined to Hartford, but is a distemper that afflicts all New England. They get a name that suits them and then hitch distinguishing handles to it and hang them on all the villages round about. It reminds me of the man who said that Adam went on naming his descendants until he ran out of names and then said gravely, "Let the rest be called Smith." Down there at New Haven they have Old Haven, West Haven, South Haven, West-by-sou'-West Haven and East-by-east—nor'- east-half—east-Haven, and the oldest man in the world can't tell which one of them Yale College is in. The boys in New England are smart, but after they have learned everything else they have to devote a couple of years to the geography of New Haven before they can enter college, and then half of them can't do it till they go to sea voyage and learn how to box the compass. That is why there are so many more New England sailors than any other. Some of them spend their whole lives in the whaling service trying to fit themselves for college. This class of people have colonized the City of New Bedford, Mass. It is well known that nine-tenths of the old salts there became old salts just in this way. Their lives a failure—they have lived in vain—they have never been able to get the hang of the New Haven geography.
In this connection they tell a story of a stranger who was coming up the Connecticut River, and was trying his best to sleep; but every now and then the boat would stop and a man would thrust his head into the room. First he sung out "Haddam!" and then "East Haddam!" and then "Haddam Neck!" and then "North Haddam!" and then "Great Haddam!" "Little Haddam!" "Old Haddam!" "New Haddam!" "Irish Haddam!" "Dutch Haddam!" "Haddam-Haddam!" and then the stranger jumped out of bed all excited and says:
"I'm a Methodist preacher, full of grace, and forty years in service without guile! I'm a meek and lowly Christian, but d—n these Haddams, I wish the devil had 'em, I say!"
The gentlemen of the Courant have given me a facsimile copy of the first issue of that paper. It is about twice as large as a sheet of foolscap, and bears date October 29, 1764—something over a hundred years ago. In its columns, under date of "Boston, October 8th,"—for it will be remembered that news travelled slowly in those days—I find broad hints of the dissatisfaction among the colonists which was within the next ten or eleven years to breed the American Revolution. Read:
"There seems to be a disposition in many of the inhabitants of this and the neighboring Governments to clothe themselves with their own manufacture."
British taxation without representation was worrying them. Again:
"It is now out of fashion to put on mourning at the funeral of the nearest relation, which will make a saving to this town of twenty-thousand sterling per annum. It is surprising how suddenly, as well as how generally, an old custom is abolished; it shows, however, the good sense of the town, for it is certainly prudent to retrench our extravagant expenses, while we have something left to subsist ourselves, rather than be driven to it by fatal necessity.
"We hear that the laudable practice of frugality is now introducing itself in all the neighboring towns, an instance of which we have from Charlestown, at a funeral there the beginning of last week, which the relatives and others attended without any other mourning than which is prescribed in a recent agreement.
"Indeed we are told that all the funerals of last week were conducted on the new Plan of Frugality.
"Nothing but FRUGALITY can now save distress'd northern colonies from impending ruin. It ought to be a consolation to the good people of a certain province that the greatest man in it exhibits the most rigid example of this political as well as moral virtue."
Who could he have been? Has his greatness totally passed from history and the memories of men?
War is boldly hinted at in this paragraph:
"It is now confidently affirmed by some that the severity of a new a—t of p—t is to be imputed to letters, representations, NARRATIVES, etc., transmitted to the m—y about two years ago by persons of eminence this side the water; and that some copies of letters are actually in this town, and others soon expected. To whatever cause these severities are owing, it behooves the colonies to represent their grievances in the strongest point of light, and to unite in such measures as WILL BE EFFECTUAL to obtain redress."
Cannot you fancy the ancient editor of the Connecticut Courant of a hundred years ago, in round Ben. Franklin spectacles, wig and cue, lace cuffs, coat-pocket-flaps like a cellar-door, long waistcoat, knee-breeches, stockings, low-quarter shoes with buckles on them like a window-sash—a man gravely culling "news" from Boston three weeks old; and "per latest advices" about Colonel Bouquet's forces having crossed the river at Pittsburg full thirty days gone by; and thrilling rumors of war from Madrid, London, Versailles, Stockholm and the Hague, with the mildews of four awful months on them; and venerable canards, a 100 days out from Naples, telling how "between three and four hundred thousand" citizens had lately died of plague in that little kingdom—a man exulting over his little old sensation despatches and latest dates, and never, strangely enough, never having a vision of 1868 flash through his complacent brain with its revelations of telegraphs and locomotives—I say, can't you fancy this old muff sitting at his desk and getting off this bit of sarcasm, and holding it up and cocking his eye at it, and reading it over, and chuckling to himself, and reading it again, and calling in the "devil" and inflicting it on him, and then sending it to the printers perfectly satisfied that it is the best and the boldest and the awfulest crusher that ever thundered from the press—can't you? Thus:
"We hear that if any Persons can tell of any valuable Reversions in the Gift of the Crown undisposed of, they may have a good Premium for such Intelligence; as there are some few of the Children of the Gentlemen now in Power still unprovided for!"
Then the rusty old flint-lock gossips pleasantly about the servant of an Irish merchant having been successfully palming himself off on the Parisians as the "Prince of Angola"—"lately"—(about a year before, no doubt); and in stunning sensation italics he puts in the Sheriff's proclamation commanding the contumacious John Wilkes, Esq., to "appear before the Lord, the King of Westminister," to answer for certain "Trespasses, Contempts and Misdemeanors" whereof he has been convicted—and then in smaller type exults in the fact that that old time Head Centre is safe in France and will not be likely to honor the Lord the King's pleasant invitation; in default of a better mining excitement he tells of a piece of ore, containing "divers particles of silver" which has been found in Florida and sent to England for assay—and probably much illuminated wild cat stock changed hands there on the strength of it; and he asserts that the "late report of the French having ceded New Orleans to the Spaniards is without foundation."
But he always comes back to his pet hobby, sooner or later—hints of war with the mother country. Hear him:
"The northern colonists have sense enough, at least the sense of feeling; and can tell where the shoe pinches—The delicate ladies begin to find by experience, that the Shoes made at LYNN are much easier than those of the make of MR. HOSE of London—What is become of the noted Shoemaker of Essex?"
Yes, what is become of him—and what is become of both of you, since you are so brash about it? It is an even bet that where you are now you don't toot your horn any louder than "the noted shoemaker of Essex" does.
But I will let him give it one more blast before I tumble him back into his dusty grave to sleep another century:
"It is fear'd by many who wish well to Great Britain, that the new A—t of P—t, will greatly distress, if not totally ruin, some of HER OWN manufactures. It is the tho't that by means of this A—t, less of her woollen cloths, to the amount of some thousands sterling, will be purchas'd in this cold climate the insuing winter."
He is a good deal worried for fear "Great Britain" will damage her prosperity if one lets him tell it. I will publish his joke, now, and then boost him back among the damned, where he belongs. I will print this joke in simplified justice to him, that people may see who originated it, and so give him the credit due (unless he stole it himself from some still more ancient periodical), for to this day it keeps turning up every now and then in the country newspapers with an aggravating pretence of being new and original:
"A Surprising Concatenation of Events to One Man in One Week—Published a Sunday—married a Monday—had a Child a Tuesday—stole a horse a Wednesday—banished a Thursday—died a Friday—buried a Saturday—all in one Week."
There you are. In our day, since we know nothing of banishment (which he did), and since we do know something of divorcement (which he didn't), we substitute the one for the other naturally enough when we steal the joke. I will now let this old buffer go. I don't wish to be too hard on him, lest I meet his musty ghost prowling about his ancient haunts, in Hartford here, some night. Where be his comrades? Whither went he to take his ale? Who was he, anyhow?
But perhaps you don't know McGrorty? McGrorty was a great man once—but that was some time ago. It was when he ran for delegate from Utah against Mr. Hooper. Somebody told him to buy a barrel of whiskey and run against Hooper—and told him whiskey was as good as talent, as long as he could get the one and hadn't the other. And McGrorty did it. He ran against Hooper, treated the Saints and the Gentiles, he made the best fight he could—and didn't win. He came near it, though. He got 105 votes, and Hooper himself only got 15,608. There was really only a difference of fourteen thousand and some odd. A negro by the name of "Sy" got the rest of the votes—six. Hooker was declared elected and McGrorty was advised to contest the election—which he did; but he failed to give notice of his reasons within thirty days (as provided by a Congressional law), and that made his contest null and void, properly. Still, when a man comes near being great—comes as near it as McGrorty did—comes within fourteen or fifteen thousand of it—it isn't in human nature to give it up. And so McG. infested Washington all last winter trying to get his dispute before the House of Representatives, but it wasn't any use. Congress was a conniver at all manner of inhumanity, and was only glad of a chance to keep this light out now that it was put out. Congress said, send along the negro—let Sy have a show—out with this Milesian Gentile! This, after he had got his speech all ready for the floor of the House! It was particularly mean of Congress to do such a thing at such a time, because the speech had to be inflicted on somebody, and so that McGrorty went around Washington all last winter reading it to everybody he could catch in a close place. People were driven crazy by it—people shot each other on account of it—thousands and thousands of suicides resulted from it. McGrorty ended by going crazy himself, I heard, though many said he was crazy enough in the first place to make a good member of Congress. But they didn't take him in. That is what I am quarrelling about. They left his light to shine under a bushel—never saw a bushel in such a shape that a light could shine under it, but suppose it possible, nevertheless—they left his light to shine that way, merely because he didn't have 15,000 votes instead of Hooper. That sort of mean partiality is a thing that I despise. And so McGrorty was lost to the nation.
What makes me inquire about him now, however, is that a rumor has reached me from a friend in Washington that Mr. McGrorty is going to run on the Democratic ticket for Congress in California, and I thought if I could help him to a vote or two in memory of that speech of his, it would be as little as one of the few survivors of it could do. I feel grateful, and so long as he is running for anything anywhere, I am ready to help him along; and whenever he has got a fresh speech, and is reading it, I will wade right through the midst of his dead and dying to hear it. Count on me, McGrorty.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, July 25, 1869
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN.
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA]
Sunday in Boston—First Impressions—The Straight Streets of Modern Athens—Nasby—The Antiquities—Boston "Notions"—A Polite People—Some Examples of the Trait.
NEW YORK, July, 1869
EDITORS ALTA: I reached Boston about seven in the morning on a certain Sunday. There was no need of an almanac whereby to discover that Sunday was the day. No—there was Sunday in the still air; there was Sunday in the absence of hurrying feet and anxious faces; there was Sunday in the trim, special-occasion look of such apparel as drifted into view here and there; there was Sunday in the dreamy lonesomeness that brooded over all things; and presently there came floating up out of the distance the muffled murmur of a bell. There was no need of an almanac.
I was the last man out of the sleeping-car. There was not a hack in sight nor an omnibus or any vehicle whatsoever, except a small boy. He volunteered to carry my valise to the hotel for the sum of thirty cents. I scrutinized him narrowly, for I was in a strange city, and he might be one of those plausible outlaws who lie in wait near depots and decoy the unsuspecting to obscure dens and murder them, for the sake of their teeth, which they sell to the dentists—and their hair, which they sell to the wig-makers—and their finger bones, which they sell to the ivory makers. I have often heard of such people, and I always try to avoid them, for I do not wish to be retailed when I am dead. This boy said his name was James—the ominous name of all the bad little boys in the Sunday School books. With many misgivings I placed myself in his power. I delivered to him my baggage, and began my reluctant march in his wake, oppressed by the knowledge that if this boy meant me harm he could easily accomplish his fell purpose, for of course there were no policemen abroad at that hour of the morning. But I tried to console myself with the reflection that I had been in situations of deadly peril before and had escaped unscathed. I trudged after him, keeping a vigilant watch upon him all the time. It was not long before my suspicions were aroused. I waited and watched, and soon I felt convinced that his actions savored of a hidden villainy of some kind. I said:
"Boy, why do you wind around in this way—why don't you go straight?"
"Sir?"
"Why do you poke in and out and wind around and about in this involved and sinuous way? Why don't you go straight?"
The boy turned and surveyed me impressively for many minutes, and then said, as if to himself:
"Go straight in Boston—ain't he innocent, though?"
He then marched on. But I had lost all confidence, and so I took refuge in the first hotel I came to and discharged James, satisfied that no virtue could abide in a boy whose ways were so crooked. In going from the depot to the hotel we passed one spot seven different times and approached it from a different direction every time.
I found the gentleman whose guest I was to be—Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby—and thenceforward my two days' vacation had only pleasant experiences in it. Boston is just as delightful a city as there is in America, and one feels more tranquilly and satisfactorily at home in it in three hours than he could in New York in as many years. There is a comfortable air of good-will and good-fellowship in the aspect of the streets, the houses, the town in general, which it gets from the people, or imparts to them, I cannot tell which. One must keep a careful rein upon his "gushing" instincts, else he will shortly find himself loving Boston instead of merely admiring it—and such conduct as that would be undignified in a stranger. It only takes a little time to reconcile one to the awful crookedness of the streets—and only a little time longer to find in that crookedness a positive charm. The hard, straight, unrelenting lines one is used to in other cities, gives way, in Boston, to graceful curves that go sweeping in and out in a pleasant and undulating way that impels a man to assume a luxurious waltz-step in place of the driving, forward-march movement he has learned in unswerving and unbending Broadway. You cannot take in a whole Boston street with a single glance of the eye and then lose your interest because you have thus taken the edge off future discovery; on the contrary, every step reveals some portion of a building which you could not see before, some change in your vista, and some suggestion of pleasant variety yet to come, which not only keeps your interest alive but heightens it and persuades you to go on. And so your street continues to open before you and close behind you like a sure-enough panorama, and you are as well pleased with it as if you had paid fifty cents admission. Many of these bending and circling ranks of buildings are architecturally handsome, and there is a Venetian picturesqueness of effect in the unfolding of their pillared and sculptured graces as you drift around the curves and watch them swing into view.
One of the most engaging peculiarities of Boston is her reverence for her tradition, her relics, her antiquities. She still purrs complacently over her "Boston Massacre," and thinks it the most gorgeous thing of the kind that ever happened, though Nasby says it only consisted in the crippling of three mulattoes and an Irishman—and they still point out three or four places where it occurred. I am not trying to detract from the subliminity of the Boston Massacre—though I do consider that for all Providence has been so partial, there are other places that are just as much entitled to a massacre as Boston is. But I find no fault. San Francisco has earthquakes, anyhow. Therefore let Boson make much of her massacre if she want to—who cares? I don't think anything of massacres. I scorn them.
And then there is that old church—the Old South, I believe, they call it—the one that has a British cannon ball sticking in it. Boston thinks the world of that. The people tell you about it, and point it out to you, and show off the moral advantages of it, till, in spite of your foreign prejudices, you are bound to confess that there is no happiness like having a church with a British cannon ball stuck in it. Boston values that relic, and cherishes it; and every time the Old South Church wears out they build another and stick the cannon ball in again, and go on overcoming the stranger with it as serenely as ever.
And next they trot out Benjamin Franklin. I am opposed to slang; but there isn't any other expression that is descriptive enough for this emergency. And how they do believe in that venerable adventurer! If it had not been for him, with his incendiary "Early to bed and early to rise," and all that sort of foolishness, I wouldn't have been so harried and worried and raked out of bed at such unseemly hours when I was young. The late Franklin was well enough in his way; but it would have looked more dignified in him to have gone on making candles and letting other people get up when they wanted to. I do not see why he ever made candles, though—as celebrated a man as he was. I would have turned my celebrity to better account. But Boston thinks a great deal of Franklin. He was born in two different places in Boston, simultaneously, and he came the nearest to being twins that he ever did in his life. Boston shows both of those places reverently to the stranger, and thinks just as much of one of them as she does of the other. Franklin was always fond of the sports of his boyhood, and until he was an old man he used to go out and fly his kite every Sunday. If he had ever read the Sunday School books he would have found out that it was dangerous to be tempting Providence in that way. He kept it up until at last, one beautiful Sabbath morning, he would have been struck by lightning and scattered all over the State but for a door-key that happened to be hanging on his kite-string. It was not a creditable adventure for an old person like him, but the Boston people got around it by saying that he was trying to attract the lightning on purpose, and therefore he was flying his kite in the interest of science. That cat won't fight, to use the language of metaphor. When General Washington chops down the cherry trees and Benjamin Franklin breaks the Sabbath, it is all right; but suppose I were to do such a thing? My parents would make it an interesting occasion for me.
And the Bostonians show you the ancient Capitol and Quincy market, and the residence of old John W. Hancock, the gentleman whose signature to the Declaration of Independence it is comfort to come back to and read, after you have got the blind-staggers trying to spell out the others. And they also show you old Faneuil Hall, the Cradle of Liberty. You must learn to pronounce Quincy as if it were Quinzy, and Fanueil as if it were Funnel. In this way you can palm yourself on the unsuspecting for a native, and so be respected. Presently they march you mysteriously to a pier, and standing uncovered, they point down at the water with impressive solemnity. That is where the Young Men's Christian Association, dressed as Mohawk Indians, threw the tea overboard in old Colonial times. It was one of the most spirited things that ever was, and is justly admired to this day. There was only one narrow-minded bigot in the whole commonwealth to refuse to swing his hat and say it was sublime. That was the gentleman who owned the tea. He never has collected a cent. When the Indians had finished their exploit their moccasins were full of tea. This was carefully preserved and distributed around to be kept always in remembrance of the incident. Nothing is now held in greater reverence in Boston, than these little parcels of tea. Nearly every family in New England is descended from those savages, and has some of the tea. It is estimated that there is as much as sixty tons of it in Boston alone. I shall always respect these Indians, for tea is a poor insipid beverage, and it is a pity the Indians could not have lived forever to indulge their fancy for emptying it into the sea.
But to the patriotic stranger, perhaps the most notable and interesting thing about Boston is the stately Bunker Hill Monument, which has been erected on the summit of Bunker Hill, to commemorate the battle of Bunker Hill, which was fought on another hill in a neighboring county. It is a very graceful and imposing structure, and is thirteen inches out of the perpendicular. This is the result of building it a little on the slant of the hill. One cannot stand on this sacred ground and feel no quickened impulse of the blood, no swelling of the heart, no exaltation. It was here that Warren fell. It was here that the angry tide of battle was to ebb and flow, and liberty flesh her maiden sword. It was here that Washington, careworn and anxious, leaned against the iron railing and prayed for night or Blucher. Drawn up behind the monument, his little patriot band stood in stern array awaiting the fateful onslaught of the British. At this juncture, when muscles and nerves were tense with expectancy, when every ear was listening, when every breath was clogged with restraint, and a dismal vague suspense brooded in the air, it was learned that the battle was to be fought on Breed's Hill, instead of here, by request of the British commander, whose relations resided in that neighborhood, and desired to witness it. It was thus that the battle of Bunker Hill came to be fought in another place. It was thus that this tranquil spot was spared those scenes of hell-ensanguined carnage which did not occur here.
The view from the top of the monument is one of the grandest the continent can afford. Toward the south the eye wanders over silvery glimpses of the bay, fringed with a long array of masts delicately pencilled against the sky; beyond, the blue hills of Canada lift their filmy outlines above the level world of tinted forest, and out of their midst Mount Washington thrusts it crown of ice and snow. Westward the bright grain fields of New Hampshire stretch their emerald undulations toward the rising sun; in the shadowy east the sullen furnaces glow among the cavernous glens of Pennsylvania and sadden the upper air with a sable pall of smoke; and in the distant north, beyond the swelling sea of vegetation flecked with white villages and threaded with sinuous brooks; beyond the dreamy belt where village and brook and forest melt together and lose their individuality; away beyond ranges of hazy mountains that lap their purple waves together under the clouds, one catches fitful glimpses of that mysterious ocean that heaves its sailless tides about the pole—and on a clear day one can see the pole itself. Such, I learn, is the view that one may obtain from Bunker Hill Monument. I did not go up.
One of the most winning features of Boston is the politeness of the people. I do not refer to any class particularly. One is civilly treated by all. You would not enjoy stopping New Yorkers to ask the way to places—you would not get in a habit of it, certainly, for you would get more curt answers than compliments. But you shortly learn in Boston to question whom you please on such matters. The native stops at once and maps your course out for you with a patience and a gentleness of speech that are as gratifying as they are unexpected and astonishing. Crooked streets are invaluable, if this is the effect they have—for I do not know what else to attribute Boston's patient affability to if it be not the schooling her citizens get in teaching lost strangers how to find themselves. We were inquiring the way pretty much all the time, but we did not get a crusty answer in a single instance. We made one inquiry of an Irishman, sitting on the ground with his back against a house. He got up to answer, and then it was plain that he was a distillery in disguise. He stretched out his hand to point, but it wavered and slewed around. He tried the other, and it slewed around also. He reeled magnificently at the same moment, and his cap slid off. In catching at his cap he tripped and fell in the gutter. He gathered himself up and apologized for the delay, and said he would tell us how to go, because he had the mumps and could not point good. Then he said:
"You go around that corner there, and turn to the right and go two blocks, and then turn to the left and go a block, and turn to the right and go two blocks to the left, and then go straight till you turn to the right, and then—"
He was tangled. He began over again, and got tangled again. He tried it all over, and checked it off on his fingers. But he got tangled in the same place. Then he reflected awhile in painful perplexity, but suddenly he said:
"Got it now! Might have thought of it before. I'll go along and show you myself." And he did.
I could not see much of Boston in a day and a half, of course, as we were simply idling about visiting people the greater part of the time, but what I did see of it has been very pleasant to remember. As it was early March that I was there, I cannot say anything about the great Peace Jubilee, for that enterprise had hardly been thought of at that time, in fact, I did not suggest it to Gilmore until about the first of April.
Nasby is about thirty-five years old. He is compact, solid, heavy. He weighs a hundred and seventy or eighty, perhaps. There is nothing of a dainty look about him, but, on the contrary, he is as burly and vigorous as a theatrical blacksmith. His energy is invincible. After travelling all day and lecturing every night for months together, he was as fresh as ever. His attire is unfashionable, but he cares nothing for that. It does not fit, but that does not concern him. He is not graceful on the stage, but that does not distress him. He is not as handsome as I am, but more picturesque.
Nasby has achieved a great success, and did it without other help than the talents that were born with him. His newspaper has a prodigious circulation; his letters take well; his books sell well; his lecture-field is the whole country. His lecture is the best thing he has written. It is a very unvarnished narrative of the negro's career, from the flood to the present day, and bristles with satire. For instance, the interpolating of the word white in State Constitutions existing under a great general Constitution which declares all men to be equal, is neatly touched by a recommendation that the Scriptures be so altered, at the same time, as to make them pleasantly conform to men's notions—thus: "Suffer little white children to come unto me, and forbid them not!" The lecture is a fair and logical argument against slavery, and is the pleasantest to listen to I have ever heard upon that novel and interesting subject. It is necessarily severe upon the Democracy, but not more so than one would expect from Nasby. The wonder is that anybody should expect anything else. But they do. In half the places I have lectured in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Illinois, and other States, I heard people talking acrimoniously about Nasby having given them an offensive political lecture instead of one upon some inoffensive subject. I wonder what on earth they did expect Nasby to talk about? Poetry, no doubt. Well, Nasby is a good fellow, and companionable, and we sat up till daylight reading Bret Harte's Condensed Novels and talking over Western lecturing experiences. But lecturing experiences, deliciously toothsome and interesting as they are, must be recounted only in secret session, with closed doors. Otherwise, what a telling magazine article one could make out of them. I lectured all over the States, during the entire winter and far into the spring, and I am sure that my salary of twenty-six hundred dollars a month was only about half of my pay—the rest was jolly experiences. I am not sure but that Nasby will go with me when I start to California about the first of August.
MARK TWAIN.
Alta California, August 1, 1869
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN.
[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ALTA CALIFORNIA]
Much Married—Story of the Crown Prince of Timbuctoo—A California Magazine Abroad—Blind Tom and His Performances—Where is the Avitor?
HARTFORD, Conn., July, 1869
EDITORS ALTA: There is some little talk about a circumstance which happened the other day to an exalted Washington official. It seems to be my duty to record it. I will call the sufferer General George Belding, for the sake of convenience. He is said to be a right good man, but was always liberal in his views and a very sociable sort of person. He used to go about a good deal, and among other places, he used to go up to Socrates, on the Hudson River Railroad, every now and then, and stay all night at a hotel kept by a Mr. and Mrs. Wagner. In due time he fell in love with a refined and cultivated young lady in Brooklyn, and immediately put himself upon his very best behavior. In the course of six months she married him, and gave it as her opinion that she was marrying perfection itself. The young couple were very happy. They began to frisk around and enjoy the honeymoon. Presently they ran up to Socrates and camped at Mr. Wagner's hotel. In the evening George was sitting on a sofa in the parlor, with his arm around his bride's shoulders, when Mrs. Wagner entered. She struck an attitude. She began to get angry in a minute. Then she said:
"Look here, my fine fellow, I've had as much of this as I'm going to stand. There you are, down on that register as 'Gen. George Belding and lady,' again. You've done that thing sixteen times in eighteen months, and you've fetched a fresh trollop along every time. Young woman, march! Vamoose the ranch, you brazen-faced huzzy!" It was a very sad circumstance. Now wasn't it?
The other day I saw in a dwelling in Hartford a well-executed portrait, by Inman, of an aged, bushy-headed, dignified darkey of patriarchal aspect, and a question concerning it brought out its story. In 1790, a party of American and English gentlemen, travelling in Africa, fell into misfortune, got lost, and in their wanderings were exposed for many days to the perils of starvation, sun-stroke, miasmatic fevers, snake-bite, mastication by wild beasts or wilder cannibals—as varied and picturesque a combination of deadly menaces as it often falls to the luck of one small party of strangers to stumble on in a new country. But variety is the spice of life. So they struggled on, fighting against hope, until at last, when hunger and thirst, and pain and fatigue had well-nigh conquered them, and they were ready to succumb to death, and even welcome it as a deliverance, a stalwart young native suddenly appeared upon then and they were saved. He was a Crown Prince by hereditary right, and likewise by nature and merit. He was the eldest son of the King of Timbuctoo, who was great and powerful, and lived in regal state, and wore a stove-pipe hat and a pair of spectacles upon solemn occasions when it was necessary to put on clothes. He was a good King and a good man. The Prince brought his starvelings home, and the entire royal family turned out to welcome them. Comfortable quarters were provided for them in the palace, and for weeks the Prince and his people nursed them, nourished them, doctored them, watched by their bed sides. At last the patients grew strong and well again, and then they thanked their generous benefactors from full hearts, and bade them farewell and journeyed away toward their homes beyond the sea.
Thirty years after this, namely, in 1820, one of the Americans of this party happened to be going along the street in Louisville, when in the person of a gray and venerable slave, he recognized his preserver, the Crown Prince of Timbuctoo! The poor fellow had been taken prisoner in battle with a neighboring tribe and sold to the traders on the coast, and now for five and twenty years he had been doing service as an American slave.
The American gentleman referred to made himself known, and he and his royal benefactor had a long talk over other days and stirring reminiscences. And then the gentleman naturally went forth in the world to lay the facts before humane people and achieve the Prince's liberation. He published the details of his ancient adventure far and wide, and called upon all charitable souls to contribute their voices and their money to the good object. Henry Clay took hold of the matter and talked earnestly and eloquently in the unfortunate Prince's behalf. So did Daniel Webster. So did other prominent men. And how long do you suppose it took to set that stricken and gallant old Prince free? It took two years. I suppose they did not know how to do things in those days. I have seen a man start around with a subscription paper for a mere ordinary public benevolent institution of some kind, in San Francisco, and collect coin enough in a single afternoon to buy up a whole tribe of Crown Princes. Highest market price, too. But in this old African's cause the money came in fifteen cents at a time, though in several shining cases a community came down with as much as two dollars all in one lump. And so, finally, they managed to scrape the stipulated amount together and buy the old royalist, though, sooth to say, he was getting pretty mature before they accomplished it. The fact is, several obstructions were thrown in the way of the enterprise. The Louisvillains, and Southerners generally, tried to frown the thing down and stop its aggravating notoriety, for it attracted too much attention to the peculiar institution, and made it smell too unsavory to have crowned heads found among its victims and the grim story of how they came there detailed in the public prints. And then the owners of this royalty made stumbling-blocks of themselves. They declined to part with him at all, at first. He was the only Prince they had on the plantation, likely, and they didn't know where they could get another one, maybe. And when they did consent to sell they put up the price on him. They were very loath to part with him—yet he was over sixty years old and of no particular account to anybody, unless it might be to the people of Timbuctoo. They put up the price on him—they said they warn't selling Kings, now, at the ruling rates for field hands—not as much as there were. They demanded full price for a King, and only ten per cent off for damage (though in honest truth he was so old and rusty that he ought not to have ranked higher than a war-chief, or maybe a First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, in good repair).
However, the Prince was bought and paid for, at last, and set at liberty, and he started around the country at once telling his story and collecting money to buy his wife with, for he had married in slavery. He was here in Hartford on this mission in 1822, when Inman painted the portrait of him which I have spoken of. The old scion of royalty raised money enough at last, and bought his wife and took her with him to Timbuctoo and remounted the throne the first chance he got—and I, for one, sincerely hope that after all his trials he is now peacefully enjoying the evening of his life and eating and relishing unsaleable niggers from neighboring tribes who fall into his hand, and making a good thing out of other niggers from neighboring tribes that are saleable. For virtues like his should be rewarded, and misfortunes like his should be compensated. The story I have told is a neat little romance and is true. I have ornamented it, and furbished it up a little, here and there, but I have not marred or misstated any of the main facts.
The Eastern press are unanimous in their commendation of your new magazine. Every paper and every periodical has something to say about it, and they lavish compliments upon it with a heartiness that is proof that they mean what they say. Even the Nation, that is seldom satisfied with anything, takes frequent occasion to demonstrate that it is satisfied with the Overland. And every now and then, it and the other critical reviews of acknowledged authority, take occasion to say that Bret Harte's sketch of the "Luck of Roaring Camp" is the best prose magazine article that has seen the light for many months on either side of the ocean. They never mention who wrote the sketch, of course (and I only guess at it), for they do not know. The Overland keeps it contributors' names in the dark. Harte's name would be very familiar in the land but for this. However, the magazine itself is well known in high literary circles. I have heard it handsomely praised by some of the most ponderous of America's literary chiefs; and they displayed a complimentary and appreciative familiarity with Harte's articles, and those of Brooks, Sam. Williams, Bartlett, etc. But are you sure that California prizes the magazine as much as the Eastern people do? I stepped into the bookstore the other day to buy an Overland, and I made some inquiries about it. The bookseller said he always disposed of twenty-five or thirty copies without trouble, and he thought another establishment did as well. He said the sale in Hartford could be run up to a hundred copies right easily. He said he had twelve regular subscribers—and then I remembered that a good authority had told me that the magazine lay decaying under slow sale on all the news counters of San Francisco, and that when the canvassars first sallied out in its behalf, they got just twelve subscribers in the entire length of Montgomery street. Is that true? Any canvasser could do better than that with it in any ten blocks in Hartford. About this time his Excellency the Lieutenant Governor came along and showed that he knew more about the Overland and the names and contributions of its writers than I did myself, and so I assumed a dignified silence.
One day last winter I was on my way from Galena to another Illinois town to fill a lecture engagement. I went into the smoking car and sat down to meditate; but it was not a good meditating place, for pretty soon a burly negro man on the opposite side of the car began to sway his body violently forward and back, and mimic with his mouth the hiss and clatter of the train, in the most savagely excited way. Every time he came forward I was sure he was going to brain himself on the seat-back in front of him, and every time he reversed I was as certain he was going to throw a back-somersault over his own seat. What a wild state he was in! Clattering, hissing, whistling, blowing off gauge cocks, ringing his bell, thundering over bridges with a row and a racket like everything going to pieces, whooping through tunnels, running over cows—Heavens! I thought, will this devil never run his viewless express off the track and give us a rest? No, sir. For three dreadful hours he kept it up—and you may know by that what muscles and what wind he had. His wild eyes were sightless. For the most part he kept his head turned sideways and upward as blind people usually do who get a dim ray of light from apparently above the eye somewhere. He kept his face constantly twisted and distorted out of all shape. When he spoke he talked excitedly to himself, in an idiotic way and incoherently, but never slowed down on his imaginary express train to do it. He looked about thirty, was coarsely and slouchily dressed, and was as ungainly in build and uncomely of countenance as any half-civilized plantation slave. After I had endured his furious entertainment until I was becoming as crazy as he was and getting ready to start an opposition express on my own hook, I inquired who this barbarian was, and where he was bound for, and why he was not chained or throttled? They said it was Blind Tom, the celebrated pianist—a harmless idiot to whom all sounds were music, and the imitation of them an unceasing delight. Even discord had a charm for his exquisite ear. Even the groaning and clattering and hissing of a railway train was harmony to him. And this stalwart brute was to torture his muscles all day with this terrific exercise, and then instead of lying down at night to die of exhaustion, was to sit behind a grand piano and bewitch a multitude with the pathos, the tenderness, the gaiety, the thunder, the brilliant and varied inspiration of his music!
A month or two ago I attended his performances three nights in succession. If ever there was an inspired idiot this is the individual. He lorded it over the emotions of his audience like an autocrat. He swept them like a storm, with his battle-pieces; he lulled them to rest again with melodies as tender as those we hear in dreams; he gladdened them with others that rippled through the charmed air as happily and cheerily as the riot the linnets make in California woods; and now and then he threw in queer imitations of the tuning of discordant harps and fiddles, and the groaning and wheezing of bag-pipes, that sent the rapt silence into tempests of laughter. And every time the audience applauded when a piece was finished, this happy innocent joined in and clapped his hands, too, and with vigorous emphasis. It was not from egotism, but because it is his natural instinct to imitate pretty much every sound he hears. When anybody else plays, the music so crazes him with delight that he can only find relief in uplifting a leg, depressing his head half way to the floor and jumping around on one foot so fast that it almost amounts to spinning—and he claps his hands all the while, too. His head misses the piano about an inch or an inch and a half every time he comes around, but some astonishing instinct keeps him forever from hitting it. It must be instinct, because he cannot see, and he must surely grow too dizzy with his spinning to be able to measure distances and know where he is going to and whither he is drifting. And when the volunteer is done, Tom stops spinning, sits down and plays the piece over, exactly as the volunteer had played it, and puts in all the slips, mistakes, discords, corrections, and everything just where they occurred in the original performance! He will exactly reproduce the piece, no matter how fast it was played or how slow, or whether he ever heard it before or not. The second night that I attended, two musical professors sat down together and played a duet, which they had composed themselves beforehand for the occasion. It was wonderfully tangled and complicated, wonderfully fast in movement, and was bristling with false notes. In the midst of it "Yankee Doodle" was interpolated, but so mutilated with intentional discords that one could not help writhing in his seat when they rattled it off. The bass was a brilliant piece of complication, and fitted the composition about as well as it would have fitted any other tune—just about. When the piece was finished, Tom stopped spinning and took the treble player's place alongside the bass performer, and clattered it furiously through, with his nose in the air, and never missed a note of any kind; and when he faithfully put in the ludicrous discords in "Yankee Doodle," the house came down. Then the treble man came back, and Tom took the wonderful bass and played it perfectly.
Tom will play two tunes and sing a third at the same time, and let the audience choose the keys he shall perform in. I heard him play "Fisher's Hornpipe" with his right hand in two sharps (D), and "Yankee Doodle" with his left in three flats (E flat), and sing "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the Boys are Marching," in the key of C—all at the same time. It was a dreadful and disorganizing mixture of meaningless sounds, but you could easily discover that there was "no deception," as the magicians say, by taking up the tunes one at a time and following them a little while, and then you would perceive that in time, movement and melody, each was without fault.
But the most surprising thing this High-You Muck-a-Muck of all the negro minstrels does, is to analyze musical sounds. If you will turn your back to the piano and let somebody strike a key at random here and there, you will see that you cannot call the name of two of the notes in succession except by pure guess work; and when just one note is touched by itself you cannot tell whether it was a black key or a white one. Blind Tom is your superior, then, in some respects. For he can stand off at a distance, and face the audience, with his back to the piano, and you may strike any key you please, and he will tell its name and its color; and two persons from the audience may select twenty keys (mixed so as to form a discord that will give you the lockjaw), and strike them suddenly and all at once, with their four hands—and while the sound lingers in the air, the listening idiot will incline his head and make a fine assay of that sound, separate the web of discord into its individual elements, and then begin with the first note and rapidly call the name of every key of the twenty in succession, and never make a mistake! And twenty more may be struck, and the fingers of the performers instantly sent scattering at random over the full compass of the piano—but by the time the flash of sound had died Thomas has analyzed it and can name the notes that made it. All the schooling of a life-time could not teach a man to do this wonderful thing, I suppose—but this blind, uninstructed idiot of nineteen does it without any trouble. Some archangel, cast out of upper Heaven like another Satan, inhabits this coarse casket; and he comforts himself and makes his prison beautiful with thoughts and dreams and memories of another time and another existence that fire this dull clod with impulses and inspirations it no more comprehends than does the stupid worm the stirring of the spirit within her of the gorgeous captive whose wings she fetters and whose flight she stays. It is not Blind Tom that does these wonderful things and plays this wonderful music—it is the other party.
Send us more news about Mr. Marriott's air-ship—the telegraph is too reticent. Some of our people take the remarks about the Avitor for mere "talk," and so pay little attention to it. Others receive in good faith what the telegraph says, and get up a good deal of enthusiasm about it. It is a subject that is bound to stir the pulses of any man one talks seriously to about, for in this age of inventive wonders all men have come to believe that in some genius' brain sleeps the solution of the grand problem of aerial navigation—and along with that belief is the hope that that genius will reveal his miracle before they die, and likewise a dread that he will poke off somewhere and die himself before he finds out that he has such a wonder lying dormant in his brain. We all know the air can be navigated—therefore, hurry up your sails and bladders—satisfy us—let us have peace. And then, with railroads, steamers, the ocean telegraph, the air ship—with all these in motion and secured to us for all time, we shall have only one single wonder left to work at and pry into and worry about—namely, commerce, or at least telegraphic communion with the people of Jupiter and the Moon. I am dying to see some of those fellows! We shall see what we shall see, before we die. I have faith—a world of it. A telescope is building in Europe, now, which will distinctly show objects in the moon two hundred and fifty feet in length, but I feel satisfied that the inhabitants of the moon have telescopes still stronger, with which they read our newspapers, look down our chimneys and pry into our private business—and I wish I might catch them at it once. I am certain that the moon-calves have been trying for a long time to communicate with us, else why are they always shying meteoric stones at us? It is to attract attention. That is the way I attract people's attention. I never hear of the falling of a meteoric stone but I sigh to think of the disappointment of the philosopher who threw it when he sees that no notice is taken of it on earth—and the irritation which will follow the disappointment and make him say: "Dang it, I wish I had broke a window!" I love to revel in philosophical matters—especially astronomy. I study astronomy more than any other foolishness there is. I am a perfect slave to it. I am at it all the time. I have got more smoked glass than clothes. I am as familiar with the stars as the comets are. I know all the facts and figures and have all the knowledge there is concerning them. I yelp astronomy like a sun-dog, and paw the constellations like Ursa Major. When Horatio Nelson discovered the principle of attraction of gravitation by the falling of an apple tree—. However, we will not go into that. Tell us about the "Avitor." We wish to hear that it is a success.
MARK TWAIN
The Chicago Republican, February 8, 1868
His Ideas on Poetical Congressmen—Hints for the Improvement of their Style.
The Scandal Against Judge Field.
Adventure with a Native of Kalamazoo—A Michigander at a Reception.
The Capitol Police—
The Colorado Brothers—
Mark Twain's Description of the Fashions at Gen. Grant's Reception.
Special Correspondence of the Chicago Republican.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31.
Congress is the most interesting body I have found yet. It does more crazy things, and does them with a graver earnestness, than any State Legislature that exists, perhaps. But I did hope it would not "drop into poetry;" I did hope it would continue its dullness to prose. But it was not to be. Hon. Mungen, of Ohio, has set a disastrous example. He has allowed the sentiment that is in him to settle, and I herewith offer you the sediment. It is all properly caked and versified. Let me give also the three or four lines which precede it in the National Intelligencer, (and which have rather shaken my respect for that staid old journal), that regularly comes out in the most sensational and aggressive manner, every morning, with news it ought to have printed the day before.
The Intelligencer remarks as follows:
[The following lines are from the pen of Hon. William Mungen, member of Congress from the Fifth District of Ohio, whose exquisite taste for poetry and art has not been blunted by his political duties:]
TO AN ABSENT ONE.
Time flies, and still its rapid wings
Strikes on my thoughts with constant blows,
Touches my heart's most secret springs,
And love's fond stream toward thee flows.
Flows like Niagara's rushing tide—
True as the needle to the pole;
Clear as the deep blue sea, and wide
As were the thoughts of Milton's soul.
Absence from thee, my own dear wife,
Makes me but know how good thou art;
Partner of sorrows, joys, and life—
Part of myself—the purer part.
When shall that happy time arrive?
When shall those days most wished for come?
When side by side we'll love and live
To bless each other in our home.
Now, isn't that bosh? Do you observe that happy Congressional grammatical inspiration whereby Time flies, and still its rapid wings strikes on this party's thoughts with constant blows, touches the said party's heart's most secret springs, and love's fond stream toward the other party flows? Isn't that criminal grammar? And don't you think that if you had a love's "fond stream" flowing out of you like Niagara's rushing tide that you would feel a little alarmed about it, and quit hatching poetry, and proceed to let a contract for a breakwater, or a coffer dam, or something of that sort? I think you would. I think you would feel some solicitude about a freshet like that. And further concerning the second stanza, Mungen has no business to come here and try to disseminate the imposture that the deep blue sea is clear, because people who know things and are consequently wise, know that the deep blue sea isn't any clearer than Mungenical poetry. That is putting it rather strong, possibly, but fraud must be frowned down, when it comes among us in the seductive garb of poetry, even though strong figures be required to do it. The needle isn't true to the pole, either. That is another attempted swindle on the public. Mariners are aware that the cases wherein the needle actually points to the pole are so rare as to be well worthy of remark. The width of Milton's thoughts has never been subjected to government survey, and officially established, and so that metaphor must not be imposed upon a confiding public. If the figure had been transposed, so as to make the "width" refer to the sea, and the clearness to Milton's thoughts, nobody could have objected. The copartnership notice in the third act is business—let it pass—I wish to speak only of the poetry. If it suits the Congressional mind to mingle poetry and business together, it is competent for the Congressional mind so to proceed. The solicitude as to "when that happy time shall arrive," might have been spared to the Congressional mind by reference to the records which determine when the Fortieth Congress shall cease from its labors—say the 4th of March, 1869, Wherefore
Be it resolved, That all after the third stanza, common meter, be and the same is hereby stricken out, and these words inserted in lieu thereof, such substitute being considered to be in consonance and in keeping with the three preceding stanzas aforesaid, and as affording important information of which the excluded stanza is deficient:
"This is the house that Jack built,
Congress adjourns the fourth of March;
Then never more shall we parties part,
Pop goes the weasel."
This is not poetical, but it has at least the merit of being instructive.
The Congressional mind had better quit soaring into poetry and go to sailing into political economy, perhaps.
A resolution was passed in the House, several days ago, to appoint a Committee to investigate certain charges which had been preferred in a six line newspaper item, against one of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States to the end that he might be impeached if such a course seemed justifiable. You will observe that the House not only so far forgot its dignity as to entertain that thing, coming in such unauthorized, anonymous, and altogether questionable shape, but discussed and acted upon it. Such conduct as this is ill advised, and is calculated to cheapen the respect due to this high tribunal. The impeachment of a Judge of the Supreme Court is a grave matter, and should have a more respectable foundation than town gossip. Hon. Stephen Field was the Judge referred to. It was stated in the newspaper item that he had said at a dinner where he was a guest, that the Reconstruction acts were unconstitutional, and that the Court would so decide them. Any man might have known that so absurd a charge as that, and one so out of all character, would prove utterly groundless, and such has been the result. If we had a party of chattering old maids on the bench, we might expect them to gad about their official business, but wise, dignified old men do not do such things. I have inquired about the matter, and find that the circumstances are not worth detailing. They are not particularly creditable to the gentleman from whom the newspaper man probably got his information, either.
I went to the Capitol, yesterday, to see if there was anything going on there of especial interest to the Northwest. Senators and all other sources of information seemed busy. I secured an Illinois Congressman at last, but he did not know anything of especial import, except that no move had yet been made this session, and doubtless none would be made at all during this Congress, in behalf of the ship canal which it is proposed shall one day give Chicago direct communication with Europe by way of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. That was sufficient on that subject, of course. Then I went to the chamber of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (I will remark that I am not a clerk of any committee), because I was told that Senator Trumbull would shortly be there.
I was standing, all by myself, in the Committee room, reading a vast law book, and wondering what it was about; and whether the plaintiff had done so and so, or whether it was the defendant; and which of them they found guilty; and how the mischief they ever knew he was guilty when the words were tangled up so; and noting, with gratification, the references to Perkins v. Bangs, Mo. Rep. iii, &c., whereby it was apparent that if one did not get mixed up enough in that book there were others that could finish him; and wondering also at the bewildering tautology of the said aforesaid book aforesaid, when a youth to fortune and to fame unknown, flourished in the most frisky way, and came to a halt before me. This young man had a moustache that dimmed the lightness of his countenance about as your breath dims the brightness of a razor; and he bored down into it with his fingers, and gave it a twist which was singularly gratifying to him, considering that no effect was produced upon the moustache by the operation. Then he tilted his little soup-dish to the port side of his head with his gloved hand, and said:
"Hello!"
I said "Hello!"
He looked surprised. Then he said: "Do you belong here?"
I was just finishing a sentence about Perkins v. Bangs. I finished it and observed: "The weather is very fine."
He whisked nervously up and down the room a couple of turns, and then stopped before me and said: "Are you the clerk of the Judiciary Committee?"
I said, in the urbanest manner:
"In view of the circumstance that on so short an acquaintance you betray so much solicitude concerning my business, I will venture to inquire what you may happen to want with the clerk of the Judiciary Committee?"
"That is not answering my question. Are you the clerk of the Judiciary Committee?"
"In view of the circumstance that on so short an acquaintance you betray so much solicitude concerning my business, I will venture to inquire again what you may happen to want with the clerk of the Judiciary Committee?"
"That don't concern anybody but me. What I want to know is, are you, or are you not the clerk of the Judiciary Committee?"
"In view, as I said before, of the circumstance that on so short an acquaintance you betray so much solicitude concerning my business, I will venture to inquire once again, what you may happen to want with the clerk of the Judiciary Committee?"
He scratched his head in apparent perplexity for a matter of five seconds, and then said with deliberation and impressive earnestness:
"Well, I'll be dammed."
"I presume so. I hope so. Still, being a stranger, you cannot expect me to take more than a passing interest in your future plans."
He looked puzzled, and a little chafed. He said: "Look here—who are you?"
"In view of the circumstance—"
"Oh, curse the circumstance!"
"Amen."
He did not reply. He seemed worried and annoyed. Presently he started out, and said by George he would go after the Michigan Senators and inquire into this thing. I said they were esteemed acquaintances of mine, and asked him to say that I was well. But he refused to do this, notwithstanding all my politeness, and was profane again. I never saw such a fire brand as he was.
Now what can that young fellow mean by going around asking respectable people if they are clerks of Senate committees? If my feelings are to be outraged in this way, I cannot stay in Washington. I don't like to be called Hello by strangers with imaginary moustaches, either. This young party turned out to be an importation from Kalamazoo, and he wished to ship as a sub-clerk to the Judiciary Committee. He is a little fresh. It might have been better if he had stayed in the Kalamazoological Gardens until he got his growth, perhaps. Still, if his friends would like to have the opinion of a stranger concerning him, I think he will make a success here in one way or another. He has spirit and persistence. The only trouble is, that he has most too much hello about him. He was at Mr. Colfax's reception last night, and if anybody was serenely and entirely at home in that brilliant gathering, and equal in all respects to the occasion, it was Kalamazoo, I think. He shouldered his way through the throng to shake hands with me, and I knew by the cheery tone of his voice that he had forgotten his anger, and regarded me in the light of a cherished old acquaintance, when he said, "Hello, old Smarty!—you here!" In about an hour and a half that fellow was acquainted with everybody in the house.
The days of the picturesque, blue uniformed, brass-buttoned Capitol police are numbered. They have cost the Government $80,000 in the last year, and have not been worth the money. They "came like shadows"—most of them—but will not so depart. They have grown fat and comfortable, dozing in chairs and scratching their backs against marble pillars. They got good wages, and had two sumptuous uniforms allowed them every year. But retrenchment is the order of the day now, and the appropriation for all Capitol police expenses is to be cut down to $5,000. That will well nigh exterminate the force. They are good men, and many of them have won a right to Governmental consideration by the deeds they have done in the field, but the times are hard and they must yield their places. If we had a little European sagacity, we would detail soldiers of the regular army to take care of the Capitol buildings, and then we need not pay even that $5,000 I have spoken of.
Colorado is memorializing Congress for admission as a State. The memorial sets forth that all classes and parties in Colorado desire a State Government, including the negroes, who are satisfied that the Constitution of the proposed State guarantees to them all the rights and privileges to which they are entitled; it furthermore sets forth that the Territory's voting strength has augmented since the President ruled her out before by veto; also that she pays a large internal revenue; that her postal receipts are great and are steadily increasing; and finally, that her population is as numerous as those of the new States last admitted. It is possible that Colorado may get in this time.
In this connection, it is observable, that in making this request the people of Colorado show an approximation to perfect unanimity of sentiment which is surprising. A Chronicle editorial says:
"The people of Colorado seem now, for the first time, to be almost unanimous for admission. We learn that one man, who was a strong State man until defeated for United States Senator, and his brother, are now the only active opponents of the measure."
Only two men against it. Only two resolute men against 30,000. This is a unanimity that would dishearten any ordinary brace of men. But it is not so in this case. These brothers are not only determined but "active." The spectacle of these two active partisans capering about the volcanic hills in solitary sublimity, while the badgered 30,000 march timidly to the polls to vote, is one that has an air of novelty about it, to say the least. The Chronicle is friendly to the admission, but I am afraid that in so magnifying the agility of these two gymnastic chiefs, it may be unwittingly damaging Colorado's chances in this second effort. The President will hardly open the door to her until the "candidate for United States Senator and his brother" shall be persuaded to quit performing on the hilltops, and cease to bullyrag the unoffending 30,000 with their pitiless opposition.
The fashions displayed by the ladies at the receptions of the great dignitaries of the Government may be regarded as orthodox and reliable, of course. I do not enjoy receptions, and yet I go to them, and inflict all manner of crowding, suffocation, and general discomfort upon myself, solely in order that I may be able to post the lady readers of newspapers concerning what they ought to wear when they wish to be utterly and exhaustively fashionable. Not being perfect in the technicalities of millinery, this duty is always tedious, and very laborious and fatiguing. I mention these things, because I wish to be credited with at least the good will to do well, even though I may chance, through ignorance, to fail of success.
At Gen. Grant's reception, the other night, the most fashionably dressed lady was Mrs. G. C. She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front, but with a good deal of rake to it—to the train, I mean; it was said to be two or three yards long. One could see it creeping along the floor some little time after the woman was gone. Mrs. C. wore also a white bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck, with the inside handkerchief not visible; white kid gloves. She had on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up in the midst of that barren waste of neck and shoulders. Her hair was grizzled into a tangled chapparal, forward of her ears; after it was drawn together, and compactly bound and plaited into a stump like a pony's tail, and furthermore was canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red velvet crupper, whose forward extremity was made fast with a half hitch around a hair pin on her poop-deck, which means, of course, the top of her head, if you do not understand fashion technicalities. Her whole top hamper was neat and becoming. She had a beautiful complexion when she first came, but it faded out by degrees in the most unaccountable way. However, it was not lost for good. I found the most of it on my shoulder afterwards. (I had been standing by the door when she had been squeezing in and out with the throng). There were other fashionably dressed ladies present, of course, but I only took notes of one, as a specimen. The subject is one of great interest to ladies, and I would gladly enlarge upon it if I were more competent to do it justice.
MARK TWAIN.
The Chicago Republican, February 19, 1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTER.
Final Defeat of the Impeachment Project in the House.
How to Describe a Fashionable Party—Some New Terms.
Mark's Valentines—Discomforts of Too Much Popularity.
How Miss Vinnie Ream Got Into the Capitol, and Won't be Turned Out.
Special Correspondence of the Chicago Republican.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14.
In this city, Feb. 13, at his lodgings in the chamber of the House Reconstruction Committee, our beloved brother, IMPEACHMENT. The malady of deceased was general debility. A short time ago his health had improved so much that a bright hope cheered the land that he would soon walk forth healthful and strong; but alas! we know not what a day may bring forth. A great fear came upon his physicians in the crisis of his disease. The weariness of watching overpowered the nurses, so that they fell asleep and neglected him—and lo! a relapse!
Then came the physicians to his bed side again with a new confidence that had been born to them of late, and said, Behold, we have other samples, that be of greater worth; we will give these unto our brother, and he shall be healed. And even as they had said, so also went they about to do.
And it came to pass that about the third hour, certain of the nurses that watched him, even Mrs. Farnsworth, and also Mrs. Boutwell, and also Mrs. Stevens, the same that is called Thad, spoke unto the other nurses, saying hearken unto us, ye that watch with us, even Mrs. Bingham, and also Mrs. Beaman, and also Mrs. Paine, and also Mrs. Hulburd, and also Mrs. Brooks, and likewise Mrs. Beck: The physicians and the people have faith that the new medicines wherewith they have provided us, can heal Him that suffereth before us here; therefore, let us make haste to do with them as they have bidden us. But straightway Mrs. Bingham, being sore afraid, cried with a loud voice, saying: Mind not the people, O ye of little nous! the doctors desire not that he shall live, for they be troubled in spirit and tormented day and night with a mighty fear. Are not we servants of the doctors, who have set this work for us to do, and is it not meet that we should do their will? Stay the hand—set thou the medicine upon the table and let him die! And so, these six, that were Mrs. Bingham, being stronger than they that were with Mrs. Stevens, called Thad, suffered not the medicine to pass the lips of him that lay sick.
And in the self-same hour he died.
So endeth the second farce. The ancient school-boy phrase best describes the position of the Congressional bodies in this matter: "One's afraid and 't'other dar'n't."
The event of the week, in the social circle, was the entertainment at Senator Chandler's residence, to celebrate the "coming out" of his daughter, Miss Chandler. It was very brilliant. I am not easily overcome by pure gorgeousness, because I am too much accustomed to it in my own palace; I feel deeply, it is true, yet I inflexibly crush those emotions and refrain from gushing even in times when it would be the greatest relief to me to gush. But when I find another man expressing exactly what I felt, and exactly what I would have expressed if I had yielded to the impulse to gush, I always borrow what that man says, and thank him kindly for saying it, and give to his paper due and proper credit, with the compliments of the undersigned. This paragraph is from the Chronicle:
"The Senator's large and elegant parlors, newly furnished, and in exquisite taste, with rare old paintings on the walls, were highly decorated with exotics of chaste and highly original designs. The brilliant scarlet leaves of the Mexican Poinsetta, with its golden center; the pure white, pink, and variegated camelias; the fragrant heliotrope and the modest violet; the gentle primrose and the drooping and graceful fern, were grouped together and arranged in vases and rustic baskets, while the niches in the walls of the staircase were tastefully decorated with camelia trees in full bloom—presenting, with their pure colors and the green and waxen leaves, a most agreeable contrast with the blazing light from the numerous jets of gas that illuminated a scene of wonderous splendor."
That is all correctly stated, and with a spirit which the subject was in every way entitled to. I do not find fault with "exotics, of highly original design;" because I know that the Deity designed them, and that to call attention in an influential daily newspaper to the happy originality of the conception, was a compliment which was as well deserved as it was well meant and gracefully put.
I add the following paragraph because the ladies of the West must surely take a particular interest in knowing how their representatives dress at the capital of the country, and because I know so well that they take a thrilling general interest in the fashions that obtain in this or any other city in the land. The technicalities that bloom so bewilderingly in these lines are altogether too abstruse for me, but I have no doubt at all that they are accurately set down. Nobody could dash off the curious phraseology of millinery science in that kind of style, but a person who was master of his subject even in its nicest details:
"Mrs. Chandler was gracefully arrayed in a dress of the finest taste—a heavy rep-pearl colored silk, empress waist, short sleeves, and low corsage, trimmed with a narrow piping of white satin, bordered with deep fringes composed of crystal beads. Her extensive train was trimmed a la passe menterie, with folds of the same material of the dress, cut in points and trimmed with pure white satin, with fold edging, the voluminous skirt arranged in the same manner. She wore a handsome set of pearls, her hair dressed with fusettes in front, rolled off her forehead with French twist and numerous plaited coils, and, surmounting, a diadem of May roses, with long pendants of buds and green leaves. Miss Chandler, a fair brunette, with golden locks, which were slightly powdered with silver, wore a chignon, over which depended a small bunch of curls, and the only ornament connected therewith was a narrow band of gold and a small piece of black lace worn on the top of the head. She wore gold jewelry, with a heavy, short necklace, with charm attached—a style that is rapidly coming into vogue. Her dress was a tunic of bright, rose-colored silk. Empress waist, short sleeves, trimmed with a rich, deep fringe of a similar shade, looped up on either side over a skirt of white silk of the most elegant description, and, of course, an elaborate train."
A "fair brunette with golden locks" is a combination which is as rare as it is necessarily striking and picturesque. I never saw a "fair" brunette in my life. And I never saw a brunette with golden locks, either. I think there must be some mistake about this. If so, no doubt it was owing to the hurry of writing up the entertainment for the morning paper. One has not time to be very particular under such circumstances. I know a good deal about that from experience.
For the last sixty years I have never seen this day approach without emotion. It was generally too deep for utterance, too. The day always brings me an armful of dainty notes from young women whom I have stricken with my destructive eye. Eyes, would have been more proper. I generally bring down a couple at a time. Strabismus enables me to do that. I usually receive notes with pictures in them; pictures of deformed shoemakers; pictures of distorted blacksmiths, pictures of cadaverous undertakers; pictures of reporters taking items at a fire and stealing clothes; and oftenest, pictures of asses, with ears longer than necessary, writing letters to newspapers. These letters are usually directed in an execrable masculine hand. The pictures and the handwriting are both intended to conceal the real passion that is consuming the young women who send them—but they fail. I have not lived three-quarters of a century for nothing.
I counted on a renewal of these little attentions to-day, and suffered no disappointment. Twenty-seven valentines are to hand, thus far, but none of them have pictures in them. They are all of a new design and very peculiar. Some of the more cautious young women have appended masculine names in place of their own. It may be well enough to offer a specimen or two since their fashion is new:
"SIR: Our metallic burial cases have taken the premium at six State Fairs in this country, and also at the great Paris Exposition. Parties who have used them have been in every instance charmed with them. Not one has yet entered a complaint. Our walnut and mahogany coffins are the delight of the people. A large stock kept constantly on hand, and orders promptly filled with pleasure. Families supplied at reduced rates. Articles in our line may be exchanged if not satisfactory. We would be glad to secure your custom, and shall be greatly pleased to hear from you.
BOX & PLANT, Undertakers."
I hope these parties will manage somehow to wait till they do hear from me. I always did hate to be in a hurry in matters of business. But, really, some girl's lacerated heart is hidden under that deftly-worded valentine.
Here is another:
"SIR: Our patent Cancer-Eradicator arouses the admiration of all whose happy fortune it has been to be in a condition to use it. Nothing can with stand its enchanting influence. Excrescences of all kinds upon the body disappear before it as by magic. If you have warts, if you have cancers, if you have a wen, come and be healed!
"We fervently hope to receive your custom.
BLISTER & CARVE, Patentees"
I fervently hope you won't. So far, I have no artificial attractions such as wens, cancers, and warts, and am satisfied to remain homely. But that whole valentine is nothing but the transparent covering to some girl's breaking heart. Let it break. Mine has been broken often enough—it don't hurt me. Once more:
"SIR: We beg to recommend to you our patent double-back action, chronometer-balance, incombustible wooden legs. You will find them superior to anything in the market. The dismantled soldiers of our beloved country are extravagant in their praises of them. Give them a trial. You cannot regret it. Be pleased to forward us your measure at once, and let us furnish you with an outfit.
PEG & HOOP, Proprietors."
It pains me to decline, but I shall have to do it. I don't want any "outfit." If it were a patent head, we could trade—but as it is, you had better go after Weston. But what is it that those mysterious wooden legs so ingeniously conceal, in reality? Blighted affection. It is hardly worthwhile for this young woman to try to deceive me with her poor fraudulent wooden legs. I see through the flimsy ruse—blighted affection is behind it.
The remainder of the twenty-seven offer tinware, and stationery, and baker's bread, and grave-stones, and chewing gum, and patent varnish, and real estate, and railroad literature, dry goods, harness, Spaulding's glue, ready made clothing, plantation bitters, and a dozen other commodities—all so many veils wherewith to hide the fatal admiration that burns in the bosoms of the young women who have sent them. They must perish. Others have gone before. Let them travel the same old road. They cannot lose the way. They will find it pretty well "blazed."
But this last one, which has just come in, I feel is fraught with a world of happiness for me. It—it says:
"SIR: You better pay for your washing.
BRIDGET."
These washerwomen have no sentiment. I scorn valentines from washerwomen.
Retrenchment breeds strange legislation. Or rather, the weak things that are done in its name breed it. They could not impeach the President—because, as Mr. Stevens says—they were afraid. But what of it? They have triumphed anyhow. They have won a dazzling victory. For they have taken away his private Secretaries! It was wonderful strategy. He cannot write any more long letters to Gen. Grant, now. He cannot spin out any more interminable messages to Congress. He will not find the time. He will have to cut everything down to the Scriptural yes, yes, and nay, nay.
This measure was certainly undignified. It does not become a Congress that has been battling with the colossal artillery of impeachment to descend to throwing mud. Such conduct is neither royal, republican, nor democratic; it is simply boys' play. It isn't worthwhile to say that the reduction of the President's clerical force was made in the virtuous interest of retrenchment, for the stupidest of us all know better than that. Its moving spring was an unworthy and an ungraceful little spite. They might as well have estimated the capabilities of the Chief Magistrate's kitchen force, and discharged a cook or two. There is not any wisdom in this kind of warfare. The people cannot applaud it. Everybody is willing to see a fair stand-up fight between the President and his Congressional master, but nobody is willing to see either of them descend to scratching and hair-pulling. These parties stand for the United States. They represent the American nation, and it is not a nation that fights in that way.
This is the shrewdest politician of them all. With a mild talent for sculpture, but with hardly as much claim upon the patronage of the Government as had even the poorest of the artists that have canvassed and frescoed our beautiful capitol with their curious nightmares at a liberal so-much an acre (they painted by the acre, likely), she has procured from Congress an interminable contract to build a bronze statue of President Lincoln for ten thousand dollars. That is well enough, for she can build statues as well as those other parties can swab frescoes—a remark which cannot by any possibility be tortured into the semblance of a compliment—but that she should succeed in getting hold of and hanging on to a choice chamber in the crowded Capitol, wherein to build Mr. Lincoln, when a tract of ground, four or five times as large as England, together with its tax-paying population of two hundred thousand souls, is trying to get into that Capitol, are perfectly aware that they ought to be allowed to enter there and yet cannot succeed, is a very, very, very, very interesting mystery to the subscriber. Really, does it not look a little singular that nine accredited delegates of nine great Territories should be obliged to stand out in the cold, month after month, in order that pretty, and talkative, and winning little Miss Vinnie Ream may have a sumptuously furnished chamber in the Capitol to build her Mr. Lincoln in? I ask this in no spirit of vindictiveness, for I surely bear Miss Vinnie Ream no malice. I just simply ask it as a man and a brother.
I said she was the shrewdest politician of them all—and verily she is. The Government never gave her permission to bring her mud, and her naked, scandalous plaster models, and set up her little shop in the Temple of Liberty, and go to building Mr. Lincoln there. No, she just talked pretty, girlish talk to some of those impotent iron-clad old politicians—Congressmen, of course—and got out her mud and made busts of some of the others; and she kept on in this fashion until she over-mastered them all with her charming little ways, and they told her to go, take a room in the Capitol, build Mr. Lincoln, and be happy.
She took a room. It had defects that interfered with the proper building of Mr. Lincoln, and she laid siege to those Congressmen again. In the goodness of their hearts, and the general feebleness of their firmness, they compassed a certain House Committee round about and delivered them into the hands of Vinnie Ream. She took their fine committee room, and they went elsewhere.
But here lately those nine delegates from the Territories have talked so plainly of the discourtesy that is being shown them in having allowed no resting-place in the Capitol, that at last the Congressmen have felt obliged to look around and see what could be done in their behalf. What could they do? Manifestly, since every solitary room in the building was already occupied in a legitimate manner, except the one occupied by Miss Ream, there was nothing left to do but go after that. They little knew their antagonist. They went—and found on the door this notice, just pasted up: "Miss Ream is absent from the city—for two weeks!" by which time the storm will have blown over, the Congressmen will have forgotten it, and the nine delegates become reconciled to the open air, and hopeless of ever getting that storm awakened again. It would take but little to turn my sympathies in favor of the Artful Dodger.
That studio is hers yet, and I think, maybe, it will so remain. And her little, one-legged broken armed, battered-nose mud gods and crippled plaster angels will remain there also; and likewise the awful apparition of Mr. Lincoln, naked as mud could make him, which she has built up in the corner behind a screen, will remain there, too, to gaze reproachfully upon its swollen and mutilated hand and frighten away discontented Territorial delegates for ever more.
MARK TWAIN
The Chicago Republican, March 1,1868
MARK TWAIN'S LETTER.
He Attends the Illinois Association Reception.
An Agreeable Gathering—The Skeleton of the Feast.
Mark's View of the Impeachment Proceedings.
A Lion Aroused—Gideon on the War Path—Make way for Welles and the Marines.
"Flame, Fire and Flame"—Fury by Telegraph.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21.
A State Reception.
THE ILLINOIS STATE ASSOCIATION.
I refer to the reception given by the "Illinois State Association," yesterday evening. Or, rather, it was more a "reunion," with considerable "at home" in it than the funereal high comedy they call a "reception in Washington." Col. Chester and his fair daughters—former citizens of Chicago—conducted the honors, and performed the onerous task with a skill and address that placed even diffident strangers at their ease; insomuch that I shortly became a contented Illinoisan without knowing just how or where the change took place. The invitation I had received was couched in such mysterious terms that I gathered from it a vague notion that I was going there to report a sort of State Agricultural Society; and it was a very agreeable surprise to find a large party of gentlemen present who were not talking about steam plows and corn-shellers, and a brilliant company of ladies who were taking no thought of prize turnips and miraculous cabbages. I like agriculture well enough, but not agricultural mass meetings. There is nothing about them that fires the blood.
At some of the receptions here, the people move in solemn procession up and down the drawing-rooms, bearing an imaginary Ark of the Covenant, and looking as if they knew they had to wander forty years in the wilderness, yet; but there was nothing of this kind last night—no processions, no solemnity, no frozen ceremony. The throng shifted constantly and talked incessantly. Nothing could be less stately or more agreeable. It was a very sociable company for a stranger to fall among. Finally, I found a petite young lady (I don't know what petite means, but it is a good word) right from my own side of the river, and then I felt more at home than ever, if possible. She was from Dubuque, which is on the California side of the Mississippi river, and so, of course, we were, in a manner, neighbors. A constructive old-acquaintanceship like this, is wonderfully fortifying and reassuring, when one is in the midst of a foreign element, even though that element is disposed to be a generous and a friendly one.
I only met one icicle in the whole party. He shook hands without cordiality, and bowed with altogether too much condescension. I said, with a vivacity that considerably oversized the importance of the remark:
"It has been a very fine day, sir."
Then this monument, this undertaker, this galvanized graveyard said:
"Sir, what the weather may be, or what the weather may not be, concerns not me, when my country is in danger."
"Well—I am sorry I made such a thoughtless remark. I meant no harm—I did not notice what I was saying. People cannot be too careful what they say, when the country is in danger. But the weather you know—"
"Sir, what signify the vagaries of the weather, when revolution stares us in the face! when the muttered thunders of coming disaster startle the ear! when dark forebodings visit our thoughts by day, and wrathful carnage crimsons our visions of the night!"
"True—I had not looked at it in that light. I slipped up on the carnage, so to speak. Under circumstances like these, I know, as well as any man knows, that it is little less than treason to speak of the weather—"
"Treason! Ha-ha! Treason is feeding at the very vitals of the land! It stalks unrebuked through the corridors of the nation's capitol! It sits in the high places of the Commonwealth; it flings its gaunt shadow athwart the very threshold of the fane of liberty! Sir, prophetic voices sound in my ears, and lo, they chant the requiem of the great Republic! Its doom is sealed!"
"Well, I know you will pardon me, sir. I didn't know it was as bad as that, or I swear I never would have mentioned the weather."
I think this old sepulchre was a member of Congress, but I did not catch his name distinctly. But why do such people go to social gatherings, and practice their execrable speeches on unoffending strangers? Why do they go around saving the country all the time, and snubbing the weather? Why do not they do like Garret Davis, and persecute Congress, which is paid to be persecuted? These harmless lunatics only distress the guests at an evening party, without absolutely scaring them. I would be ashamed to act so poor a part as that. If I had to be a lunatic, I do think I would have self-respect enough to be a dangerous one. I hate that solemn-visaged body-snatcher now, and if he is a Congressman I shall always try to find out all the mean things I can that other people do, and put them in print and attribute them to him. I think that will make him wince. The idea of a Congressman bowing condescendingly to one of the people! We cannot put up with that. I long to report one of that man's speeches, and garble it so that his constituents will think he has forsaken his political principles and gone over to the enemy.
I have digressed somewhat, and now return to the subject only to say that this Illinoisan reunion was lively, void of restraint, and eminently pleasant. This is the most agreeable way in which Senators and Representatives can meet their fitting constituents, and the idea is well worthy of adoption by the representatives of other States here. Americans are not by nature, inclination, or home teaching, courtly enough to enjoy the formal humbuggery of an orthodox "reception."
I have made the above notes the present time, because it was most convenient to do it now—the remainder of this letter will be written a week hence. I had a list of all the Illinoisans present at the party, but I cannot furnish it now. The degraded, black-hearted chambermaid has kindled the fire with it, of course. If there is on earth a race of miscreants I hate with an undying hatred, it is chambermaids. If there is any dissipation I enjoy with all my heart, it is to attend their funerals.
LAZARUS IMPEACHMENT, COME FORTH!
Monday, Feb. 24. The past few days have been filled with startling interest. On Friday the nation was electrified by the President's last and boldest effort to dislodge Mr. Stanton. The wild excitement that pervaded the capital that night, has not had its parallel here since the murder of Mr Lincoln. The air was thick with rumors of dreadful import. Every tranquil brain, thrown from its balance by the colossal surprise, magnified the creations of its crazed fancy into the phantoms of anarchy, rebellion, bloody revolution! Assassinations were prophesied; murders, robberies, and conflagrations; cannon were to thunder, drums to beat, and the pavements to echo to the tread of armed men! The Senate sat at night, and the unusual spectacle of the illuminated Capitol attracted every eye, and impressed every mind with something like an assurance that its bodings and prophecies were well founded. And out of the midst of the political gloom, impeachment, that dead corpse, rose up and walked forth again!
THE TWENTY-SECOND OF FEBRUARY
The next morning that one word, Impeachment, was upon every tongue. There was no simpleton but knew that this memorable twenty-second of February was likely to be one of those tremendous days that stand up out of the level of a nation's history like a mountain in a desert—a mark toward which all roads converge on the one side, and from which they all radiate on the other—a mark which catches the eye first, from all directions and all distances, and holds it longest. Instead of resting from its labors, in reverent regard for the memory of Washington, as has been the honored custom for three-score years upon this natal day, the Congress had resolved to sit—and for business! Before 9 o'clock in the morning a multitude was assembled in the Capitol grounds, and from all points of the compass the clans were still gathering. Fifteen minutes after the doors were opened, the broad lobbies were crowded with men and women, and every seat in the ample galleries was occupied.
SCENE IN THE CAPITOL
A strong interest was depicted in every countenance—even in the countenances of the members of the floor—inasmuch that these latter earnestly conversed in groups and couples, instead of looking listless and writing private letters, as is their custom. The multitude of strangers were waiting for impeachment. They did not know what impeachment was, exactly, but they had a general idea that it would come in the form of an avalanche, or a thunder clap, or that maybe the roof would fall in. Bye and bye a member rose up solemnly, and every soul prepared to stand from under. But it was a vain delusion—he only had a speech to make about a degraded cooking stove patent. The people were justly incensed. An hour of irksome suspense rolled away, and then the one man the audience found out they must look for, entered—Thaddeus Stevens. All the faces were full of interest again in a moment. The emaciated old man stood up and addressed the Speaker. The Speaker commanded the audience to beware of manifesting either satisfaction or dissent, on pain of instant expulsion, but to maintain strict and respectful silence—and when he finished, the profoundest stillness reigned in the House. Then the one man upon whom all interest centered, read the resolutions the multitude so longed to hear; and when he came to where it was resolved that "The President of the United States be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors," the prodigious words had something so solemn and so awe-inspiring about them that the people seemed inclined to think that the expected thunder-clap was about to crash above the pictured ceiling! The strong lights and shadows, augmenting distances and creating deceitful prospectives, the ghostly figure of the reader, the eager interest that marked the sea of faces, the impressive silence that pervaded the place, and the historic grandeur of the occasion, conspired to render the scene one of the most striking and dramatic that has ever been witnessed in the Capitol.
THE CLOSING DEBATE
Then the speech making began, and the resurrected Lazarus of impeachment soon gave token of a strength ard a vigor it had never possessed in its former life. The crowds remained in the Capitol till nearly midnight.
Tuesday, Feb. 25.
All day yesterday, the place was densely thronged; the people wished to hear the all-important vote taken. It was not to transpire till nearly night fall, and they knew it; but they came betimes in the morning, and brought their luncheon with them, resolved to sit it out—and they did. They heard strong speeches from the Republicans, and angry protests from the Democrats—but these latter were not confident in tone. The Democrats had said, themselves, that the President had made an ill-advised move and they felt that they were fighting for a lost cause. The "aye" votes, in nearly all cases, came in a clear voice, but many of the "nays" were inaudible in the reporters' gallery. The spirit appeared to be chiefly on one side. The resolution passed, and that was a momentous event; but Saturday was still the great day, after all. It was the day most to be remembered; its pictures were the most striking to the eye, and its events the most sensational, because of their novelty.
THE HUNTED CHIEF IN HIS CASTLE
That the President would be arraigned before the bar of the Senate, there seemed to be no possible question. Yesterday was reception night at the White House and several of us went there at 10 o'clock. I confess that I went out of a thoughtless curiosity to see how the Chief Magistrate bore himself under these untoward circumstances, but I did not enjoy the visit. I stood at a little distance and watched him receive and dismiss his visitors. He looked so like a plain, simple, good-natured old farmer, that it was hard to conceive that this was the imperious "tyrant" whose deeds had been stirring the sluggish blood of thirty millions of people. He was uneasy and restless; the smile that came and went upon his face had distress in it; when he shook hands with a guest he looked wistfully into the person's face, as if he sought a friendly interest there, and yet hardly hoped to find it; he seemed humbled—the expression of his countenance could be made to signify nothing else; when he ceased to smile for a moment, the shadow of a secret anxiety fell upon his features, and then, if ever a man looked weary and worn, and needful of rest and forgetfulness, it was this envied President of the United States. I never saw a man who seemed as friendless and forsaken, and I never felt for any man so much.
They said that earlier in the evening he bore himself as serenely as if his fortunes were at their fairest; everybody admired the brave spirit that so mastered its corroding cares that they gave no sign—so mastered them that in the countenance that should have told of a world of trouble within, only a sunny cheerfulness was visible. But he had stood in that one place for hours now, undergoing that toil-some monotony of hand shaking, and fatigue had conquered him at last. Not any man that lives could occupy the President's place to-day, and be tranquil and content.
A Sleeping Lion Aroused—Gideon Rampant
Feb. 26. The ball is in motion. The Philadelphians send encouraging dispatches to the President. Chicago mass meetings tell Illinois Representatives to impeach. New York city threatens blood and slaughter in behalf of the President. Gov. Geary promises another uprising for Congress. And last, Mr. Gideon Welles is "standing by" with his redoubtable four hundred marines to rush to the Chief Magistrate's protection. It is time to tremble when Gideon's Band is hitching up its towsers, shifting its quids to starboard, and preparing to repel boarders! But Congress is in earnest, and maybe the old salts will see service shortly. Gen. Logan says that if Congress quails this time, he wants an appropriation made to iron plate the members so that the nation can kick them from the Capitol to the White House without its wearing them out! Sound the tocsin! don't know what a tocsin is, but I want it sounded, all the same.
TELEGRAPHIC THUNDER AND LIGHTNING.
Gideon is not to be alone. Telegrams offering support and encouragement to the President are still arriving constantly. My position as Private Secretary ad interim to the Chief Magistrate gives me peculiar facilities for easily learning their contents:
Maysville, Feb. 25—Will one regiment of Irish be of any service to you? Answer.
There is a thousand anyhow. The case looks healthier.
Philadelphia, Feb. 25—I can raise one thousand men to sustain you from my Second District of New Jersey, if necessary.
Not signed. From the Camden and Amboy Railroad Company, doubtless. They own the Second District of New Jersey, and the other Districts, also, I believe. However, it is a thousand more, in any event. This is cheering.
New York City, Feb. 25. Go on! All the decent men in the metropolis will back you.
Well! that makes another thousand. We are all right now.
Wheatland, Pa., Feb. 25. Proceed with caution—but proceed. Garrison Fort Sumter. But do not provision it yet. Be cautious. Do not act with too much decision about things. Wait.
Pub. Func.
I thought the old lady was dead. But she only sleepeth. Someone must wake her up, and tell her Sumter is battered down.
Chicago, Feb. 23. Keep steadily on. Oglesby has made himself ridiculous. He knew when he sent that dispatch that it was impossible to fill the bill. When you want either men or money, more than half of the able-bodied men in the State will promptly respond to your call. Good!
Ning Yong, Cal., Feb. 24. Mellican man welly good. You sabby Chinaman? No hab got, how can catch? Chinaman welly good man, John. Send you nine hundred Chinaman, heap smach 'um Congress.
Hong Wo See Yup.
I know Chinamen too well. They are a nation of Pub Funcs. They are not partisan enough in character. They would come here with their tubs and take in washing from both sides.
St. Louis, Feb. 25.
The people here are with you, and ready almost to a man to sustain you in whatever way may be necessary in upholding the Constitution and resisting Congressional usurpation.
Good again!
Cincinnati, Feb. 24.
Dis foreign boppulations fon Cincinnati is mit you in dis clofious grisus. Speal your hant for all vot it is vort. Make vot you shall—do vot you is—holt up your het, and shust go right along de same as never vos. You shall haf limburg, und lager, und pretzels—every dings vot you vants, at de lowest brice—greenbecks. Grisuses is de brinciples vot I goes in for! Grisuses is de dings vot makes droubles for de dam ratticals!
Hans Von Kraut.
Wee gates, Hans. I don't know what "wee gates" is, but I suppose it is the neat thing to fire the German heart with, in times of "grisus."
Richmond, Feb. 25. We are with you, heart and soul! There are plenty of railroads leading from the South to Washington, and in your far-sighted sagacity you long ago put them all into my hands, and under my supreme control. Blessings on the singular policy which has given the North only one railway route to Washington! Count on us. Men, money, and transporation are at your service.
Beauregard.
This is victory itself.
Alaska, Feb. 25. Thermometer at 78 degrees below zero, but Democratic patriotism at a hundred and sixty above. We are with you! Glorious mass meeting yesterday. Forwarded full proceedings. Bear ate the messenger. Ate the proceedings also. Since died, but proceedings and messenger so mixed up in stomach shall have to send all in a box.
C. Green Iceberg.
Bear steak, masticated messenger, and Democratic resolutions ought to make a fair enough feast in these hungry times. Proceedings generally contain "provisions," but this time the provisions contain the proceedings. The case is peculiar.
St. Thomas, Feb. 25. Hurrah! hur—
[Excuse interruption. Great storm just swept away this portion of the town.]
Hurrah! hur—
[Excuse interruption again. Earthquake.]
Hurrah! hur—
[Perdition! Volcano let go under the house.]
rah!
In haste.
John Smi—.
John Smith, I suppose. Some new disaster must have interferred with him, and he could not finish his name. His part of the world has come to an end maybe. However, with the help of Providence, he got his hurrah out, anyhow. It is about all that the others have accomplished, so far, although they took more words to say it in.
Dublin, Ireland, Feb. 25.
God and Liberty! Star Spangled Banner! Erin go Bragh! Greenwhillikins!
America for white men Tempus fugit! Bow-wow-wow!
Down with the revolutionists! Death to demagogues! No slinking! Let every true patriot show his ear-marks and be known by his voice!
Waw-he! waw-he! waw-he!
George Francis Train.
Now we are safe, since the great Fenian Female Suffrage Ass is going to bray in our favor.
What with running to Congress to see the impeachment fight, and to the hotels to hear public opinion about it, and to an occasional reception to endeavor to forget it all and start fresh again, and meanwhile, trying to carry on two colds in the head at the same time (which it cannot be done), I have taken about a week to write this letter. I wish you would put in dates just wherever you please. Dates are cheap, and I wish to be liberal. There is nothing mean about me when it comes to dates.
But was not that old cemetery almost prophetic, in my first paragraph? Nobody suspected on the 20th what the President was going to do next day.
MARK TWAIN.
The Chicago Republican, May 19, 1868
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN.
Mark's Sea Voyage to San Francisco—Pleasant Traveling Companions.
Their "Beguilement in the Boat"—
Some of the Worst Jokes Ever Heard.
An Original Charade.
Mark's Lecturing Tour—
May Day Among the Mountains.
VIRGINIA, Nevada, May 1.
Special Correspondence of the Chicago Republican.
I chartered one of the superb vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars, and invited several parties to go along with me, twelve hundred in all. I shall not take so many next time. The fewer people you take with you, the fewer there are to grumble. I did not suppose that anyone could find anything to grumble at in so faultless a ship as ours, but I was mistaken. Very few of our twelve hundred had ever been so pleasantly circumstanced before, or had sailed with an abler Captain or a more obliging baggage master, but yet they grumbled. Such is human-nature. The man who drinks beer at home always criticizes the champagne, and finds fault with the Burgundy when he is invited out to dinner.
However, we had fifteen people on board who never growled. From New York to Hatteras they complimented the bitter cold weather and the heavy seas, and said they were excellent for the health. When we sighted Cuba and St. Domingo, and passed into a temperature that grew hourly hotter from there to the isthmus, till the pitch began to stew out of the spars and the ice to spoil and smell offensive, they got out their fans, and fancy summer suits and said they had been perishing to have a taste of Christian heat again. When we took the railway train and went steaming and sweating and scorching across the isthmus, through a gloomy wilderness of tropical vegetation, they ate their luncheon boisterously and lied and smoked and kept a sharp lookout for monkeys and savages, and said it was splendid. When we went shopping for the ladies in the ancient city of Panama, and wandered through the narrow streets for weary hours without finding any one thing we precisely wanted, they said it was fun. That is the kind of people to travel with. Both the ladies and gentlemen of that party persistently refused to be distressed about anything whatsoever. They looked on the bright side of things, and made the best of their opportunities. Going out from Panama they stayed on deck half the night, singing, swapping anecdotes, and going into ecstacies over the beauty of the vessel's glittering wake, and the long sinuous serpents of flashing fire that trailed after the sharks and porpoises frolicking about us. They went ashore, at eventide, at that curious old Mexican town of Acapulco, and made themselves at home. They swung in the native hammocks; they supped at the native restaurant; they joined in a native fandango, and danced to the drumming of a guitar and the soft warbling of an uncommonly greasy "Greaser" and his sweetheart; they reverently entered the Cathedral and by reason of the dimness of the altar candles, mistook a ghastly, bleeding and wounded image of the Saviour, in a great glass case, for a genuine human being, newly murdered—and then they were hurrying out again with very irreverent haste, when the deception was discovered. They bought long ten-cent strings of fancy sea-shells, and tricked themselves out like Indian chiefs hanging the shells about their necks rather for the sake of convenience in carrying them than for show, however. They warily avoided the bananas, pineapples, oranges, and such things, out of deference to the deadly Isthmian fevers, but they took kindly to a certain snow white flower, gifted with an entrancing fragrance and an unpronounceable name. They bore the clamorings of the dusky Mexican peddler girls, in the small market place, placidly; and when the ship's guns thundered a warning at night, they paddled out, well tired and got aboard just about the same moment the anchor did. For a matter of fourteen to sixteen days of blistering weather, during this voyage (part of the time without ice) these people smoked and read by day, and sang and romped by night, and never wasted a moment in useless complainings. While we had ice they said: "Who cares how hot the weather gets?" and when the ice gave out, they said it was a lucky thing, because ice wasn't healthy in the tropics.
We had one ball on the upper deck, under the awnings, by lantern light. We did not have what you might call a multitude of dancers, but we had six hundred admiring spectators. When we reached cool weather again, within about eight hundred miles of San Francisco four hundred whist players assembled in the main saloon every night. We had music by the minstrel troupe occasionally, and religious services every Sunday.
We established a Jokers' Society and fined every member who furnished an unbearably bad joke.—We tried one man for his life (the Rajah of Borneo) for building a conundrum of unwarranted atrocity. Mr. Cohen disliked his trunk, and often spoke angrily of its small size. The conundrum touched upon this matter:
"Why is one of the passengers, or his trunk, like a certain geographical, algebraical, geometrical, technical term? Answer—Because he is a truncated cone (trunk-hated Cohen)."
We hung him. At dinner, one day, in the steamship "Sacramento" on this side, I said something to my roommate while he was carving a piece of veal. A member of the Society said,
"Beware—remember the sign in the pilot-house: "No conversation with the man at the wheel" (weal-veal.) We hung him, also.
One night the first officer brought the tears to many eyes with a touching story of a shipmate of his, whose leg was bitten off by a shark. A young lady said, "Oh, how shocking!" A member of the society said, "Indeed, it was—it was very sharking." He was publicly executed.
A merchant from China told us a story of a tiger that ate up a Chinaman, and then ate up his bamboo cart. A member observed that it was the first time that he had ever heard of a tiger dining a la carte. He is no more.
This nonsense reminds me of a circumstance. Once in Washington, during the winter, Riley a fellow-correspondent, who stayed in the same house with me, rushed into my room—it was past midnight—and said, "Great God, what can the matter be! What makes that awful smell?"
I said, "Calm yourself, Mr. Riley. There is no occasion for alarm. You smell about as usual."
But he said there was no joke about this matter—the house was full of smoke—he had heard dreadful screams—he recognized the odor of burning human flesh. We soon found out that he was right. A poor old negro woman, a servant in the next house, had fallen on the stove and burned herself so badly that she soon died. It was a sad case, and at breakfast all spoke gloomily of the disaster, and felt low-spirited. The landlady even cried, and that depressed us still more. She said:
"Oh, to think of such a fate! She was so good, and so kind and so faithful. She had worked hard and honestly in that family for twenty-eight long years, and now she is roasted to death—yes, roasted to crisp, like so much beef."
In a grave voice and without even the shadow of a smile, Riley said:
"Well done, good and faithful servant!"
It sounded like a benediction, and the landlady never perceived the joke, but I never came so near choking in my life.
The night before the good ship "Sacramento" reached San Francisco, the Society had a grand reunion and a supper at eleven o'clock, and according to previous orders, every member came forward and read a short poem, written especially for the occasion. Between every two readings a song was sung. Those poems were good, and I copied them for publication, but I have left them in San Francisco. However, I find my own contribution in my note book, and I will publish that—partly because I never wrote a poem before, and partly because I have a sort of an idea that this is about the best poem that ever was written:
Charade.
My First my darling gave to me
When last we met—and parted;
Her only gift it was, and yet
It left me broken-hearted.
My second shot from out her eye,
When she my first conferred;
Lord, how it flamed with irony,
As flames the Phoenix-bird!
My third receive at sundry times,
Donations like to mine,
From fair and false sweet maidenhood—
But duplicates decline!
And each time swear with many an oath.
And many an execration
That when they next,
With love perplexed
Earn similar vexation:
They hope some friend with hob-nailed boot
Inclosing an almighty foot
(Like that of grim McPherson)
My fourth will launch with dire intent,
And muscles firm, and limb unbent
Straight at his august person!
In the grand cathedral's aisle,
Where the sun's dimmed glories smile,
Down through pictured windows old,
Flashed with crimson, blue and gold,
Where the clustering columns loom
Vague and massy, through the gloom—
Where, steeped in slumbers long and deep
The mail-clad old Crusaders sleep,
My Whole the sorrowing sinner sees,
And humbly seeks on bended knees!
The boon is his! hath passed his lips! Behold!
By God's own grace, the heart so cold—
A sad, and torn, and blighted thing—
Is swept as by an angel's wing!
Is healed! is cleansed from every stain!
Is filled with life and hope again.
Answer—Sac(k)-ra(y) men-to(e,)—
(Spanish—The Sacrament.)
Where is your Martin Farquhar Tupper now?
My royal room-mate, Captain Cox of the San Francisco department of the Pacific Mail, was the life and soul of this voyage, and the state dinner the passengers gave him in San Francisco the night after our arrival, was a deserved compliment. I do not like to mention names or pay compliments in print, and I seldom do it; but whenever I think of that splendid old chief, slaving night and day to make everybody else comfortable and happy and never once thinking of himself; when I remember him, in the goodness of his true sailor's heart, nursing the babies of sea-sick mothers, and doing all he honestly could to keep those babies right end up when he didn't know how to do it; whenever I remember him turning out of his bunk at unreasonable hours, of the swallowing my smoke and coughing and barking, and yet swearing all the time that tobacco smoke never inconvenienced him; when I remember the night I fell through on him, and he climbed out to inquire, with earnest solicitude was I hurt; when I recall his honest attempts to help the choir out on Sunday mornings with his stormy "Bay of Biscay," which he sang with strict impartiality to all the church tunes which were ever started; when I remembered him in all the varied phases and circumstances of a long sea voyage, and yet can call to mind no moment when he was not a generous and a willing helper of all in time of need, and a gentleman in the best sense of the term, I feel half an inclination to cast my selfish newspaper policy to the winds and pay him a good hearty compliment in print!
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.
It was good to get back to San Francisco again, with its generous climate, and its clouded skies—and better than all, its cordial people, who always shake you by the hand as if they were in solid earnest.
When I had finished the business that brought me home, I lectured for the mutual benefit of the public and myself. It affords me great satisfaction to be able to say that there were eighteen hundred people present, and that sixteen hundred and five of them paid a gold dollar each to get there. Such is the thirst for reliable information in California. It is pleasant to have greenbacks in the State, but somehow it seems pleasanter to handle only gold and silver.
Since then, I have been making a flying trip across the State, and find myself here, in one of my former homes, ready to go back over the mountains again tomorrow. They treated me exceedingly well in Carson (as they always do) and made no attempt whatever to rob me. The people themselves treated me well, here, but the owners of the theater charged me four hundred dollars for the privilege of lecturing in their miserable barn. It was an act of Christian charity to pay it, however, for they hadn't made enough to pay their gas bills for the previous six weeks. I love to go around doing good.
I know exactly how this May-Day looks in the Mississippi Valley. There are limpid brooks babbling through forests that are splendid with fresh green foliage; there are grassy nooks here and there, and mysterious avenues, carpeted with wild flowers, mottled with sunshine and shifting shadows, garlanded with vines that swing down from the trees and cross and recross, with many a graceful sweep; avenues that wind in and out among mossy rocks and hazel thickets, till they are lost in the solemn depths of the forest; there are scampering squirrels, and the music of birds; there is a blooming fragrance everywhere, and the softest, dreamiest summer laziness in the atmosphere! And behold, the May parties are abroad in a glory of ribbons and fleecy costumes, and the beautiful Queen of the May, mother, perspires and blushes, and smiles upon her noisy subjects, and is unspeakably proud and happy.
Here 8,000 feet above the sea is May Day, too, and the wintry wind is howling, and it is snowing like all possessed. The feathery flakes fall so thickly that a hundred yards away I see what I know to be men, moving vaguely through the storm like shapeless blurs upon a fog. The houses are mere outlines, filled between with slanting rays of falling snow. I see no grass, no flowers, no trees, no vines. I hear no song of birds, I breathe no fragrant odors. There is no balmy softness in the air. There are only rocks, and sand, and sagebrush—a gray barrenness all about, compassed round with bleak mountains, capped with snow and turbaned with eternal clouds. It is not Paradise, and yet, to me, this was always a pleasant place to live in.
You must not think we have no May parties here. I saw one this morning. A tribe of school-children, dressed in their best, and bearing a national flag, had gone up the mountain side and perched upon a barren rock to crown their queen of May and to inaugurate a summer that will not arrive, alas! according to the almanac. But the biting winds drove them behind protecting rocky projections, and sported stormily with the girls' dresses and well-nigh whipped their little flag to ribbons. The children shivered and blew their fingers to keep them warm, and had no breath to spare for music in honor of the day. They had chosen high ground, with innocent vanity, in order that the people might behold their festivities from the town—but in this the unschooled wisdom of youth was sadly at fault. For the world of rolling clouds that brooded upon the summit swung their vast-hinged curtains down, and hid the poor little picnic utterly from sight.
MARK TWAIN.
The Chicago Republican, May 31, 1868
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN.
The Silver Mines of Nevada—Curious Changes Since 1863.
A More Healthy State of Affairs—Labor vs. Speculation.
How a Superintendent made a Fortune.
A Nevada Execution—Horrible Nonchalance of the Victim.
The Summit of the Sierras—From Flowers to Snow Drifts.
Eight Days from California to Chicago.
Special Correspondence of the Chicago Republican
VIRGINIA, Nevada, May 2.
I find some changes since I was here last. The little wildcat mines are abandoned and forgotten, and the happy millionaires I fancy (I used to be one of them) have wandered penniless to other climes, or have returned to honest labor for degrading wages. But the majority of the great silver mines on the Comstock lode are flourishing. True, the Ophir, that once ranked first, and sold at nearly four thousand dollars a foot, is not worth two hundred now. The Gould & Curry, that next became chief, and sold at six thousand three hundred dollars a foot, is worth fifty less than six hundred now. The Daney, that reached five hundred, is worth seven dollars and fifty cents now. The Savage, once worth about three thousand dollars a foot, is worth a hundred and fifty-three to-day. The Overman, which was worth five hundred once, sells at a hundred and thirty now. Alpha, once worth fourteen hundred, is worth eighty-eight now. You will perceive that somebody has been losing money.
But now we have the other side of the picture. Imperial, which I had the honor of selling at thirty dollars a share in the days when I was a wild-cat millionaire, is worth two hundred and forty-five now. Hale & Norcross, whereof I sold six feet at three hundred dollars a foot, is worth two thousand, now, and was up to seven thousand during the winter. Yellow Jacket which I have seen sell at thirty dollars, is worth fourteen hundred, to-day. Crown Point, which I had no option of, as a silver mine, in the old times, sells at twenty-two hundred and fifty, now.
But where are the old familiar "adverse" claims, that used to range all the way from ten dollars to a thousand a foot in the glorious "flush times of '63?" Where is the Union? The Rovers? The White and Murphy? The Shamrock? The Bajazet and Golden Era? The East India? The Moscow? The Uncle Sam? The Branch Mint? The Ophir Grade? The Zanzibar? The Masonic? The Mary Ann? The Black Hawk? The Dick Sides? The Irving, which the spirits superintended for poor old Winn, and spent twenty or thirty thousand dollars of his hard-earned restaurant money for him, and then left him out in the cold with a dollar? Where is the Cedar Hill, which desperadoes were employed to defend night and day with minie rifles from behind rudely constructed forts and fortifications? Where is the famous Genessee, which United States Senator Steward and "uncle" Johnny Atchison bought for so fabulous a sum? Where is the Mexican mine, which ten thousand dollars a foot in gold coin could not buy in '63, and whose actual yield of silver was so enormous that common people looked upon the man who owned two thirds of it as a sort of prince of the House of Midas? What has become of that wonderful mine, whose name I cannot recollect, but which was so deftly "salted" with imperfectly melted half dollars for the especial attraction and capture of McKean Buchanan, tragedian—and with such brilliant success? Where is the Madison, whose day and night shift of cut throats used to stand in the dark drifts and tunnels with bated breath and ears pressed to the damp walls, listening to the dull thump of pick and crowbar in the subterranean corridors of the Ophir, ready to receive the miners with murderous assault of knife and pistol whenever they should cleave through the narrow bulwark of quartz that separated them? Where are the Golden Gate and the Golden Age?—those mysterious branches of the great Comstock, so ingeniously traced to impossible localities by a wealthy gentleman now resident not very far from Chicago, and who will smile, maybe, and maybe wince, when his eye falls upon this paragraph. And finally, Oh were is the wonderful Echo? [Echo, according to ancient usage, simply answers, Where?]
Ah me, not one of these mighty treasuries of virgin silver is ever heard of now-a days, and many and many a moon has waxed and waned since they were quoted in the stock board. Except the Mexican mine, they were essentially and outrageously wild-cat, every one of them! They were not worth the paper their pictured and beautiful stock was printed on. The "Union" is dissolved; the "White and Murphy" is dead; the "Rogers" is departed; the "Shamrock" is forgotten' the "Bajazet" is absorbed' the "East India"—that astonishing mine which was found right in the middle of C. street, and which sold at great figures, while at the same time there was a tunnel running directly under that spot which had never a sign of a quartz ledge in it! Humbug, thy name is legion, I don't know what legion is, but it seems to be about the right word for a conjunction like this. The "Moscow," which used to yield masses of pure silver as black as a coal, and nests of silver wire that was as beautiful as the cunningest jeweler could have wrought it, is swallowed up in the capacious maw of the "Ophir." The "Branch Mint," the "Ophir Grade," and more than a thousand others I could mention, were never anything but barren, barren rocks and dirt, and like that curious production that some lunatic brought here from the East, (the "People's Gold and Silver Mining Company") are long ago abandoned and forgotten.
In those old days, when we reporters went dangling down a dark shaft at the end of a crazy rope, with a candle in our teeth, to the depth of two or three hundred feet, we felt as if we were getting into the very bowels of the earth. We prowled uncomfortably through muddy, crumbling drifts, and tunnels, and were happy no more until the man up at the bullet-hole that showed us a far-off glimpse of blue-sky, wound us up with his windlass and set us in the cheerful light of the sun again. But now they send me whizzing down a compactly boarded well, thirteen hundred feet below the surface of the earth, and deliver me into the midst of a mighty cavern, timbered up and supported by a dim wilderness of logs and beams and braces that cross and recross and tower upward till they fade and vanish in the thick darkness far above my head. I know that I am buried alive, down, down, down in the remote centre of the earth and feel the hot crust of hell beneath my feet! A short stay there is sufficient. I see from whence those great frosted masses of silver bullion come that I look upon in the mills and assay offices every day, and then I am satisfied to be sent whizzing upward toward the earth again by ponderous steam machinery.
I see many, many changes. But most notable is the change from the bootless, feverish, ruinous speculation in undeveloped mines, to sober, remunerating labor on veins of great and lasting value. It is the change from mere speculation to regular, systematic business—and in it lies a firm future prosperity for Nevada. I hear the stamp-mills thundering, and I see the carts laden with massive silver bricks—each a load for a man—and I feel that the Silver Land is safe at last beyond the reach of those disastrous panics that once threatened utterly to destroy her.
BRIEF MENTION OF A FRIEND.
An acquaintance shook hands with me in such a patronizing manner yesterday that I am moved to make him the text of a paragraph that will serve to illustrate what one may term a "state of things." When I first knew this man he hadn't a cent. He did not put on airs then. Now he is the superintendent of one of the great silver mines, and has grown rich. You may not believe that a superintendent can grow absolutely rich in four years on a salary of from ten to twenty thousand dollars a year, but such is really the case. Ordinary superintendents are content to covertly receive a present of a dollar or so from each ton of ore they sell to a mill man; but my man's ambition soared higher than that. He took lumber belonging to the great corporation that employed him, and built a little mill of his own with it. He built that mill below the company's mill, too, which was wise. Then he took other of the company's lumber, and built a string of sluice boxes that reached clear from the company's mill to his own. After that he worked the company's rock in the company's mill and got sixteen dollars a ton out of it—and turned the money over to the company—which didn't declare a dividend. Then he took the "tailings" from that same rock, carried them through his sluices to his little private mill, worked them over again, and out of every ton he got thirty dollars! Which money was his own, of course, and he never gave any of it to the company. Now you can understand how a man can get rich in four years, on twelve thousand dollars a year, when the company furnishes him a dwelling house and horses and carriages free. And this is the moral beggar that shakes hands patronizingly with a spotless and virtuous newspaper correspondent.
The people used to say it was a shame that the company did not put an injunction on that little private mill and stop its confiscations. But the company did not. The company was too much accustomed to queer taxation by superintendents, perhaps. But at last an offended providence put an injunction on that mill—sent it in the form of a flood that washed the mill away. Happily there is no appeal from an injunction when Providence puts it on. Nevadians will know who I am speaking of.
But I am tired talking about mines. I saw a man hanged the other day. John Melanie, of France. He was the first man ever hanged in this city (or country either), where the first twenty six graves in the cemetery were those of men who died by shots and stabs.
I never had witnessed an execution before, and did not believe I could be present at this one without turning away my head at the last moment. But I did not know what fascination there was about the thing, then. I only went because I thought I ought to have a lesson, and because I believed that if ever it would be possible to see a man hanged, and derive satisfaction from the spectacle, this was the time. For John Melanie was no common murderer—else he would have gone free. He was a heartless assassin. A year ago, he secreted himself under the house of a woman of the town who lived alone, and in the dead watches of the night, he entered her room, knocked her senseless with a billet of wood as she slept, and then strangled her with his fingers. He carried off all her money, her watches, and every article of her wearing apparel, and the next day, with quiet effrontery, put some crepe on his arm and walked in her funeral procession.
Afterward he secreted himself under the bed of another woman of the town, and in the middle of the night was crawling out with a slung-shot in one hand and a butcher knife in the other, when the woman discovered him, alarmed the neighborhood with her screams, and he retreated from the house. Melanie sold dresses and jewelry here and there until some of the articles were identified as belonging to the murdered courtezan. He was arrested and then his later intended victim recognized him.
After he was tried and condemned to death, he used to curse and swear at all who approached him; and he once grossly insulted some young Sisters of Charity who came to minister kindly to his wants. The morning of the execution, he joked with the barber, and told him not to cut his throat—he wanted the distinction of being hanged.
This is the man I wanted to see hung. I joined the appointed physicians, so that I might be admitted within the charmed circle and be close to Melanie. Now I never more shall be surprised at anything. That assassin got out of the closed carriage, and the first thing his eye fell upon was that awful gallows towering above a great sea of human heads, out yonder on the hill side and his cheek never blanched, and never a muscle quivered! He strode firmly away, and skipped gaily up the steps of the gallows like a happy girl. He looked around upon the people, calmly; he examined the gallows with a critical eye, and with the pleased curiosity of a man who sees for the first time a wonder he has often heard of. He swallowed frequently, but there was no evidence of trepidation about him—and not the slightest air of braggadocio whatever. He prayed with the priest, and then drew out an abusive manuscript and read from it in a clear, strong voice, without a quaver in it. It was a broad, thin sheet of paper, and he held it apart in front of him as he stood. If ever his hand trembled in even the slightest degree, it never quivered that paper. I watched him at that sickening moment when the sheriff was fitting the noose about his neck, and pushing the knot this way and that to get it nicely adjusted to the hollow under his ear—and if they had been measuring Melanie for a shirt, he could not have been more perfectly serene. I never saw anything like that before. My own suspense was almost unbearable—my blood was leaping through my veins, and my thoughts were crowding and trampling upon each other. Twenty moments to live—fifteen to live—ten to live—five—three—heaven and earth, how the time galloped!—and yet that man stood there unmoved though he knew that the sheriff was reaching deliberately for the drop while the black cap descended over his quiet face!—then down through the hole in the scaffold the strap-bound figure shot like a dart!—a dreadful shiver started at the shoulders, violently convulsed the whole body all the way down, and died away with a tense drawing of the toes downward, like a doubled fist—and all was over!
I saw it all. I took exact note of every detail, even to Melanie's considerately helping to fix the leather strap that bound his legs together and his quiet removal of his slippers—and I never wish to see it again. I can see that stiff, straight corpse hanging there yet, with its black pillow-cased head turned rigidly to one side, and the purple streaks creeping through the hands and driving the fleshy hue of life before them. Ugh!
I rather dread the trip over the Sierra Nevada tomorrow. Now that you can come nearly all the way from Sacramento to this city by rail, one would suppose that the journey is pleasant enough, but it is not. It is more irksome than it was before—more tiresome on account of your being obliged to shift from cars to stages and back again every now and then in the mountains. We used to rattle across all the way by stage, and never mind it at all, save that we had to ride thirty hours without stopping.
The other day we left the summer valleys of California in the morning—left grassy slopes and orchards of cherry, peach and apple in full bloom—left strawberries and cream and vegetable gardens, and a mild atmosphere that was heavy with the perfume of flowers; and at noon we stood seven thousand feet above the sea, with snow banks more than a hundred feet deep almost within rifle-shot of us. We were at Cisco, the summit of the Sierras, where for miles the railway trains rush along under tall wooden sheds, built to protect them from snows and the milder sort of avalanches. We had been running alongside of perpendicular snow-banks, whose upper edges were much above the cars. At Cisco the snow was twenty or thirty feet deep. I said to an old friend who lives there:
"Good deal of snow here."
"No—there ain't now—but we had considerable during the winter."
"Without meaning any offense, what might you call 'considerable'?"
"Sixty-eight feet on a dead level, and more a falling!"
"Good morning."
"Good morning—stay awhile?"
"Excuse me. My time is limited."
He spoke the truth. And yet he had the hardihood to spend two years there. Leaving Cisco, they sent us twenty four miles in four-horse sleighs, around and among the tremendous mountain peaks, grand with their regalia of storm-clouds. We swept by the company's stables on a level with their roofs, so deep was the snow.
Taking the advice of people I deemed wiser than myself, I had wrapped up myself in overcoats, and put on overshoes. But here in the midst of these snowy wastes the sun flamed out as hot as August, and I had to take off everything I could. It was a perfect tropical day. I got badly sunburned, and partly snow-blind, and I sweated more and growled more than I had in a year before. All this in a four-horse sleigh, in the midst of snow full twenty feet deep!
All I wish to say is, that I do not despise to go sleighriding in the summer time. And the next time I have to do such a thing I mean to have a fan, and some ice cream, and a suit of summer linen along.
The railroad is progressing rapidly. It is promised that those who take the Overland well along toward July, shall go hence to Chicago in eight days.
AMEN
I came very near starting overland to Chicago to-day, with the Nevada delegates to the convention. But I will wait till June. I beg to commend the California and Nevada delegates to your kind courtesies, however especially the Nevada one, whose heart is so large that it distends his body and deceives strangers into the notion that he is corpulent—and the noisy California one with the cordial manner and the enormous moustache. They be friends of mine.
MARK TWAIN.
The Chicago Republican, August 23, 1868
LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN.
Immense Emigration to California—The Labor Exchange, and What It Has Done.
Changes in the Manner of Life in California.
The Panama Railroad—How Americans get up a Revolution on the Isthmus.
Hartford, Conn.—The Paradise of Insurance Mon.
ONE OR TWO CALIFORNIA ITEMS
Special Correspondence of the Chicago Republican.
New York, Aug. 17, 1868
We had a pleasant voyage from California. The travel to and fro has diminished considerably, for it has its regular seasons, and the season is over for the present. It will open again in a few months. The exodus of people from the Atlantic States to California within the past nine months, has been something surprising. The ships of the Pacific Mail Company carried 40,000 persons to San Francisco during that time. The ships of the Opposition Line must have carried about half as many. The former company dispatches four steamers a month, and the latter company two. The officers of the ship I came in from the Isthmus said the last was the lightest passenger trip out ward from New York they had had for eight months, and yet they had up ward of eight hundred persons on board. During more months than one, their passenger list reached about 5,000. When I went out in this vessel five months ago, she had 1,200 souls on board, less fifteen. This grand "rush" to California of 60,000 people in nine months provokes little or no remark, now—but was the "rush" of '49 greater?
Several things contributed toward inaugurating this new flight of the people westward. California and Oregon suddenly sprang to a considerable importance as wheat producing States—the brand of the former taking to itself the chief rank in the Eastern markets and still holding it. Farms could be purchased at reasonable figures in both States. Both climates possessed inviting features. The opening of the great China mail line of steamers, and the rapid advancement being made toward the completion of the Pacific rail road suggested that broad, new fields of labor, capital, and enterprise would be thrown open shortly on the Western seaboard and continue to widen and augment in importance with every voyage of the steamers and every section added to the railway. There were contributors; but the chief contributors to the exodus were the untoward condition of things in the Atlantic States last year, and the reduction of fares on the California steamers. Just in the midst of the sorest distress of the winter, when mills and factories were suspending work and thousands of men were being thrown out of employment just too late to enjoy the eight hour system and the augmented wages they had fought so manfully for, the Opposition line and the regular mail line of California steamers began a system of mutual throat-cutting, in the matter of freights and fares, which has continued to the present time. First cabin fares suddenly came down from $400 or $500 to $150—steerage fares even below $50, often. It was cheaper to spend three weeks at sea between here and California, than to stay at home. Swarms of men who were idle, and who saw no prospect of employment in the States, found California forced upon their attention all at once. There was a great demand there for workingmen of all descriptions; the wages were excellent; transportation thither was cheap. Sixty thousand men seized up on this inviting opportunity to better their fortunes.
The Pacific steamers still carry 3,000 emigrants out of New York every month, and the prospect is good that the "rush" will begin again with the opening of the new season—say about February. Has the Pacific coast found employment for these people? Yes. For every one that asked it. It can find work for as many more, I think. It need not be supposed that all these emigrants have remained in California. On the contrary, probably half the number, or more, have spread themselves abroad over Oregon, Washington Territory, the British possessions, Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana, and a few have straggled to Japan and China. San Francisco was bewildered for awhile. She found herself besieged by a vast army of unexpected visitors, many of them without a cent, and she did not know what to do with them. As St. Paul justly remarks, in his epistle to the Fenians, "Necessity is the mother of invention." The business men of San Francisco invented the California Labor Exchange. It proved equal to the emergency. For the past six or seven months it has found labor and the customary wages for from fifteen hundred to two thousand immigrants a month—her full share of the immigration. The others scattered abroad, as I have said. The Labor Exchange not only found employment for fifty, sixty, or seventy men a day, when I left San Francisco, the demand upon it for various classes of laborers and mechanics was greater than the supply. Every "steamer day" (incoming) its offices were crowded with immigrants. They were sent to work in mines, mills, factories, on railroads, and in shops. Yet, still there were orders on the books that could not be filled, as I have just said. With the present light trips of the steamers (500 passengers) the Exchange finds its labors exceedingly light, no doubt.
California is a very good State to go to. It is not so speculative a country as it was, in matters of pure business. It has sobered down considerably and taken upon itself the steady-going habits of legitimate trade and commerce. Formerly, to be a Californian was to be a speculator. A man could not help it. One man tried to be otherwise, but he was only kicking against fate. While everybody was wild with a spirit of speculation, and full of plans for making sudden fortunes, he said he would just farm along quietly, and slowly gain a modest competency, and so be happy. But his first crop of onions happened to be about the only onions produced that year. He sold it for a hundred thousand dollars and retired. People who buy San Francisco lots now cannot help being speculators, any more than if they bought Chicago lots; but I mean that wild speculations in candles, rice, mining stocks, and such things, are not nearly so much in order now as they were formerly. The same remark will apply to the sister State of Nevada. The bullion yield of the two States combined, for the present year, will reach $50,000,000, possibly more. At present prices the California wheat crop for the present year would sell for about $60,000,000, greenbacks. California wheat is worth from forty to fifty cents more here, than any other brand, if I read the market reports aright.
I have been led to write this chapter, from seeing several flings, in the Eastern papers, at the absurdity of emigrating to the Pacific coast. In view of the fact that the emigrants were about as badly off here, as they could well be, and yet were being furnished with work and good wages as fast as they landed in San Francisco, it seemed to me that the point of order of the Eastern press was not well taken.
As far as California politics are concerned, I can only say that everything was promising that the State would go Republican at the Presidential election.
Mr. Colfax made himself very popular when he was out there a few years ago, and the fact that he has been so useful an Odd Fellow is something in his favor in a State where that order flourishes so luxuriantly as it does in California. Besides, the election of Gov. Haight was not strictly a Democratic victory. The Republican candidate was very unpopular, even with his own party, while Mr. Haight stood well with all.
I wish to talk of this far-off land of California while yet I may. This is the last opportunity I shall have of speaking of it in that sense, for by next May, or at least by next July, it will have been hauled over all the mountains by the locomotives of the Pacific railroad, till it will be so near Chicago that you can see it with a good spy-glass on a clear day. And you can visit it in five days then.
A Railroad Mint—What the Legend Says
This item about railroads suggests that wonderful enterprise, the Panama railroad. We took the train at Panama, clattered for two or three hours through a tangled wilderness of tropical vegetation, and discharged ourselves in Aspinwall. It is only forty-five miles. Going and coming, that little road has carried about 100,000 passengers for the California steamers during the past twelve months—and charged every soul of them twenty-five dollars fare. About 70,000 of them paid twenty-five dollars apiece in gold; the thirty thousand paid twenty-five apiece, also, but whether it was in gold or greenbacks, I cannot say. One could travel by rail from New York to Chicago—about 1,100 miles, I think it is—for less money, when I went over the route last. The road charged them for extra baggage, too. It charges like smoke for freight, likewise. Ten cents a pound for ordinary freights, I am told. It does a heavy freight and passenger business for the French and English lines of steamers in addition. Its stock stands at a premium of 240 in the New York board. It is probably the best railroad stock in the world.
It was a hard road to build. The tropical fevers slaughtered the laborers by wholesale. It is a popular saying, that every railroad tie from Panama to Aspinwall rests upon a corpse. It ought to be a substantial road, being so well provided with sleepers—eternal ones and otherwise. It is claimed that this small railroad enterprise cost the lives of 10,000 men. It is possible.
I have been told some things which I will jot down here, not vouching for their truth. The Panama railroad was an American project, in the first place. Then the English got a commanding interest in it, and it became an English enterprise. They grew somewhat sick of it, and it began to swap back until it became American again. The Americans finished it. It proved a good investment. But the right of way granted by the Colombian States was limited to only a few years. The Americans tried to get the term extended. But they were not particularly popular with the Governments of the Isthmus, and could not succeed. Delegations of heavy guns were sent down, but they could not prevail. They offered a few millions of dollars and Government transportation free. President Mosquiera declined. The English saw an opportunity, now. They made an effort to secure to themselves the right of way whose term was so soon to expire. They were popular with the Isthmian chiefs. They made the Central Governments some valuable presents—gunboats and such things. They were progressing handsomely. Things looked gloomy for Americans.
Possibly you know that they have a "revolution" in Central America every time the moon changes. All you have to do is to get out in the street, in Panama or Aspinwall and give a whoop, and the thing is done. Shout, down with the Administration! and up with somebody else, and revolution follows. Nine-tenths of the people break for home, slam the doors behind them, and get under the bed. The other tenth go and overturn the Government and banish the officials, from President down to notary public. Then for the next thirty days they inquire anxiously of all comers what sort of a stir their little shivaree made in Europe and America! By that time the next revolution is ready to be touched off, and out they go.
Very well; two American gentlemen, who were well acquainted with the Isthmus people and their ways, were commissioned by the Panama Railroad Company, about the time of the opposition English effort, to go down to the Isthmus and make a final trial for an extension of the right of way franchise. Did they take treasure boxes along? Did they take gun boats? Did they take other royal persuaders of like description? Quite the contrary. They took down twelve hundred baskets of champagne and a ship-load of whisky. In three days they had the entire population as drunk as lords, the President in jail, the National Congress crazy with delirium tremens, and a gorgeous revolution in full blast! In three more they were at sea again with the document of an extension of the railroad franchise to ninety-nine years in their pockets, procured for and in consideration of the sum of three millions of dollars in coin and transportation of Isthmian stores and soldiers over the road free of charge. How's that?
That is the legend. That is as one hears it in idle gossip with steamer employees, about the ship's decks on lazy moonlight nights at sea. I don't know whether it is true or not. I don't care, either. I only know that the American company have got the franchise extended to ninety-nine years, and that all parties concerned are satisfied and agreeable.
Anchored in the harbor of Panama we found the Opposition Steamer, America, in command of Capt. Ned Wakeman, "mariner for forty years." I made a voyage with him once. It was very late at night, but we borrowed the Captain's gig and boat's crew and went out and paid the old gentleman a visit. He was as tempestuous of exterior, as hearty of manner and as stormy of voice as ever,—and just as good a man as exists anywhere. His legs, and arms, and back, and breast, were just as splendid as ever with grand red and blue anchors, and ships and flags, and goddesses of liberty, done in the perfection of the tattooing art. A stranger would have thought his ship's crew must be at least a mile away when he shouted:
"Bear a hand there, men! Stand by to take that painter! Assist the gentleman up! Glad to see you—glad to see you all, gentlemen! You are as welcome as the flowers of May!"
We sat down in his private cabin.
"You have been lying up here at anchor a good while, Capt. Wakeman. You must be getting tired of it."
"Tired of it! It's no name for it, sir—no name for it. Been here six months sir. Never was so tired of a ship before since I made my first voyage, sir. Since I made my first voyage. I didn't know what ships was then. I went down to New York City; never been out of the interior of the State before. But I wanted to go to sea, you know. I been a reading all sorts of cussed bosh about sailors, and voyages, and adventures, and I thought it was be-autiful, don't you see? beautiful! Found some more boys there from different places, and they wanted to go to sea. We cruised around the streets awhile, and one day we see an old gentleman—a venerable, noble looking old Daniel-come-to-judgment he was,—and when he backed his sails and ranged up alongside and give us a friendly hail, I knowed that a man with that figure and that voice couldn't own less than seven churches—I knowed it, sir. He smiled a smile, he did, that was as lovely as Barnegat light in a storm, and he put his hand down gently on my head, so, and says as sweet as syrien:
"'Wouldn't you like to go on a beautiful voyage to sea, my son?'
"'Yes, sir,' says I—'we all would.'
"'Ah—noble boys—noble youths. What is your name, my little man?'
"'Edward, sir—Edward Wakeman.'
"'Ah—Edward. Beautiful name. Had a dear brother once by the name of Edward. Dead now. Oh, God. Where do you come from, Edward?'
"'Come from the interior, sir.'
"'Ah—from the interior, is it? Lovely country—lovely. Had a cherished nephew born in the interior once. And what is your name, my little man?'
"'Johnny, sir—Johnny Barker.'
"'Ah—Johnny. Touching name. One of the blessed apostles named Johnny. And where do you come from, Johnny?'
"'Connecticut, sir.'
"'Connecticut, did you say? Ah, happy clime—glorious clime how I have longed to visit that celestial spot. And what is your name, my little man?'
"'Augustus William Mayberry, sir!'
"'Augustus William. Stately name—beautiful name. Had a beloved relative by the name of Augustus William. Tore up in a carding machine. Oh, God!—And where do you come from, Augustus?'
"'New Hampshire, sir.'
"'Let me embrace you, noble State—banner State of the world. Had a worshipped uncle hung there once unjustly—unjustly. Well now, Edward and Johnny—beautiful name—name of blessed disciple and Augustus William—get your little things ready, and take 'em aboard the 'Polly,' down at the slip. And get you some nice warm mittens, and some nice warm socks, to keep your little hands and feet warm when we're going round the Horn. That's all you'll want. Because when we get up in the Pacific it'll be all warm and delightful and beautiful, like a Garding of Eden, clear up to rellums of eternal summer, where the whales are that we're agoing after.'
"I never felt so happy in my life, sir—never since I was born, sir. Loved that hoary, venerable old angel as if he was my father, sir. On board the ship, agoing out of that harbor, he was a feeding us boys on raisins, and a beaming on us, and a-Johnnying and Augustus-Williaming us, to that degree that we was intoxicated with happiness, as you might say. Clear up to the minute the pilot's painter was let go, sir. But the minute that pilot was gone, and that pilot boat p'inted towards New York, and the 'Polly' a-scudding for the Equator, he was a different man! He catched the nigger steward by the top of the head and bounced him on the deck a couple of times, and says: "You miserable charcoal hound! Wanted to quit the ship at the last minute, because your family's sick, did you! I'll learn you, you mangy, lying, thieving, off-spring of a tar-barrel! Take that, and see how you like it!"
"And he bounced him again. Next he tackled a sailor, and says:
"'You sneaking worthless brute! You want to go shore and buy coffee to drink because the ship don't furnish it, do you! I'll learn you, you hog! Smell of that!—and that!—and that! you lubber!
And he caved his head in on three sides with a belaying pin, till it was the shape of a plug hat that's been through the wars. Then he made just three jumps aft as high as the yard-arm, and came down a belching fire and smoke, and a-shaking himself up, and a-sawing his arms around like he had a thunderstorm tearing him up inside and says:
"'You Connecticut son of a thief! Up to that main truck in a jiffy! You New Hampshire ashcat! shin up that mizzenm'st! Goin' to stand around here and suck your thumbs all day? What'd I hire you for, you scum, you dirt, you vermin! You in-terior son of a skunk! Aloft with you! I'll tar your legs off and brain you with 'em! Hell and furies, 'pears like a man can't be master in his own ship!'
"'And from that day out the howling old nor'wester never called us by no other name but You Connecticut son of a thief! You New Hampshire ash-cat! You in-terior son of a skunk! Never been so tired of a ship since, till they pull this America out of commission for six months, sir!—never, sir,—never in the world, sir. Take my bloody oath of it, sir. You hear Ned Wakeman, sir."
The old gentleman told his remarkable dream, and about hanging the negro in the Chincha Islands and about his perilous cruise in a buggy, and about his voyage to the Monkey Islands, and the entertaining legend of the rats of Liverpool, and many other pleasant bits of history and then we bade him goodbye, at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, and rowed away again.
I have been about ten days in Hartford, and shall return there before very long. I think it must be the handsomest city in the Union, in summer. It is the moneyed center of the State; and one of its capitals, also, for Connecticut is so law-abiding, and so addicted to law, that there is not room enough in one city to manufacture all of the articles they need. Hartford is the place where the insurance companies all live. They use some of the houses for dwellings. The others are for insurance offices. So it is easy to see that there is quite a spirit of speculative enterprise there. Many of the inhabitants have retired from business, but the others labor along in the old customary way, as presidents of insurance companies. It is said that a citizen went west from there once, to be gone a week. He was gone three. A friend said:
"What kept you so long? You must have enjoyed yourself."
"Yes, I did enjoy myself, and that delayed me some but that was not the worst of it. The people heard there was a Hartford man aboard the train, and so they stopped me at every station trying to get me to be president of an insurance company!"
But I suppose it was a lie.
PERSONAL.
I shall be here only a week, yet, before I start out to Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis, to collect my rents, but New York will be my headquarters all the time anyhow, and therefore I beg permission to say that all letters addressed to me at the Everett House, Union Square, will reach me.
MARK TWAIN.
The aged Professor Silliman took the homely-looking specimen of New Jersey coal, and said he would make a test and determine its quality. The next day the owners of the grand discovery waited on him again, eager to hear the verdict which was to make or mar their fortunes. The Professor said, with that impressive solemnity which always marked his manner:
"Gentlemen, I understand you to say that this property is situated upon a hill-top—consequently the situation is prominent. It is valuable—immensely valuable—though as a coal mine I am obliged to observe that it is a failure. Fence it in, gentlemen—fence it in, and hold to it through good and evil fortune till the Last Day; for I am convinced that it will be the best point from which to view the sublime spectacle of the final conflagration. I feel satisfied that if any part of the earth shall remain uninjured after that awful fire, it will be this coal mine of yours!"
"Just about the close of that long, hard winter," said the Sunday-school superintendent, "as I was wending toward my duties one brilliant Sabbath morning, I glanced down toward the levee, and there lay the City of Hartford!—no mistake about it, there she was, puffing and panting, after her long pilgrimage through the ice. A glad sight? Well, I should say so! And then came a pang, right away, because I should have to instruct empty benches, sure; the youngsters would all be off welcoming the first steamboat of the season. You can imagine how surprised I was when I opened the door and saw half the benches full! My gratitude was free, large, and sincere. I resolved that they should not find me unappreciative. I said:
"'Boys, you cannot think how proud it makes me to see you here, nor what renewed assurance it gives me of your affection. I confess that I said to myself, as I came along and saw that the City of Hartford was in—'
"'No! but is she, though!'
"And, as quick as any flash of lightning, I stood in the presence of empty benches! I had brought them the news myself."
* * *
A journal has at last been found which excuses the inhumanity of Captain Eyre. It is the Toronto "Globe." It even says the Oneida ran into the Bombay—which she doubtless did, if she was on her way to America stern foremost. There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it. And they are not really scarce, either. Cain is branded a murder so heartily and unanimously in America, only because he was neither a Democrat nor a Republican. The Feejee Islander's abuse of Cain ceased very suddenly when the white man mentioned casually that Cain was a Feejee Islander. The next remark of the savage, after an awkward pause, was:
"Well, what did Abel come fooling around there for?"
* * *
It is stated with a show of authority, that diamond engagement rings are rapidly going out of fashions, and emeralds, opals, or pearls taking their place. It is an excellent move, and one which should meet with hearty sympathy. If the idea be followed up faithfully to its extremest capabilities, matrimony will be brought within the reach of all.
THE GALAXY, JUNE 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
"Yes, I remember that anecdote," the Sunday school superintendent said, with the old pathos in his voice and the old say look in his eyes. "It was about a simple creature named Higgins, that used to haul rock for old Maltby. When the lamented Judge Bagley tripped and fell down the court-house stairs and broke his neck, it was a great question how to break the news to poor Mrs. Bagley. But finally the body was put into Higgin's wagon and he was instructed to take it to Mrs. B., but to be very guarded and discreet in his language, and not break the news to her at once, but do it gradually and gently. When Higgins got there with his sad freight, he shouted till Mrs. Bagley came to the door. Then he said:
"Does the widder Bagley live here?"
"The widow Bagley? No, Sir!"
"I'll bet she does. But have it your own way. Well, does Judge Bagley live here?"
"Yes, Judge Bagley lives here."
"I'll bet he don't. But never mind—it ain't for me to contradict. Is the Judge in?"
"No, not at present."
"I jest expected as much. Because, you know—take hold o' suthin, mum, for I'm a-a-going to make a little communication, and I reckon maybe it'll jar you some. There's been an accident, mum. I've got the old Judge curled up out here n the wagon—and when you see him you'll acknowledge, yourself, that an inquest is about the only thing that could be a comfort to him!"
THE GALAXY, JUNE 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
For five years I have preserved the following miracle of pointless imbecility and bathos, waiting to see if I could find anything in literature that was worse. But in vain. I have read it forty or fifty times, altogether, and with a steadily-increasing pleasurable disgust. I now offer it for competition as the sickliest specimen of sham sentimentality that exists. I almost always get it out and read it when I am low-spirited, and it has cheered many and many a sad hour for me—I will remark in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is "hogwash":
[From the "California Farmer."]
A TOUCHING INCIDENT.
MR. EDITOR—I hand you the following for insertion, if you think it worthy of publication; it is a picture, though brief, of a living reality which the writer witnessed, within a little time since, in a luxurious city:
A beautiful lady sat beneath a verandah overshadowed by clustering vines; in her lap was a young infant, apparently asleep; the mother sat, as she supposed, unobserved, and lost in deep meditation. Richly-robed and surrounded with all the outward appearances of wealth and station, wife and mistress of a splendid mansion and garden around it, it would have seemed as if the heart that could claim to be queen here should be a happy one. Alas! appearances are not always the true guide, for—
That mother sat there like a statue awhile,
When over her face beamed a sad, sad smile;
Then she started and shudder'd as if terrible fears
Were crushing her spirit—then came the hot tears
And the wife and mother, with all that was seemingly joyous around her, gave herself up to the full sweep of agonizing sorrow. I gazed upon this picture for a little while only, for my own tears fell freely and without any control; the lady was so truthful and innocent, to all outward appearances, that my own deepest sympathies went out instantly to her and her sorrows.
This is no fancy sketch, but a sad, sad reality. It occurred in the very heart of our city, and witnessing it with deep sorrow, I asked myself, how can these things be? But I remember that this small incident may only be a foreshadowing of some great sorrow deeply hidden in that mother's aching heart. The Bard of Avon says:
"When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions."
I had turned away for a moment to look at some object that attracted my attention, when looking again, this child of sorrow was drying her eyes carefully and preparing to leave and go within—
"And there will canker sorrow eat her bud,
And chase the native beauty from her cheek."
THE GALAXY, JUNE 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
A LITERARY "OLD OFFENDER" IN COURT WITH SUSPICIOUS PROPERTY IN HIS POSSESSION
In last month's MEMORANDA I published a sketch entitled "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper," and closed it with a dreadful nitro-glycerine explosion which destroyed the boy. He had unwittingly been sitting on a can of this compound and got his pantaloons greased with it; and when he got a reproving spank upon that portion of his system, the catastrophe instantly followed. There was something so stupendously grotesque about the "situation," that I was filled with admiration of it, and therefore borrowed it. I say "borrowed" it, for it was not my invention. I found it drifting about the sea of journalism, in the shape of a simple statement of the catastrophe in a single sentence, and attributed to a California paper. I thought, at the time, that in saying it in the Californian unnecessary pains had been taken, for such a happy inspiration of extravagance as that could not well have originated elsewhere. I used it, and stated in a foot-note that I "borrowed it, without the unknown but most ingenious owner's permission." I naturally expected that so neat a compliment as that would resurrect the "ingenious unknown," and bring him to the light of day. Truly, it did produce a spectre, but not the one I was looking for. The party thus raised hails from Philadelphia, and in testimony that he is the "ingenious unknown," he encloses to me a half-column newspaper article, dated December 22, signed with his name, and being what he says is the original draft of the nitro-glycerine catastrophe.
The impulse to make pleasant mention of this person's name and give him the credit he claims, is crippled by the fact that I, or any one else acquainted with his literary history, would feel obliged to decline to accept any evidence coming from him, upon any matter, and especially upon a question of authorship. His simple word is worthless; and to embellish it with his oath would merely make it picturesque, not valuable. This person several of us know of our own personal knowledge to be a poor little purloiner of other men's ideas and handicraft. It would not be just to call him a literary pirate, for there is a sort of manliness about flaunting the black flag in the face of a world, and taking desperate chances against death and dishonor, that gives a sombre dignity to the pirate's calling but little suggestive of the creeping and stealthy ways of the smaller kind of literary rogues. But there is a sort of adventurer whom the police detect by a certain humble look in their faces, and who, when searched, yield abundance of spools, handkerchiefs, napkins, spoons, and such things, acquired by them when the trusting owners left the property openly in their company not thinking any harm. The police call this kind of adventurer a _____. However, upon second thought, I will not print the name, for it has almost too harsh a sound for polite ears; but the Philadelphia person I have spoken of will probably recognize a long-lost brother in the description. Anybody capturing the subject of these remarks and overhauling the catalogue of what he calls his "writings," will find in it two very good articles of mine, and if the rest were advertised as "strayed or stolen," they would doubtless be called for by journalists residing in all the different States of the Union. The effrontery of this person in appearing before me, through the U.S. mail, and claiming to have originated an idea, surpasses anything that has come under my notice lately. I cannot conceive of his being so reckless as to deliberately try to originate an idea—considering how he is built. He knows himself that it would rip, and tear, and rend him worse than the glycerine did the boy.
This sad person purloins all his literary materials, I fancy. And he spreads his damaged remnants before his customers with as happy an admiration as if they were bright and fresh from the intellectual loom. With due modesty I venture the prophecy that some day he will even ravish a dying speech from some poor fellow, and say with a flourish as he goes out of the world: "Fellow-citizens, I die innocent."
I do not print this party's name, because, knowing as I do upon what an exceedingly slender capital of merit, fame, or public invitation, two or three of the most widely popular lecturers of the day, of both sexes, got a foothold upon the rostrum, I might thus help to pave the way for him to transfer the report of somebody's speech from the papers to his portfolio, and step into the lecture arena upon a sudden and comfortable income of ten or fifteen thousand dollars a season.
I cannot take this person's evidence. Will the party from whom he pilfered the nitro-glycerine idea please send me a copy of the paper in which it first appeared, and with the date of the paper intact? I shall now soon find out who really invented the exploded boy.
THE GALAXY, JUNE 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice (said the banker's clerk) was there in Corning, during the war. Dan Murphy enlisted as a private, and fought very bravely. The boys all liked him, and when a wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was too heavy work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a sutler. He made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for him. She was a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to keep money when she got it. She didn't waste a penny. On the contrary, she began to get miserly as her bank account grew. She grieved to part with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working life she had known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and without a dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering so again. Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their esteem and respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she would like to have him embalmed and sent home, when you know the usual custom was to dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then inform his friends what had become of him. Mrs. Murphy jumped to the conclusion that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her dead husband, and so she telegraphed "Yes." It was at the "wake" that the bill for embalming arrived and was presented to the widow. She uttered a wild, sad wail, that pierced every heart, and said: "Sivinty-foive dollars for stooffin' Dan, blister their sowls! Did thim diivils suppose I was goin' to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such expinsive curiassities!"
The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.
* * *
A curious incident, and one which is perfectly well authenticated, comes to us in a private letter from the West. A patriarch of eighty-four was nearing death, and his descendants came from all distances to honor him with the last homage of affection. He had been blind for several years—so completely blind that night and noonday were alike to him. But about half an hour before his death his sight came suddenly back to him. He was as blithe and happy over it as any child could have been, and appeared to be only anxious to make the most of every second of time that was left him wherein to live and enjoy it. He did not waste any precious moments in speculating upon the wonderful nature of the thing that had happened to him, but diligently and hungrily looked at this, that, and the other thing, and luxuriously feasted his famishing vision. Children and grandchildren were marched in review by the bedside; the features of favorites were conned eagerly and searchingly; the freckles on a young girl's face were counted with painstaking interest, and with an unimpeachable accuracy that filled the veteran with gratified vanity; and then, while he read some verses in his Testament his sight grew dim and passed away again, and a few minutes afterward he died. It seems to be a common thing for long-absent reason and memory to revisit the brains of the dying, but the return of vision is a rare circumstance indeed.
* * *
There is something very touching in this news of Lady Franklin's setting sail, at the age of eighty years, to go half-way round the globe to get a scrap of Sir John's writing which she has heard is in the possession of a man who will not deliver it to any hands but hers. Here is a love which has lasted through forty years of a common lot, then bridged a grave and lived on through twenty years of grief which only such an affection is capable of feeling—and still, at this day, widowed and venerable, is able to mock at the zeal of half the honeymoon-loves in the world.
THE GALAXY, July 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
Lately there appeared an item to this effect, and the same went the customary universal round of the press:
A telegraph station has just been established upon the traditional site of the Garden of Eden.
As a companion to that, nothing fits so aptly and so perfectly as this:
Brooklyn has revived the knightly tournament of the Middle Ages.
It is hard to tell which is the most startling, the idea of that highest achievement of human genius and intelligence, the telegraph, prating away about the practical concerns of the world's daily life in the heart and home of ancient indolence, ignorance, and savagery, or the idea of that happiest expression of the brag, vanity, and mock-heroics of our ancestors, the "tournament," coming out of its grave to flaunt its tinsel trumpery and perform its "chivalrous"absurdities in the high noon of the nineteenth century, and under the patronage of a great, broad-awake city and an advanced civilization.
A "tournament" in Lynchburg is a thing easily within the comprehension of the average mind; but no commonly gifted person can conceive of such a spectacle in Brooklyn without straining his powers. Brooklyn is part and parcel of the city of New York, and there is hardly romance enough in the entire metropolis to re-supply a Virginia "knight" with "chivalry," in case he happened to run out of it. Let the reader, calmly and dispassionately, picture to himself "lists"—in Brooklyn; heralds, pursuivants, pages, garter king-at-arms—in Brooklyn; the marshalling of the fantastic hosts of "chivalry" in slashed doublets, velvet trunks, ruffles, and plumes—in Brooklyn; mounted on omnibus and livery-stable patriarchs, promoted, and referred to in cold blood as "steeds," "destriers," and "chargers," and divested of their friendly, humble names—these meek old "Jims" and "Bobs" and "Charleys," and renamed "Mohammed," "Bucephalus," and "Saladin"—in Brooklyn; mounted thus, and armed with swords and shields and wooden lances, and cased in pasteboard hauberks, morions, greaves, and gauntlets, and addressed as "Sir" Smith, and "Sir" Jones, and bearing such titled grandeurs as "The Disinherited Knight," the "Knight of Shenandoah," the "Knight of the Blue Ridge," the "Knight of Maryland," and the "Knight of the Secret Sorrow"—in Brooklyn; and at the toot of the horn charging fiercely upon a helpless ring hung on a post, and prodding at it intrepidly with their wooden sticks, and by and by skewering it and cavorting back to the judges' stand covered with glory—this in Brooklyn; and each noble success like this duly and promptly announced by an applauding toot from the herald's horn, and "the band playing three bars of an old circus tune"—all in Brooklyn, in broad daylight. And let the reader remember, and also add to his picture, as follows, to wit: when the show was all over, the party who had shed the most blood and overturned and hacked to pieces the most knights, or at least had prodded the most muffin-rings, was accorded the ancient privilege of naming and crowning the Queen of Love and Beauty—which naming had in reality been done for him by the "cut-and dried" process, and long in advance, by a committee of ladies, but the crowning he did in person, though suffering from loss of blood, and then was taken to the county hospital on a shutter to have his wounds dressed—these curious things all occurring in Brooklyn, and no longer ago than one or two yesterdays. It seems impossible, and yet it is true.
This was doubtless the first appearance of the "tournament" up here among the rolling-mills and factories, and will probably be the last. It will be well to let it retire permanently to the rural districts of Virginia, where, it is said, the fine mailed and plumed, noble-natured, maiden-rescuing, wrong redressing, adventure-seeking knight of romance is accepted and believed in by the peasantry with pleasing simplicity, while they reject with scorn the plain, unpolished verdict whereby history exposes him as a braggart, a ruffian, a fantastic vagabond, and an ignoramus.
All romance aside, what shape would our admiration of the heroes of Ashby de la Zouch be likely to take, in this practical age, if those worthies were to rise up and come here and perform again the chivalrous deeds of that famous passage of arms? Nothing but a New York jury and the insanity plea could save them from hanging, from the amiable Bois Guilbert and the pleasant Front-de-Boeuf clear down to the nameless ruffians that entered the riot with unpictured shields and did their first murder and acquired their first claim to respect that day. The doings of the so-called "chivalry" of the Middle Ages were absurd enough, even when they were brutally and bloodily in earnest, and when their surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and half-savage peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely reproduced with tinsel decorations and mock pageantry, by bucolic gentlemen with broomstick lances, and with muffin-rings to represent the foe, and all in the midst of the refinement and dignity of a carefully-developed modern civilization, is absurdity gone crazy.
Now, for next exhibition, let us have a fine representation of one of those chivalrous wholesale butcheries and burnings of Jewish women and children, which the crusading heroes of romance used to indulge in in their European homes, just before starting to the Holy Land, to seize and take to their protection the Sepulchre and defend it from "pollution."
THE GALAXY, July 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
There are some things which cannot be burlesqued, for the simple reason that in themselves they are so extravagant and grotesque that nothing is left for burlesque to take hold of. For instance, all attempts to burlesque the "Byron Scandal" were failures because the central feature of it, incest, was a "situation" so tremendous and so imposing that the happiest available resources of burlesque seemed tame and cheap in its presence. Burlesque could invent nothing to transcend incest, except by enlisting two crimes, neither of which is ever mentioned among women and children, and one of which is only mentioned in rare books of the law, and then as "the crime without a name"—a term with a shudder in it! So the reader never saw the "Byron Scandal" successfully travestied in print, and he may rest satisfied that he never will.
All attempts to burlesque the monster musical "Peace Jubilee" in Boston were mournful failures. The ten thousand singers, the prodigious organ, the hundred anvils, and the artillery accompaniment made up an unintentional, but complete, symmetrical and enormous burlesque, which shamed the poor inventions of the sketchers and scribblers who tried to be funny over it in magazines and newspapers. Even Cruikshank failed when he tried to pictorially burlesque the English musical extravaganza which probably furnished Mr. Gilmore with his idea.
There was no burlesquing the "situation" when the French Train, Henri Rochefort, brayed forth the proclamation that whenever he was arrested forty thousand ouviers would be there to know the reason why—when, alas! right on top of it one single humble policeman took him and marched him off to prison through an atmosphere with never a taint of garlic in it.
There is no burlesquing the McFarland trial, either as a whole or piecemeal by selection. Because it was sublimated burlesque itself, in any way one may look at it. The court gravely tried the prisoner, not for murder, apparently, but as to his sanity or insanity. His counsel attempted the intellectual miracle of proving the prisoner's deed to have been a justifiable homicide by an insane person. The Recorder charged the jury to—well, there are different opinions as to what the Recorder wanted them to do, among those who have translated the charge from the original Greek, though his general idea seemed to be to scramble first to the support of the prisoner and then to the support of the law, and then to the prisoner again, and back again to the law, with a vaguely perceptible desire to help the prisoner a little the most without making that desire unofficially and ungracefully prominent. To wind up and put a final polish to the many-sided burlesque, the jury went out and devoted nearly two hours to trying for his life a man whose deed would not be accepted as a capital crime by the mass of mankind even though all the lawyers did their best to prove it such. It is hardly worth while to mention that the emotional scene in the court room, following the delivery of the verdict, when women hugged the prisoner, the jury, the reporters, and even the remorselessly sentimental Graham, is eminently unburlesquable.
But first and last, the splendid feature of the McFarland comedy was the insanity part of it. Where the occasion was for dragging in that poor old threadbare lawyer-trick, is not perceptible, except it was to make a show of difficulty in winning a verdict that would have won itself without ever a lawyer to meddle with the case. Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge, ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think. Anyone who watched the proceedings closely in the McFarland-Richardson mockery will believe that the insanity plea was a rather far-fetched compliment to pay the prisoner, inasmuch as one must first have brains before he can go crazy, and there was surely nothing in the evidence to show that McFarland had enough of the raw material to justify him in attempting anything more imposing than a lively form of idiocy.
Governor Alcorn, of Mississippi, recommends his Legislature to so alter the laws that as soon as the insanity plea is offered in the case of a person accused of crime, the case shall be sent up to a high State court and the insanity part of the matter inquired into and settled permanently, by itself, before the trial for the crime charged is touched at all. Anybody but one of this latter-day breed of "lunatics" on trial for murder will recognize the wisdom of the proposition at a glance.
There is one other thing which transcends the powers of burlesque, and that is a Fenian "invasion." First we have the portentous mystery that precedes it for six months, when all the air is filled with stage whisperings; when "Councils" meet every night with awful secrecy, and the membership try to see who can get up first in the morning and tell the proceedings. Next, the expatriated Nation struggles through a travail of national squabbles and political splits, and is finally delivered of a litter of "Governments," and Presidents McThis, and Generals O'That, of several different complexions, politically speaking; and straightway the newspapers teem with the new names, and men who were insignificant and obscure one day find themselves great and famous the next. Then the several "governments," and presidents, and generals, and senates get by the ears, and remain so until the customary necessity of carrying the American city elections with a minority vote comes around and unites them; then they begin to "sound the tocsin of war" again—that is to say, in solemn whisperings at dead of night they secretly plan a Canadian raid, and publish it in the "World" next morning; they begin to refer significantly to "Ridgway," and we reflect bodingly that there is no telling how soon that slaughter may be repeated. Presently the "invasion" begins to take tangible shape; and as no news travels so freely or so fast as the "secret" doings of the Fenian Brotherhood, the land is shortly in a tumult of apprehension. The telegraph announces that "last night, 400 men went north from Utica, but refused to disclose their destination—were extremely reticent—answered no questions—were not armed, or in uniform, but it was noticed that they marched to the depot in military fashion"—and so on. Fifty such despatches follow each other within two days, evidencing that squads of locomotive mystery have gone north from a hundred different points and rendezvoused on the Canadian border—and that, consequently, a horde of 25,000 invaders, at least, is gathered together; and then, hurrah! they cross the line; hurrah! they meet the enemy; hip, hip, hurrah! a battle ensues; hip—no, not hip nor hurrah—for the U. S. Marshal and one man seize the Fenian General-in-Chief on the battle field, in the midst of his "army," and bowl him off in a carriage and lodge him in a common jail—and, presto! the illustrious "invasion" is at an end!
The Fenians have not done many things that seemed to call for pictorial illustration; but their first care has usually been to make a picture of any performance of theirs that would stand it as soon as possible after its achievement, and paint everything in it a violent green, and embellish it with harps and pickaxes, and other emblems of national grandeur, and print thousands of them in the severe simplicity of primitive lithography, and hang them above the National Palladium, among the decanters. Shall we have a nice picture of the battle of Pigeon Hill and the little accident to the Commander-in Chief?
No, a Fenian "invasion" cannot be burlesqued, because it uses up all the material itself. It is harmless fun, this annual masquerading toward the border; but America should not encourage it, for the reason that it may some time or other succeed in embroiling the country in a war with a friendly power—and such an event as that would be ill compensated by the liberation of even so excellent a people as the Down trodden Nation.
THE GALAXY, July 1870
MEMORANDA
BY MARK TWAIN
A DARING ATTEMPT AT A SOLUTION OF IT.
The Fenian invasion failed because George Francis Train was absent. There was no lack of men, arms, or ammunition, but there was sad need of Mr. Train's organizing power, his coolness and caution, his tranquillity, his strong good sense, his modesty and reserve, his secrecy, his taciturnity and above all his frantic and bloodthirsty courage. Mr. Train and his retiring and diffident private secretary were obliged to be absent, though the former must certainly have been lying at the point of death, else nothing could have kept him from hurrying to the front, and offering his heart's best blood for the Downtrodden People he so loves, so worships, so delights to champion. He must have been in a disabled condition, else nothing could have kept him from invading Canada at the head of his "children."
And indeed, this modern Samson, solitary and alone, with his formidable jaw would have been a more troublesome enemy than five times the Fenians that did invade Canada, because they could be made to retire, but G.F. would never leave the field while there was an audience before him, either armed or helpless. The invading Fenians were wisely cautious, knowing that such of them as were caught would be likely to hang; but the Champion would have stood in no such danger. There is no law, military or civil, for hanging persons afflicted in his peculiar way.
He was not present, alas!—save in spirit. He could not and would not waste so fine an opportunity, though, to send some ecstatic lunacy over the wires, and so he wound up a ferocious telegram with this:
WITH VENGEANCE STEEPED IN WORMWOOD'S GALL! D—D OLD ENGLAND, SAY WE ALL!
And keep your powder dry.
GEO. FRANCIS TRAIN.
SHERMAN HOUSE,
CHICAGO, NOON, Thursday, May 26.
P.S.—Just arrived and addressed grand Fenian meeting in Fenian Armory, donating $50.
This person could be made really useful by roosting him on some Hatteras lighthouse or other prominence where storms prevail, because it takes so much wind to keep him going that he probably moves in the midst of a dead calm wherever he travels.
THE GALAXY, July 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
To those parties who have offered to send me curious obituaries, I would say that I shall be very glad to receive such. A number have already been sent me. The quaint epitaph business has had a fair share of attention in all generations, but the village obituaries—those marvellous combinations of ostentatious sorrow and ghastly "fine writing"—have been unkindly neglected. Inquirers are informed that the "Post-mortem Poetry" of last month really came, without alteration, from the Philadelphia "Ledger." The "Deaths" have long been a prominent feature in the "Ledger."
Those six or eight persons who have written me from various localities, inquiring with a deal of anxiety if I am permanently engaged to write for THE GALAXY, have been surprised, maybe, at the serene way in which I let the days go by without making any sort of reply. Do they suppose that I am one of that kind of birds that can be walked up to and captured by the process of putting salt on its tail? Hardly. These people want to get me to say Yes, and then stop their magazine. The subscriber was not fledged yesterday.
THE GALAXY, August 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
When I say that I never knew my austere father to be enamored of but one poem in all the long half century that he lived, persons who knew him will easily believe me; when I say that I have never composed but one poem in all the long third of a century that I have lived, persons who know me will be sincerely grateful; and finally, when I say that the poem which I composed was not the one which my father was enamored of, persons who may have known us both will not need to have this truth shot into them with a mountain howitzer before they can receive it. My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering. As a general thing I was a backward, cautious, unadventurous boy; but once I jumped off a two-story stable; another time I gave an elephant a "plug" of tobacco and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time I pretended to be talking in my sleep, and got off a portion of a very wretched original conundrum in hearing of my father. Let us not pry into the result; it was of no consequence to anyone but me.
But the poem I have referred to as attracting my father's attention and achieving his favor was "Hiawatha." Some man who courted a sudden and awful death presented him an early copy, and I never lost faith in my own senses until I saw him sit down and go to reading it in cold blood—saw him open the book, and heard him read these following lines, with the same inflectionless judicial frigidity with which he always read his charge to the jury, or administered an oath to a witness:
Take your bow, O Hiawatha,
Take your arrows, jasper-headed,
Take your war-club, Puggawaugun,
And your mittens, Minjekahwan,
And your birch canoe for sailing,
And the oil of Mishe-Nama.
Presently my father took out of his breast pocket an imposing "Warranty Deed," and fixed his eyes upon it and dropped into meditation. I knew what it was. A Texan lady and gentleman had given my half-brother, Orrin Johnson, a handsome property in a town in the North, in gratitude to him for having saved their lives by an act of brilliant heroism.
By and by my father looked toward me and sighed. Then he said:
"If I had such a son as this poet, here were a subject worthier than the traditions of these Indians."
"If you please, sir, where?"
"In this deed."
"In the—deed?"
"Yes—in this very deed," said my father, throwing it on the table. "There is more poetry, more romance, more sublimity, more splendid imagery hidden away in that homely document than could be found in all the traditions of all the savages that live."
"Indeed, sir? Could I—could I get it out, sir? Could I compose the poem, sir, do you think?"
"You!"
I wilted.
Presently my father's face softened somewhat, and he said:
"Go and try. But mind, curb folly. No poetry at the expense of truth. Keep strictly to the facts."
I said I would, and bowed myself out, and went upstairs.
"Hiawatha" kept droning in my head—and so did my father's remarks about the sublimity and romance hidden in my subject, and also his injunction to beware of wasteful and exuberant fancy. I noticed, just here, that I had heedlessly brought the deed away with me. Now, at this moment came to me one of those rare moods of daring recklessness, such as I referred to a while ago. Without another thought, and in plain defiance of the fact that I knew my father meant me to write the romantic story of my half-brother's adventure and subsequent good fortune, I ventured to heed merely the letter of his remarks and ignore their spirit. I took the stupid "Warranty Deed" itself and chopped it up into Hiawathian blank verse, without altering or leaving out three words, and without transposing six. It required loads of courage to go downstairs and face my father with my performance. I started three or four times before I finally got my pluck to where it would stick. But at last I said I would go down and read it to him if he threw me over the church for it. I stood up to begin, and he told me to come closer. I edged up a little, but still left as much neutral ground between us as I thought he would stand. Then I began. It would be useless for me to try to tell what conflicting emotions expressed themselves upon his face, nor how they grew more and more intense as I proceeded; nor how a fell darkness descended upon his countenance, and he began to gag and swallow, and his hands began to work and twitch, as I reeled off line after line, with the strength ebbing out of me, and my legs trembling under me:
THIS INDENTURE, made the tenth
Day of November, in the year
Of our Lord one thousand eight
Hundred six-and-fifty,
Between JOANNA S. E. GRAY
And PHILIP GRAY, her husband,
Of Salem City in the State
Of Texas, of the first part,
And O. B. Johnson, of the town
Of Austin, ditto, WITNESSETH:
That said party of the first part,
For and in consideration
Of the sum of Twenty Thousand
Dollars, lawful money of
The U. S. of Americay,
To them in hand now paid by said
Party of the second part,
The due receipt whereof is here
By confessed and acknowledged,
Have Granted, Bargained, Sold, Remised,
Released and Aliened and Conveyed,
Confirmed, and by these presents do
Grant and Bargain, Sell, Remise,
Alien, Release, Convey, and Con—
Firm unto the said aforesaid
Party of the second part,
And to his heirs and assigns
Forever and ever, ALL
That certain piece or parcel of
LAND situate in city of
Dunkirk, county of Chautauqua,
And likewise furthermore in York State,
Bounded and described, to-wit,
As follows, herein, namely:
BEGINNING at the distance of
A hundred two-and-forty feet,
North-half-east, north-east-by-north,
East-north-east and northerly
Of the northerly line of Mulligan street,
On the westerly line of Brannigan street,
And running thence due northerly
On Brannigan street 200 feet,
Thence at right angles westerly,
North-west-by-west-and-west-half-west,
West-and-by-north, north-west-by-west,
About—
I kind of dodged, and the boot-jack broke the looking glass. I could have waited to see what became of the other missiles if I had wanted to, but I took no interest in such things.
THE GALAXY, September 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
The latest report about the Spanish crown is, that it will now be offered to Prince Alfonso, the second son of the King of Portugal, who is but five years of age. The Spaniards have hunted through all the nations of Europe for a King. They tried to get a Portuguese in the person of Dom Luis, who is an old ex-monarch, they tried to get an Italian, in the person of Victor Emanuel's young son, the Duke of Genoa; they tried to get a Spaniard, in the person of Espartero, who is an octogenarian. Some of them desired a French Bourbon, Montpensier; some of them a Spanish Bourbon, the Prince of Asturias; some of them an English prince, one of the sons of Queen Victoria. They have just tried to get the German Prince Leopold; but they have thought it better to give him up than take a war along with him. It is a long time since we first suggested to them to try an American ruler. We can offer them a large number of able and experienced sovereigns to pick from—men skilled in statesmanship, versed in the science of government, and adepts in all the arts of administration—men who could wear the crown with dignity and rule the kingdom at a reasonable expense. There is not the least danger of Napoleon threatening them if they take an American sovereign; in fact, we have no doubt he would be pleased to support such a candidature. We are unwilling to mention names—though we have a man in our eye whom we wish they had in theirs.—New York Tribune.
It would be but an ostentation of modesty to permit such a pointed reference to myself to pass unnoticed. This is the second time that "The Tribune" (no doubt sincerely looking to the best interests of Spain and the world at large) has done me the great and unusual honor to propose me as a fit person to fill the Spanish throne. Why "The Tribune" should single me out in this way from the midst of a dozen Americans of higher political prominence, is a problem which I cannot solve. Beyond a somewhat intimate knowledge of Spanish history and a profound veneration for its great names and illustrious deeds, I feel that I possess no merit that should peculiarly recommend me to this royal distinction. I cannot deny that Spanish history has always been mother's milk to me. I am proud of every Spanish achievement, from Hernando Cortes's victory at Thermopylae down to Vasco Nunez de Balboa's discovery of the Atlantic ocean; and of every splendid Spanish name, from Don Quixote and the Duke of Wellington down to Don Caesar de Bazan. However, these little graces of erudition are of small consequence, being more showy than serviceable.
In case the Spanish sceptre is pressed upon me—and the indications unquestionably are that it will be—I shall feel it necessary to have certain things set down and distinctly understood beforehand. For instance: My salary must be paid quarterly in advance. In these unsettled times it will not do to trust. If Isabella had adopted this plan, she would be roosting on her ancestral throne to-day, for the simple reason that her subjects never could have raised three months of a royal salary in advance, and of course they could not have discharged her until they had squared up with her. My salary must be paid in gold; when greenbacks are fresh in a country, they are too fluctuating. My salary has got to be put at the ruling market rate; I am not going to cut under on the trade, and they are not going to trail me a long way from home and then practise on my ignorance and play me for a royal North Adams Chinaman, by any means. As I understand it, imported kings generally get five millions a year and house-rent free. Young George of Greece gets that. As the revenues only yield two millions, he has to take the national note for considerable; but even with things in that sort of shape he is better fixed than he was in Denmark, where he had to eternally stand up because he had no throne to sit on, and had to give bail for his board, because a royal apprentice gets no salary there while he is learning his trade. England is the place for that. Fifty thousand dollars a year Great Britain pays on each royal child that is born, and this is increased from year to year as the child becomes more and more indispensable to his country. Look at Prince Arthur. At first he only got the usual birth-bounty; but now that he has got so that he can dance, there is simply no telling what wages he gets.
I should have to stipulate that the Spanish people wash more and endeavor to get along with less quarantine. Do you know, Spain keeps her ports fast locked against foreign traffic three-fourths of each year, because one day she is scared about the cholera, and the next about the plague, and next the measles, next the hooping cough, the hives, and the rash? but she does not mind leonine leprosy and elephantiasis any more than a great and enlightened civilization minds freckles. Soap would soon remove her anxious distress about foreign distempers. The reason arable land is so scarce in Spain is because the people squander so much of it on their persons, and then when they die it is improvidently buried with them.
I should feel obliged to stipulate that Marshal Serrano be reduced to the rank of constable, or even roundsman. He is no longer fit to be City Marshal. A man who refused to be king because he was too old and feeble, is ill qualified to help sick people to the station-house when they are armed and their form of delirium tremens is of the exuberant and demonstrative kind.
I should also require that a force be sent to chase the late Queen Isabella out of France. Her presence there can work no advantage to Spain, and she ought to be made to move at once; though, poor thing, she has been chaste enough heretofore—for a Spanish woman.
I should also require that I am at this moment authoritatively informed that "The Tribune" did not mean me, after all. Very well, I do not care two cents.
THE GALAXY, September 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
One calamity to which the death of Mr. Dickens dooms this country has not awakened the concern to which its gravity entitles it. We refer to the fact that the nation is to be lectured to death and read to death all next winter, by Tom, Dick, and Harry, with poor lamented Dickens for a pretext. All the vagabonds who can spell will afflict the people with "readings" from Pickwick and Copperfield, and all the insignificants who have been ennobled by the notice of the great novelist or transfigured by his smile will make a marketable commodity of it now, and turn the sacred reminiscence to the practical use of procuring bread and butter. The lecture rostrums will fairly swarm with these fortunates. Already the signs of it are perceptible. Behold how the unclean creatures are wending toward the dead lion and gathering to the feast:
"Reminiscences of Dickens." A lecture. By John Smith, who heard him read eight times.
"Remembrances of Charles Dickens." A lecture. By John Jones, who saw him once in a street car and twice in a barber shop.
"Recollections of Mr. Dickens." A lecture. By John Brown, who gained a wide fame by writing deliriously appreciative critiques and rhapsodies upon the great author's public readings, and who shook hands with the great author upon various occasions, and held converse with him several times.
"Readings from Dickens." By John White, who has the great delineator's style and manner perfectly, having attended all his readings in this country and made these things a study, always practising each reading before retiring, and while it was hot from the great delineator's lips. Upon this occasion Mr. W. will exhibit the remains of a cigar which he saw Mr. Dickens smoke. This Relic is kept in a solid silver box made purposely for it.
"Sights and Sounds of the Great Novelist." A popular lecture. By John Gray, who waited on his table all the time he was at the Grand Hotel, New York, and still has in his possession and will exhibit to the audience a fragment of the Last Piece of Bread which the lamented author tasted in this country."
"Heart Treasures of Precious Moments with Literature's Departed Monarch." A lecture. By Miss Serena Amelia Tryphenia McSpadden, who still wears, and will always wear, a glove upon the hand made sacred by the clasp of Dickens. Only Death shall remove it.
"Readings from Dickens." By Mrs. J. O'Hooligan Murphy, who washed for him.
"Familiar Talks with the Great Author." A narrative lecture By John Thomas, for two weeks his valet in America.
And so forth, and so on. This isn't half the list. The man who has a "Toothpick once used by Charles Dickens" will have to have a hearing; and the man who "once rode in an omnibus with Charles Dickens;" and the lady to whom Charles Dickens "granted the hospitalities of his umbrella during a storm;" and the person who "possesses a hole which once belonged in a handkerchief owned by Charles Dickens." Be patient and long-suffering, good people, for even this does not fill up the measure of what you must endure next winter. There is no creature in all this land who has had any personal relations with the late Mr. Dickens, however slight or trivial, but will shoulder his way to the rostrum and inflict his testimony upon his helpless countrymen. To some people it is fatal to be noticed by greatness.
THE GALAXY, September 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
An unknown friend in Cleveland sends me a printed paragraph, signed "Lucretia," and says: "I venture to forward to you the enclosed article taken from a news correspondence in a New Haven paper, feeling confident that for gushing tenderness it has never been equalled. Even that touching Western production which you printed in the June GALAXY by way of illustrating what Californian journalists term 'hogwash,' is thin when compared with the unctuous ooze of 'Lucretia.'" The Clevelander has a correct judgment, as "Lucretia's" paragraph, hereunto appended, will show:
One lovely morning last week, the pearly gates of heaven were left ajar, and white-robed angels earthward came, bearing on their snowy pinions a lovely babe. Silently, to a quiet home nest, where love and peace abide, the angels came and placed the infant softly on a young mother's arm, saying in sweet musical strains, "Lady, the Saviour bids you take this child and nurse it for him." The low-toned music died away as the angels passed upward to their bright home; but the baby girl sleeps quietly in her new found home. We wish thee joy, young parents, in thy happiness.
This, if I have been rightly informed, is not the customary method of acquiring offspring, and for all its seeming plausibility it does not look to me to be above suspicion. I have lived many years in this world, and I never knew of an infant being brought to a party by angels, or other unauthorized agents, but it made more or less talk in the neighborhood. It may be, Miss Lucretia, that the angels consider New Haven a more eligible place to raise children in than the realms of eternal day, and are capable of deliberately transferring infants from the one locality to the other; but I shall have to get you to excuse me. I look at it differently. It would be hard to get me to believe such a thing. And I will tell you why. However, never mind. You know, yourself, that the thing does not stand to reason. Still, if you were present when the babe was brought so silently to that quiet home nest, and placed in that soft manner on the young mother's arm, and if you heard the sweet musical strains which the messengers made, and could not recognize the tune, and feel justified in believing that it and likewise the messengers themselves were of super-sublunary origin, I pass. And so I leave the question open. But I will say, and do say, that I have not read anything sweeter than that paragraph for seventy or eighty years.
THE GALAXY, September 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
* * *
Another correspondent writes as follows from New York:
Having read your "Beef Contract" in the May GALAXY with a great deal of gratification, I showed it to a friend of mine, who after reading it said he did not believe a word of it, and that he was sure it was nothing but a pack of lies; that it was a libel on the Government, and the man who wrote it ought to be prosecuted. I thought this was as good as the "Contract" itself, and knew it would afford you some amusement.
Yours truly, S.S.G.
That does amuse me, but does not surprise me. It is not possible to write a burlesque so broad that some innocent will not receive it in good faith as being a solemn statement of fact. Two of the lamest that ever were cobbled up by literary shoemakers went the rounds two or three months ago, and excited the wonder and led captive the faith of many unprejudiced people. One was a sickly invention about a remote valley in Arizona where all the lost hair-pins and such odds and ends as had disappeared from the toilet tables of the world for a generation, had somehow been mysteriously gathered together; and this poor little production wound up with a "prophecy" by an Apache squaw to the effect that "By'm'by heap muchee shake—big town muchee shake all down"; a "prophecy" which pointed inexorably at San Francisco and was awfully suggestive of its coming fate. The other shallow invention was one about some mud- turtle of a Mississippi diving-bell artist finding an ancient copper canoe, roofed and hermetically sealed, and believed to contain the remains of De Soto. Now, it could not have marred, but only symmetrically finished, so feeble an imposture as that, to have added that De Soto's name was deciphered upon a tombstone which was found tagging after the sunken canoe by a string. Plenty of people even believed that story of a South American doctor who had discovered a method of chopping off people's heads and putting them on again without discommoding the party of the second part, and who finally got a couple of heads mixed up and transposed, yet did the fitting of them on so neatly that even the experimentees themselves thought everything was right, until each found that his restored head was recalling, believing in, and searching after moles, scars, and other marks which had never existed upon his body, and at the same time refusing to remember or recognize similar marks which had always existed upon the said body. A "Bogus Proclamation" is a legitimate inspiration of genius, but any infant can contrive such things as those I have been speaking of. They really require no more brains than it does to be a "practical joker." Perhaps it is not risking too much to say that even the innocuous small reptile they call the "village wag" is able to build such inventions...Before I end this paragraph and subject, I wish to remark that maybe the gentleman who said my "Beef Contract" article was a libel upon the Government was right—though I had certainly always thought differently about it. I wrote that article in Washington, in November, 1867, during Andrew Johnson's reign. It was suggested by Senator Stewart's account of a tedious, tiresome, and exasperating search which he had made through the Land Office and the Treasury Department, among no end of lofty and supercilious clerks, to find out something which he ought to have been able to find out at ten minutes' notice. I mislaid the MS. at the time, and never found it again until last April. It was not a libel on the Government in 1867. Mr. Stewart still lives to testify to that.
* * *
From Boston a correspondent writes as follows: "Please make a memorandum of this drop of comfort which I once heard a child-hating bachelor offer to his nieces at their FATHER's funeral: 'Remember, children, this happens only once in your lifetime, and don't cry—it can't possibly occur again!'"
* * *
From Alabama "A Friend" responds to our call for touching obituaries, with the following "from an old number of the 'Tuscaloosa Observer.'" The disease of this sufferer (as per third stanza) will probably never attack the author of his obituary—and for good and sufficient reasons:
Farewell, thou earthy friend of mine,
The messenger was sent, why do we repine,
Why should we grieve and weep
In Jesus he fell asleep.
Around his bed his friends did stand,
Nursing with a willing hand;
Anxiety great with medical skill,
The fever raged he still was ill.
His recovery we prayed but in vain,
The disease located on his brain,
Death succeeded human skill,
Pulse ceased to beat, death chilled every limb.
Death did not distorture his pale face,
How short on earth was his Christian race
With tears flowing from the youth and furrowed face
He was consigned to his last resting, resting place.
The lofty oaks spreading branches
Shades the grave of his dear sister Addie and sweet little Frances,
Three children now in Heaven rest, Should parents grieve? Jesus called and
blest.
* * *
A number of answers to the enigma published in the July GALAXY have been received and filed for future reference. I think one or two have guessed it, but am not certain. I got up the enigma without any difficulty, but the effort to find out the true answer to it has proved to be beyond my strength, thus far.
THE GALAXY, October 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
THE RECEPTION AT THE PRESIDENT'S.
After I had drifted into the White House with the flood tide of humanity that had been washing steadily up the street for an hour, I obeyed the orders of the soldier at the door and the policeman within, and banked my hat and umbrella with a colored man, who gave me a piece of brass with a number on it and said that that thing would reproduce the property at any time of the night. I doubted it, but I was on unknown ground now, and must be content to take a good many chances.
Another person told me to drop in with the crowd and I would come to the President presently. I joined, and we drifted along till we passed a certain point, and then we thinned out to double and single file. It was a right gay scene, and a right stirring and lively one; for the whole place was brightly lighted, and all down the great hall, as far as one could see, was a restless and writhing multitude of people, the women powdered, painted, jewelled, and splendidly upholstered, and many of the men gilded with the insignia of great naval, military, and ambassadorial rank. It was bewildering.
Our long line kept drifting along, and by and by we came in sight of the President and Mrs. Grant. They were standing up shaking hands and trading civilities with our procession. I grew somewhat at home little by little, and then I began to feel satisfied and contented. I was getting to be perfectly alive with interest by the time it came my turn to talk with the President. I took him by the hand and looked him in the eye, and said:
"Well, I reckon I see you at last, General. I have said as much as a thousand times, out in Nevada, that if ever I went home to the States I would just have the private satisfaction of going and saying to you by word of mouth that I thought you was considerable of a soldier, anyway. Now, you know, out there we—"
I turned round and said to the fellow behind me:
"Now, look here, my good friend, how the nation do you suppose I can talk with any sort of satisfaction, with you crowding me this way? I am surprised at your manners." He was a modest-looking creature. He said:
"But you see the whole procession's stopped, and they're crowding up on me."
I said:—
"Some people have got more cheek. Just suggest to the parties behind you to have some respect for the place they are in and not try to shove in on a private conversation. What the General and me are talking about ain't of the least interest to them."
Then I resumed with the President:
"Well, well, well. Now this is fine. This is what I call something like. Gay? Well, I should say so. And so this is what you call a Presidential reception. I'm free to say that it just lays over anything that ever I saw out in the sage-brush. I have been to Governor Nye's Injun receptions at Honey Lake and Carson City, many and many a time—he that's Senator Nye now—you know him, of course. I never saw a man in all my life that Jim Nye didn't know—and not only that, but he could tell him where he knew him, and all about him, family included, even if it was forty years ago. Most remarkable man, Jim Nye—remarkable. He can tell a lie with that purity of accent, and that grace of utterance, and that convincing emotion—"
I turned again, and said:
"My friend, your conduct surprises me. I have come three thousand miles to have a word with the President of the United States upon subjects with which you are not even remotely connected, and by the living geewhillikins I can't proceed with any sort of satisfaction on account of your cussed crowding. Will you just please to go a little slow, now, and not attract so much attention by your strange conduct? If you had any eyes you could see how the bystanders are staring."
He said:
"But I tell you, sir, it's the people behind. They are just growling and surging and shoving, and I wish I was in Jericho I do."
I said:
"I wish you was, myself. You might learn some delicacy of feeling in that ancient seat of civilization, maybe. Drat if you don't need it."
And then I resumed with the President:
"Yes, sir, I've been at receptions before, plenty of them—old Nye's Injun receptions. But they warn't as starchy as this by considerable. No great long strings of high-fliers like these galoots here, you know, but old high-flavored Washoes and Pi-Utes, each one of them as powerful as a rag-factory on fire. Phew! Those were halcyon days. Yes, indeed, General; and madam, many and many's the time, out in the wilds of Nevada, I've been—"
"Perhaps you had better discontinue your remarks till another time, sir, as the crowd behind you are growing somewhat impatient," the President said.
"Do you hear that?" I said to the fellow behind me. "I suppose you will take that hint, anyhow. I tell you he is milder than I would be. If I was President, I would waltz you people out at the back door if you came crowding a gentleman this way, that I was holding a private conversation with."
And then I resumed with the President:
"I think that hint of yours will start them. I never saw people act so. It is really about all I can do to hold my ground with that mob shoving up behind. But don't you worry on my account, General—don't give yourself any uneasiness about me—I can stand it as long as they can. I've been through this kind of a mill before. Why, as I was just saying to you, many and many a time, out in the wilds of Nevada, I have been at Governor Nye's Injun receptions—and between you and me that old man was a good deal of a Governor, take him all round. I don't know what for Senator he makes, though I think you'll admit that him and Bill Steward and Tom Fitch take a bigger average of brains into that Capitol up yonder, by a hundred and fifty fold, than any other State in America, according to population. Now that is so. Those three men represent only twenty or twenty-five thousand people—bless you, the least little bit of a trifling ward in the city of New York casts two votes to Nevada's one—and yet those three men haven't their superiors in Congress for straight-out, simon pure brains and ability. And if you could just have been at one of old Nye's Injun receptions and seen those savages—not high-fliers like these, you know, but frowsy old bummers with nothing in the world on, in the summer time, but an old battered plug hat and a pair of spectacles—I tell you it was a swell affair, was one of Governor Nye's early-day receptions. Many and many's the time I have been to them, and seen him stand up and beam and smile on his children, as he called them in his motherly way—beam on them by the hour out of his splendid eyes, and fascinate them with his handsome face, and comfort them with his persuasive tongue—seen him stand up there and tell them anecdotes and lies, and quote Watts's hymns to them, until he just took the war spirit all out of them—and grim chiefs that came two hundred miles to tax the whites for whole wagon-loads of blankets and things or make eternal war if they didn't get them he has sent away bewildered with his inspired mendacity and perfectly satisfied and enriched with an old hoop skirt or two, a lot of Patent Office reports, and a few sides of condemned army bacon that they would have to chain up to a tree when they camped, or the skippers would walk off with them. I tell you he is a rattling talker. Talk! It's no name for it. He—well, he is bound to launch straight into close quarters and a heap of trouble hereafter, of course—we all know that—but you can rest satisfied that he will take off his hat and put out his hand and introduce himself to the King of Darkness perfectly easy and comfortable, and let on that he has seen him some where before; and he will remind him of parties he used to know, and things that's slipped out of his memory—and he'll tell him a thousand things that he can't help taking an interest in, and every now and then he will just gently mix in an anecdote that will fetch him if there's any laugh in him—he will, indeed—and Jim Nye will chip in and help cross-question the candidates, and he will just hang around and hang around and hang around, getting more and more sociable all the time, and doing this, that, and the other thing in the handiest sort of way, till he has made himself perfectly indispensable—and then, the very first thing you know—" I wheeled and said:
"My friend, your conduct grieves me to the heart. A dozen times at least your unseemly crowding has seriously interfered with the conversation I am holding with the President, and if the thing occurs again I shall take my hat and leave the premises."
"I wish to the mischief you would! Where did you come from anyway, that you've got the unutterable cheek to spread yourself here and keep fifteen hundred people standing waiting half an hour to shake hands with the President?"
An officer touched me on the shoulder and said:
"Move along, please; you're annoying the President beyond all patience. You have blocked the procession, and the people behind you are getting furious. Come, move along, please."
Rather than have trouble, I moved along. So I had no time to do more than look back over my shoulder and say: "Yes, sir, and the first thing they would know, Jim Nye would have that place, and the salary doubled! I do reckon he is the handiest creature about making the most of his chances that ever found an all-sufficient substitute for mother's milk in politics and sin. Now that is the kind of man old Nye is—and in less than two months he would talk every—But I can't make you hear the rest, General, without hollering too loud."
THE GALAXY, October 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN.
NOTE.—No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a Chinaman's sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient.
LETTER I.
SHANGHAI, 18—.
DEAR CHING-FOO: It is all settled, and I am to leave my oppressed and overburdened native land and cross the sea to that noble realm where all are free and all equal, and none reviled or abused—America! America, whose precious privilege it is to call herself the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We and all that are about us here look over the waves longingly, contrasting the privations of this our birthplace with the opulent comfort of that happy refuge. We know how America has welcomed the Germans and the Frenchmen and the stricken and sorrowing Irish, and we know how she has given them bread and work and liberty, and how grateful they are. And we know that America stands ready to welcome all other oppressed peoples and offer her abundance to all that come, without asking what their nationality is, or their creed or color. And, without being told it, we know that the foreign sufferers she has rescued from oppression and starvation are the most eager of her children to welcome us, because, having suffered themselves, they know what suffering is, and having been generously succored, they long to be generous to other unfortunates and thus show that magnanimity is not wasted upon them.
AH SONG HI.
* * *
LETTER II.
AT SEA, 18—.
DEAR CHING-FOO: We are far away at sea now, on our way to the beautiful Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. We shall soon be where all men are alike, and where sorrow is not known. The good American who hired me to go to his country is to pay me $12 a month, which is immense wages, you know—twenty times as much as one gets in China. My passage in the ship is a very large sum—indeed, it is a fortune and this I must pay myself eventually, but I am allowed ample time to make it good to my employer in, he advancing it now. For a mere form, I have turned over my wife, my boy, and my two daughters to my employer's partner for security for the payment of the ship fare. But my employer says they are in no danger of being sold, for he knows I will be faithful to him, and that is the main security.
I thought I would have twelve dollars to begin life with in America, but the American Consul took two of them for making a certificate that I was shipped on the steamer. He has no right to do more than charge the ship two dollars for one certificate for the ship, with the number of her Chinese passengers set down in it; but he chooses to force a certificate upon each and every Chinaman and put the two dollars in his pocket. As 1,300 of my countrymen are in this vessel, the Consul received $2,600 for certificates. My employer tells me that the Government at Washington know of this fraud, and are so bitterly opposed to the existence of such a wrong that they tried hard to have the extor—the fee, I mean, legalized by the last Congress;* but as the bill did not pass, the Consul will have to take the fee dishonestly until next Congress makes it legitimate. It is a great and good and noble country, and hates all forms of vice and chicanery.
We are in that part of the vessel always reserved for my countrymen. It is called the steerage. It is kept for us, my employer says, because it is not subject to changes of temperature and dangerous drafts of air. It is only another instance of the loving unselfishness of the Americans for all unfortunate foreigners. The steerage is a little crowded, and rather warm and close, but no doubt it is best for us that it should be so.
Yesterday our people got to quarrelling among themselves, and the captain turned a volume of hot steam upon a mass of them and scalded eighty or ninety of them more or less severely. Flakes and ribbons of skin came off some of them. There was wild shrieking and struggling while the vapor enveloped the great throngs and so some who were not scalded got trampled upon and hurt. We do not complain, for my employer says this is the usual way of quieting disturbances on board the ship, and that it is done in the cabins among the Americans every day or two.
Congratulate me, Ching-Foo! In ten days more I shall step upon the shore of America, and be received by her great hearted people; and I shall straighten myself up and feel that I am a free man among freemen.
AH SONG HI.
*Pacific and Mediterranean steamship bills.—[ED. MEM.]
* * *
LETTER III.
SAN FRANCISCO, 18—
DEAR CHING-FOO: I stepped ashore jubilant! I wanted to dance, shout, sing, worship the generous Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. But as I walked from the gang-plank a man in a gray uniform* kicked me violently behind and told me to look out—so my employer translated it. As I turned, another officer of the same kind struck me with a short club and also instructed me to look out. I was about to take hold of my end of the pole which had mine and Hong-Wo's basket and things suspended from it, when a third officer hit me with his club to signify that I was to drop it, and then kicked me to signify that he was satisfied with my promptness. Another person came now, and searched all through our basket and bundles, emptying everything out on the dirty wharf. Then this person and another searched us all over. They found a little package of opium sewed into the artificial part of Hong-Wo's queue, and they took that, and also they made him prisoner and handed him over to an officer, who marched him away. They took his luggage, too, because of his crime, and as our luggage was so mixed together that they could not tell mine from his, they took it all. When I offered to help divide it, they kicked me and desired me to look out.
Having now no baggage and no companion, I told my employer that if he was willing, I would walk about a little and see the city and the people until he needed me. I did not like to seem disappointed with my reception in the good land of refuge for the oppressed, and so I looked and spoke as cheerily as I could. But he said, wait a minute—I must be vaccinated to prevent my taking the small-pox. I smiled and said I had already had the small-pox, as he could see by the marks, and so I need not wait to be "vaccinated," as he called it. But he said it was the law, and I must be vaccinated anyhow. The doctor would never let me pass, for the law obliged him to vaccinate all Chinamen and charge them ten dollars apiece for it, and I might be sure that no doctor who would be the servant of that law would let a fee slip through his fingers to accommodate any absurd fool who had seen fit to have the disease in some other country. And presently the doctor came and did his work and took my last penny—my ten dollars which were the hard savings of nearly a year and a half of labor and privation. Ah, if the law-makers had only known there were plenty of doctors in the city glad of a chance to vaccinate people for a dollar or two, they would never have put the price up so high against a poor friendless Irish, or Italian, or Chinese pauper fleeing to the good land to escape hunger and hard times.
AH SONG HI.
*Policeman.
* * *
LETTER IV.
SAN FRANCISCO, 18—.
DEAR CHING FOO: I have been here about a month now, and am learning a little of the language every day. My employer was disappointed in the matter of hiring us out to service on the plantations in the far eastern portion of this continent. His enterprise was a failure, and so he set us all free, merely taking measures to secure to himself the repayment of the passage money which he paid for us. We are to make this good to him out of the first moneys we earn here. He says it is sixty dollars apiece.
We were thus set free about two weeks after we reached here. We had been massed together in some small houses up to that time, waiting. I walked forth to seek my fortune. I was to begin life a stranger in a strange land, without a friend, or a penny, or any clothes but those I had on my back. I had not any advantage on my side in the world—not one, except good health and the lack of any necessity to waste any time or anxiety on the watching of my baggage. No, I forget. I reflected that I had one prodigious advantage over paupers in other lands—I was in America! I was in the heaven-provided refuge of the oppressed and the forsaken!
Just as that comforting thought passed through my mind, some young men set a fierce dog on me. I tried to defend myself, but could do nothing. I retreated to the recess of a closed doorway, and there the dog had me at his mercy, flying at my throat and face or any part of my body that presented itself. I shrieked for help, but the young men only jeered and laughed. Two men in gray uniforms (policemen is their official title) looked on for a minute and then walked leisurely away. But a man stopped them and brought them back and told them it was a shame to leave me in such distress. Then the two policemen beat off the dog with small clubs, and a comfort it was to be rid of him, though I was just rags and blood from head to foot. The man who brought the policemen asked the young men why they abused me in that way, and they said they didn't want any of his meddling. And they said to him:
"This Ching divil comes till Ameriky to take the bread out o' dacent intilligent white men's mouths, and whin they try to defind their rights there's a dale o' fuss made about it."
They began to threaten my benefactor, and as he saw no friendliness in the faces that had gathered meanwhile, he went on his way. He got many a curse when he was gone. The policemen now told me I was under arrest and must go with them. I asked one of them what wrong I had done to anyone that I should be arrested, and he only struck me with his club and ordered me to "hold my yop." With a jeering crowd of street boys and loafers at my heels, I was taken up an alley and into a stone-paved dungeon which had large cells all down one side of it, with iron gates to them. I stood up by a desk while a man behind it wrote down certain things about me on a slate. One of my captors said:
"Enter a charge against this Chinaman of being disorderly and disturbing the peace."
I attempted to say a word, but he said:
"Silence! Now ye had better go slow, my good fellow. This is two or three times you've tried to get off some of your d___d insolence. Lip won't do here. You've got to simmer down, and if you don't take to it paceable we'll see if we can't make you. Fat's your name?"
"Ah Song Hi."
"Alias what?"
I said I did not understand, and he said what he wanted was my true name, for he guessed I picked up this one since I stole my last chickens. They all laughed loudly at that.
Then they searched me. They found nothing, of course. They seemed very angry and asked who I supposed would "go my bail or pay my fine." When they explained these things to me, I said I had done nobody any harm, and why should I need to have bail or pay a fine? Both of them kicked me and warned me that I would find it to my advantage to try and be as civil as convenient. I protested that I had not meant anything disrespectful. Then one of them took me to one side and said:
"Now look here, Johnny, it's no use you playing softy wid us. We mane business, ye know; and the sooner ye put us on the scent of a V the asier ye'll save yerself from a dale of trouble. Ye can't get out o' this for anny less. Who's your frinds?"
I told him I had not a single friend in all the land of America, and that I was far from home and help, and very poor. And I begged him to let me go.
He gathered the slack of my blouse collar in his grip and jerked and shoved and hauled at me across the dungeon, and then unlocking an iron cell-gate thrust me in with a kick and said:
"Rot there, ye furrin spawn, till ye lairn that there's no room in America for the likes of ye or your nation."
AH SONG HI.
THE GALAXY, October 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
"For sale, for the benefit of the Fund for the Relief of the Widows and Orphans of Deceased Firemen, a Curious Ancient Bedouin pipe procured at the city of Endor in Palestine, and believed to have once belonged to the justly-renowned Witch of Endor. Parties desiring to examine this singular relic with a view to purchasing, can do so by calling upon Daniel S., 119 and 121 William street, New York."
As per advertisement in the "Herald." A curious old relic indeed, as I had a good personal right to know. In a single instant of time, a long drawn panorama of sights and scenes in the Holy Land flashed through my memory—town and grove, desert, camp, and caravan clattering after each other and disappearing, leaving me with a little of the surprised and dizzy feeling which I have experienced at sundry times when a long express train has overtaken me at some quiet curve and gone whizzing, car by car, around the corner and out of sight. In that prolific instant I saw again all the country from the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth clear to Jerusalem, and thence over the hills of Judea and through the Vale of Sharon to Joppa, down by the ocean. Leaving out unimportant stretches of country and details of incident, I saw and experienced the following described matters and things. Immediately three years fell away from my age, and a vanished time was restored to me—September, 1867. It was a flaming Oriental day—this one that had come up out of the past and brought along its actors, its stage-properties, and scenic effects—and our party had just ridden through the squalid hive of human vermin which still holds the ancient Biblical name of Endor; I was bringing up the rear on my grave four-dollar steed, who was about beginning to compose himself for his usual noon nap. My! only fifteen minutes before how the black, mangy, nine-tenths naked, ten-tenths filthy, ignorant, bigoted, besotted, hungry, lazy, malignant, screeching, crowding, struggling, wailing, begging, cursing, hateful spawn of the original Witch had swarmed out of the caves in the rocks and the holes and crevices in the earth, and blocked our horses' way, besieged us, threw themselves in the animals' path, clung to their manes saddle-furniture, and tails, asking, beseeching, demanding "bucksheesh! bucksheesh! BUCKSHEESH!" We had rained small copper Turkish coins among them, as fugitives fling coats and hats to pursuing wolves, and then had spurred our way through as they stopped to scramble for the largess. I was fervently thankful when we had gotten well up on the desolate hillside and outstripped them and left them jawing and gesticulating in the rear. What a tempest had seemingly gone roaring and crashing by me and left its dull thunders pulsing in my ears!
I was in the rear, as I was saying. Our pack-mules and Arabs were far ahead, and Dan, Jack, Moult, Davis, Denny, Church, and Birch (these names will do as well as any to represent the boys) were following close after them. As my horse nodded to rest, I heard a sort of panting behind me, and turned and saw that a tawny youth from the village had overtaken me—a true remnant and representative of his ancestress the Witch—a galvanized scurvy, wrought into the human shape and garnished with ophthalmia and leprous scars—an airy creature with an invisible shirt-front that reached below the pit of his stomach, and no other clothing to speak of except a tobacco pouch, an ammunition-pocket, and a venerable gun, which was long enough to club any game with that came within shooting distance but far from efficient as an article of dress.
I thought to myself, "Now this disease with a human heart in it is going to shoot me." I smiled in derision at the idea of a Bedouin daring to touch off his great-grandfather's rusty gun and getting his head blown off for his pains. But then it occurred to me, in simple school-boy language, "Suppose he should take deliberate aim and 'haul off' and fetch me with the butt-end of it?" There was wisdom in that view of it, and I stopped to parley. I found he was only a friendly villain who wanted a trifle of bucksheesh, and after begging what he could get in that way, was perfectly willing to trade off everything he had for more. I believe he would have parted with his last shirt for bucksheesh if he had had one. He was smoking the "humbliest" pipe I ever saw—a dingy, funnel-shaped, red-clay thing, streaked and grimed with oil and years of tobacco, and with all the different kinds of dirt there are, and thirty per cent of them peculiar and indigenous to Endor and perdition. And rank? I never smelt anything like it. It withered a cactus that stood lifting its prickly hands aloft beside the trail. It even woke up my horse. I said I would take that. It cost me a franc, a Russian kopek, a brass button, and a slate pencil; and my spendthrift lavishness so won upon the son of the desert that he passed over his pouch of most unspeakably villainous tobacco to me as a free gift. What a pipe it was, to be sure! It had a rude brass-wire cover to it, and a little coarse iron chain suspended from the bowl, with an iron splinter attached to loosen up the tobacco and pick your teeth with. The stem looked like the half of a slender walking-stick with the bark on.
I felt that this pipe had belonged to the original Witch of Endor as soon as I saw it; and as soon as I smelt it, I knew it. Moreover, I asked the Arab cub in good English if it was not so, and he answered in good Arabic that it was. I woke up my horse and went my way, smoking. And presently I said to myself reflectively, "If there is anything that could make a man deliberately assault a dying cripple, I reckon maybe an unexpected whiff from this pipe would do it." I smoked along till I found I was beginning to lie, and project murder, and steal my own things out of one pocket and hide them in another; and then I put up my treasure, took off my spurs and put them under my horse's tail, and shortly came tearing through our caravan like a hurricane. From that time forward, going to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and the Jordan, Bethany, Bethlehem, and everywhere, I loafed contentedly in the rear and enjoyed my infamous pipe and revelled in imaginary villainy. But at the end of two weeks we turned our faces toward the sea and journeyed over the Judean hills, and through rocky defiles, and among the scenes that Samson knew in his youth, and by and by we touched level ground just at night, and trotted off cheerily over the plain of Sharon. It was perfectly jolly for three hours, and we whites crowded along together, close after the chief Arab muleteer (all the pack animals and the other Arabs were miles in the rear), and we laughed, and chatted, and argued hotly about Samson, and whether suicide was a sin or not, since Paul speaks of Samson distinctly as being saved and in heaven. But by and by the night air, and the duskiness, and the weariness of eight hours in the saddle, began to tell, and conversation flagged and finally died out utterly. The squeak-squeaking of the saddles grew very distinct; occasionally somebody sighed, or started to hum a tune and gave it up; now and then a horse sneezed. These things only emphasized the solemnity and the stillness. Everybody got so listless that for once I and my dreamer found ourselves in the lead. It was a glad, new sensation, and I longed to keep the place forevermore. Every little stir in the dingy cavalcade behind made me nervous. Davis and I were riding side by side, right after the Arab. About 11 o'clock it had become really chilly, and the dozing boys roused up and began to inquire how far it was to Ramlah yet, and to demand that the Arab hurry along faster. I gave it up then, and my heart sank within me, because of course they would come up to scold the Arab. I knew I had to take the rear again. In my sorrow I unconsciously took to my pipe, my only comfort. As I touched the match to it the whole company came lumbering up and crowding my horse's rump and flanks. A whiff of smoke drifted back over my shoulder, and—
"The suffering Moses!"
"Whew!"
"By George, who opened that graveyard?"
"Boys, that Arab's been swallowing something dead!"
Right away there was a gap behind us. Whiff after whiff sailed airily back, and each one widened the breach. Within fifteen seconds the barking, and gasping, and sneezing, and coughing of the boys, and their angry abuse of the Arab guide, had dwindled to a murmur, and Davis and I were alone with the leader. Davis did not know what the matter was, and don't to this day. Occasionally he caught a faint film of the smoke and fell to scolding at the Arab and wondering how long he had been decaying in that way. Our boys kept on dropping back further and further, till at last they were only in hearing, not in sight. And every time they started gingerly forward to reconnoitre—or shoot the Arab, as they proposed to do—I let them get within good fair range of my relic (she would carry seventy yards with wonderful precision), and then wafted a whiff among them that sent them gasping and strangling to the rear again. I kept my gun well charged and ready, and twice within the hour I decoyed the boys right up to my horse's tail, and then with one malarious blast emptied the saddles, almost. I never heard an Arab abused so in my life. He really owed his preservation to me, because for one entire hour I stood between him and certain death. The boys would have killed him if they could have got by me.
By and by, when the company were far in the rear, I put away my pipe—I was getting fearfully dry and crisp about the gills and rather blown with good diligent work—and spurred my animated trance up alongside the Arab and stopped him and asked for water. He unslung his little gourd-shaped earthenware jug, and I put it under my moustache and took a long, glorious, satisfying draught. I was going to scour the mouth of the jug a little, but I saw that I had brought the whole train together once more by my delay, and that they were all anxious to drink too—and would have been long ago if the Arab had not pretended that he was out of water. So I hastened to pass the vessel to Davis. He took a mouthful, and never said a word, but climbed off his horse and lay down calmly in the road. I felt sorry for Davis. It was too late now, though, and Dan was drinking. Dan got down too, and hunted for a soft place. I thought I heard Dan say, "That Arab's friends ought to keep him in alcohol or else take him out and bury him somewhere." All the boys took a drink and climbed down. It is not well to go into further particulars. Let us draw the curtain upon this act.
*****
Well, now, to think that after three changing years I should hear from that curious old relic again, and see Dan advertising it for sale for the benefit of a benevolent object. Dan is not treating that present right. I gave that pipe to him for a keepsake. However, he probably finds that it keeps away custom and interferes with business. It is the most convincing inanimate object in all this part of the world, perhaps. Dan and I were room-mates in all that long "Quaker City" voyage, and whenever I desired to have a little season of privacy I used to fire up on that pipe and persuade Dan to go out; and he seldom waited to change his clothes, either. In about a quarter, or from that to three-quarters of a minute, he would be propping up the smoke-stack on the upper deck and cursing. I wonder how the faithful old relic is going to sell?
THE GALAXY, October 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
* * *
Aware of the interest we take in obituaries and obituary poetry, unknown friends send specimens from many States of the Union. But they are nearly all marred by one glaring defect—they are not bad enough to be good. No, they drivel along on one dull level of mediocrity, and, like Mr. Brick Pomeroy's "Saturday Night" sentiment, are simply dreary and humiliating, instead of wholesomely execrable and exasperating.
* * *
A Boston correspondent writes: "The author of "Johnny Skae's Item" will doubtless find merit in the enclosed atrocity. I cut it from a Provincial paper, where it appeared in perfect seriousness, as a touching tribute to departed worth." The "atrocity" referred to (half a column of doggerel) comes under the customary verdict—not superhumanly bad enough to be good; but nothing in literature can surpass the eloquent paragraph which introduces it, viz.:
LINES
Written on the death—sudden and untimely death of—Cornelius Kickham, son of John Kickham, Souris West, and nephew of E. Kickham, Esq., of the same place, on the 25th ult., at the age of nineteen years, in the humane attempt of rescuing three small children in a cart and a runaway horse, came in contact with the shaft, which after extreme suffering for two days, caused his death, during which time, he bore with heroic resignation to the divine will. May he rest in peace.
Comment here would be sacrilege. "Johnny Skae's Item," referred to above, was written in San Francisco, by the editor of this MEMORANDA, six or seven years ago, to burlesque a painfully incoherent style of local itemizing which prevailed in the papers there at that day. The above "Lines" were absolutely written and printed in a Provincial paper, in all seriousness, just as copied above; but we will append "Johnny Skae's Item," and leave it to the reader to say if he can shut his eyes and tell which is the burlesque and which isn't:
—Last evening about six o'clock, as Mr. William Schuyler, an old and respectable citizen of South Park, was leaving his residence to go down town, as has been his usual custom for many years, with the exception only of a short interval in the spring of 1850, during which he was confined to his bed by injuries received in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly placing himself directly in its wake and throwing up his hands and shouting, which, if he had done so even a single moment sooner, must inevitably have frightened the animal still more instead of checking its speed, although disastrous enough to himself as it was, and rendered more melancholy and distressing by some reason of the presence of his wife's mother, who was there and saw the sad occurrence, notwithstanding it is at least likely, though not necessarily so, that she should be reconnoitering in another direction when incidents occur, not being vivacious and on the lookout, as a general thing, but even the reverse, as her own mother is said to have stated, who is no more, but died in the full hope of a glorious resurrection, upwards of three years ago, aged eighty-six, being a Christian woman and without guile, as it were, or property, in consequence of the fire of 1849, which destroyed every solitary thing she had in the world. But such is life. Let us all take warning by this solemn occurrence, and let us endeavor so to conduct ourselves that when we come to die we can do it. Let us place our hands upon our hearts, and say with earnestness and sincerity that from this day forth we will beware of the intoxicating bowl.
* * *
From Cambridge, N.Y., comes the following: "In your August 'Favors from Correspondents' occurs an account of the rather unique advent of a baby into New Haven. After reading 'Lucretia's Paragraph,' I remembered I had seen nearly the same thing before, only in poetry. As you may not have seen it, I forward it, together with a rhyming reply."
THE GATES AJAR.
On the occasion of the birth of his first child the poet writes:
One night, as old Saint Peter slept,
He left the door of Heaven ajar,
When through a little angel crept
And came down with a falling star.
One summer, as the blessed beams
Of morn approached, my blushing bride
Awakened from some pleasing dreams
And found that angel by her side.
God grant but this, I ask no more,
That when he leaves this world of sin,
He'll wing his way to that bright shore
And find the door of Heaven again.
Whereupon Saint Peter, not liking this imputation of carelessness, thus (by a friend) replies:
ON THE PART OF THE DEFENCE
For eighteen hundred years and more
I've kept my door securely tyled;
There has no little angel strayed,
No one been missing all the while.
I did not sleep as you supposed,
Nor leave the door of Heaven ajar,
Nor has a little angel strayed
Nor gone down with a falling star.
Go ask that blushing bride and see
If she don't frankly own and say,
That when she found that angel babe,
She found it in the good old way.
God grant but this, I ask no more,
That should your numbers still enlarge,
You will not do as heretofore,
And lay it to old Peter's charge.
* * *
From Missouri a friend furnished the following information upon a matter which has probably suggested an inquiry in more than one man's mind: "A venerable and greatly esteemed and respected old patriarch, late of this vicinity, divulged to me, on his death-bed, the origin of a certain popular phrase or figure of speech. He said it came about in this wise: A gentleman was blown up on a Mississippi steamboat, and he went up in the air about four or four and a half miles, and then, just before parting into a great variety of fragments, he remarked to a neighbor who was sailing past on a lower level, 'Say, friend, how is this for high?'"
* * *
From Albany, at the last moment, comes a screed from an old Pennsylvania paper, which is the gem of all obituary poetry unearthed thus far. It is reserved for the present—it will not spoil.
____
Some other favors have been received from corespondents in various States, and are reserved for a future number of the magazine.
THE GALAXY, NOVEMBER 1870
I published my "Map of the Fortifications of Paris" in my own paper a fortnight ago, but am obliged to reproduce it in THE GALAXY, to satisfy the extraordinary demand for it which has arisen in military circles throughout the country. General Grant's outspoken commendation originated this demand, and General Sherman's fervent endorsement added fuel to it. The result is that tons of these maps have been fed to the suffering soldiers of our land, but without avail. They hunger still. We will cast THE GALAXY into the breach and stand by and await the effect.
The next Atlantic mail will doubtless bring news of a European frenzy for the map. It is reasonable to expect that the siege of Paris will be suspended till a German translation of it can be forwarded (it is now in preparation), and that the defence of Paris will likewise be suspended to await the reception of the French translation (now progressing under my own hands, and likely to be unique). King William's high praise of the map and Napoleon's frank enthusiasm concerning its execution will ensure its prompt adoption in Europe as the only authoritative and legitimate exposition of the present military situation. It is plain that if the Prussians cannot get into Paris with the facilities afforded by this production of mine they ought to deliver the enterprise into abler hands.
Strangers to me keep insisting that this map does not "explain itself." One person came to me with bloodshot eyes and an harassed look about him, and shook the map in my face and said he believed I was some new kind of idiot. I have been bused a good deal by other quick-tempered people like him, who came with similar complaints. Now, therefore, I yield willingly, and for the information of the ignorant will briefly explain the present military situation as illustrated by the map. Part of the Prussian forces, under Prince Frederick William, are now boarding at the "farm-house" in the margin of the map. There is nothing between them and Vincennes but a rail fence in bad repair. Any corporal can see at a glance that they have only to burn it, pull it down, crawl under, climb over, or walk around it, just as the commander-in-chief shall elect. Another portion of the Prussian forces are at Podunk, under Von Moltke. They have nothing to do but float down the river Seine on a raft and scale the walls of Paris. Let the worshippers of that overrated soldier believe in him still, and abide the result—for me, I do not believe he will ever think of a raft. At Omaha and the High Bridge are vast masses of Prussian infantry, and it is only fair to say that they are likely to stay there, as that figure of a window-sash between them stands for a brewery. Away up out of sight over the top of the map is the fleet of the Prussian navy, ready at any moment to come cavorting down the Erie Canal (unless some new iniquity of an unprincipled Legislature shall put up the tolls and so render it cheaper to walk). To me it looks as if Paris is in a singularly close place. She never was situated before as she is in this map.
MARK TWAIN.
* * *
TO THE READER.
The accompanying map explains itself.
The idea of this map is not original with me, but is borrowed from the "Tribune" and the other great metropolitan journals.
I claim no other merit for this production (if I may so call it) than that it is accurate. The main blemish of the city-paper maps of which it is an imitation, is, that in them more attention seems paid to artistic picturesqueness than geographical reliability.
Inasmuch as this is the first time I ever tried to draft and engrave a map, or attempt anything in the line of art at all, the commendations the work has received and the admiration it has excited among the people, have been very grateful to my feelings. And it is touching to reflect that by far the most enthusiastic of these praises have come from people who know nothing at all about art.
By an unimportant oversight I have engraved the map so that it reads wrong end first, except to left-handed people. I forgot that in order to make it right in print it should be drawn and engraved upside down. However, let the student who desires to contemplate the map stand on his head or hold it before her looking-glass. That will bring it right.
The reader will comprehend at a glance that that piece of river with the "High Bridge" over it got left out to one side by reason of a slip of the engraving-tool, which rendered it necessary to change the entire course of the river Rhine or else spoil the map. After having spent two days in digging and gouging at the map, I would have changed the course of the Atlantic ocean before I would have lost so much work.
I never had so much trouble with anything in my life as I did with this map. I had heaps of little fortifications scattered all around Paris, at first, but every now and then my instruments would slip and fetch away whole miles of batteries and leave the vicinity as clean as if the Prussians had been there.
The reader will find it well to frame this map for future reference, so that it may aid in extending popular intelligence and dispelling the wide-spread ignorance of the day.
MARK TWAIN.
OFFICIAL COMMENDATIONS.
It is the only map of the kind I ever saw.
U. S. GRANT.
____
It places the situation in an entirely new light.
BISMARCK.
* * *
I cannot look upon it without shedding tears.
BRIGHAM YOUNG.
* * *
It is very nice, large print.
NAPOLEON.
* * *
My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. But, sir, since her first glance at your map, they have entirely left her. She has nothing but convulsions now.
J. SMITH.
* * *
If I had had this map I could have got out of Metz without any trouble.
BAZAINE.
* * *
I have seen a great many maps in my time, but none that this one reminds me of.
TROCHU.
* * *
It is but fair to say that in some respects it is a truly remarkable map.
W. T. SHERMAN.
* * *
I said to my son Frederick William, "If you could only make a map like that, I would be perfectly willing to see you die—even anxious."
WILLIAM III
THE GALAXY, November 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN.
[Continued.]
[Note.—No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to a Chinaman's sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient.]
LETTER V.
SAN FRANCISCO, 18—,
DEAR CHING-FOO: You will remember that I had just been thrust violently into a cell in the city prison when I wrote last. I stumbled and fell on someone. I got a blow and a curse; and on top of these a kick or two and a shove. In a second or two it was plain that I was in a nest of prisoners and was being "passed around"—for the instant I was knocked out of the way of one I fell on the head or heels of another and was promptly ejected, only to land on a third prisoner and get a new contribution of kicks and curses and a new destination. I brought up at last in an unoccupied corner, very much battered and bruised and sore, but glad enough to be let alone for a little while. I was on the flag-stones, for there was no furniture in the den except a long, broad board, or combination of boards, like a barn door, and this bed was accommodating five or six persons, and that was its full capacity. They lay stretched side by side, snoring—when not fighting. One end of the board was four inches higher than the other, and so the slant answered for a pillow. There were no blankets, and the night was a little chilly; the nights are always a little chilly in San Francisco, though never severely cold. The board was a deal more comfortable than the stones, and occasionally some flag-stone plebeian like me would try to creep to a place on it; and then the aristocrats would hammer him good and make him think a flag pavement was a nice enough place after all.
I lay quiet in my corner, stroking my bruises and listening to the revelations the prisoners made to each other—and to me—for some that were near me talked to me a good deal. I had long had an idea that Americans, being free, had no need of prisons, which are a contrivance of despots for keeping restless patriots out of mischief. So I was considerably surprised to find out my mistake.
Ours was a big general cell, it seemed, for the temporary accommodation of all comers whose crimes were trifling. Among us there were two Americans, two "Greasers" (Mexicans), a Frenchman, a German, four Irishmen, a Chilenean (and, in the next cell, only separated from us by a grating, two women), all drunk, and all more or less noisy; and as night fell and advanced, they grew more and more discontented and disorderly, occasionally shaking the prison bars and glaring through them at the slowly pacing officer, and cursing him with all their hearts. The two women were nearly middle-aged, and they had only had enough liquor to stimulate instead of stupefy them. Consequently they would fondle and kiss each other for some minutes, and then fall to fighting and keep it up till they were just two grotesque tangles of rags and blood and tumbled hair. Then they would rest awhile, and pant and swear. While they were affectionate they always spoke of each other as "ladies," but while they were fighting "strumpet" was the mildest name they could think of—and they could only make that do by tacking some sounding profanity to it. In their last fight, which was toward midnight, one of them bit off the other's finger, and then the officer interfered and put the "Greaser" into the "dark cell" to answer for it—because the woman that did it laid it on him, and the other woman did not deny it because, as she said afterward, she "wanted another crack at the huzzy when her finger quit hurting," and so she did not want her removed. By this time those two women had mutilated each other's clothes to that extent that there was not sufficient left to cover their nakedness. I found that one of these creatures had spent nine years in the county jail, and that the other one had spent about four or five years in the same place. They had done it from choice. As soon as they were discharged from captivity they would go straight and get drunk, and then steal some trifling thing while an officer was observing them. That would entitle them to another two months in jail, and there they would occupy clean, airy apartments, and have good food in plenty, and being at no expense at all, they could make shirts for the clothiers at half a dollar apiece and thus keep themselves in smoking tobacco and such other luxuries as they wanted. When the two months were up, they would go just as straight as they could walk to Mother Leonard's and get drunk; and from there to Kearney street and steal something; and thence to this city prison, and next day back to the old quarters in the county jail again. One of them had really kept this up for nine years and the other four or five, and both said they meant to end their days in that prison.* Finally, both these creatures fell upon me while I was dozing with my head against their grating, and battered me considerably, because they discovered that I was a Chinaman, and they said I was "a bloody interlopin' loafer come from the divil's own country to take the bread out of dacent people's mouths and put down the wages for work whin it was all a Christian could do to kape body and sowl together as it was." "Loafer" means one who will not work.
AH SONG HI.
* The former of the two did.—[ED. MEM.
* * *
LETTER VI.
SAN FRANCISCO, 18—.
DEAR CHING-FOO: To continue—the two women became reconciled to each other again through the common bond of interest and sympathy created between them by pounding me in partnership, and when they had finished me they fell to embracing each other again and swearing more eternal affection like that which had subsisted between them all the evening, barring occasional interruptions. They agreed to swear the finger-biting on the Greaser in open court, and get him sent to the penitentiary for the crime of mayhem.
Another of our company was a boy of fourteen who had been watched for some time by officers and teachers, and repeatedly detected in enticing young girls from the public schools to the lodgings of gentlemen down town. He had been furnished with lures in the form of pictures and books of a peculiar kind, and these he had distributed among his clients. There were likenesses of fifteen of these young girls on exhibition (only to prominent citizens and persons in authority, it was said, though most people came to get a sight) at the police headquarters, but no punishment at all was to be inflicted on the poor little misses. The boy was afterward sent into captivity at the House of Correction for some months, and there was a strong disposition to punish the gentlemen who had employed the boy to entice the girls, but as that could not be done without making public the names of those gentlemen and thus injuring them socially, the idea was finally given up.
There was also in our cell that night a photographer (a kind of artist who makes likenesses of people with a machine), who had been for some time patching the pictured heads of well known and respectable young ladies to the nude, pictured bodies of another class of women; then from this patched creation he would make photographs and sell them privately at high prices to rowdies and blackguards, averring that these, the best young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their likenesses in that unclad condition. What a lecture the police judge read that photographer when he was convicted! He told him his crime was little less than an outrage. He abused that photographer till he almost made him sink through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred dollars. And he told him he might consider himself lucky that he didn't fine him a hundred and twenty-five dollars. They are awfully severe on crime here.
About two or two and a half hours after midnight, of that first experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as were dozing were awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a little while a man was pushed into our den with a "There, d__n you, soak there a spell!"—and then the gate was closed and the officers went away again. The man who was thrust among us fell limp and helpless by the grating, but as nobody could reach him with a kick without the trouble of hitching along toward him or getting fairly up to deliver it, our people only grumbled at him, and cursed him, and called him insulting names—for misery and hardship do not make their victims gentle or charitable toward each other. But as he neither tried humbly to conciliate our people nor swore back at them, his unnatural conduct created surprise, and several of the party crawled to him where he lay in the dim light that came through the grating, and examined into his case. His head was very bloody and his wits were gone. After about an hour, he sat up and stared around; then his eyes grew more natural and he began to tell how that he was going along with a bag on his shoulder and a brace of policemen ordered him to stop, which he did not do—was chased and caught, beaten ferociously about the head on the way to the prison and after arrival there, and finally thrown into our den like a dog. And in a few seconds he sank down again and grew flighty of speech. One of our people was at last penetrated with something vaguely akin to compassion, maybe, for he looked out through the gratings at the guardian officer pacing to and fro, and said: "Say, Mickey, this shrimp's goin' to die."
"Stop your noise!" was all the answer he got. But presently our man tried it again. He drew himself to the gratings, grasping them with his hands, and looking out through them, sat waiting till the officer was passing once more, and then said:
"Sweetness, you'd better mind your eye, now, because you beats have killed this cuss. You've busted his head and he'll pass in his checks before sun-up. You better go for a doctor, now, you bet you had."
The officer delivered a sudden rap on our man's knuckles with his club, that sent him scampering and howling among the sleeping forms on the flag-stones, and an answering burst of laughter came from the half dozen policemen idling about the railed desk in the middle of the dungeon.
But there was a putting of heads together out there presently, and a conversing in low voices, which seemed to show that our man's talk had made an impression; and presently an officer went away in a hurry, and shortly came back with a person who entered our cell and felt the bruised man's pulse and threw the glare of a lantern on his drawn face, striped with blood, and his glassy eyes, fixed and vacant. The doctor examined the man's broken head also, and presently said:
"If you'd called me an hour ago I might have saved this man, maybe—too late now."
Then he walked out into the dungeon and the officers surrounded him, and they kept up a low and earnest buzzing of conversation for fifteen minutes, I should think, and then the doctor took his departure from the prison. Several of the officers now came in and worked a little with the wounded man, but toward daylight he died.
It was the longest, longest night! And when the daylight came filtering reluctantly into the dungeon at last, it was the grayest, dreariest, saddest daylight! And yet, when an officer by and by turned off the sickly yellow gas flame, and immediately the gray of dawn became fresh and white, there was a lifting of my spirits that acknowledged and believed that the night was gone, and straightway I fell to stretching my sore limbs, and looking about me with a grateful sense of relief and a returning interest in life. About me lay evidences that what seemed now a feverish dream and a nightmare was the memory of a reality instead. For on the boards lay four frowsy, ragged, bearded vagabonds, snoring—one turned end-for-end and resting an unclean foot, in a ruined stocking, on the hairy breast of a neighbor; the young boy was uneasy, and lay moaning in his sleep; other forms lay half revealed and half concealed about the floor; in the furthest corner the gray light fell upon a sheet, whose elevations and depressions indicated the places of the dead man's face and feet and folded hands; and through the dividing bars one could discern the almost nude forms of the two exiles from the county jail twined together in a drunken embrace, and sodden with sleep.
By and by all the animals in all the cages awoke, and stretched themselves, and exchanged a few cuffs and curses, and then began to clamor for breakfast. Breakfast was brought in at last—bread and beefsteak on tin plates, and black coffee in tin cups, and no grabbing allowed. And after several dreary hours of waiting, after this, we were all marched out into the dungeon and joined there by all manner of vagrants and vagabonds, of all shades and colors and nationalities, from the other cells and cages of the place; and pretty soon our whole menagerie was marched up stairs and locked fast behind a high railing in a dirty room with a dirty audience in it. And this audience stared at us, and at a man seated on high behind what they call a pulpit in this country and at some clerks and other officials seated below him—and waited. This was the police court.
The court opened. Pretty soon I was compelled to notice that a culprit's nationality made for or against him in this court. Overwhelming proofs were necessary to convict an Irishman of crime, and even then his punishment amounted to little; Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians had strict and unprejudiced justice meted out to them, in exact accordance with the evidence; negroes were promptly punished, when there was the slightest preponderance of testimony against them; but Chinamen were punished always, apparently. Now this gave me some uneasiness, I confess. I knew that this state of things must of necessity be accidental, because in this country all men were free and equal, and one person could not take to himself an advantage not accorded to all other individuals. I knew that, and yet in spite of it I was uneasy.
And I grew still more uneasy, when I found that any succored and befriended refugee from Ireland or elsewhere could stand up before that judge and swear away the life or liberty or character of a refugee from China; but that by the law of the land the Chinaman could not testify against the Irishman. I was really and truly uneasy, but still my faith in the universal liberty that America accords and defends, and my deep veneration for the land that offered all distressed outcasts a home and protection, was strong within me, and I said to myself that it would all come out right yet.
AH SONG HI.
THE GALAXY, November 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
A REMINISCENCE OF THE BACK SETTLEMENTS.
"Now that corpse [said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of deceased approvingly] was a brick—every way you took him he was a brick. He was so real accommodating, and so modest-like and simple in his last moments. Friends wanted metallic burial case—nothing else would do. I couldn't get it. There warn't going to be time—anybody could see that. Corpse said never mind, shake him up some kind of a box he could stretch out in comfortable, he warn't particular 'bout the general style of it. Said he went more on room than style, anyway, in a last final container. Friends wanted a silver door-plate on the coffin, signifying who he was and where he was from. Now you know a fellow couldn't roust out such a gaily thing as that in a little country town like this. What did corpse say? Corpse said, whitewash his old canoe and dob his address and general destination onto it with a blacking brush and a stencil plate, long with a verse from some likely hymn or other, and p'int him for the tomb, and mark him C. O. D., and just let him skip along. He warn't distressed any more than you be—on the contrary just as carm and collected as a hearse-horse; said he judged that wher' he was going to, a body would find it considerable better to attract attention by a picturesque moral character than a natty burial case with a swell door-plate on it. Splendid man, he was. I'd druther do for a corpse like that 'n any I've tackled in seven year. There's some satisfaction in buryin' a man like that. You feel that what you're doing is appreciated. Lord bless you, so's he got planted before he sp'iled, he was perfectly satisfied; said his relations meant well, perfectly well, but all them preparations was bound to delay the thing more or less, and he didn't wish to be kept layin' around. You never see such a clear head as what he had—and so carm and so cool. Just a hunk of brains—that is what he was. Perfectly awful. It was a ripping distance from one end of that man's head to t'other. Often and over again he's had brain fever a-raging in one place, and the rest of the pile didn't know anything about it—didn't affect it any more than an Injun insurrection in Arizona affects the Atlantic States. Well, the relations they wanted a big funeral, but corpse said he was down on flummery—didn't want any procession—fill the hearse full of mourners, and get out a stern line and tow him behind. He was the most down on style of any remains I ever struck. A beautiful, simple-minded creature—it was what he was, you can depend on that. He was just set on having things the way he wanted them, and he took a solid comfort in laying his little plans. He had me measure him and take a whole raft of directions; then he had the minister stand up behind a long box with a table-cloth over it and read his funeral sermon, saying 'Angcore, angcore!' at the good places, and making him scratch out every bit of brag about him, and all the hifalutin; and then he made them trot out the choir so's he could help them pick out the tunes for the occasion, and he got them to sing 'Pop Goes the Weasel,' because he'd always liked that tune when he was down-hearted, and solemn music made him sad; and when they sung that with tears in their eyes (because they all loved him), and his relations grieving around, he just laid there as happy as a bug, and trying to beat time and showing all over how much he enjoyed it; and presently he got worked up and excited, and tried to join in, for mind you he was pretty proud of his abilities in the singing line; but the first time he opened his mouth and was just going to spread himself, his breath took a walk. I never see a man snuffed out so sudden. Ah, it was a great loss—it was a powerful loss to this poor little one-horse town. Well, well, well, I hain't got time to be palavering along here—got to nail on the lid and mosey along with him; and if you'll just give me a lift we'll skeet him into the hearse and meander along. Relations bound to have it so—don't pay no attention to dying injunctions, minute a corpse's gone; but if I had my way, if I didn't respect his last wishes and tow him behind the hearse, I'll be cuss'd. I consider that whatever a corpse wants done for his comfort is a little enough matter, and a man hain't got no right to deceive him or take advantage of him—and whatever a corpse trusts me to do I'm a-going to do, you know, even if it's to stuff him and paint him yaller and keep him for a keepsake—you hear me!"
He cracked his whip and went lumbering away with his ancient ruin of a hearse, and I continued my walk with a valuable lesson learned—that a healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation. The lesson is likely to be lasting, for it will take many months to obliterate the memory of the remarks and circumstances that impressed it.
THE GALAXY, November 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
When I was sixteen or seventeen years old, a splendid idea burst upon me—a bran-new one, which had never occurred to anybody before: I would write some "pieces" and take them down to the editor of the "Republican," and ask him to give me his plain, unvarnished opinion of their value! NOW, as old and threadbare as the idea was, it was fresh and beautiful to me, and it went flaming and crashing through my system like the genuine lightning and thunder of originality. I wrote the pieces. I wrote them with that placid confidence and that happy facility which only want of practice and absence of literary experience can give. There was not one sentence in them that cost half an hour's weighing and shaping and trimming and fixing. Indeed, it is possible that there was no one sentence whose mere wording cost even one-sixth of that time. If I remember rightly, there was not one single erasure or interlineation in all that chaste manuscript. [I have since lost that large belief in my powers, and likewise that marvellous perfection of execution.] I started down to the "Republican" office with my pocket full of manuscripts, my brain full of dreams, and a grand future opening out before me. I knew perfectly well that the editor would be ravished with my pieces. But presently—
However, the particulars are of no consequence. I was only about to say that a shadowy sort of doubt just then intruded upon my exaltation. Another came, and another. Pretty soon a whole procession of them. And at last, when I stood before the "Republican" office and looked up at its tall, unsympathetic front, it seemed hardly me that could have "chinned" its towers ten minutes before, and was now so shrunk up and pitiful that if I dared to step on the gratings I should probably go through.
At about that crisis the editor, the very man I had come to consult, came down stairs, and halted a moment to pull at his wristbands and settle his coat to its place, and he happened to notice that I was eyeing him wistfully. He asked me what I wanted. I answered, "NOTHING!" with a boy's own meekness and shame; and, dropping my eyes, crept humbly round till I was fairly in the alley, and then drew a big grateful breath of relief, and picked up my heels and ran!
I was satisfied. I wanted no more. It was my first attempt to get a "plain unvarnished opinion" out of a literary man concerning my compositions, and it has lasted me until now. And in these latter days, whenever I receive a bundle of MS. through the mail, with a request that I will pass judgment upon its merits, I feel like saying to the author, "If you had only taken your piece to some grim and stately newspaper office, where you did not know anybody, you would not have so fine an opinion of your production as it is easy to see you have now."
Every man who becomes editor of a newspaper or magazine straightway begins to receive MSS. from literary aspirants, together with requests that he will deliver judgment upon the same. And after complying in eight or ten instances, he finally takes refuge in a general sermon upon the subject, which he inserts in his publication, and always afterward refers such correspondents to that sermon for answer. I have at last reached this station in my literary career. I now cease to reply privately to my applicants for advice, and proceed to construct my public sermon.
As all letters of the sort I am speaking of contain the very same matter, differently worded, I offer as a fair average specimen the last one I have received:
MARK TWAIN, Esq.
DEAR SIR: I am a youth, just out of school and ready to start in life. I have looked around, but don't see anything that suits exactly. Is a literary life easy and profitable, or is it the hard times it is generally put up for? It must be easier than a good many if not most of the occupations, and I feel drawn to launch out on it, make or break, sink or swim, survive or perish. Now, what are the conditions of success in literature? You need not be afraid to paint the thing just as it is. I can't do any worse than fail. Everything else offers the same. When I thought of the law—yes, and five or six other professions—I found the same thing was the case every time, viz: all full—overrun—every profession so crammed that success is rendered impossible—too many hands and not enough work. But I must try something, and so I turn at last to literature. Something tells me that that is the true bent of my genius, if I have any. I enclose some of my pieces. Will you read them over and give me your candid, unbiased opinion of them? And now I hate to trouble you, but you have been a young man yourself, and what I want is for you to get me a newspaper job of writing to do. You know many newspaper people, and I am entirely unknown. And will you make the best terms you can for me? though I do not expect what might be called high wages at first, of course. Will you candidly say what such articles as these I enclose are worth? I have plenty of them. If you should sell these and let me know, I can send you more, as good and maybe better than these. An early reply, etc. Yours truly, etc.
I will answer you in good faith. Whether my remarks shall have great value or not, or my suggestions be worth following, are problems which I take great pleasure in leaving entirely to you for solution. To begin: There are several questions in your letter which only a man's life experience can eventually answer for him—not another man's words. I will simply skip those.
1. Literature, like the ministry, medicine, the law, and all other occupations, is cramped and hindered for want of men to do the work, not want of work to do. When people tell you the reverse, they speak that which is not true. If you desire to test this, you need only hunt up a first-class editor, reporter, business manager, foreman of a shop, mechanic, or artist in any branch of industry, and try to hire him. You will find that he is already hired. He is sober, industrious, capable, and reliable, and is always in demand. He cannot get a day's holiday except by courtesy of his employer, or his city, or the great general public. But if you need idlers, shirkers, half instructed, unambitious, and comfort-seeking editors, reporters, lawyers, doctors, and mechanics, apply anywhere. There are millions of them to be had at the dropping of a handkerchief.
2. No; I must not and will not venture any opinion whatever as to the literary merit of your productions. The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all. Do not take my poor word for this, but reflect a moment and take your own. For instance, if Sylvanus Cobb or T. S. Arthur had submitted their maiden MSS. to you, you would have said, with tears in your eyes, "Now please don't write any more!" But you see yourself how popular they are. And if it had been left to you, you would have said the "Marble Faun" was tiresome, and that even "Paradise Lost" lacked cheerfulness; but you know they sell. Many wiser and better men than you pooh-poohed Shakespeare, even as late as two centuries ago; but still that old party has outlived those people. No, I will not sit in judgment upon your literature. If I honestly and conscientiously praised it, I might thus help to inflict a lingering and pitiless bore upon the public; if I honestly and conscientiously condemned it, I might thus rob the world of an undeveloped and unsuspected Dickens or Shakespeare.
3. I shrink from hunting up literary labor for you to do and receive pay for. Whenever your literary productions have proved for themselves that they have a real value, you will never have to go around hunting for remunerative literary work to do. You will require more hands than you have now, and more brains than you probably ever will have, to do even half the work that will be offered you. Now, in order to arrive at the proof of value hereinbefore spoken of, one needs only to adopt a very simple and certainly very sure process; and that is, to write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for. If he has any wisdom at all, then, he will retire with dignity and assume his heaven-appointed vocation.
In the above remarks I have only offered a course of action which Mr. Dickens and most other successful literary men had to follow; but it is a course which will find no sympathy with my client, perhaps. The young literary aspirant is a very, very curious creature. He knows that if he wished to become a tinner, the master smith would require him to prove the possession of a good character, and would require him to promise to stay in the shop three years—possibly four—and would make him sweep out and bring water and build fires all the first year, and let him learn to black stoves in the intervals; and for these good honest services would pay him two suits of cheap clothes and his board; and next year he would begin to receive instructions in the trade, and a dollar a week would be added to his emoluments; and two dollars would be added the third year, and three the fourth; and then, if he had become a first-rate tinner, he would get about fifteen or twenty, or may be thirty dollars a week, with never a possibility of getting seventy-five while he lived. If he wanted to become a mechanic of any other kind, he would have to undergo this same tedious, ill-paid apprenticeship. If he wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor, he would have fifty times worse; for he would get nothing at all during his long apprenticeship, and in addition would have to pay a large sum for tuition, and have the privilege of boarding and clothing himself. The literary aspirant knows all this, and yet he has the hardihood to present himself for reception into the literary guild and ask to share its high honors and emoluments, without a single twelvemonth's apprenticeship to show in excuse for his presumption! He would smile pleasantly if he were asked to make even so simple a thing as a ten-cent tin dipper without previous instruction in the art; but, all green and ignorant, wordy, pompously-assertive, ungrammatical, and with a vague, distorted knowledge of men and the world acquired in a back country village, he will serenely take up so dangerous a weapon as a pen, and attack the most formidable subject that finance, commerce, war, or politics can furnish him withal. It would be laughable if it were not so sad and so pitiable. The poor fellow would not intrude upon the tin shop without an apprenticeship, but is willing to seize and wield with unpractised hand an instrument which is able to overthrow dynasties, change religions, and decree the weal or woe of nations.
If my correspondent will write free of charge for the newspapers of his neighborhood, it will be one of the strangest things that ever happened if he does not get all the employment he can attend to on those terms. And as soon as ever his writings are worth money, plenty of people will hasten to offer it.
And by way of serious and well-meant encouragement, I wish to urge upon him once more the truth that acceptable writers for the press are so scarce that book and periodical publishers are seeking them constantly, and with a vigilance that never grows heedless for a moment.
THE GALAXY, November 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
Out of a rusty and dusty old scrap-book a friend in Nevada resurrects the following verses for us. Thirty years ago they were very popular. It was on a wager as to whether this poem originated in the "Noctes Ambrosianae" or not that Leicester won two thousand pounds:
THE LAWYER'S POEM.
Whereas, on sundry boughs and sprays
Now divers birds are heard to sing,
And sundry flowers their heads upraise
To hail the coming on of Spring;
The songs of the said birds arouse
The mem'ry of our youthful hours—
As young and green as the said boughs,
As fresh and fair as the said flowers.
The birds aforesaid, happy pairs,
Love 'midst the aforesaid boughs enshrines
In household nests—themselves, their heirs,
Administrators, and assigns.
O busiest time of Cupid's court,
When tender plaintiffs actions bring!
Season of frolic and of sport,
Hail, as aforesaid, coming Spring!
* * *
Occasionally from suffering soul there comes to this department a frantic appeal for help, which just boils an entire essay down into one exhaustive sentence, and leaves nothing more to be said upon that subject. Now, can the reader find any difficulty in picturing to himself what this "Subscriber" has been going through out there at Hazel Green, Wisconsin?
MR. TWAIN.
MY DEAR SIR: Do not, in your MEMORANDA, forget the travelling book agents. They are about as tolerable as lightning-rod men, especially the "red-nosed chaps" who sell "juveniles," temperance tracts, and such like delectable fodder.
Yours, etc.,
A SUBSCRIBER
Such subscription canvassers, probably, are all this correspondent's fancy paints them. None but those canvassers who sell compact concentrations of solid wisdom, like the work entitled "The Innocents Abroad," can really be said to be indispensable to the nation.
* * *
In a graceful feminine hand comes the following, from a city of Illinois:
Reading your remarks upon "innocents" in a recent GALAXY, I must tell you how that touching little obituary was received here.
I attended a lecture, and sat beside and was introduced to a young minister from Pennsylvania, a few evenings since. Having my GALAXY in my hand and knowing the proverbial ministerial love of a joke, I handed him the little poem, simply whispering "Mark Twain."
He read it through gravely, and in the most serious manner turned to me and whispered, "Did Mark Twain write that?"
"Breathes there a man with soul so dead!"
If this is a specimen of your Eastern young ministers, we Western girls will take no more at present, I thank you.
Speaking of ministers reminds me of a joke that I always thought worth publishing; it is a fact, too, which all the jokes published are not.
The Rev. Dr. B. was minister in our stylish little city some years since. He was a pompous, important, flowery sort of preacher—very popular with the masses. He exchanged pulpits with old Solomon N., the plain, meek old minister of the little C. Church, one Sabbath; and the expectant little congregation were surprised when the grand Dr. arose and gave out as his text:
"For behold a greater than Solomon is here!"
* * *
It is said that once a man of small consequence died, and the Rev. T. K. Beecher was asked to preach the funeral sermon—a man who abhors the lauding of people, either dead or alive, except in dignified and simple language, and then only for merits which they actually possessed or possess, not merits which they merely ought to have possessed. The friends of the deceased got up a stately funeral. They must have had misgivings that the corpse might not be praised strongly enough, for they prepared some manuscript headings and notes in which nothing was left unsaid on that subject that a fervid imagination and an unabridged dictionary could compile, and these they handed to the minister as he entered the pulpit. They were merely intended as suggestions, and so the friends were filled with consternation when the minister stood up in the pulpit and proceeded to read off the curious odds and ends in ghastly detail and in a loud voice! And their consternation solidified to petrifaction when he paused at the end, contemplated the multitude reflectively, and then said impressively:
"The man would be a fool who tried to add anything to that. Let us pray!"
* * *
And with the same strict adhesion to truth it can be said that the man would be a fool who tried to add anything to the following transcendent obituary poem. There is something so innocent, so guileless, so complacent, so unearthly serene and self-satisfied about this peerless "hogwash," that the man must be made of stone who can read it without a dulcet ecstasy creeping along his backbone and quivering in his marrow. There is no need to say that this poem is genuine and in earnest, for its proofs are written all over its face. An ingenious scribbler might imitate it after a fashion, but Shakespeare himself could not counterfeit it. It is noticeable that the country editor who published it did not know that it was a treasure and the most perfect thing of its kind that the storehouses and museums of literature could show. He did not dare to say no to the dread poet—for such a poet must have been something of an apparition—but he just shovelled it into his paper anywhere that came handy, and felt ashamed, and put that disgusted "Published by Request" over it, and hoped that his subscribers would overlook or not feel an impulse to read it:
[Published by Request.]
LINES
Composed on the death of Samuel and Catharine Belknap's children.
BY M. A. GLAZE.
Friends and neighbors all draw near,
And listen to what I have to say;
And never leave your children dear
When they are small, and go away
But always think of that sad fate,
That happened in year of '63;
Four children with a house did burn,
Think of their awful agony.
Their mother she had gone away,
And left them there alone to stay;
The house took fire and down did burn,
Before their mother did return.
Their piteous cry the neighbors heard,
And then the cry of fire was given;
But, ah! before they could reach,
Their little spirits had flown to heaven.
Their father he to war had gone,
And on the battle-field was slain;
But little did he think when he went away,
But what on earth they would meet again.
The neighbors often told his wife
Not to leave his children there,
Unless she got some one to stay,
And of the little ones take care.
The oldest he was years not six,
And the youngest only eleven months old,
But often she had left them there alone,
As, by the neighbors, I have been told.
How can she bear to see the place,
Where she so oft has left them there,
Without a single one to look to them,
Or of the little ones to take good care.
Oh, can she look upon the spot,
Where under their little burnt bones lay,
But what she thinks she hears them say,
"Twas God had pity, and took us on high."
And there may she kneel down and pray,
And ask God her to forgive;
And she may lead a different life
While she on earth remains to live.
Her husband and her children, too,
God has took from pain and woe.
May she reform and mend her ways,
That she may also to them go.
And when it is God's holy will,
O, may she be prepared
To meet her God and friends in peace,
And leave this world of care.
Nicholson, Pa., Feb. 8, 1863.
THE GALAXY, December 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
AN ENTERTAINING ARTICLE.
I take the following paragraph from an article in the Boston "Advertiser":
AN ENGLISH CRITIC ON MARK TWAIN.
—Perhaps the most successful flights of the humor of Mark Twain have been descriptions of the persons who did not appreciate his humor at all. We have become familiar with the Californians who were thrilled with terror by his burlesque of a newspaper reporter's way of telling a story, and we have heard of the Pennsylvania clergyman who sadly returned his "Innocents Abroad" to the book-agent with the remark that "the man who could shed tears over the tomb of Adam must be an idiot." But Mark Twain may now add a much more glorious instance to his string of trophies. The Saturday Review, in its number of October 8th, reviews his book of travels, which has been republished in England, and reviews it seriously. We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next monthly Memoranda.
[Publishing the above paragraph thus, gives me a sort of authority for reproducing the "Saturday Review's" article in full in these pages. I dearly wanted to do it, for I cannot write anything half so delicious myself. If I had a cast-iron dog that could read this English criticism and preserve his austerity, I would drive him off the door-step.—EDITOR MEMORANDA.]
[From the London Saturday Review]
REVIEWS OF NEW BOOKS.
THE INNOCENTS ABROAD. A Book of Travels By Mark Twain. London: Hotten, publisher. 1870.
Lord Macaulay died too soon. We never felt this so deeply as when we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work. Macaulay died too soon—for none but he could mete out complete and comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impertinence, the presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance of this author.
To say that the "Innocents Abroad" is a curious book, would be to use the faintest language—would be to speak of the Matterhorn as a neat elevation or of Niagara as being "nice" or "pretty." "Curious" is too tame a word wherewith to describe the imposing insanity of this work. There is no word that is large enough or long enough. Let us, therefore, photograph a passing glimpse of book and author, and trust the rest to the reader. Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following-described things—and not only doing them, but with incredible innocence printing them calmly and tranquilly in a book. For instance:
He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get shaved, and the first '"rake" the barber gave with his razor it loosened his "hide" and lifted him out of the chair.
This is unquestionably exaggerated. In Florence he was so annoyed by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a frantic spirit of revenge. There is of course no truth in this. He gives at full length a theatrical programme seventeen or eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the ruins of the Coliseum, among the dirt and mould and rubbish. It is a sufficient comment upon this statement to remark that even a cast-iron programme would not have lasted so long under such circumstances. In Greece he plainly betrays both fright and flight upon one occasion, but with frozen effrontery puts the latter in this falsely tame form: "We sidled towards the Piraeus." "Sidled," indeed! He does not hesitate to intimate that at Ephesus, when his mule strayed from the proper course, he got down, took him under his arm, carried him to the road again, pointed him right, remounted, and went to sleep contentedly till it was time to restore the beast to the path once more. He states that a growing youth among his ship's passengers was in the constant habit of appeasing his hunger with soap and oakum between meals. In Palestine he tells of ants that came eleven miles to spend the summer in the desert and brought their provisions with them; yet he shows by his description of the country that the feat was an impossibility. He mentions, as if it were the most commonplace of matters, that he cut a Moslem in two in broad daylight in Jerusalem, with Godfrey de Bouillon's sword, and would have shed more blood if he had had a graveyard of his own. These statements are unworthy a moment's attention. Mr. Twain or any other foreigner who did such a thing in Jerusalem would be mobbed, and would infallibly lose his life. But why go on? Why repeat more of his audacious and exasperating falsehoods? Let us close fittingly with this one: he affirms that "in the mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople I got my feet so stuck up with a complication of gums, slime, and general impurity, that I wore out more than two thousand pair of bootjacks getting my boots off that night, and even then some Christian hide peeled off with them." It is monstrous. Such statements are simply lies—there is no other name for them. Will the reader longer marvel at the brutal ignorance that pervades the American nation when we tell him that we are informed upon perfectly good authority that this extravagant compilation of falsehoods, this exhaustless mine of stupendous lies, this "Innocents Abroad", has actually been adopted by the schools and colleges of several of the States as a text-book!
But if his falsehoods are distressing, his innocence and his ignorance are enough to make one burn the book and despise the author. In one place he was so appalled at the sudden spectacle of a murdered man, unveiled by the moonlight, that he jumped out of the window, going through sash and all, and then remarks with the most childlike simplicity that he "was not scared, but was considerably agitated." It puts us out of patience to note that the simpleton is densely unconscious that Lucrezia Borgia ever existed off the stage. He is vulgarly ignorant of all foreign languages, but is frank enough to criticise the Italians' use of their own tongue. He says they spell the name of their great painter "Vinci, but pronounce it Vinchy"—and then adds with a naivete possible only to helpless ignorance, "foreigners all spell better than they pronounce.'" In another place he commits the bald absurdity of putting the phrase "tare an ouns" into an Italian's mouth. In Rome he unhesitatingly believes the legend that St. Philip Neri's heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs—believes it wholly because an author with a learned list of university degrees strung after his name endorses it—"otherwise," says this gentle idiot, "I should have felt curiosity to know what Philip had for dinner." Our author makes a long, fatiguing journey to the Grotto del Cane on purpose to test its poisoning powers on a dog—got elaborately ready for the experiment, and then discovered that he had no dog. A wiser person would have kept such a thing discreetly to himself, but with this harmless creature everything comes out. He hurts his foot in a rut two thousand years old in exhumed Pompeii, and presently when staring at one of the cinder-like corpses unearthed in the next square, conceives the idea that maybe it is the remains of the ancient Street Commissioner, and straightway his horror softens down to a sort of chirpy contentment with the condition of things. In Damascus he visits the well of Ananias, three thousand years old, and is as surprised and delighted as a child to find that the water is "as pure and fresh as if the well had been dug yesterday." In the Holy Land he gags desperately at the hard Arabic and Hebrew Biblical names, and finally concludes to call them Baldwinsville, Williamsburgh, and so on, "for convenience of spelling."
We have thus spoken freely of this man's stupefying simplicity and innocence, but we cannot deal similarly with his colossal ignorance. We do not know where to begin. And if we knew where to begin, we certainly would not know where to leave off. We will give one specimen, and one only. He did not know, until he got to Rome, that Michael Angelo was dead! And then, instead of crawling away and hiding his shameful ignorance somewhere, he proceeds to express a pious, grateful sort of satisfaction that he is gone and out of his troubles!
No, the reader may seek out the author's exhibition of his uncultivation for himself. The book is absolutely dangerous, considering the magnitude and variety of its misstatements and the convincing confidence with which they are made. And yet it is a text-book in the schools of America.
The poor blunderer mouses among the sublime creations of the Old Masters, trying to acquire the elegant proficiency in art-knowledge, which he has a groping sort of comprehension is a proper thing for the traveled man to be able to display. But what is the manner of his study? And what is the progress he achieves? To what extent does he familiarize himself with the great pictures of Italy, and what degree of appreciation does he arrive at? Read:
When we see a monk going about with a lion and looking up into heaven, we know that that is St. Mark. When we see a monk with a book and a pen, looking tranquilly up to heaven, trying to think of a word, we know that that is St. Matthew. When we see a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranquilly up to heaven, with a human skull beside him, and without other baggage, we know that that is St. Jerome. Because we know that he always went flying light in the matter of baggage. When we see other monks looking tranquilly up to heaven, but having no trade-mark, we always ask who those parties are. We do this because we humbly wish to learn.
He then enumerates the thousands and thousands of copies of these several pictures which he has seen, and adds with accustomed simplicity that he feels encouraged to believe that when he has seen "SOME MORE" of each and had a larger experience, he will eventually "begin to take an absorbing interest in them"—the vulgar boor.
That we have shown this to be a remarkable book, we think no one will deny. That it is a pernicious book to place in the hands of the confiding and uninformed we think we have also shown. That the book is a deliberate and wicked creation of a diseased mind, is apparent upon every page. Having placed our judgment thus upon record, let us close with what charity we can, by marking that even in this volume there is some good to be found; for whenever the author talks of his own country and lets Europe alone, he never fails to make himself interesting, and not only interesting, but instructive. No one can read without benefit his occasional chapters and paragraphs, about life in the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada; about the Indians of the plains and deserts of the West, and their cannibalism; about the raising of vegetables in kegs of gunpowder by the aid of two or three teaspoonfuls of guano, about the moving of small farms from place to place at night in wheelbarrows to avoid taxes; and about a sort of cows and mules in the Humboldt mines, that climb down chimneys and disturb the people at night. These matters are not only new, but are well worth knowing.* It is a pity the author did not put in more of the same kind. His book is well written and is exceedingly entertaining, and so it just barely escaped being quite valuable also.
*Yes, I calculated they were pretty new. I invented them myself.—MARK TWAIN.
THE GALAXY, December 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
The following I find in a Sandwich Island paper which some friend has sent me from that tranquil far-off retreat. The coincidence between my own experience and that here set down by the late Mr. Benton is so remarkable that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the paragraph. The Sandwich Island paper says:
How touching is this tribute of the late Hon. T. H. Benton to his mother's influence: "My mother asked me never to use tobacco; I have never touched it from that time to the present day. She asked me not to gamble, and I have never gambled. I cannot tell who is losing in games that are being played. She admonished me, too, against liquor-drinking, and whatever capacity for endurance I have at present, and whatever usefulness I may have attained through life, I attribute to having complied with her pious and correct wishes. When I was seven years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my mother."
I never saw anything so curious. It is almost an exact epitome of my own moral career—after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother. How well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco, good old soul! She said, "You're at it again, are you, you whelp? Now, don't ever let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay I'll black snake you within an inch of your life!" I have never touched it at that hour of the morning from that time to the present day.
She asked me not to gamble. She whispered and said, "Put up those wicked cards this minute!—two pair and a jack, you numskull, and the other fellow's got a flush!"
I never have gambled from that day to this—never once—without a "cold deck" in my pocket. I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games that are being played unless I dealt myself.
When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence. That I have adhered to it and enjoyed the beneficent effects of it through all time, I owe to my grandmother. I have never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water.
THE GALAXY, December 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
A few months ago I was nominated for Governor of the great State of New York, to run against Stewart L. Woodford and John T. Hoffman, on an independent ticket. I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage over these gentlemen, and that was, good character. It was easy to see by the newspapers, that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good name, that time had gone by. It was plain that in these latter years they had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes. But at the very moment that I was exalting my advantage and joying in it in secret, there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort "riling" the deeps of my happiness—and that was, the having to hear my name bandied about in familiar connection with those of such people. I grew more and more disturbed. Finally I wrote my grandmother about it. Her answer came quick and sharp. She said:
You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed of—not one. Look at the newspapers—look at them and comprehend what sort of characters Woodford and Hoffman are, and then see if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a public canvass with them.
It was my very thought! I did not sleep a single moment that night. But after all, I could not recede. I was fully committed and must go on with the fight. As I was looking listlessly over the papers at breakfast, I came across this paragraph, and I may truly say I never was so confounded before:
PERJURY.—Perhaps, now that Mr. Mark Twain is before the people as a candidate for Governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses, in Wakawak, Cochin China, in 1863, the intent of which perjury was to rob a poor native widow and her helpless family of a meagre plantain patch, their only stay and support in their bereavement and their desolation. Mr. Twain owes it to himself, as well as to the great people whose suffrages he asks, to clear this matter up. Will he do it?
I thought I should burst with amazement! Such a cruel, heartless charge—I never had seen Cochin China! I never had heard of Wakawak! I didn't know a plantain patch from a kangaroo! I did not know what to do. I was crazed and helpless. I let the day slip away without doing anything at all. The next morning the same paper had this—nothing more:
SIGNIFICANT.—Mr. Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively silent about the Cochin China perjury.
[Mem.—During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to me in any other way than as "the infamous perjurer Twain."]
Next came the "Gazette," with this:
WANTED TO KNOW.—Will the new candidate for Governor deign to explain to certain of his fellow-citizens (who are suffering to vote for him!) the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Montana losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his "trunk" (newspaper he rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to give him a friendly admonition for his own good, and so tarred and feathered him and rode him on a rail, and then advised him to leave a permanent vacuum in the place he usually occupied in the camp. Will he do this?
Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that? For I never was in Montana in my life.
[After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as "Twain, the Montana Thief."]
I got to picking up papers apprehensively—much as one would lift a desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it. One day this met my eye:
THE LIE NAILED!—By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan, Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr. Kit Burns and Mr. John Allen, of Water street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-bearer, John T. Hoffman, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal and gratuitous LIE, without a single shadow of foundation in fact. It is disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their graves and defiling their honored names with slander. When we think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the innocent relatives and friends of the deceased, we are almost driven to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful vengeance upon the traducer. But no—let us leave him to the agony of a lacerating conscience—(though if passion should get the better of the public and in its blind fury they should do the traducer bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict and no court punish the perpetrators of the deed).
The ingenious closing sentence had the effect of moving me out of bed with despatch that night, and out at the back door, also, while the "outraged and insulted public" surged in the front way, breaking furniture and windows in their righteous indignation as they came, and taking off such property as they could carry when they went. And yet I can lay my hand upon the Book and say that I never slandered Governor Hoffman's grandfather. More—I had never even heard of him or mentioned him, up to that day and date.
[I will state, in passing, that the journal above quoted from always referred to me afterward as "Twain, the Body-Snatcher."]
The next newspaper article that attracted my attention was the following:
A SWEET CANDIDATE.—Mark Twain, who was to make such a blighting speech at the mass meeting of the Independents last night, didn't come to time! A telegram from his physician stated that he had been knocked down by a runaway team and his leg broken in two places—sufferer lying in great agony, and so forth, and so forth, and a lot more bosh of the same sort. And the Independents tried hard to swallow the wretched subterfuge and pretend that they did not know what was the real reason of the absence of the abandoned creature whom they denominate their standard-bearer. A certain man was seen to reel into Mr. Twain's hotel last night in state of beastly intoxication. It is the imperative duty of the Independents to prove that this besotted brute was not Mark Twain himself: We have them at last! This is a case that admits of no shirking. The voice of the people demands in thunder-tones: "WHO WAS THAT MAN?
It was incredible, absolutely incredible, for a moment, that it was really my name that was coupled with this disgraceful suspicion. Three long years had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine, or liquor of any kind.
[It shows what effect the times were having on me when I say that I saw myself confidently dubbed "Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain" in the next issue of that journal without a pang—notwithstanding I knew that with monotonous fidelity the paper would go on calling me so to the very end.]
By this time anonymous letters were getting to be an important part of my mail matter. This form was common:
How about that old woman you kiked of your premisers which was beging.
POL PRY.
And this:
There is things which you have done which is unbeknowens to anybody but me. You better trot out a few dols. to yours truly or you'll hear thro' the papers from
HANDY ANDY.
That is about the idea. I could continue them till the reader was surfeited, if desirable.
Shortly the principal Republican journal "convicted" me of wholesale bribery, and the leading Democratic paper "nailed" an aggravated case of blackmailing to me.
[In this way I acquired two additional names: "Twain, the Filthy Corruptionist," and "Twain, the Loathsome Embracer."]
By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an "answer" to all the dreadful charges that were laid to me, that the editors and leaders of my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any longer. As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following appeared in one of the papers the very next day:
BEHOLD THE MAN!—The Independent candidate still maintains Silence. Because he dare not speak. Every accusation against him has been amply proved, and they have been endorsed and re-endorsed by his own eloquent silence till at this day he stands forever convicted. Look upon your candidate, Independents! Look upon the Infamous Perjurer! the Montana Thief! the Body-Snatcher! Contemplate your incarnate Delirium Tremens! your Filthy Corruptionist! your Loathsome Embracer! Gaze upon him—ponder him well—and then say if you can give your honest votes to a creature who has earned this dismal array of titles by his hideous crimes, and dares not open his mouth in denial of any one of them!
There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so, in deep humiliation, I set about preparing to "answer" a mass of baseless charges and mean and wicked falsehoods. But I never finished the task, for the very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity, and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all its inmates because it obstructed the view from my house. This threw me into a sort of panic. Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened. This drove me to the verge of distraction. On top of this I was accused of employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food for the foundling hospital when I was warden. I was wavering—wavering. And at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness were taught to rush on to the platform at a public meeting and clasp me around the legs and call me PA!
I gave up. I hauled down my colors and surrendered. I was not equal to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the State of New York, and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of spirit signed it,
"Truly yours,
"Once a decent man, but now
"MARK TWAIN, I. P., M. T., B. S., D. T., F. C., and L. E."
THE GALAXY, December 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
To be the editor of any kind of a newspaper, either country or metropolitan (but very especially the former), is a position which must be trying to a good-natured man. Because it makes him an object of charity whether or no. It makes him the object of a peculiar and humiliating, because an interested, charity—a charity thrust upon him with offensive assurance and a perfectly unconcealed taken-for granted that it will be received with gratitude, and the donor accounted a benefactor; and at the very same time the donor's chief motive, his vulgar self-interest, is left as frankly unconcealed. The country editor offers his advertising space to the public at the trifle of one dollar and a half or two dollars a square, first insertion, and one would suppose his "patrons" would be satisfied with that. But they are not. They puzzle their thin brains to find out some still cheaper way of getting their wares celebrated—some way whereby they can advertise virtually for nothing. They soon hit upon that meanest and shabbiest of all contrivances for robbing a gentle-spirited scribbler, viz., the conferring upon him of a present and begging a "notice" of it—thus pitifully endeavoring to not only invade his sacred editorial columns, but get ten dollars' worth of advertising for fifty cents' worth of merchandise, and on top of that leave the poor creature burdened with a crushing debt of gratitude! And so the corrupted editor, having once debauched his independence and received one of these contemptible presents, wavers a little while the remnant of his self-respect is consuming, and at last abandons himself to a career of shame, and prostitutes his columns to "notices" of every sort of present that a stingy neighbor chooses to inflict upon him. The confectioner insults him with forty cents' worth of ice-cream—and he lavishes four "squares" of editorial compliments on him; the grocer insults him with a bunch of overgrown radishes and a dozen prize turnips—and gets an editorial paragraph perfectly putrid with gratitude; the farmer insults him with three dollars' worth of peaches, or a beet like a man's leg, or a watermelon like a channel-buoy, or a cabbage in many respects like his own head, and expects a third of a column of exuberant imbecility—and gets it. And these trivial charities are not respectfully and gracefully tendered, but are thrust in silently upon the victim, and with an air that plainly shows that the victim will be held to a strict accountability in the next issue of his paper.
I am not an editor of a newspaper, and shall always try to do right and be good, so that God will not make me one; but there are some persons who have got the impression, somehow, that I am that kind of character, and they treat me accordingly. They send me a new fangled wheel-barrow, and ask me to "notice" it; or a peculiar boot jack, and ask me to "notice" it; or a sample of coffee, and ask me to "notice" it; or an article of furniture worth eight or ten dollars, or a pair of crutches, or a truss, or an artificial-nose, or a few shillings' worth of rubbish of the vegetable species; and here lately, all in one day, I receive a barrel of apples, a thing to milk cows with, a basket of peaches, a box of grapes, a new sort of wooden leg, and a patent "composition" grave-stone. "Notices" requested. A barrel of apples, a cow-milker, a basket of peaches, and a box of grapes, all put together, are not worth the bore of writing a "notice," nor a tenth part of the room the "notice" would take up in the paper, and so they remained unnoticed. I had no immediate use for the wooden leg, and would not have accepted a charity grave-stone if I had been dead and actually suffering for it when it came—so I sent those articles back.
I do not want any of these underhanded, obligation-inflicting presents. I prefer to cramp myself down to the use of such things as I can afford, and then pay for them; and then when a citizen needs the labor of my hands he can have it, and I will infallibly come on him for damages.
The ungraceful custom, so popular in the back settlements, of facetiously wailing about the barren pockets of editors, is the parent of this uncanny present-inflicting, and it is time that the guild that originated the custom and now suffer in pride and purse from it, reflected that decent and dignified poverty is thoroughly respectable; while the flaunting of either a real or pretended neediness in the public face, and the bartering of nauseating "puffs" for its legitimate fruit of charitable presents, are as thoroughly indelicate, unbecoming, and disreputable.
THE GALAXY, December 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
Some of the decisions of the Post Office Department are eminently luminous. It has in times gone by been enacted that "author's manuscript" should go through the mails for a trifling postage—newspaper postage, in fact. A calm and dispassionate mind would gather from this, that the object had in view was to facilitate and foster newspaper correspondence, magazine writing, and literature generally, by discontinuing a tax in the way of postage which had become very burdensome to gentlemen of the quill. Now by what effort of good old well-meaning, grandmotherly dullness does the reader suppose the postal authorities have rendered that wise and kindly decree utterly null and void, and solemnly funny? By deciding that "author's manuscript" does not mean anything but "manuscript intended to be made into a BOUND BOOK"—all pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers ruled out!
Thus we are expected to believe that the original regulation was laboriously got up to save two dollars' worth of postage to two authors in a year—for probably not more than that number of MS. books are sent by mail to publishers each year. Such property is too precious to trust to any conveyance but the author's own carpet-sack, as a general thing.
But granting that one thousand MS. books went to the publishers in a year, and thus saved to one thousand authors a dollar apiece in postage in the twelve months, would not a law whose whole aim was to accomplish such a trifle as that be simply an irreverent pleasantry, and not proper company to thrust among grave and weighty statutes in the law-books?
The matter which suggested these remarks can be stated in a sentence. Once or twice I have sent magazine MSS. from certain cities, on newspaper rates, as "author's MS." But in Buffalo the postmaster requires full letter postage. He claims no authority for this save decisions of the Post Office Department. He showed me the law itself, but even the highest order of intellectual obscurity, backed by the largest cultivation (outside of a Post Office Department), could not find in it authority for the "decisions" aforementioned. And I ought to know, because I tried it myself [I say that, not to be trivially facetious when talking in earnest, but merely to take the word out of the mouths of certain cheap witlings, who always stand ready in any company to interrupt anyone whose remarks offer a chance for the exhibition of their poor wit and worse manners.]
I will not say one word about this curious decision, or utter one sarcasm or one discourteous speech about it, or the well intending but misguided officer who rendered it; but if he were in California, he would fare far differently—very far differently—for there the wicked are not restrained by the gentle charities that prevail in Buffalo, and so they would deride him, and point the finger of scorn at him, and address him as "Old Smarty from Mud Springs." Indeed they would.
THE GALAXY, December 1870
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
* * *
In a Sandwich Island paper just received by mail, I learn that some gentlemen of taste and enterprise, and also of Keokuk, Iowa, have named a fast young colt for me. Verily, one does have to go away from home to learn news. The cannibal paper adds that the colt has already trotted his mile, of his own accord, in 2:17 1-2. He was probably going to dinner at the time. The idea of naming anything that is fast after me—except an anchor or something of that kind—is a perfect inspiration of humor. If this poor colt could see me trot around the course once, he would laugh some of his teeth out—he would indeed, if he had time to wait till I finished the trip. I have seen slower people than I am—and more deliberate people than I am—and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead.
* * *
And by that Sandwich Island paper ("Commercial Advertiser") I also learned that H. M. Whitney, its able editor and proprietor for sixteen years, was just retiring from business, having sold out to younger men. I take this opportunity of thanking the disappearing veteran for courtesies done and information afforded me in bygone days. Mr. Whitney is one of the fairest-minded and best-hearted cannibals I ever knew, if I do say it myself. There is not a stain upon his name, and never has been. And he is the best judge of a human being I ever saw go through a market. Many a time I have seen natives try to palm off part of an old person on him for the fragment of a youth, but I never saw it succeed. Ah, no, there was no deceiving H. M. Whitney. He could tell the very family a roast came from, if he had ever tried the family before. I remember his arresting my hand once and saying, "Let that alone—it's from one of those Hulahulas—a very low family—and tough." I cannot think of Whitney without my mouth watering. We used to eat a great many people in those halcyon days, which shall come again, alas! nevermore. We lived on the fat of the land. And I will say this for Henry Whitney—he never thought less of his friend after examining into him, and he was always sorry when his enemy was gone.
Most of the above may fairly and justly rank as nonsense, but my respect and regard for Mr. Whitney are genuine.
* * *
My old friend is married again—as I learn from the following notice cut by a correspondent from a Cincinnati paper last May—rather old news, but it is a good scattering shot, and cannot fail to "fetch" some ignorant interested body somewhere, considering the number of brides:
YOUNG—MARTIN—PENDERGAST—JENICKSON—CLEVELAND—MARTIN.—In Salt Lake City, Utah, on the 16th ult., in the presence of the Saints, Elder Brigham Young to Mrs. J. R. Martin, Miss L. M. Pendergast, Mrs. R. M. Jenickson, Miss Susie P. Cleveland, and Miss Emily P. Martin, all of county of Berks, England.
* * *
The following is genuine, and was cut from the regular advertising columns of a great daily newspaper in a certain city. How many of my little Sunday-school friends can guess the city? Do not all speak at once—or if you do, do not put the emphasis strong on the second syllable, because it would not be nice for little boys and girls to disturb the continent. Though people who want divorces are not always the continent. Read:
WANTED—Divorces legally obtained without publicity, and at small expense. No fee unless decree is obtained. Address P. O. Box 1,037. This is the P. O. Box advertised for the past six years, and the owner has obtained 466 divorces during that time.
* * *
"M." (Springfield, O.) encloses for the Memoranda an inscription copied verbatim from a tombstone in Mount Wood Cemetery, Wheeling, erected to the memory of four little children who died within a few weeks of each other. (S. J., of Wheeling, also sends a copy of the same.) The verses seem to represent a conversation between the parents and the departed:
Children dear, what made you go
Far away, &c.
And leave us in our grief below,
Far way, &c.
You could not find a better home,
Nor better friends where e'er you roam,
Since you have left your earthly dome,
Far way, &c.
A heavenly message came for we,
All is well, &c.
To go and join that glorious glee,
All is well, &c.
We are members of that band,
On a holy pavement we do stand,
With a golden trumpet in our hands,
All is well, &c.
Ye are strangers in that sphere,
Children dear, &c.
You have no friends that you know there
Children dear, &c.
We wish, we wish we could but see
That heavenly palace where you be,
And bring you back to live with we,
Children dear, &c.
Dear parents weep for us no more,
All is well, &c.
We landed safe on Canaan's shore,
All is well, &c.
Ah! friends we have, we are well known
With saints and angels round the throne,
And Jesus claims us as his own.
All is well, &c.
* * *
"Quizquiz" hurls me this, under New York postmark: "I met last night on the Podunk Railroad an individual whose characteristics are best indicated by what follows:
"I handed him THE GALAXY, directing his attention to your map of Paris. He read your explanations through deliberately, and when he came to that part where you advised standing on the ear or the use of a looking glass in order to see it properly, he turned to a careful consideration of the map. In a few moments a bright idea struck him. Holding the sheet up to a light, he looked through the reverse side and exclaimed: 'Why, all that ain't necessary, after all! All you've got to do is to look at it the wrong way, and it makes it all right!' He read the remainder of your explanation, including certificates, and then returned to the profound study of the map. After a while he burst out:
"'Why, here's a thing that's wrong, anyhow! You can't get Omaha on the west and Jersey City on the east. They're both west. I don't care who says it's right, I say it ain't!'
"I mildly suggested that Jersey City and Omaha were a long way apart, and probably the longitude had something to do with it; for it was impossible to suppose such military critics as General Grant and General Sherman would not have detected the blunder if it were one.
"He pondered some time. 'Ah!' he said finally, 'it must be the longitude, for you see if you go around the world one way you might get Omaha on the west; while if you went round for Jersey City the other way, you'd get that on the east. I see it; it's the longitude does it.' "
* * *
The above mention of my map of Paris calls to mind that that work of art is appreciated among the learned. It is duly advertised that whoever sends a club of one hundred subscribers to the Yale College "Courant"—together with the necessary four hundred dollars—will receive as a prize a copy of my map! I am almost tempted to go canvassing myself.
* * *
All my soul is in Art lately, since I have been taking lessons in drawing and painting. I have drawn, and am now engraving, an elegant portrait of King William of Prussia, as a companion to the customary GALAXY portraits, and to complete the set. This work of Art, with accompanying remarks, will appear in the January number of this magazine.
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN.
NOTE.—No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a Chinaman's sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient.
LETTER VII.
SAN FRANCISCO, 18—.
DEAR CHING FOO: I was glad enough when my case came up. An hour's experience had made me as tired of the police court as of the dungeon. I was not uneasy about the result of the trial, but on the contrary felt that as soon as the large auditory of Americans present should hear how that the rowdies had set the dogs on me when I was going peacefully along the street, and how, when I was all torn and bleeding, the officers arrested me and put me in jail and let the rowdies go free, the gallant hatred of oppression which is part of the very flesh and blood of every American would be stirred to its utrnost, and I should be instantly set at liberty. In truth I began to fear for the other side. There in full view stood the ruffians who had misused me, and I began to fear that in the first burst of generous anger occasioned by the revealment of what they had done, they might be harshly handled, and possibly even banished the country as having dishonored her and being no longer worthy to remain upon her sacred soil.
The official interpreter of the court asked my name, and then spoke it aloud so that all could hear. Supposing that all was now ready, I cleared my throat and began—in Chinese, because of my imperfect English:
"Hear, O high and mighty mandarin, and believe! As I went about my peaceful business in the street, behold certain men set a dog on me, and—"
"Silence!"
It was the judge that spoke. The interpreter whispered to me that I must keep perfectly still. He said that no statement would be received from me—I must only talk through my lawyer.
I had no lawyer. In the early morning a police court lawyer (termed, in the higher circles of society, a "shyster") had come into our den in the prison and offered his services to me, but I had been obliged to go without them because I could not pay in advance or give security. I told the interpreter how the matter stood. He said I must take my chances on the witnesses then. I glanced around, and my failing confidence revived.
"Call those four Chinamen yonder," I said. "They saw it all. I remember their faces perfectly. They will prove that the white men set the dog on me when I was not harming them."
"That won't work," said he. "In this country white men can testify against Chinamen all they want to, but Chinamen ain't allowed to testify against white men!'
What a chill went through me! And then I felt the indignant blood rise to my cheek at this libel upon the Home of the Oppressed, where all men are free and equal—perfectly equal—perfectly free and perfectly equal. I despised this Chinese-speaking Spaniard for his mean slander of the land that was sheltering and feeding him. I sorely wanted to sear his eyes with that sentence from the great and good American Declaration of Independence which we have copied in letters of gold in China and keep hung up over our family altars and in our temples—I mean the one about all men being created free and equal.
But woe is me, Ching Foo, the man was right. He was right, after all. There were my witnesses, but I could not use them. But now came a new hope. I saw my white friend come in, and I felt that he had come there purposely to help me. I may almost say I knew it. So I grew easier. He passed near enough to me to say under his breath, "Don't be afraid," and then I had no more fear. But presently the rowdies recognized him and began to scowl at him in no friendly way, and to make threatening signs at him. The two officers that arrested me fixed their eyes steadily on his; he bore it well, but gave in presently, and dropped his eyes. They still gazed at his eyebrows, and every time he raised his eyes he encountered their winkless stare—until after a minute or two he ceased to lift his head at all. The judge had been giving some instructions privately to someone for a little while, but now he was ready to resume business. Then the trial so unspeakably important to me, and freighted with such prodigious consequence to my wife and children, began, progressed, ended, was recorded in the books, noted down by the newspaper reporters, and forgotten by everybody but me—all in the little space of two minutes!
"Ah Song Hi, Chinaman. Officers O'Flannigan and O'Flaherty, witnesses. Come forward, Officer O'Flannigan."
OFFICER—"He was making a disturbance in Kearny street."
JUDGE—"Any witnesses on the other side?"
No response. The white friend raised his eyes—encountered Officer O'Flaherty's—blushed a little—got up and left the court-room, avoiding all glances and not taking his own from the floor.
JUDGE—"Give him five dollars or ten days."
In my desolation there was a glad surprise in the words; but it passed away when I found that he only meant that I was to be fined five dollars or imprisoned ten days longer in default of it.
There were twelve or fifteen Chinamen in our crowd of prisoners, charged with all manner of little thefts and misdemeanors, and their cases were quickly disposed of, as a general thing. When the charge came from a policeman or other white man, he made his statement and that was the end of it, unless the Chinaman's lawyer could find some white person to testify in his client's behalf; for, neither the accused Chinaman nor his countrymen being allowed to say anything, the statement of the officers or other white person was amply sufficient to convict. So, as I said, the Chinamen's cases were quickly disposed of, and fines and imprisonment promptly distributed among them. In one or two of the cases the charges against Chinamen were brought by Chinamen themselves, and in those cases Chinamen testified against Chinamen, through the interpreter; but the fixed rule of the court being that the preponderance of testimony in such cases should determine the prisoner's guilt or innocence, and there being nothing very binding about an oath administered to the lower orders of our people without the ancient solemnity of cutting off a chicken's head and burning some yellow paper at the same time, the interested parties naturally drum up a cloud of witnesses who are cheerfully willing to give evidence without ever knowing anything about the matter in hand. The judge has a custom of rattling through with as much of this testimony as his patience will stand, and then shutting off the rest and striking an average.
By noon all the business of the court was finished, and then several of us who had not fared well were remanded to prison; the judge went home; the lawyers, and officers, and spectators departed their several ways, and left the uncomely court-room to silence, solitude, and Stiggers, the newspaper reporter, which latter would now write up his items (said an ancient Chinaman to me), in the which he would praise all the policemen indiscriminately and abuse the Chinamen and dead people.
AH SONG HI.
THE GALAXY, January 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
My ancient comrade, "Doesticks," in a letter from New York, quotes a printed paragraph concerning a story I used to tell to lecture audiences about a wonderfully mean man whom I used to know, and then Mr. D. throws himself into a passion and relates the following circumstance (writing on both sides of his paper, which is at least singular in a journalist, if not profane and indecent):
Now I don't think much of that. I know a better thing about old Captain Asa T. Mann of this town. You see, old Mann used to own and command a pickaninny, bull-headed, mud-turtle-shaped craft of a schooner that hailed from Perth Amboy. Old Mann used to prance out of his little cove where he kept his three-cent craft, and steal along the coast of the dangerous Kill von Kull, on the larboard side of Staten Island, to smouch oysters from unguarded beds, or pick clams off sloops where the watch had gone to bed drunk. Well, once old Mann went on a long voyage—for him. He went down to Virginia, taking his wife and little boy with him. The old rapscallion put on all sorts of airs, and pretended to keep up as strict discipline as if his craft was a man-of-war. One day his darling baby tumbled overboard. A sailor named Jones jumped over after him and after cavorting around about an hour or so, succeeded in getting the miserable little scion of a worthless sire on board again. Then old Mann got right up on his dignity—he put on all the dig. he had handy—and in two minutes he had Jones into double irons, and there he kept him three weeks, in the forehold, for leaving the ship without orders.
I will not resurrect my own mean man, for possibly he might not show to good advantage in the presence of this gifted sailor; but I will enter a Toledo bridegroom against the son of the salt wave, and let the winner take the money. I give the Toledo story just as it comes to me. (It, too, is written on both sides of the paper; but as this correspondent is not a journalist, the act is only wicked, not obscene.)
In this village there lived, and continue to live, two chaps who in their bachelor days were chums. S., one of the chaps, tiring of single blessedness, took unto himself a wife and a wedding, with numerous pieces of silverware and things from congratulating friends. C., the other chap, sent in a handsome silver ladle, costing several dollars or more. Their friendship continued. A year later C., also entered into partnership for life with one of the fair Eyes; and he also had a wedding. S., being worth something less than $20,000, thought he ought to return the compliment of a wedding present, and a happy thought struck him. He took that ladle down to the jeweller from whom is was purchased by C. the year before, and traded it off for silver salt dishes to present to C. and his bride.
THE GALAXY, January 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
Latterly I have received several letters, and see a number of newspaper paragraphs, all upon a certain subject, and all of about the same tenor. I here give honest specimens. One is from a New York paper, one is from a letter from an old friend, and one is from a letter from a New York publisher who is a stranger to me. I humbly endeavor to make these bits toothsome with the remark that the article they are praising (which appeared in the December Galaxy, and pretended to be a criticism from the London "Saturday Review" on my "Innocents Abroad") was written by myself—every line of it:
The "Herald" says the richest thing out is the "serious critique" in the London "Saturday Review", on Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad." We thought before we read it that it must be "serious," as everybody said so, and were even ready to shed a few tears; but since perusing it, we are bound to confess that next to Mark's "Jumping Frog" it's the finest bit of humor and sarcasm that we've come across in many a day.
[I do not get a compliment like that every day.]
I used to think that your writings were pretty good but after reading the criticism in THE GALAXY from the "London Review," have discovered what an ass I must have been. If suggestions are in order, mine is, that you put that article in your next edition of the "Innocents," as an extra chapter, if you are not afraid to put your own humor in competition with it. It is as rich a thing as I ever read."
[Which is strong commendation from a book publisher.]
The London Reviewer, my friend, is not the stupid "serious" creature he pretends to be, I think; but, on the contrary, has a keen appreciation and enjoyment of your book. As I read his article in THE GALAXY, I could imagine him giving vent to many a hearty laugh. But he is writing for Catholics and Established Church people, and high-toned, antiquated, conservative gentility, whom it is a delight to him to help you shock, while he pretends to shake his head with owlish density. He is a magnificent humorist himself.
[Now that is graceful and handsome. I take off my hat to my life-long friend and comrade, and with my feet together and my fingers spread over my heart, I say, in the language of Alabama, "You do me proud."]
I stand guilty of the authorship of the article, but I did not mean any harm. I saw by an item in the Boston Advertiser that a solemn, serious critique on the English edition of my book had appeared in the London "Saturday Review," and the idea of such a literary breakfast by a stolid, ponderous British ogre of the quill was too much for a naturally weak virtue, and I went home and burlesqued it—revelled in it, I may say. I never saw a copy of the real "Saturday Review" criticism until after my burlesque was written and mailed to the printer. But when I did get hold of a copy, I found it to be vulgar, awkwardly written, ill-natured, and entirely serious and in earnest. The gentleman who wrote the newspaper paragraph above quoted had not been misled as to its character.
If any man doubts my word now, I will kill him. No, I will not kill him; I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one, and let any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have above made as to the authorship of the article in question are entirely true. Perhaps I may get wealthy at this, for I am willing to take all the bets that offer; and if a man wants larger odds, I will give him all he requires. But he ought to find out whether I am betting on what is termed "a sure thing" or not before he ventures his money, and he can do that by going to a public library and examining the London "Saturday Revue" of October 8th, which contains the real critique.
Bless me, some people thought that I was the "sold" person!
P. S.—I cannot resist the temptation to toss in this most savory thing of all—this easy, graceful, philosophical disquisition, with its happy, chirping confidence. It is from the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Nothing is more uncertain than the value of a fine cigar. Nine smokers out of ten would prefer an ordinary domestic article, three for a quarter, to a fifty-cent Partaga, if kept in ignorance of the cost of the latter. The flavor of the Partaga is too delicate for palates that have been accustomed to Connecticut seed leaf. So it is with humor. The finer it is in quality, the more danger of its not being recognized at all. Even Mark Twain has been taken in by an English review of his "Innocents Abroad." Mark Twain is by no means a coarse humorist, but the Englishman's humor is so much finer than his, that he mistakes it for solid earnest, and "larfs most consumedly."
A man who cannot learn stands in his own light. Hereafter, when I write an article which I know to be good, but which I may have reason to fear will not, in some quarters, be considered to amount to much, coming from an American, I will aver that an Englishman wrote it and that it is copied from a London journal. And then I will occupy a back seat and enjoy the cordial applause.
THE GALAXY, January 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
ANSWER TO AN INQUIRY FROM THE COMING MAN.
"YOUNG AUTHOR."—Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorous in it makes brains. So far you are correct. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat—at least, not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales.
THE GALAXY, February 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
THE COMING MAN.
GENERAL DEWLAP G. LOVEL, minister to Hong-Wo, has resigned and returned to this country. His successor will not be appointed at present. Some of General Lovel's friends are nominating him for the vacant English mission. [Item in all the papers.]
What a jar it gave me! For as I am a true man, I thought it meant my old fellow-soldier in the Nevada militia, General Dunlap G. Lovel. And so I read it again, and again, and once more, and repeatedly—and with ever augmenting astonishment. But at last I grew calmer and began to scrutinize the "internal evidences" of this item. They were equal—part for, and part against my Lovel. For instance, my Lovel, who always thought gunpowder tea was made from ordinary gunpowder boiled instead of burned (and will still think so until he sees this paragraph), is guileless enough to go on wearing a military title gained as Brigadier in a militia which never saw service even in a Fourth of July procession, and consider it a distinction far from ridiculous. Consequently this general is as likely to be as general as another's. But then the remaining point of evidence is against us—namely, that this Minister Lovel has resigned. So it is not my Lovel after all. For my Lovel would not have resigned.
No; my Lovel is a man who can always be relied upon—a man who would be faithful to the death. If intrusted with an office, he would cling to that office until it was abolished. I am acquainted with my Lovel.
The distinct evidence is against my Lovel, and yet that lifting of a serene, unblinking gaze aloft to the awful sublimity of St. James's, from the remote insignificance of the U.S. embassage to Hong-Wo, with its candle-box for an official desk, and boiled beans three times a day for subsistence, and peanuts on Sunday for grandeur, is so precisely like my Lovel!
But with sorrow I own that this General Lovel is Dewlap G., while mine is only Dunlap G. Consequently they are not the same—far from it. Yet it is possible that a kind word from me may attract attention and sympathy to my poor Lovel, and thus help a deserving man to fortune. So let me go on.
General P. Edward O'Connor has done the highest and faithfullest and best military service in Mormondom, that ever has been rendered there for our country. For about seven years or such a matter he has made both Brigham and the Indians reasonably civil and polite. Well—. However, I see by the papers that General O'Connor has not been appointed Governor of Utah, as the Pacific coast desired. I cannot think how I came to wander off to General O'Connor, for he has nothing whatever to do with my General Lovel. Therefore I will drop him and not digress again. I now resume.
When the nation rose, years ago, Dunlap G. Lovel of Virginia, Nevada (Territory), flew to arms and was created a Brigadier-General of the territorial militia; and with his hand on his heart he swore an oath that he never would budge from his post till the enemy came. Colonel O'Connor flew to arms and put down the Indians and the Mormons, and kept them down for years—and fought his gallant way up through bullets and blood to his brigadier-generalship. But this is not a biography of General O'Connor. Hang General O'Connor! It is General Lovel I desire to speak of.
General Lovel—how imposing he looked in his uniform! He was a very exceedingly microscopic operator in wild-cat silver-mining stocks, and so he could not wear it every day; but then he was always ready when a fireman was to be buried or a relative hung. And he did look really beautiful, any of the old citizens will say that. It was a fine sight when all the militia turned out at once. The territorial population was some 20,000 then, and the Territorial militia numbered 139 persons, including regimental officers, three major and eleven brigadier-generals. General Lovel was the eleventh.
I cannot now call to mind distinctly the several engagements General Lovel was in, but I remember the following, on account of their peculiar prominence:
When Thompson Billings the desperado was captured, Lovel's brigade guarded the front door of the jail that night. It was well for Billings that he left by the back door; for it was always thought that if he had come out the front way he would have been shot.
At the great Sanitary Ball in Carson City, General Lovel was present in his uniform.
When the Legislature met in 1863, General Lovel and brigade were promptly on duty, either to do honor to them or protect the public, I have forgotten which.
He was present in his uniform with his men, to guard the exit of the Legislature of 1862, and let the members retire in peace with the surplus steel pens and stationery. This was the Legislature that confirmed his appointment as Brigadier General. It also elected as enrolling clerk of its House of Representatives a militia chieftain by the name of Captain G. Murphy, who could not write. This was a misunderstanding, however, rather than a blunder, for the Legislature of 1862 did not know it was necessary he should know how to write.
When the Governor delivered his farewell address, General Lovel and brigade were there, and never gave way an inch till it was done.
General Lovel was in several other engagements, but I cannot call them to mind now.
By-and-by the people began to feel that General Lovel's military services ought to be rewarded. So some one suggested that he run as an independent candidate for U. S. Senator (for Nevada was become a new-fledged State by this time). Modest as this old soldier was, backward as he was, naturally diffident as he was, he said he would do it, and he did. It was commonly reported and steadfastly believed by everybody that he spent the bulk of his fortune, which was fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, in "putting up" a legislative delegation from Virginia City which should fight under his Senatorial banner. AND YET THAT MAN WAS NOT ELECTED. I not only state it, but I swear to it. Why, unless my memory has gone entirely crazy, that polluted Legislature never even mentioned his name!
What was an old public servant to do after such treatment? Shake the dust from his sandals and leave the State to its self-invited decay and ruin. That was the course to pursue, and that was the one he did pursue. He knew a land where worth is always recognized, a city where the nation's faithful vassal cannot know the cold hand of neglect—WASHINGTON. He went there in Andrew Johnson's time. He probably got Captain John Nye to use his "influence" for him—ha! ha!
What do we behold a grateful nation instantly do? We see it send General O'Connor—no, I mean General Lovel—to represent us as resident minister at oriental Hong-Wo!
No, no, no—I have got it all wrong again. It is not my Dun-lap, but somebody's Dew-lap that was sent.
But might it not—no, it cannot be and is not my Lovel whose "friends" are pointing him towards august St. James's. The first syllable of the name is so different. But my Lovel would do very well indeed for that place. I am aware that he knows no French, and is not certain of his English. But then our foreign representatives seldom know the "language of diplomacy" anyhow. I do not know that he has any education to speak of—am confident he has not—but cannot a man learn? I am not even certain that he knows enough to come in when it rains, but I say it again, and repeat and reiterate it, cannot a man learn? We need a person at such a lordly court as the British who is well-bred and gentlemanly in his appearance and address, a man accustomed to the dignities and proprieties of the highest and best society. There is not a barkeeper, a desperado, an editor, or an Indian in Nevada but will speak in terms of respect of Dun-lap G. Lovel, and say that he always worthily bore himself among the very cream of society in that critical and exacting community. We want no mere unconsidered "Mr." at the Court of St. James's; we want a person with a title to his name—a General, nothing less. My General would answer. He could tell those old field-marshals from India and Abyssinia something about soldier-life which would be new to them, perhaps. But above all, we want a great-brained, profound diplomatic genius at the Court of St. James's—a man surcharged with experience likewise. Now if this deep, this bottomless Hong-Wooian diplomat were only Dun-lap G. Lovel—but no, it is Dew-lap. But my General would be a great card for us in England, and I wish we could have him. Contemplate him in Motley's place. Think of my dainty Lilliputian standing in Brobdingnag Motley's shoes, and peeping out smartly over the instep at the Great Powers. It would be a thing to bless and honor a heedful Providence for—this consummation.
Who are the "friends" who desire the appointment of that other Lovel, I wonder! If that Lovel were my Lovel, I should think the term "friends" referred to "Captain" John Nye, of the lobby, Washington, a man whom I love to call "the Wheels of Government," because if you could see him backing members up into corners by the button-hole, and "influencing" them in favor of this, that, and the other Lovel whom the back settlements have cast up undigested, you would believe as I do, that our Government could not proceed without him.
But sorrow to me, this Lovel is Dew-lap, and mine is totally another man—Dun-lap. Let it go. I care not. And yet my heart knows I would worship that President who should show my fading eyes and failing life the spectacle of "General" Dun-lap G. Lovel Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James's, and "Captain" John Nye, of the lobby, Washington, Secretary of Legation. I would be content to die then—entirely content. And so with loving zeal I add my name to the list of "General Lovel's friends" who are "nominating him for the vacant English mission."
THE GALAXY, February 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
BY R.B.W.
In his preface to this volume ["An Inquiry into the Origin, Development, and Transmission of the Games of Childhood, in all Ages and of every Nation, Critical, Analytical, and Historical." By Thomas Henry Huxley, L.L.D., F.R.S. Author's edition. New York: Shelton & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo., pp. 498] Professor Huxley says:
To the historiographer the most interesting period of research is that where history proper loses itself in the vague mist of mythologic shadow. The childhood of nations has always been a favorite subject of investigation. To separate the type from the fact; the symbol from the thing symbolized; the ideal from the real; to regroup the disintegrated fragments, and from the materials thus gathered to construct a firm and trustworthy superstructure on which the mind may rest in tranquil confidence; this has ever been and ever will be one of the most fascinating pursuits to which the cultured intellect can be devoted. If then we seek the childhood of nations as a favored field for philosophic speculation, may we not with equal propriety turn to the semper-existent nation of children, seek out the origin of their traditions, trace the development of their customs, and interpret by the light of history and reason their orally transmitted lore? Herein is a new field for speculative research. Hence may be derived results the most far-reaching prescience could not forecast; and even childhood's games may thus attain an eminence in the realms of thought undreamt of by purblind metaphysicans of the dormant ages!
This extract shows sufficiently the spirit in which the author of "Vestiges of the Creation" has undertaken a work which, to many, might seem scarcely worthy the time and labor evidently bestowed upon it, and the high position in the scientific world its author enjoys. [It is to be regretted that unfortunate domestic relations should ever affect the social status of a great and learned writer; but this affords no just ground for disputing the logical results of the inductive system.] Following out the idea of similarity between the childhood of nations and the nationality of childhood, Professor Huxley says, p. 76:
Disraeli, in his "Amenities of Literature," has shown conclusively that the religion of Druidism was one only possible to a people not yet emerged from a state of mental childhood. The British Druids constituted a sacred and secret society, religious, political, literary, and military. In the rude mechanism of society in a state of pupillage, the first elements of government, however puerile, were the levers to lift and sustain the barbaric mind. Invested with all privileges and immunities, amid that transcient omnipotence which man, in his first feeble condition, can confer, the wild children of society crouched together before those illusions which superstition so easily forges. Whatever was taught was forbidden to be written, and not only their doctrines and their sciences were veiled in sacred obscurity, but the laws which they made and the traditions of their mythology were oral. The Druids were the common fathers of the British youth, for they were their sole educators, and, for the most part, progenitors. Could the parallel be more exact?
Descending from the general to the particular consideration of this subject, Professor Huxley traces objectively the origin of many of the childish games known in this country, such as marbles, ring-taw, leap-frog, etc., and others which have been practised from time immemorial by the youth of every clime and age. Speaking of the game of oats, peas, beans, and barley, oh, which is found to have originated in a mystic symbolism similar in some respects to the dances of the so-called Shakers of to-day, he says:
The allegory constantly presented in the religious chants of the Aryans reveals a freshness which renders their interpretation easy. It is sufficient to read the Rig-veda to be convinced that naturalism—that is to say, the study of physical nature—constituted the foundation of the worship of those pastoral peoples who then occupied the Punjaub, and later emigrated to the northerly plains of Hindoostan. It is the direct product of that poetical and anthropomorphic spirit which personifies all objects, all phenomena, and is the unvarying form imagination takes at its awakening.
The lengthy extracts already made render it impossible even to allude to many of the most entertaining topics of this exhaustive work; but one of the most curious of the traditions exhumed from the buried records of the past is that which relates to the game of hop Scotch. The Professor traces clearly the practice of this pastime as far back as the invention of the morris and broadsword dances of the Scottish clansmen in the early part of the eleventh century, and suggests, rather than positively ascribes, its origin to the boyish imitation of their parents' warlike sports, by the youthful Bruces and Douglasses of the period. He gives, however, for what it is worth, a quaint tradition which carries the origin of this game back almost to the garden of Eden—back, in fact, to Cain and Abel in person. ***** [To economize space, I leave out the tradition, and also the arguments which the reviewer offers in support of its claims to probability.—EDITOR MEMORANDA.]
There is a superficial objection which may be made to the reception of this theory of the origin of hop Scotch, and it is obvious. To have used these words, Cain and Abel must have spoken English. Granted. But the explanation is really very simple. Adam was an Aryan, [ The Hebrews, it will be remembered, do not appear among the brotherhood of nations until the Abrahamic era. In this respect the Mosaic cosmogony is fully sustained by Sanscrit writers as well as by the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who flourished 346 years B.C.] and necessarily, Cain and Abel were Aryans also. Now the roots of all languages are found in the Aryan and Semitic tongues. Professor Huxley gives numerous instances (most of which are well known to philologists) of radical identity between words in use in several of the modern languages at the present day and those of the most primitive nations of the globe. The reader familiar with the Semitic languages will have no difficulty in following the author in his philological demonstration of the innate possibility that Cain and Abel may have given this name to this game—that is, that the sound and the idea intended were the same, although it is unnecessary to say the spelling may have differed. But this is a minor point. The most interesting demonstration, however, is to be found in the algebraic formula by which Professor Huxley proves a similar conclusion. It shall be our final extract, but we cannot refrain from giving it entire, in the Professor's own words:
Representing the two known qualities Cain and Abel by the letters C and A, we proceed as follows: Let x=the language used by Cain, and x, the language used by Abel. Also, let y=the language not used by Cain, and y, the language not used by Abel. Then
]=x + y, or all the language used by Cain, and
]=x + y, or all the language used by Abel.
The time is assumed to be that at which the games was at its height.
Then, p + p, being the respective probabilities that any particular words were used, we have:
Cpx + cpy=cl; and
Ap,x + ap,y=al.
Adding the two equations:
Cpx + ap,x, + cpy + ap,y=cl + al.
Cpx + ap,x=cl + al=cpy=ap,y
But since y=o, we may omit the quantities containing that symbol, and
Cpx + ap,x,=cl, or
Cpx=cl and
cx=cl./p
Ap,x,=al,
Ax=al,/p But,
p=1 when x words are considered, and
p,=1 when x, words are considered. Therefore, adding the two equations again, we have
Cx =ax,=cl + al.
Thus proving that Cain used x words and Abel used x, words. Q.E.D.
Enough has been given, we think, to arouse the interest of our readers in this, all things considered, remarkable book. It is enough to say in conclusion that the patient research and philosophical deductions of the student and the thinker have here unearthed for the instruction and amusement of the present age, a wealth of quaint and curious information which has long lain buried in oblivion, or existed only among the ana of that pigmy nation which exists among us and around us, but which, until Professor Huxley became its historian and interpreter, was not of us.
[I wish to state that this review came to me from some Philadelphia person entirely unknown to me; but as I could make neither head nor tail of the thing, I thought it must be good, and therefore have published it. I have heard of Professor Huxley before, and knew that he was the author of Watts's hymns, but I did not know before that he wrote "Vestiges of Creation." However, let it pass—I suppose he did, since it is so stated. I have not yet seen his new work about children, and moreover, I do not want to, for all this reviewer thinks so much of it. Mr. Huxley is too handy with his slate-pencil to suit me.—EDITOR MEMORANDA.]
THE GALAXY, February 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
When I get old and ponderously respectable, only one thing will be able to make me truly happy, and that will be to be put on the Venerable Tone-Imparting Committee of the City of New York, and have nothing to do but sit on the platform, solemn and imposing, along with Peter Cooper, Horace Greeley, etc., etc., and shed momentary fame at second hand on obscure lecturers, draw public attention to lectures which would otherwise clack eloquently to sounding emptiness, and subdue audiences into respectful hearing of all sorts of unpopular and outlandish dogmas and isms. That is what I desire for the cheer and gratification of my gray hairs. Let me but sit up there with those fine relics of the Old Red Sandstone period and give Tone to an intellectual entertainment twice a week, and be so reported, and my happiness will be complete. Those men have been my envy for a long, long time. And no memories of my life are so pleasant as my reminiscence, of their long and honorable career in the Tone-imparting service. I can recollect the first time I ever saw them on the platforms just as well as I can remember the events of yesterday. Horace Greeley sat on the right, Peter Cooper on the left, and Thomas Jefferson, Red Jacket, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock sat between them. This was on the 22d of December, 1799, on the occasion of the state funeral of George Washington in New York. It was a great day, that—a great day, and a very, very sad one. I remember that Broadway was one mass of black crape from Castle Garden nearly up to where the City Hall now stands. The next time I saw these gentlemen officiate was at a ball given for the purpose of procuring money and medicines for the sick and wounded soldiers and sailors. Horace Greeley occupied one side of the platform on which the musicians were exalted, and Peter Cooper the other. There were other Tone-imparters attendant upon the two chiefs, but I have forgotten their names now. Horace Greeley, gray-haired and beaming, was in sailor costume—white duck pants, blue shirt, open at the breast, large neckerchief, loose as an ox-bow, and tied with a jaunty sailor knot, broad turnover collar with star in the corner, shiny black little tarpaulin hat roosting daintily far back on head and flying two gallant long ribbons. Slippers on ample feet, round spectacles on benignant nose, and pitchfork in hand completed Mr. Greeley, and made him, in my boyish admiration, every inch a sailor, and worthy to be the honored great-grandfather of the Neptune he was so ingeniously representing. I shall never forget him. Mr. Cooper was dressed as a general of militia, and was dismally and oppressively warlike. I neglected to remark, in the proper place, that the soldiers and sailors in whose aid the ball was given had just been sent in from Boston—this was during the war of 1812. At the grand national reception of Lafayette, in 1824, Horace Greeley sat on the right and Peter Cooper on the left. The other Tone-imparters of that day are sleeping the sleep of the just now. I was in the audience when Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, and other chief citizens imparted tone to the great meetings in favor of French liberty, in 1848. Then I never saw them any more until here lately; but now that I am living tolerably near the city, I run down every time I see it announced that "Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, and several other distinguished citizens will occupy seats on the platform;" and next morning, when I read in the first paragraph of the phonographic report that "Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, and several other distinguished citizens occupied seats on the platform," I say to myself, "Thank God, I was present." Thus I have been enabled to see these substantial old friends of mine sit on the platform and give tone to lectures on anatomy, and lectures on agriculture, and lectures on stirpiculture, and lectures on astronomy, on chemistry, on miscegenation, on "Is Man Descended from the Kangaroo?" on veterinary matters, on all kinds of religion, and several kinds of politics; and have seen them give tone and grandeur to the Four-legged Girl, the Siamese Twins, the Great Egyptian Sword Swallower, and the Old Original Jacobs. Whenever somebody is to lecture on a subject not of general interest, I know that my venerated Remains of the Old Red Sandstone Period will be on the platform, whenever a lecturer is to appear whom nobody has heard of before, nor will be likely to seek to see, I know that the real benevolence of my old friends will be taken advantage of, and that they will be on the platform (and in the bills) as an advertisement; and whenever any new and obnoxious deviltry in philosophy, morals, or politics is to be sprung upon the people, I know perfectly well that these intrepid old heroes will be on that platform too, in the interest of full and free discussion, and to crush down all narrower and less generous souls with the solid dead weight of their awful respectability. And let us all remember that while these inveterate and imperishable presiders (if you please) appear on the platform every night in the year as regularly as the volunteered piano from Steinway's or Chickering's, and have bolstered up and given tone to a deal of questionable merit and obscure emptiness in their time, they have also diversified this inconsequential service by occasional powerful uplifting and upholding of great progressive ideas which smaller men feared to meddle with or countenance.
THE GALAXY, February 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
The man in the ticket office said: "Have an accident insurance ticket, also?"
"No," I said, after studying the matter over a little. "No, I believe not; I am going to be travelling by rail all day to-day. However, to-morrow I don't travel. Give me one for to-morrow."
The man looked puzzled. He said:
"But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel by rail—"
"If I am going to travel by rail, I shan't need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing I am afraid of."
I had been looking into this matter. Last year I travelled twenty thousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I travelled over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail; and the year before that I travelled in the neighborhood of ten thousand miles, exclusively by rail. I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have travelled sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned. And never an accident.
For a good while I said to myself every morning: "Now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I shall catch it this time. I will be shrewd, and buy an accident ticket." And to a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of that sort of daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month. I said to myself, "A man can't buy thirty blanks in one bundle."
But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the lot. I could read of railway accidents every day—the newspaper atmosphere was foggy with them; but somehow they never came my way. I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business, and had nothing to show for it. My suspicions were aroused, and I began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual that had ever had an accident or made a cent. I stopped buying accident tickets and went to ciphering. The result was astounding. 'THE PERIL LAY NOT IN TRAVELLING, BUT IN STAYING AT HOME.
I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring newspaper headings concerning railroad disasters, less than three hundred people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six—or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straightway suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country; so the double number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise.
By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger trains each way every day—sixteen altogether; and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in six months—the population of New York city. Well, the Erie kills from thirteen to twenty-three persons out of its million in six months; and in the same time 13,000 of New York's million die in their beds! My flesh crept, my hair stood on end. "This is appalling!" I said. "The danger isn't in travelling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again."
I had figured on considerably less than one-half the length of the Erie road. It was plain that the entire road must transport at least eleven or twelve thousand people every day. There are many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much; a great many such roads. There are many roads scattered about the Union that do a prodigious passenger business. Therefore it was fair to presume that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road in the country would be about correct. There are 846 railway lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000. So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day; six hundred and fifty millions of people a year, without counting the Sundays. They do that, too—there is no question about it; though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic; for I have hunted the census through and through, and I find that there are not that many people in the United States, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least. They must use some of the same people over again, likely.
San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York; there are 60 deaths a week in the former and 500 a week in the latter—if they have luck. That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York—say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health of the two places is the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that consequently 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die every year. That amounts to one-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, die annually. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal mines, falling off housetops breaking through church or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills from 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill a average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to the appalling figure of nine hundred and eighty-seven thousand six hundred and thirty-one corpses, die naturally in their beds!
You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.
And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than you can help; but when you have got to stay at home a while, buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious.
[One can see now why I answered that ticket agent in the manner recorded at the top of this sketch.]
The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is, not that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth, but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred!
THE GALAXY, February 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
I suppose that if there is one thing in the world more hateful than another to all of us, it is to have to write a letter. A private letter especially. And business letters, to my thinking, are very little pleasanter. Nearly all the enjoyment is taken out of every letter I get by the reflection that it must be answered. And I do so dread the affliction of writing those answers, that often my first and gladdest impulse is to burn my mail before it is opened. For ten years I never felt that sort of dread at all because I was moving about constantly, from city to city, from State to State, and from country to country, and so I could leave all letters unanswered if I chose, and the writers of them would naturally suppose that I had changed my post office and missed receiving my correspondence. But I am "cornered" now. I cannot use that form of deception any more. I am anchored, and letters of all kinds come straight to me with deadly precision.
They are letters of all sorts and descriptions, and they treat of everything. I generally read them at breakfast, and right often they kill a day's work by diverting my thoughts and fancies into some new channel, thus breaking up and making confusion of the programme of scribbling I had arranged for my working hours. After breakfast I clear for action, and for an hour try hard to write; but there is no getting back into the old train of thought after such an interruption, and so at last I give it up and put off further effort till next day. One would suppose that I would now answer those letters and get them out of the way; and I suppose one of those model young men we read about, who enter New York barefoot and live to become insolent millionaires, would be sure to do that; but I don't. I never shall be a millionaire, and so I disdain to copy the ways of those men. I did not start right. I made a fatal mistake to begin with, and entered New York with boots on and above forty cents in my pocket. With such an unpropitious beginning, any efforts of mine to acquire great wealth would be frowned upon as illegitimate, and I should be ruthlessly put down as an impostor. And so, as I said before, I decline to follow the lead of those chrysalis Croesuses and answer my correspondents with commercial promptness. I stop work for the day, and leave the new letters stacked up along with those that came the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, and so on. And by-and-by the pile grows so large that it begins to distress me, and then I attack it and give full five and sometimes six hours to the assault. And how many of the letters do I answer in that time? Never more than nine; usually only five or six. The correspondence clerk in a great mercantile house would answer a hundred in that many hours. But a man who has spent years in writing for the press cannot reasonably be expected to have such facility with a pen. From old habit he gets to thinking and thinking, patiently puzzling for minutes together over the proper turning of a sentence in an answer to some unimportant private letter, and so the precious time slips away.
It comes natural to me in these latter years to do all manner of composition laboriously and ploddingly, private letters included. Consequently, I do fervently hate letter-writing, and so do all the newspaper and magazine men I am acquainted with.
The above remarks are by way of explanation and apology to parties who have written me about various matters, and whose letters I have neglected to answer. I tried in good faith to answer them—tried every now and then, and always succeeded in clearing off several, but always as surely left the majority of those received each week to lie over till the next. The result was always the same, to wit: the unanswered letters would shortly begin to have a reproachful look about them, next an upbraiding look, and by-and-by an aggressive and insolent aspect; and when it came to that, I always opened the stove door and made an example of them. The return of cheerfulness and the flight of every feeling of distress on account of neglected duty, was immediate and thorough.
I did not answer the letter of the Wisconsin gentleman, who inquired whether imported brads were better than domestic ones, because I did not know what brads were, and did not choose to "let on" to a stranger. I thought it would have looked much better in him, anyhow, to have asked somebody who he knew was in the habit of eating brads, or wearing them, whichever is the proper way of utilizing them.
I did manage to answer the little Kentucky boy who wished to send me his wildcat. I thanked him very kindly and cordially for his donation, and said I was very fond of cats of all descriptions, and told him to do like the little Indiana boy and forward it to Rev. Mr. Beecher, and I would call and get it some time. I could not bear to check the warm young tide of his generosity, and yet I had no (immediate) use for the insect myself.
I did not answer the young man who wrote me from Tennessee, inquiring "how to become a good reporter and acceptable journalist," chiefly because if one marks out the nice easy method which he knows these kind of inquirers have in their mind's eye, they straightway begin to afflict him with semi-weekly specimens of what they can do, under the thin disguise of a friendly correspondence; and if he marks out the unromantic and unattractive method which he believes in his heart to be the absolutely necessary one, they always write back and call him a "nigger" or a "thief." These people are so illogical.
THE GALAXY, February 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
THE INDIGNITY PUT UPON THE REMAINS OF GEORGE HOLLAND BY THE REV. MR. SABINE.
What a ludicrous satire it was upon Christian charity!—even upon the vague, theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small saint mouths from his own pulpit every Sunday. Contemplate this freak of Nature, and think what a Cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his pigmy skin. If we probe, and dissect, and lay open this diseased, this cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the good that is done in the earth, and hence are better than common clay—hence are competent to say to such as George Holland, "You are unworthy; you are a play actor, and consequently a sinner; I cannot take the responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of Heaven." It must have had its origin in that impression, else he would have thought, "We are all instruments for the carrying out of God's purposes; it is not for me to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to praise or to revile it; I have divine authority for it that we are all sinners, and therefore it is not for me to discriminate and say we will supplicate for this sinner, for he was a merchant prince or a banker, but we will beseech no forgiveness for this other one, for he was a play-actor." It surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air and turn his back upon so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger come to beg the last kindness that humanity can do in its behalf. This creature has violated the letter of the gospel and judged George Holland—not George Holland either—but his profession through him. Then it is in a measure fair that we judge this creature's guild through him. In effect he has said, "We are the salt of the earth; we do all the good work that is done; to learn how to be good and do good, men must come to us; actors and such are obstacles to moral progress." *
[* Reporter—What answer did you make, Mr. Sabine?
Mr. Sabine—I said that I had a distaste for officiating at such a funeral, and that I did not care to be mixed up in it. I said to the gentleman that I was willing to bury the deceased from his house, but that I objected to having the funeral solemnized at a church.
Reporter—Is it one of the laws of the Protestant Episcopal Church that a deceased theatrical performer shall not be buried from the church?
Mr. Sabine—It is not; but I have always warned the professing members of my congregation to keep away from theatres and not to have anything to do with them. I don't think that they teach moral lessons.—New York Times.]
Pray look at the thing reasonably for a moment, laying aside all biasses of education and custom. If a common public impression is fair evidence of a thing, then this minister's legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly, coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable. And his congregation forget it all between church and home. But for fifty years it was George Holland's business, on the stage, to make his audience go and do right, and be just, merciful, and charitable—because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures, he showed them what it was to do these things, and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward! Is it not a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban, and say, "I do not think it teaches moral lessons"?
Where was ever a sermon preached that could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of "King Lear"? Or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy as the sinful play of "Othello"? And where are there ten preachers who can stand in the pulpit teaching heroism, unselfish devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of five hundred William Tells that can be raised up upon five hundred stages in the land at a day's notice? It is almost fair and just to aver (although it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people to-day, got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and NOT from the drowsy pulpit!
All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of Jesus Christ, and many creatures, and of divers sorts, were doubtless appointed to disseminate it; and let us believe that this seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower's garment; and that whosoever, in his way and according to his opportunity, sows the one and produces the other, has done high service and worthy. And further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the Throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself.
Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating the marrow, the meat of the gospel of Christ? (For we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a spectre.)
No, I am not saying that the pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice a week—nearly two hours, altogether—and does what it can in that time. The theatre teaches large audiences seven times a week—28 or 30 hours altogether; and the novels and newspapers plead, and argue, and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate, at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and all day long, and far into the night; and so these vast agencies till nine-tenths of the vineyard, and the pulpit tills the other tenth. Yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, "You unanointed are coarse clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of the world; go, bury yourselves else where, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of Heaven." How does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores? Think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has Black Crooks in it; forgetting that if that were sufficient ground, people would condemn the pulpit because it had Cooks, and Kallochs, and Sabines in it.
No, I am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of Christ; but I am trying to get a moment's hearing for worthy agencies in the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a recognition of their great services. I am aware that the pulpit does its excellent one-tenth (and credits itself with it now and then, though most of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); I am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with uninflammable truisms about doing good; bores them with correct compositions on charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar, or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript. And in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best, and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way. And so I have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people; but when a pulpit takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and the worth of just as legitimate an instrument of God as itself, who spent a long life preaching from the stage the self-same gospel with out the alteration of a single sentiment or a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well, to protest. And having protested, it is also fair and just—being driven to it, as it were—to whisper to the Sabine pattern of clergyman, under the breath, a simple, instructive truth, and say, "Ministers are not the only servants of God upon earth. nor His most efficient ones either, by a very, very long distance!" Sensible ministers already know this, and it may do the other kind good to find it out.
But to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again, was it not pitiable, that spectacle? Honored and honorable old George Holland, whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brim full of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile!
THE GALAXY, April 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[VALEDICTORY—I have written for THE GALAXY a year. For the last eight months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet all the time been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter once a month for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity of the occasion.]
[The MEMORANDA will cease permanently with this issue of the magazine. To be a pirate, on a low salary, and with no share in the profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in a cheerless time is drearier.]
[So much by way of explanation and apology to the reader of any obtrusive lack of humorousness that may have been noticed in my humorousness department during the year. At last I am free of the doctors and watchers, and am so exalted in spirits that I will cut this final MEMORANDA very short and go off and enjoy the new state of things. I will put it to pleasant and diligent use in writing a book. I would not print any MEMORANDA at all this month, but the following short sketch has dropped from my pen of its own accord and without any compulsion from me, and so it may as well go in. As I shall write but little for periodicals hereafter, it seems to fit in with a sort of inoffensive appropriateness here, since it is a record of the first scribbling for any sort of periodical I ever had the temerity to attempt.]
I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen—an unusually smart child, I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in the community. It did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too. I was a printer's "devil," and a progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars a year in advance—five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, and unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try! Higgins was the editor in the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could no longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore! He had concluded he wouldn't. The village was full of it for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine opportunity. I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and then illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden type with a jack-knife—one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of gratuitous rascality and "see him squirm." I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the Burial of "Sir John Moore"—and a pretty crude parody it was, too. Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously—not because they had done anything to deserve it, but merely because I thought it was my duty to make the paper lively. Next I gently touched up the newest stranger—the lion of the day, the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb of the first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the State. He was an inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy "poetry" for the "Journal," about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed, "To MARY IN H—L," meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But while setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I compressed it into a snappy foot-note at the bottom—thus—"We will let this thing pass, just this once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly that we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth when he wants to commune with his friends in h—l, he must select some other medium than the columns of this journal!"
The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much attention as those playful trifles of mine. For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand—a novelty it had not experienced before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped in with a double-barrelled shot-gun early in the forenoon. When he found that it was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the damage, he simply pulled my ears and went away; but he threw up his situation that night and left town for good. The tailor came with his goose and a pair of shears; but he despised me too, and departed for the South that night. The two lampooned citizens came with threats of libel, and went away incensed at my insignificance. The country editor pranced in with a warwhoop next day, suffering for blood to drink; but he ended by forgiving me cordially and inviting me down to the drug store to wash away all animosity in a friendly bumper of "Fahnestock's Vermifuge." It was his little joke.
My uncle was very angry when he got back—unreasonably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had given the paper, and considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to have been uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so wonderfully escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head shot off. But he softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had actually booked the unparalleled number of thirty- three new subscribers, and had the vegetables to show for it, cordwood, cabbage, beans, and unsalable turnips enough to run the family for two years!
THE GALAXY, April 1871
MEMORANDA.
BY MARK TWAIN.
Being a Sandwich Island Reminiscence.
[On second thoughts I will extend my MEMORANDA a little, and insert the following chapter from the book I am writing. It will serve to show that the volume is not going to be merely entertaining, but will be glaringly instructive as well. I have related one or two of these incidents before lecture audiences but have never printed any of them before.—M.T.]
I had barely finished when this person spoke out with rapid utterance and feverish anxiety:
"Oh, that was certainly remarkable, after a fashion, but you ought to have seen my chimney—you ought to have seen my chimney, sir! Smoke! Humph! I wish I may hang if—Mr. Jones, you remember that chimney—you must remember that chimney! No, no—I recollect, now, you warn't living on this side of the island then. But I am telling you nothing but the truth, and I wish I may never draw another breath if that chimney didn't smoke so that the smoke actually got caked in it and I had to dig it out with a pickaxe! You may smile, gentlemen, but the High Sheriff's got a hunk of it which I dug out before his eyes, and so it's perfectly easy for you to go and examine for yourselves."
The interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to lag, and we presently hired some natives and an out-rigger canoe or two, and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest.
Two weeks after this, while talking in a company, I looked up and detected this same man boring through and through me with his intense eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to speak. The moment I paused, he said:
"Beg your pardon, sir, beg your pardon, but it can only be considered remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation. Sir, contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it instantly becomes commonplace. No, not that—for I will not speak so discourteously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a gentleman—but I am obliged to say that you could not, and you would not ever again refer to this tree as a large one, if you could behold, as I have, the great Yakmatack tree, in the island of Ounaska, sea of Kamtchatka—a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen feet in solid diameter!—and I wish I may die in a minute if it isn't so! Oh, you needn't look so questioning, gentlemen; here's old Cap Saltmarsh can say whether I know what I'm talking about or not. I showed him the tree."
Captain Saltmarsh.—"Come, now, cat your anchor, lad—you're heaving too taut. You promised to show me that stunner, and I walked more than eleven mile with you through the cussedest aggravatingest jungle I ever see, a hunting for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn't as big around as a beer cask, and you know that your own self, Markiss."
"Hear the man talk! Of course the tree was reduced that way, but didn't I explain it? Answer me, didn't I? Didn't I say I wished you could have seen it when I first saw it? When you got up on your ear and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling, didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years? And did you s'pose the tree could last forever, confound it? I don't see why you want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a person that's never done you any harm."
Somehow this man's presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands, desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found trespassing on his grounds.
I think it was about ten days afterward that, as I finished a statement I was making for the instruction of a group of friends and acquaintances, and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a familiar voice chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and said:
"But, my dear sir, there was nothing remarkable about that horse, or the circumstance either—nothing in the world! I mean no sort of offence when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about speed. Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margaretta; there was a beast!—there was lightning for you! Trot! Trot is no name for it—she flew! How she could whirl a buggy along! I started her out once, sir—Colonel Bilgewater, you recollect that animal perfectly well—I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the awfullest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of eighteen miles! It did, by the everlasting hills! And I'm telling you nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single drop of rain, fell on me—not a single drop, sir! And I swear to it! But my dog was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!"
For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet this person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me. But one evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a sociable time. About ten o'clock I chanced to be talking about a merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying workmen. Instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot—and for a moment I trembled on the imminent verge of profanity:
"Oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade that as a surprising circumstance. Bless your heart and hide, you are ignorant of the very A B C of meanness! ignorant as the unborn babe! ignorant as unborn twins! You don't know anything about it! It is pitiable to see you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is perfectly ghastly! Look me in the eye, if you please; look me in the eye. John James Godfrey was the son of poor but honest parents in the State of Mississippi—boyhood friend of mine—bosom comrade in later years. Heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now. John James Godfrey was hired by the Hayblossom Mining Company in California to do some blasting for them—the "Incorporated Company of Mean Men," the boys used to call it. Well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an awful blast of powder, and was standing over it ramming it down with an iron crowbar about nine foot long, when the cussed thing struck a spark and fired the powder, and scat! away John Godfrey whizzed like a sky rocket, him and his crow bar! Well, sir, he kept on going up in the air higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a boy—and he kept going on up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a doll—and he kept on going up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a little small bee—and then he went out of sight! Presently he came in sight again, looking like a little small bee—and he came along down further and further, till he looked as big as a doll again—and down further and further, till he was as big as a boy again—and further and further, till he was a full-sized man once more; and then him and his crowbar came a wh-izzing down and lit right exactly in the same old tracks and went to r-ramming down, and r-ramming down, and r-ramming down again, just the same as if nothing had happened! Now do you know, that poor cuss warn't gone only sixteen minutes, and yet that Incorporated Company of Mean Men DOCKED HIM FOR THE LOST TIME!"
I said I had the headache, and so excused myself and went home. And on my diary I entered "another night spoiled" by this offensive loafer. And a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company. And the very next day I packed up, out of all patience, and left the Islands.
Almost from the very beginning, I regarded that man as a liar.
*****
The line of points represents an interval of years. At the end of which time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons. The man Markiss was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom (the doors and windows securely fastened on the inside), dead; and on his breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to suspect no innocent person of having anything to do with his death, for that it was the work of his own hands entirely. Yet the jury brought in the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death "by the hands of some person or persons unknown!" They explained that the perfectly undeviating consistency of Markiss's character for thirty years towered aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as a lie. And they further stated their belief that he was not dead, and instanced strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he was dead—and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as possible, which was done. And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him up. But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to "suicide induced by mental aberration"—because, said they, with penetration, "he said he was dead, and he was dead; and would he have told the truth if he had been in his right mind? No, sir."
THE GALAXY CLUB-ROOM, August 1871
All things change except barbers, the ways of barbers, and the surroundings of barbers. These never change. What one experiences in a barber shop the first time he enters one, is what he always experiences in barber shops afterward till the end of his days. I got shaved this morning as usual. A man approached the door from Jones street as I approached it from Main—a thing that always happens. I hurried up, but it was of no use; he entered the door one little step ahead of me, and I followed in on his heels and saw him take the only vacant chair, the one presided over by the best barber. It always happens so. I sat down, hoping that I might fall heir to the chair belonging to the better of the remaining two barbers, for he had already begun combing his man's hair, while his comrade was not yet quite done rubbing up and oiling his customer's locks. I watched the probabilities with strong interest. When I saw that No. 2 was gaining on No. 1, my interest grew to solicitude. When No. 1 stopped a moment to make change on a bath ticket for a new-comer, and lost ground in the race, my solicitude rose to anxiety. When No. 1 caught up again, and both he and his comrade were pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customers' cheeks, and it was about an even thing which one would say "Next!" first, my very breath stood still with the suspense. But when, at the final culminating moment, No. 1 stopped to pass a comb a couple of times through his customer's eye brows, I saw that he had lost the race by a single instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop, to keep from falling into the hands of No. 2; for I have none of that enviable firmness that enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he will wait for his fellow barber's chair. I stayed out fifteen minutes, and then went back, hoping for better luck. Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting, silent, unsociable, distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who are awaiting their turn in a barber's shop. I sat down in one of the iron-armed compartments of an old sofa, and put in the time for a while, reading the framed advertisements of all sorts of quack nostrums for dyeing and coloring the hair. Then I read the greasy names on the private bay rum bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the private shaving cups in the pigeon-holes; studied the stained and damaged cheap prints on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and voluptuous, recumbent sultanas, and the tiresome and ever lasting young girl putting her grandfather's spectacles on; execrated in my heart the cheerful canary and the distracting parrot that few barber shops are without. Finally, I searched out the least dilapidated of the last year's illustrated papers that littered the foul centre-table, and conned their unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events. At last my turn came. A voice said "Next!" and I surrendered to—No. 2 of course. It always happens so. I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it. He shoved up my head and put a napkin under it. He ploughed his fingers into my collar and fixed a towel there. He explored my hair with his claws and suggested that it needed trimming. I said I did not want it trimmed. He explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style—better have a little taken off; it needed it behind, especially. I said I had had it cut only a week before. He yearned over it reflectively a moment, and then asked, with a disparaging manner, who cut it. I came back at him promptly with a "You did!" I had him there. Then he fell to stirring up his lather and regarding himself in the glass, stopping now and then to get close and examine his chin critically or torture a pimple. Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the other, when a dog fight attracted his attention, and he ran to the window and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction. He finished lathering, meantime getting the brush into my mouth only twice, and then began to rub in the suds with his hand; and as he now had his head turned, discussing the dog fight with the other barbers, he naturally shovelled considerable lather into my mouth without knowing it, but I did. He now began to sharpen his razor on an old suspender, and was delayed a good deal on account of a controversy about a cheap masquerade ball he had figured at the night before, in red cambric and bogus ermine, as some kind of a king. He was so gratified with being chaffed about some damsel whom he had smitten, with his charms, that he used every means to continue the controversy by pretending to be annoyed at the chaffings of his fellows. This matter begot more surveyings of himself in the glass, and he put down his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care, plastering an inverted arch of it down on his forehead, accomplishing an accurate "part" behind, and brushing the two wings forward over his ears with nice exactness. In the mean time the lather was drying on my face, and apparently eating into my vitals. Now he began to shave, digging his fingers into my countenance to stretch the skin, making a handle of my nose now and then, bundling and tumbling my head this way and that as convenience in shaving demanded, and "hawking" and expectorating pleasantly all the while. As long as he was on the tough sides of my face I did not suffer; but when he began to rake, and rip, and tug at my chin, the tears came. I did not mind his getting so close down to me; I did not mind his garlic, because all barbers eat garlic, I suppose; but there was an added something that made me fear that he was decaying inwardly while still alive, and this gave me much concern. He now put his finger into my mouth to assist him in shaving the corners of my upper lip, and it was by this bit of circumstantial evidence that I discovered that a part of his duties in the shop was to clean the kerosene lamps. I had often wondered in an indolent way whether the barbers did that, or whether it was the boss. About this time I was amusing myself trying to guess where he would be most likely to cut me this time, but he got ahead of me and sliced me on the end of the chin before I had got my mind made up. He immediately sharpened his razor—he might have done it before. I do not like a close shave, and would not let him go over me a second time. I tried to get him to put up his razor, dreading that he would make for the side of my chin, my pet tender spot, a place which a razor cannot touch twice without making trouble. But he said he only wanted to just smooth off one little roughness, and in that same moment he slipped his razor along the forbidden ground, and the dreaded pimple-signs of a close shave rose up smarting and answered to the call. Now he soaked his towel in bay rum, and slapped it all over my face nastily; slapped it over as if a human being ever yet washed his face in that way. Then he dried it by slapping with the dry part of the towel, as if a human being ever dried his face in such a fashion; but a barber seldom rubs you like a Christian. Next he poked bay rum into the cut place with his towel, then choked the wound with powdered starch, then soaked it with bay rum again, and would have gone on soaking and powdering it for evermore, no doubt, if I had not rebelled and begged off. He powdered my whole face now, straightened me up and began to plough my hair thoughtfully with his hands and examine his fingers critically. Then he suggested a shampoo, and said my hair needed it badly, very badly. I observed that I had shampooed it myself very thoroughly in the bath yesterday. I "had him" again. He next recommended some of "Smith's Hair Glorifier," and offered to sell me a bottle. I declined. He praised the new perfume, "Jones's Delight of the Toilet," and proposed to sell me some of that. I declined again. He tendered me a tooth-wash atrocity of his own invention, and when I declined, offered to trade knives with me. He returned to business after the miscarriage of this last enterprise, sprinkled me all over, legs and all, greased my hair in defiance of my protests against it, rubbed and scrubbed a good deal of it out by the roots, and combed and brushed the rest, parting it behind and plastering the eternal inverted arch of hair down on my forehead, and then, while combing my scant eyebrows and defiling them with pomade, strung out an account of the achievements of a six-ounce black and tan terrier of his till I heard the whistles blow for noon, and knew I was five minutes too late for the train. Then he snatched away the towel, brushed it lightly about my face, passed his comb through my eyebrows once more, and gayly sang out "Next!"
This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later. I am waiting over a day for my revenge—I am going to attend his funeral.
Admit bad women into private rooms in one of the Departments
Allegory of unconditional surrender
Almighty, of a necessity, thinks exactly as he does
Altogether unnecessary energy and enthusiasm
ARREST OF ANOTHER OF THE ROBBING GANG
ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF A DETECTIVE OFFICER
Be good, so that God wil not make me one
BEARDING THE FENIAN IN HIS LAIR
BURGLARY—THE BURGLAR CAUGHT IN THE ACT
BURNING OF THE CLIPPER SHIP HORNET AT SEA
Can't keep my temper in New York
Cannot be healthy to have them around
Cannot go anywhere in New York in an hour
Cats enough for three apiece all around
CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG, AND OTHER SKETCHES
CHARGE AGAINST A POLICE OFFICER
Cheaper tospend three weeks at sea
Chivalrous wholesale butcheries
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION IN WARM QUARTERS
CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR
Conduct ourselves that when we come to die we can do it.
Confidence is the mainstay of every class of commercial enterpri
CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRACY AND SECESSION AFFILIATIONS
Couching treason in loyal phrases
day was generally disagreeable
DEDICATION OF BUSH STREET SCHOOL
DEMOCRATIC MEETING AT HAYES' PARK
DEMOCRATIC RATIFICATION MEETING
Dignified poverty is thoroughly respectable
Edit one issue of the paper judiciously
Evasion of the law, but not in violation of it.
Except when permitted to have her own way
EXPLOSION OF THE STEAMER WASHOE
Fatal to be noticed by greatness
Father and I were always on the most distant terms
FAVORS FROM CORRESPONDENTS 1 2
Fish in Lake Tahoe are not troublesome
Foot-prints they make on the brick pavements
Foreigners all spell better than they pronounce
FREE-AND-EASY FASHIONS OF NATIVE WOMEN
FRIGHTFUL ACCIDENT TO DAN DE QUILLE
GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN 1 2 3
GRAND FETE-DAY AT THE CLIFF HOUSE
great disadvantage when he loses his temper
HERO OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL BOOKS
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick
HOW THEY DID IN ANCIENT TIMES—FUNERALS
Hugging the bugbear of martyrdom
HUNGER DRIVETH TO DESPERATE ENTERPRISES
INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE FOR STOCKTON
INSPECTION OF THE FORTIFICATIONS
Justifiable homicide by an insane person
Kiss for old acquaintance sake
Knew where a display of heroism would be safe
Lonely in the midst of a million of his race
Manner is everything in these cases
MARRIAGE OF THE RUNAWAY COUPLE
Matrimony will be brought within the reach of all
Meagreness that would make a parasol blush
meaning well and doing well are two very different things
MISSIONARIES WANTED FOR SAN FRANCISCO
Mother's admonitions to her son.
Native canoe is an irresponsible looking contrivance
Not in his right mind at the time, and hardly ever is.
One's afraid and 't'other dar'n't
Oyster beds in New York Harbor
People who collect money for benevolent purposes
policemen were as smart as they could afford to be for $125 a month
praises all alike—makes no distinction.
prose which is spelled atrociously
Purloiner of other men's ideas and handicraft
Pushed over the Yo Semite Falls
RACE FOR THE OCCIDENTAL HOTEL PREMIUM
Refreshing to see men break laws so coolly whose sole business
REMINISCENCE OF THE BACK SETTLEMENTS
Return of the Sutro Tunnel from Europe.
Rewards are conferred for conniving at dishonesty
RUINS OF AN ANCIENT HEATHEN TEMPLE
Rushing into print, like mediocrity the world over
SAD ACCIDENT—DEATH OF JEROME RICE
Samson, and whether suicide was a sin or not
Saving the country all the time
Scared in the direction of heaven
SEVERAL EFFECTS OF THE TURBULENT SEA
Sivinty-foive dollars for stooffin' Dan
smart as they could afford to be
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
Some differences of opinion that we cannot tolerate
stabbed Ah Wong "not too litty, not too much,"
Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper
STRIKE OF THE STEAMER EMPLOYEES
Success is possible, though there are chances against it.
Telegrams offering support and encouragement
Tranquil simplicity of self conceit
Trivial reminiscences out of his insignificant history
Two earthquakes a month was not considered in the salary
Veterans of Grant, Sherman and Sheridan
Waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity
Weighted down with the wisdom of an infant
What diseases do they die of mostly?
WHAT HAVE THE POLICE BEEN DOING?
What the owner wanted to throw it away for
When rogues fall out, honest men get their dues
WHILE WE WERE MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
Who can decide when Doctors disagree?
Who had never prayed in their lives before
Wholesomely execrable and exasperating.
Write some "pieces" and take them down to the editor
Write without pay until somebody offers pay
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