How Mark Twain got his start.
“Do you know the locus classicus of that exquisitely American intransitive verb, to absquatulate?” I am often asked. “Prefix, ab- as in from or out of; root, squat– from the reflexive verb, to seat oneself upon the hams or haunches; suffix -ulare, emulating other Latinate infinitives such as ‘to emulate’? Literally, to depart dragging one’s hindquarters; colloquially, to haul a** or tuck tail and skedaddle; literarily, to hasten away abjectly; melodramatically, to abscond in shame?”
“I believe I do,” is my unwavering reply, though these things are, of course, subject to eternal debate among those who care. “It is to be found on the second page of the Gold Hill Daily News in the Comstock, Nevada Territory, May 30, 1864.”
Some background and context are called for. In September 1862, Samuel Clemens, not yet boasting his soon-to-be famous nom de plume “Mark Twain,” walked into the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise office and started work as a reporter at $25 a week. In Virginia City, Twain would later write, “There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses,’ wide-gambling palaces, political powwows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, [and] a whisky mill every fifteen steps.”
The wild, young, talented gang of writers at the Enterprise was everything Sam Clemens could have wished for. He was 26. Joe Goodman, co-owner and editor, was just 24; humorist and reporter Dan DeQuille (William Wright) was the old man at 32; Steve Gillis, the compositor, was 22. Steve weighed 95 pounds and was the most eager and tenacious barroom fighter in the city. They would all become close friends. Soon, with Mark Twain on staff, the Enterprise became one of the most influential papers in the West.
The profession of journalism as practiced in those parts and in those times was more or less a blood sport. Almost immediately, Sam drew blood and drew some notice to himself by writing (without a byline) a hoax titled “The Petrified Man.” Mark Twain’s biographer tells the story:
[The hoax] was directed at an official named Sewall, a coroner and justice of the peace at Humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in the matter of supplying news. The story, told with great circumstance and apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a petrified prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert more than one hundred miles from Humboldt, and how Sewall had made the perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an inquest over a man that had been dead three hundred years; also how, “with that delicacy so characteristic of him,” Sewall had forbidden the miners from blasting him from his position.
Newspapers in Nevada and California reprinted the hoax in the belief it was a factual report; they didn’t appreciate being made fools of, but that was part of the sport. Clemens followed up quickly with an even more controversial hoax about “A Bloody Massacre near Carson.” This hoax described at second hand a man in Ormsby County who went on a rampage, murdering and scalping his wife and killing seven of his nine daughters, then riding his horse into Carson City and arriving “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.”
What had driven the otherwise mild-mannered husband and father mad was the real point of the hoax. He had supposedly lost his life savings to a crooked investment operation in California. When news spread that the horrific report was a hoax, public revulsion caused Clemens to publish an immediate retraction over his own name, titled: “I TAKE IT ALL BACK.” But his retraction made matters even worse. He tried to justify the hoax by arguing it was necessary to tell the shocking lies to force the newspapers of California to call attention to the fact that “the Spring Valley Water company is ‘cooking’ dividends.” Outraged California newspapers denounced him. Some subscribers to the Enterprise canceled their subscriptions because of the hoax. Clemens offered to resign, but Goodman and DeQuille persuaded him to stay. They told him it would blow over and would become famous and bring more subscribers than ever to the Enterprise. They were right.
I Can’t Get No Satisfaction
One of Clemens’s jobs at the Enterprise was to report from Carson City, the capital of the Nevada Territory. On February 3, 1863—less than six months since he had begun working as a journalist—he sent in from Carson City his first report signed with the name “Mark Twain.” By the summer of that same year, Twain wrote his mother that he had “the widest reputation as a local editor, of any man on the Pacific coast…. Everybody knows me, & I feel like a prince wherever I go.” In November 1863, an article by a prominent New York writer in the California literary journal The Golden Era described Mark Twain as “that Irresistible Washoe Giant,” a humorist in “a school by himself.”
A few months later, when Joe Goodman was away from the Enterprise office, he left the great Mark Twain in charge as editor, and Twain took the opportunity to publish a couple of hoaxes that surpassed in offensiveness anything he had yet written. He succeeded in insulting several parties, from respectable women in Carson City to the publisher and staff of the Virginia City Daily Union. A public and private brawl of words ensued that held potential for stirring up inconvenient trouble.
As Twain writes in his Autobiography:
In those early days dueling suddenly became a fashion in the new territory of Nevada, and by 1864 everybody was anxious to have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one himself.
Most of Twain’s colleagues on the Enterprise had already been in gun fights either spontaneous or formally arranged. These duels often arose in the natural course of their newspaper work. It was common practice for the editors and writers of the competing papers in the Comstock to exercise their art by insulting one another in escalating exchanges of highly inventive language that sometimes reached the point where honor must demand satisfaction. Dan DeQuille had been in at least one duel; Steve Gillis had participated in several duels, either as principal or second; Joe Goodman had in September 1863 stepped across the border into California for a duel with Daily Union editor Tom Fitch. Fitch fired first and missed. Goodman then shot Fitch in the kneecap, concluding the disagreement, making them friends, and leaving Fitch lame for life.
Carson City women denounced Twain publicly, and some of their husbands threatened privately to challenge him to duels. Twain apologized publicly and privately to the Carson City women. He was embarrassed enough by one piece he had written that he swore he had been drunk when he wrote it and that it had been published by accident. He began to carry his pistol with him when he went about town. By his own recollection and from other surviving evidence, Twain was not eager for a duel. But his experienced colleagues in the Enterprise office encouraged and coached him in the affair, and the melodrama unfolded as if from a textbook on the code duello.
Twain called James L. Laird, publisher of the Daily Union, a “putrid…groveling, vulgar liar,” an “ass,” and a “craven carcass.” Laird in turn called Twain “an unmitigated liar, a poltroon, and a puppy” (emphasis original). Things developed according to form, and at the last stage, Twain wrote Laird: “I now peremptorily demand of you the satisfaction due to a gentleman—without alternative.” To demand “satisfaction” with “alternative,” was to allow the challenged one to avoid a duel by apologizing. To demand satisfaction “peremptorily” meant that only a duel could give satisfaction to honor.
In the end, for reasons obscure to history, no duels were fought. Papers throughout the Comstock and even as far away as Sacramento and San Francisco reported on the fiasco, treating it either as a farce or a disgrace. Before the dust could settle, Twain, with sidekick Steve Gillis, left Virginia City on a morning stage headed for San Francisco. The Gold Hill Daily News bade him good riddance: “[H]is face is black before the people of Washoe,” they editorialized. And then, the locus classicus: “He has vamosed, cut stick, absquatulated….”
Mark Twain may have been forced to absquatulate from Virginia City in shame, but he remembered his years in the Comstock as “the most vigorous enjoyment of life I had ever experienced.”
