Twain in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

“Salad Days of Mark Twain” (1893)

[25] === “Salad Days of Mark Twain” (1893) Dan De Quille Twain and his fellows enjoyed rollicking lives on the Comstock, as Dan De Quille remembered. “Much of my conduct on the Pacific Coast was not of a character to recommend me to the respectful regard of a high eastern civilization,” Twain conceded several years later to his future father-in-law, Jervis Langdon (1809–70), “but it was not considered blameworthy there, perhaps. We go according to our lights” (Mark Twain’s Letters 2:357). He learned to duel with a foil—this a decade before he observed fencing at a fraternity party in Heidelberg. He perpetrated hoaxes in the pages of the Territorial Enterprise that earned him a local reputation as a practical joker. Two of the hoaxes De Quille mentions in this piece have been recovered: “Petrified Man” (4 October 1862) and “Frightful Accident to Dan De Quille” (20 April 1864). Moreover, when Charles Farrar Browne, aka Artemus Ward (1834–67), visited Virginia City in November 1863, Twain struck up a friendship with the famous humorist. He crossed paths with the actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–68), best known for her scandalous role in Mazeppa in which she appeared on stage in a flesh-colored body stocking. “The Menken” arrived in Virginia City on 27 February 1864, in company with her husband (the third of four), Robert Henry Newell, aka the humorist Orpheus C. Kerr (1836–1901). De Quille remembered in particular a dinner party he attended with Menken, Twain, and the American poet and actor Ada Clare, aka Jane McElhinney (1834–74)—while Newell strutted and fretted in the hallway outside the hotel room. Later, after drifting to San Francisco, Twain announced in “A Full and Reliable Account of the Extraordinary Meteoric Shower of Last Saturday Night” (Californian, 19 November 1864) that “the whole constellation of the Great Menken came flaming out of the heavens like a vast spray of gas-jets, and shed a glory abroad over the universe as it fell!” Some of Menken ’s vers libre, written under the influence if not in the style of Walt Whitman, appeared in both the Territorial Enterprise and the Californian. Much of her poetry was collected in Infelicia (1868), published two weeks after she died in Paris at the age of thirty-three. [26] the comstock was young when I first met Mark Twain in the editorial rooms of the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City. We were both young then, and the world seemed young and teeming to overflowing with wealth. The whole country was booming, and the Enterprise was booming equally with all else. It was undoubtedly at the time the most flourishing newspaper on the Pacific Coast. A tribal wave of gold rolled in upon its proprietors. The paper seemed to run itself—and in doing so ran all connected with it. It seemed to take the lead and go right along without thought or care on the part of anyone. All there was to do was to pile into the paper all the news it would hold. The money to pay for everything seemed to besiege the office. Mark Twain and I were employed in the local department of the Enterprise , and there was no lack of matters of interest in our line. Improvements of all kinds, new discoveries in the mines, accidents, cutting and shooting affrays, fires and all manner of exciting events crowded themselves upon us. However, we went merrily along, joking and laughing, and never feeling the weight of the work we were doing in the whirl and excitement of the times. Soon after we began working together Mark and I rented two rooms on the second floor of a large brick building on B street erected by R. M. Daggett and his partner W. F. Myers, the well-known operator in mining stocks. We had a large bedroom and a somewhat smaller room for use as a parlor or sitting room. Joseph T. Goodman, editor and one-third owner of the Enterprise, bossed the job of furnishing these rooms, and piled into them several hundred dollars’ worth of stuff. Mark said that as Goodman had been “so keen to do the ordering” of the things, we’d “just let him foot the bill.” So, whenever the furniture man—good old Moses Goldman—came after us with his bill, we laughed at him, and referred him to Goodman. But one day old Moses sued us and...