88 Days Research notes
San Francisco Morning Call - One of the paper's early writers was Mark Twain, who served as Nevada correspondent in 1863 and as reporter after he moved to San Francisco the following year. In just over four months as full time beat reporter, Twain produced some 200 articles on crime and the courts, theater and the opera, and politics.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94052989/
Territorial Enterprise - Virginia City, 1862 http://www.territorial-enterprise.com/tee.htm
"What is certain is that on May 29, 1864 the failed prospector who had come to Virginia City as Samuel Clemens departed as Mark Twain. Although still poor in pocket -- for none of his mining speculation while working for the Enterprise had panned out -- he had located and begun to mine his own rich vein of literary ore. The twenty months he held spent on the Enterprise had helped him discover himself -- his dual self. The paper had given scope to his native gifts as a storyteller and humorist. In its pages he began to perfect the style, personal as well as literary, that would make him an international celebrity and America's most enduring author. The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, it can be said with justice, gave Mark Twain to the world."
Interviewees:
Jim Fletcher - Interviewed 3/25 in Virginia City and 3/27 in Angels Camp
James E. Caron - UoH Professor. Interview in Salem, Oregon on Monday July 28th. Talk about Washoe Mark Twain, debunk Virginia City origin of name
William Handley - USC Professor. Not available
Rob Gordon - Senior Researcher, Tuolumne County Historical Society - Interviewed Thursday 3/27
Dave Tenis(sp?) - Lives on Jackass Hill - contact during 3/23 filming week - - Mr. Tenis passed away the first week of March
Gregg Camfield - UC Merced Professor - Sent email 7/23 - no response
UC Davis woman - still trying to contact - .
Michelle Gordon - USC Associate Professor - Interviewed on campus at USC on 7/21. E-mail: [email protected]
Victor A. Fischer - UC Berkeley Bancroft Library - E-mail: [email protected].
Gun Research
In 1861 as he is traveling by stage across the country to Carson City, he describes his revolver (in Roughing It) as a Smith and Wesson seven shooter which makes it a Smith & Wesson Model 1.
When he arrives in Virginia City a year later in September 1862 he says he has a "universal navy revolver" which is most likely a 1851 Navy Colt or an 1861 Navy Colt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colt_Navy_Model_1851.JPG (My guess is that it would be an 1851 Navy Colt, which was very popular)
Suicide
Apparently he talks of suicide several times during low points in his life. He himself recalls a period in 1866, but in an 1865 letter to his brother and sister (see timeline below) he writes "pistols or poison - exit me". Could he have contemplated suicide during his "slinking" period? If he pawned everything except the clothes he had on - does he still have the Navy revolver?
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Twain-s-most-chilling-time-was-a-fall-in-San-2826065.php
On 21 April 1909, in a marginal note in his copy of the Letters of James Russell Lowell, Clemens recalled an “experience of 1866” when “I put the pistol to my head but wasn’t man enough to pull the trigger. Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed, but I was never ashamed of having tried. Suicide is the only really sane thing the young or the old ever do in this life” (SLC 1909, 1:375). This attempt must have come no later than the first days of 1866. Surely by 20 January, when he boasted of his literary success to his mother and sister and outlined an array of short- and long-term literary projects, Clemens was no longer disposed to consider “Self-Murder.”
Rough Timeline
14 August 1861 - Arrives in Carson City
September 1862 - Arrives in Virginia City
"He reached Virginia City in September 1862, in his own estimation a "rusty looking" specimen, "coatless, slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt." (Can we get Tom to read this? I will find the source.)
3 February 1863 - Signs a newspaper article for the first time as Mark Twain at The Territorial Enterprise
22 December 1863 - Artemus Ward comes to Virginia City to lecture (stays longer than planned - he and Clemens are cut from same cloth?)
June 1864 - Arrives in San Francisco No letters have been discovered for the next eleven months. As 1864 drew to a close Clemens continued to eke out an existence on the $12.00 or $12.50 per article he received from The California. Since he published only three articles at this time, on 12 November, 19 November, and 3 December (see ET&S2, 108–33), his circumstances must have been straitened indeed. According to the chronology Clemens established in Roughing It, in early December 1864 he was coming to the end of his “slinking” period:
For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board. I became a very adept at “slinking.” I slunk from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar, I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I slunk to my bed. I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the worms. During all this time I had but one piece of money—a silver ten cent piece—and I held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was entirely penniless, might suggest suicide. I had pawned every thing but the clothes I had on; so I clung to my dime desperately, till it was smooth with handling. (Roughing It, chapter 59)
30 November 1864 - 29th birthday
1 December 1864 - lives in San Francisco at 44 Minna Street in a boarding house run by Martha Gillis - leaves for Sonora/Jackass Hill by steamer/stagecoach through Stockton
4 December 1864 - arrives in Jackass Hill with $300 in his pocket http://www.authorama.com/boys-life-of-mark-twain-24.html
December 4, 1864 was a Sunday and steamers and coaches didn't run on Sundays. He had to leave S.F. earlier than December 3rd. December 2 - overnight boat to Stockton, December 3 - Day stage to Sonora, December 4 - arrive at JH.
31 December 1864 - Spends New Year's Eve in Vallecitos with Jim Gillis
22 January 1865 - Travels from Jackass Hill to Angels Camp
8 February 1865 - Attends Masonic meeting in Angels Camp
20 February 1865 - Returns to Jackass Hill
23 February 1865 - Leaves for San Francisco via Copperopolis and Stockton
26 February 1865 - Arrives Occidental Hotel in San Francisco
8 October 1865 - Writes about a 6.5 earthquake in San Francisco
18 October 1865 - Sends Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog story to Artemus Ward
19 October 1865 - A letter to Orion and Mollie, in pencil on the back: Friday--Have just got your letter. The “prospects” are infernal, Mollie. “Confidence” is down low. I saved on the Ophir $25, [but ] not losing the $100 assessment I would have had to pay had I held it a few days longer. All stocks have their day, & “Confidence” will, too—I did want to wait on one stock till its day[arrived, but ]your prospects do not look encouraging.5 [ Go on, I ]I read all your sermons—and I shall continue to read them, but of course as unsympathetically as a man of stone. I have a religion—but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.
You are in trouble, & in debt—so am I. I am utterly miserable—so are you.K◇e Perhaps your religion will sustain you, will feed you—I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect—neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck. If I do not get out of debt in 3 months,—pistols or poison for one—exit me. {There’s a text for a sermon on [Self-Murder—Proceed.}] 6
18 November 1865 - The Jumping Frog is published by the New York Saturday Press
Early 1866 - Starts working for the Sacramento Union which was then located in a brick building, which still stands today, at 121 J Street (Old Town Sacramento)
March 1866 - Takes steamship Ajax to Sandwich Islands (Note: The Ajax only makes two trips to Hawaii - they're not profitable. Twain is on the second voyage.) He's a correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, the largest newspaper on the West Coast.
13 August 1866 - arrives by sailing ship back in San Francisco
2 October 1866 - First lecture - Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco - Sacramento (11 October), Marysville (15 October), Grass Valley (20 October), Nevada City (23 October), Red Dog (24 October), and You Bet (25 October), http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Early_San_Francisco_Theater
30 October 1866 - Gives a lecture in Virginia City
15 December 1866 - Sails for New York
Notes in his journal In Mark Twain's old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story—a mere casual entry of its main features:
"Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, and C. got him one:—in the mean time stranger filled C.‘s frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won."
It seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame. The hills along the Stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no other of such size as that.
The Daniels Sisters:
Billy Gillis in 1924 recalls:
When we got there Sam suggested that we take a walk, and so we started out. We knew of some late clingstone peaches growing on Black Creek, two miles away, so we walked over and got some. When he started back Mol[lie] said, “I know a trail through the chemisal that will cut off half the distance.” So we took it, and went a long way before we discovered that we were lost. We had to get down on our hands and knees and crawl through the chaparral. Then we decided to give up and go back and around the long way.
It was nearly midnight when we got home, and Mrs. Daniels was furious. She gave us a good tongue lashing, and she directed most of it at Sam. He said: “Mrs. Daniels, it wasn’t my fault, it was Billie’s fault[.]” She said:
“Mr. Clemens, Mr. Gillis has been walking with the girls a hundred times, and this never happened before. Besides, you are older and ought to have better sense.”
“I’m very sorry,” Sam said, “and I promise you it won’t happen again. But now we are tired and hungry. We are almost starved.”
“Well, you’ll get nothing to eat in this house tonight!” said Mrs. Daniels.
Just then Sam saw Miss Nellie’s guitar in a corner of the room. He picked it up and began playing, and presently he sang “Fly Away Moth” and then “Araby’s Daughter.” He sang very softly. Mrs. Daniels listened, and presently her face softened. When he was through she left the room and went out in the kitchen. In a few minutes we heard a chicken squawk, and a little later we fell to on hot biscuit and fried chicken and coffee.
As we were walking home Sam said to me: “Billie, you’ve read the old saying, ‘music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.’ You’ve seen how it soothed that savage old lady. If you have any talent for music, cultivate it.” (West, 18)
Twain writes in "The Innocents Adrift" in 1891 -“Chapparal Quails.” That was their pet name in the mountains where they lived. They were sisters, seventeen & eighteen years old, respectively; beautiful creatures, clean-minded, good-hearted, well meaning, favorites with old & young; yet they could outswear Satan. It was the common speech of that remote & thinly settled region, they had come by it naturally, & if there was any harm in it they were not aware of it.
Is this any help anywhere: http://books.google.com/books?id=uaPuYNV_qa0C&pg=RA1-PT137&lpg=RA1-PT137&dq=%22sylvan+paradise%22+mark+twain&source=bl&ots=iZ3GRDrpmk&sig=HREl4S-6eOU5-bseXXKTE3svPkM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=G7VbU5S5AcGSyATskYHoAg&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22sylvan%20paradise%22%20mark%20twain&f=false
http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/MTLN00112.xml;query=dime;searchAll=;sectionType1=;sectionType2=;sectionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;;brand=mtp#1
Images of San Francisco Waterfront: http://www.sfimages.com/history/Embarcadero-Waterfront.html
Character research
Artemus Ward - pseudonym of Charles Farrar Browne 1834-1867
(born April 26, 1834, Waterford, Maine, U.S.—died March 6, 1867, Southampton, Hampshire, Eng.), one of the most popular 19th-century American humorists, whose lecture techniques exercised much influence on such humorists as Mark Twain.Starting as a printer’s apprentice, Browne went to Boston to work as a compositor for The Carpet-Bag, a humour magazine. In 1860, after several years as local editor for the Toledo (Ohio) Commercial and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he became staff writer for Vanity Fair in New York. While working on the Plain Dealer, Browne created the character Artemus Ward, the manager of an itinerant sideshow who “commented” on a variety of subjects in letters to the Plain Dealer, Punch, and Vanity Fair. The most obvious features of his humour are puns and gross misspellings. In 1861 Browne turned to lecturing under the pseudonym Artemus Ward. Though his books were popular, it was his lecturing, delivered with deadpan expression, that brought him fame. His works include Artemus Ward: His Book (1862); Artemus Ward: His Travels (1865); and Artemus Ward in London (1867).
Ward is also said to have inspired Mark Twain when Ward performed in Virginia City, Nevada. Legend has it that, following Ward's stage performance, he, Mark Twain, and Dan De Quille were taking a drunken rooftop tour of Virginia City until a town constable threatened to blast all three of them with a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Pictures of Ward at the time show him with a bushy mustache, which Clemens grew after meeting him. Did Clemens want to be Ward, but knew that he wasn't "worldly" or "traveled" enough?
http://www.authorama.com/boys-life-of-mark-twain-23.html
Jim Gillis - 1830 -1907 - http://www.authorama.com/boys-life-of-mark-twain-24.html
James Norman Gillis (1830–1907) was a native of Georgia. In 1848 he received a diploma from the Botanico-Medical College in Memphis, Tennessee, which trained practitioners of herbal medicine. The following year he arrived in San Francisco and set off for the gold mines of Calaveras County. After two years of mining, he began ranching near Sacramento, continuing at that for most of the succeeding eleven years. In 1862 he moved to Tuolumne County, where he settled in a cabin on Jackass Hill, near Tuttletown, and resumed mining. He spent the rest of his life in the area, except for occasional visits to San Francisco, where his parents lived and in the mid-1860s were acquainted with Clemens. According to Dan De Quille (William Wright), Jim Gillis was the “Thoreau of the Sierras,” a devoted naturalist who was “not only a thorough English scholar, but also well versed in Greek and Latin.” He was, in addition, acknowledged to be the most expert and successful pocket miner in California—indeed he is the father of all the pocket mines. He was the first to discover the laws that govern that kind of mining and reduce the business to a science. He now has eight mines running in California and every one paying. (William Wright 1891)
It was while visiting San Francisco late in 1864 that Gillis met Clemens, who already knew his younger brother Steve (1838–1918). In financial straits, Clemens was anxious to avoid having to honor a $500 bail bond he had posted for Steve, who had been arrested for injuring a bartender in a fight and had fled to Nevada to avoid prosecution. He therefore accompanied Jim Gillis to his cabin on Jackass Hill. Joined also by Gillis’s partner, Dick Stoker, and the youngest Gillis brother, William (1840–1929), he spent much of the next three months there and in nearby Angel’s Camp (“James N. Gillis—His Life and Death,” Sonora [Calif.] Sierra Times, 14 Apr 1907, clipping in CU-MARK; Fulton, 54–55; Gillis, 53–58; De Ferrari 1964, 107–8; Evans et al.; Norwood, 416–19; L1, 313–14 n. 3). Clemens described his visit to the region in chapters 60 and 61 of Roughing It, making one character, a miner “who had had a university education,” a loose amalgam of Gillis and Stoker, and recreating Gillis’s tall tale about Dick Baker and his cat, Tom Quartz (RI 1993, 412–20, 703–5).
William Gillis - 1840 - 1929
"Getting into Tuttletown at a rather late hour one night on my way home from Sonora, I found a party of half a dozen young men who had been serenading their lady friends in the neighborhood. I suggested that they go with me to Jackass Hill and end the night’s program with a serenade to Mark Twain. They readily fell in with my suggestion and we climbed the hill together, and, after our chief musician had tuned up his “old banjo,” lined up under Mark’s window, and opened up with “Oh, Darkies, hab you seen Ole Massa?”
We had finished this song and “Happy Land O’Canaan” and were well under way with “I’se Gwine to de Shuckin,” when that window went up with a bang, and an angry, rasping voice snarled out, “What do you lot of yapping coyotes mean by disturbing the peace and quiet of the respectable people on the hill with that infernal yowling you’re doing out there? Get away from this window, you drunken loafers, and go off to that shuckin you’re howling about, and go right now.”
This rude reception, it is needless to say, put an abrupt ending to our serenade and my companions left the hill on the double quick. On entering the cabin I found Mark sitting on the side of the bed, cramming his pipe with “Bull Durham” tobacco. “Hello, Sam,” said I, “going to have a smoke?”
At my salutation he looked at me with an ugly scowl and greeted me with, “Billy, how did you come to get drunk tonight, and bring that gang of low down rowdies on the hill, to make the night hideous with their horrible racket? Up to this time I have regarded you as a well-behaved, behaved, decent young fellow with instincts somewhat approaching those of a gentleman but I have been wakened from that dream tonight to find you nothing but a common, wine guzzling hoodlum.” (William R. Gillis, 38–39)"
Stephen Gillis - 1838 - 1918
Clemens’s good friend Stephen E. Gillis was raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, where he was trained as a typesetter. He came to San Francisco with several family members in 1853 and, except for stints as a newspaper editor in Oregon and Arizona, worked on various newspapers there until the end of the decade. When Clemens joined the Virginia City Enterprise in 1862, Gillis was the paper’s foreman. Equally adept as foreman, compositor, and writer, he spent most of the next thirty years as a news editor, first of the Enterprise and then of the Virginia City Chronicle. In 1894 he removed to Jackass Hill, California, where he lived with his brothers James and William until his death (William R. Gillis, 7, 19–20, 22, 26–28, 34–35; West, 18). Well known as a scrappy fighter, Gillis acted as Clemens’s second during the present dispute with the Union and also attempted to become directly involved himself (see 21 May 64 to Laird [9:00 p.m.], n. 2). (Had a son names James Gillis.)
Jacob Richard (Dick) Stoker - 1820 - 1898
Gillis’s partner and cabinmate, was originally from Kentucky. In 1849, after fighting in the Mexican War, he joined the gold rush, settling on Jackass Hill, where he spent the rest of his life as a pocket miner (RI 1993, 704–5). Stoker was Clemens’s prototype for Dick Baker, owner of the cat Tom Quartz, in chapter 61 of Roughing It. He was also a willing foil for Gillis, whom Clemens later called “a born humorist and a very competent one”: Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration, and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie—a fairy-tale, an extravagant romance, —with Dick Stoker as the hero of it, as a general thing. Jim always soberly pretended that what he was relating was strictly history—veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a sweet gentle serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest. In one of my books—“Huckleberry Finn,” I think—I have used one of Jim’s impromptu tales, which Jim he called “The Tragedy of the Burning Shame.” I had to modify it considerably to make it proper for print, and this was a great damage. As Jim told it—inventing it as he went along— I think it was one of the most outrageously funny things I have ever listened to. How mild it is in the book, and how pale; how extravagant and how gorgeous in its unprintable form! I used another of Jim’s impromptus in a book of mine called “The Tramp Abroad,” a tale of how the poor innocent and ignorant woodpeckers tried to fill up a house with acorns. . . . I used another of Jim’s inventions in one of my books—the story of Jim [i.e., Dick] Baker’s cat, the remarkable Tom Quartz. Jim Baker was Dick Stoker, of course; Tom Quartz had never existed; there was no such cat—at least outside of Jim Gillis’s imagination. (AD, 26 May 1907, in MTE, 360–62)
Ben Coon - is the storyteller of the Jumping Frog in the tavern in Angels Camp. (Some sources list him as the bartender at the Angels Hotel.) Former Illinois River pilot, Ben Coon, a solemn, fat-witted person, who dozed by the stove, or told old slow, endless stories, without point or application. Listeners were a boon to him, for few came and not many would stay. To Mark Twain and Jim Gillis, however, Ben Coon was a delight. It was soothing and comfortable to listen to his endless narratives, told in that solemn way, with no suspicion of humor. Even when his yarns had point, he did not recognize it. One dreary afternoon, in his slow, monotonous fashion, he told them about a frog—a frog that had belonged to a man named Coleman, who trained it to jump, but that failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded the trained jumper with shot. The story had circulated among the camps, and a well-known journalist, named Samuel Seabough, had already made a squib of it, but neither Clemens nor Gillis had ever happened to hear it before. They thought the tale in itself amusing, and the “spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd.” When Coon had talked himself out, his hearers played billiards on the frowsy table, and now and then one would remark to the other
San Francisco Morning Call - One of the paper's early writers was Mark Twain, who served as Nevada correspondent in 1863 and as reporter after he moved to San Francisco the following year. In just over four months as full time beat reporter, Twain produced some 200 articles on crime and the courts, theater and the opera, and politics.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94052989/
Territorial Enterprise - Virginia City, 1862 http://www.territorial-enterprise.com/tee.htm
"What is certain is that on May 29, 1864 the failed prospector who had come to Virginia City as Samuel Clemens departed as Mark Twain. Although still poor in pocket -- for none of his mining speculation while working for the Enterprise had panned out -- he had located and begun to mine his own rich vein of literary ore. The twenty months he held spent on the Enterprise had helped him discover himself -- his dual self. The paper had given scope to his native gifts as a storyteller and humorist. In its pages he began to perfect the style, personal as well as literary, that would make him an international celebrity and America's most enduring author. The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, it can be said with justice, gave Mark Twain to the world."
Interviewees:
Jim Fletcher - Interviewed 3/25 in Virginia City and 3/27 in Angels Camp
James E. Caron - UoH Professor. Interview in Salem, Oregon on Monday July 28th. Talk about Washoe Mark Twain, debunk Virginia City origin of name
William Handley - USC Professor. Not available
Rob Gordon - Senior Researcher, Tuolumne County Historical Society - Interviewed Thursday 3/27
Dave Tenis(sp?) - Lives on Jackass Hill - contact during 3/23 filming week - - Mr. Tenis passed away the first week of March
Gregg Camfield - UC Merced Professor - Sent email 7/23 - no response
UC Davis woman - still trying to contact - .
Michelle Gordon - USC Associate Professor - Interviewed on campus at USC on 7/21. E-mail: [email protected]
Victor A. Fischer - UC Berkeley Bancroft Library - E-mail: [email protected].
Gun Research
In 1861 as he is traveling by stage across the country to Carson City, he describes his revolver (in Roughing It) as a Smith and Wesson seven shooter which makes it a Smith & Wesson Model 1.
When he arrives in Virginia City a year later in September 1862 he says he has a "universal navy revolver" which is most likely a 1851 Navy Colt or an 1861 Navy Colt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colt_Navy_Model_1851.JPG (My guess is that it would be an 1851 Navy Colt, which was very popular)
Suicide
Apparently he talks of suicide several times during low points in his life. He himself recalls a period in 1866, but in an 1865 letter to his brother and sister (see timeline below) he writes "pistols or poison - exit me". Could he have contemplated suicide during his "slinking" period? If he pawned everything except the clothes he had on - does he still have the Navy revolver?
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Twain-s-most-chilling-time-was-a-fall-in-San-2826065.php
On 21 April 1909, in a marginal note in his copy of the Letters of James Russell Lowell, Clemens recalled an “experience of 1866” when “I put the pistol to my head but wasn’t man enough to pull the trigger. Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed, but I was never ashamed of having tried. Suicide is the only really sane thing the young or the old ever do in this life” (SLC 1909, 1:375). This attempt must have come no later than the first days of 1866. Surely by 20 January, when he boasted of his literary success to his mother and sister and outlined an array of short- and long-term literary projects, Clemens was no longer disposed to consider “Self-Murder.”
Rough Timeline
14 August 1861 - Arrives in Carson City
September 1862 - Arrives in Virginia City
"He reached Virginia City in September 1862, in his own estimation a "rusty looking" specimen, "coatless, slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt." (Can we get Tom to read this? I will find the source.)
3 February 1863 - Signs a newspaper article for the first time as Mark Twain at The Territorial Enterprise
22 December 1863 - Artemus Ward comes to Virginia City to lecture (stays longer than planned - he and Clemens are cut from same cloth?)
June 1864 - Arrives in San Francisco No letters have been discovered for the next eleven months. As 1864 drew to a close Clemens continued to eke out an existence on the $12.00 or $12.50 per article he received from The California. Since he published only three articles at this time, on 12 November, 19 November, and 3 December (see ET&S2, 108–33), his circumstances must have been straitened indeed. According to the chronology Clemens established in Roughing It, in early December 1864 he was coming to the end of his “slinking” period:
For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board. I became a very adept at “slinking.” I slunk from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar, I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I slunk to my bed. I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the worms. During all this time I had but one piece of money—a silver ten cent piece—and I held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was entirely penniless, might suggest suicide. I had pawned every thing but the clothes I had on; so I clung to my dime desperately, till it was smooth with handling. (Roughing It, chapter 59)
30 November 1864 - 29th birthday
1 December 1864 - lives in San Francisco at 44 Minna Street in a boarding house run by Martha Gillis - leaves for Sonora/Jackass Hill by steamer/stagecoach through Stockton
4 December 1864 - arrives in Jackass Hill with $300 in his pocket http://www.authorama.com/boys-life-of-mark-twain-24.html
December 4, 1864 was a Sunday and steamers and coaches didn't run on Sundays. He had to leave S.F. earlier than December 3rd. December 2 - overnight boat to Stockton, December 3 - Day stage to Sonora, December 4 - arrive at JH.
31 December 1864 - Spends New Year's Eve in Vallecitos with Jim Gillis
22 January 1865 - Travels from Jackass Hill to Angels Camp
8 February 1865 - Attends Masonic meeting in Angels Camp
20 February 1865 - Returns to Jackass Hill
23 February 1865 - Leaves for San Francisco via Copperopolis and Stockton
26 February 1865 - Arrives Occidental Hotel in San Francisco
8 October 1865 - Writes about a 6.5 earthquake in San Francisco
18 October 1865 - Sends Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog story to Artemus Ward
19 October 1865 - A letter to Orion and Mollie, in pencil on the back: Friday--Have just got your letter. The “prospects” are infernal, Mollie. “Confidence” is down low. I saved on the Ophir $25, [but ] not losing the $100 assessment I would have had to pay had I held it a few days longer. All stocks have their day, & “Confidence” will, too—I did want to wait on one stock till its day[arrived, but ]your prospects do not look encouraging.5 [ Go on, I ]I read all your sermons—and I shall continue to read them, but of course as unsympathetically as a man of stone. I have a religion—but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.
You are in trouble, & in debt—so am I. I am utterly miserable—so are you.K◇e Perhaps your religion will sustain you, will feed you—I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect—neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck. If I do not get out of debt in 3 months,—pistols or poison for one—exit me. {There’s a text for a sermon on [Self-Murder—Proceed.}] 6
18 November 1865 - The Jumping Frog is published by the New York Saturday Press
Early 1866 - Starts working for the Sacramento Union which was then located in a brick building, which still stands today, at 121 J Street (Old Town Sacramento)
March 1866 - Takes steamship Ajax to Sandwich Islands (Note: The Ajax only makes two trips to Hawaii - they're not profitable. Twain is on the second voyage.) He's a correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, the largest newspaper on the West Coast.
13 August 1866 - arrives by sailing ship back in San Francisco
2 October 1866 - First lecture - Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco - Sacramento (11 October), Marysville (15 October), Grass Valley (20 October), Nevada City (23 October), Red Dog (24 October), and You Bet (25 October), http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Early_San_Francisco_Theater
30 October 1866 - Gives a lecture in Virginia City
15 December 1866 - Sails for New York
Notes in his journal In Mark Twain's old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story—a mere casual entry of its main features:
"Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, and C. got him one:—in the mean time stranger filled C.‘s frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won."
It seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame. The hills along the Stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no other of such size as that.
The Daniels Sisters:
Billy Gillis in 1924 recalls:
When we got there Sam suggested that we take a walk, and so we started out. We knew of some late clingstone peaches growing on Black Creek, two miles away, so we walked over and got some. When he started back Mol[lie] said, “I know a trail through the chemisal that will cut off half the distance.” So we took it, and went a long way before we discovered that we were lost. We had to get down on our hands and knees and crawl through the chaparral. Then we decided to give up and go back and around the long way.
It was nearly midnight when we got home, and Mrs. Daniels was furious. She gave us a good tongue lashing, and she directed most of it at Sam. He said: “Mrs. Daniels, it wasn’t my fault, it was Billie’s fault[.]” She said:
“Mr. Clemens, Mr. Gillis has been walking with the girls a hundred times, and this never happened before. Besides, you are older and ought to have better sense.”
“I’m very sorry,” Sam said, “and I promise you it won’t happen again. But now we are tired and hungry. We are almost starved.”
“Well, you’ll get nothing to eat in this house tonight!” said Mrs. Daniels.
Just then Sam saw Miss Nellie’s guitar in a corner of the room. He picked it up and began playing, and presently he sang “Fly Away Moth” and then “Araby’s Daughter.” He sang very softly. Mrs. Daniels listened, and presently her face softened. When he was through she left the room and went out in the kitchen. In a few minutes we heard a chicken squawk, and a little later we fell to on hot biscuit and fried chicken and coffee.
As we were walking home Sam said to me: “Billie, you’ve read the old saying, ‘music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.’ You’ve seen how it soothed that savage old lady. If you have any talent for music, cultivate it.” (West, 18)
Twain writes in "The Innocents Adrift" in 1891 -“Chapparal Quails.” That was their pet name in the mountains where they lived. They were sisters, seventeen & eighteen years old, respectively; beautiful creatures, clean-minded, good-hearted, well meaning, favorites with old & young; yet they could outswear Satan. It was the common speech of that remote & thinly settled region, they had come by it naturally, & if there was any harm in it they were not aware of it.
Is this any help anywhere: http://books.google.com/books?id=uaPuYNV_qa0C&pg=RA1-PT137&lpg=RA1-PT137&dq=%22sylvan+paradise%22+mark+twain&source=bl&ots=iZ3GRDrpmk&sig=HREl4S-6eOU5-bseXXKTE3svPkM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=G7VbU5S5AcGSyATskYHoAg&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22sylvan%20paradise%22%20mark%20twain&f=false
http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/MTLN00112.xml;query=dime;searchAll=;sectionType1=;sectionType2=;sectionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;;brand=mtp#1
Images of San Francisco Waterfront: http://www.sfimages.com/history/Embarcadero-Waterfront.html
Character research
Artemus Ward - pseudonym of Charles Farrar Browne 1834-1867
(born April 26, 1834, Waterford, Maine, U.S.—died March 6, 1867, Southampton, Hampshire, Eng.), one of the most popular 19th-century American humorists, whose lecture techniques exercised much influence on such humorists as Mark Twain.Starting as a printer’s apprentice, Browne went to Boston to work as a compositor for The Carpet-Bag, a humour magazine. In 1860, after several years as local editor for the Toledo (Ohio) Commercial and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he became staff writer for Vanity Fair in New York. While working on the Plain Dealer, Browne created the character Artemus Ward, the manager of an itinerant sideshow who “commented” on a variety of subjects in letters to the Plain Dealer, Punch, and Vanity Fair. The most obvious features of his humour are puns and gross misspellings. In 1861 Browne turned to lecturing under the pseudonym Artemus Ward. Though his books were popular, it was his lecturing, delivered with deadpan expression, that brought him fame. His works include Artemus Ward: His Book (1862); Artemus Ward: His Travels (1865); and Artemus Ward in London (1867).
Ward is also said to have inspired Mark Twain when Ward performed in Virginia City, Nevada. Legend has it that, following Ward's stage performance, he, Mark Twain, and Dan De Quille were taking a drunken rooftop tour of Virginia City until a town constable threatened to blast all three of them with a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Pictures of Ward at the time show him with a bushy mustache, which Clemens grew after meeting him. Did Clemens want to be Ward, but knew that he wasn't "worldly" or "traveled" enough?
http://www.authorama.com/boys-life-of-mark-twain-23.html
Jim Gillis - 1830 -1907 - http://www.authorama.com/boys-life-of-mark-twain-24.html
James Norman Gillis (1830–1907) was a native of Georgia. In 1848 he received a diploma from the Botanico-Medical College in Memphis, Tennessee, which trained practitioners of herbal medicine. The following year he arrived in San Francisco and set off for the gold mines of Calaveras County. After two years of mining, he began ranching near Sacramento, continuing at that for most of the succeeding eleven years. In 1862 he moved to Tuolumne County, where he settled in a cabin on Jackass Hill, near Tuttletown, and resumed mining. He spent the rest of his life in the area, except for occasional visits to San Francisco, where his parents lived and in the mid-1860s were acquainted with Clemens. According to Dan De Quille (William Wright), Jim Gillis was the “Thoreau of the Sierras,” a devoted naturalist who was “not only a thorough English scholar, but also well versed in Greek and Latin.” He was, in addition, acknowledged to be the most expert and successful pocket miner in California—indeed he is the father of all the pocket mines. He was the first to discover the laws that govern that kind of mining and reduce the business to a science. He now has eight mines running in California and every one paying. (William Wright 1891)
It was while visiting San Francisco late in 1864 that Gillis met Clemens, who already knew his younger brother Steve (1838–1918). In financial straits, Clemens was anxious to avoid having to honor a $500 bail bond he had posted for Steve, who had been arrested for injuring a bartender in a fight and had fled to Nevada to avoid prosecution. He therefore accompanied Jim Gillis to his cabin on Jackass Hill. Joined also by Gillis’s partner, Dick Stoker, and the youngest Gillis brother, William (1840–1929), he spent much of the next three months there and in nearby Angel’s Camp (“James N. Gillis—His Life and Death,” Sonora [Calif.] Sierra Times, 14 Apr 1907, clipping in CU-MARK; Fulton, 54–55; Gillis, 53–58; De Ferrari 1964, 107–8; Evans et al.; Norwood, 416–19; L1, 313–14 n. 3). Clemens described his visit to the region in chapters 60 and 61 of Roughing It, making one character, a miner “who had had a university education,” a loose amalgam of Gillis and Stoker, and recreating Gillis’s tall tale about Dick Baker and his cat, Tom Quartz (RI 1993, 412–20, 703–5).
William Gillis - 1840 - 1929
"Getting into Tuttletown at a rather late hour one night on my way home from Sonora, I found a party of half a dozen young men who had been serenading their lady friends in the neighborhood. I suggested that they go with me to Jackass Hill and end the night’s program with a serenade to Mark Twain. They readily fell in with my suggestion and we climbed the hill together, and, after our chief musician had tuned up his “old banjo,” lined up under Mark’s window, and opened up with “Oh, Darkies, hab you seen Ole Massa?”
We had finished this song and “Happy Land O’Canaan” and were well under way with “I’se Gwine to de Shuckin,” when that window went up with a bang, and an angry, rasping voice snarled out, “What do you lot of yapping coyotes mean by disturbing the peace and quiet of the respectable people on the hill with that infernal yowling you’re doing out there? Get away from this window, you drunken loafers, and go off to that shuckin you’re howling about, and go right now.”
This rude reception, it is needless to say, put an abrupt ending to our serenade and my companions left the hill on the double quick. On entering the cabin I found Mark sitting on the side of the bed, cramming his pipe with “Bull Durham” tobacco. “Hello, Sam,” said I, “going to have a smoke?”
At my salutation he looked at me with an ugly scowl and greeted me with, “Billy, how did you come to get drunk tonight, and bring that gang of low down rowdies on the hill, to make the night hideous with their horrible racket? Up to this time I have regarded you as a well-behaved, behaved, decent young fellow with instincts somewhat approaching those of a gentleman but I have been wakened from that dream tonight to find you nothing but a common, wine guzzling hoodlum.” (William R. Gillis, 38–39)"
Stephen Gillis - 1838 - 1918
Clemens’s good friend Stephen E. Gillis was raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, where he was trained as a typesetter. He came to San Francisco with several family members in 1853 and, except for stints as a newspaper editor in Oregon and Arizona, worked on various newspapers there until the end of the decade. When Clemens joined the Virginia City Enterprise in 1862, Gillis was the paper’s foreman. Equally adept as foreman, compositor, and writer, he spent most of the next thirty years as a news editor, first of the Enterprise and then of the Virginia City Chronicle. In 1894 he removed to Jackass Hill, California, where he lived with his brothers James and William until his death (William R. Gillis, 7, 19–20, 22, 26–28, 34–35; West, 18). Well known as a scrappy fighter, Gillis acted as Clemens’s second during the present dispute with the Union and also attempted to become directly involved himself (see 21 May 64 to Laird [9:00 p.m.], n. 2). (Had a son names James Gillis.)
Jacob Richard (Dick) Stoker - 1820 - 1898
Gillis’s partner and cabinmate, was originally from Kentucky. In 1849, after fighting in the Mexican War, he joined the gold rush, settling on Jackass Hill, where he spent the rest of his life as a pocket miner (RI 1993, 704–5). Stoker was Clemens’s prototype for Dick Baker, owner of the cat Tom Quartz, in chapter 61 of Roughing It. He was also a willing foil for Gillis, whom Clemens later called “a born humorist and a very competent one”: Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration, and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie—a fairy-tale, an extravagant romance, —with Dick Stoker as the hero of it, as a general thing. Jim always soberly pretended that what he was relating was strictly history—veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a sweet gentle serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest. In one of my books—“Huckleberry Finn,” I think—I have used one of Jim’s impromptu tales, which Jim he called “The Tragedy of the Burning Shame.” I had to modify it considerably to make it proper for print, and this was a great damage. As Jim told it—inventing it as he went along— I think it was one of the most outrageously funny things I have ever listened to. How mild it is in the book, and how pale; how extravagant and how gorgeous in its unprintable form! I used another of Jim’s impromptus in a book of mine called “The Tramp Abroad,” a tale of how the poor innocent and ignorant woodpeckers tried to fill up a house with acorns. . . . I used another of Jim’s inventions in one of my books—the story of Jim [i.e., Dick] Baker’s cat, the remarkable Tom Quartz. Jim Baker was Dick Stoker, of course; Tom Quartz had never existed; there was no such cat—at least outside of Jim Gillis’s imagination. (AD, 26 May 1907, in MTE, 360–62)
Ben Coon - is the storyteller of the Jumping Frog in the tavern in Angels Camp. (Some sources list him as the bartender at the Angels Hotel.) Former Illinois River pilot, Ben Coon, a solemn, fat-witted person, who dozed by the stove, or told old slow, endless stories, without point or application. Listeners were a boon to him, for few came and not many would stay. To Mark Twain and Jim Gillis, however, Ben Coon was a delight. It was soothing and comfortable to listen to his endless narratives, told in that solemn way, with no suspicion of humor. Even when his yarns had point, he did not recognize it. One dreary afternoon, in his slow, monotonous fashion, he told them about a frog—a frog that had belonged to a man named Coleman, who trained it to jump, but that failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded the trained jumper with shot. The story had circulated among the camps, and a well-known journalist, named Samuel Seabough, had already made a squib of it, but neither Clemens nor Gillis had ever happened to hear it before. They thought the tale in itself amusing, and the “spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd.” When Coon had talked himself out, his hearers played billiards on the frowsy table, and now and then one would remark to the other
