As a child, I dreamed I’d grow up and dazzle the world. But time and disappointment chipped away at me until only the real stuff was left, and it wasn’t dazzling.
Tired stories, a sack of regrets, and a reverence for the pieces of me that survived. All this ruination has stranded me in a dark place where I stare at my fingertips, realizing I cannot offer the world what I had hoped.
But I still wake up each morning and draw my hopes on the sidewalk, though every time so far, they’ve been trampled over or hosed off, or the rain rolled them into the gutter. I am not all I wish I were, but I am here, trying, awake, and part of the story even if no one ever hears it.
I get it now.
At a certain point, daydreaming will not do it. I had spent too much time in that venture as I sat at the dock looking out over the Pacific Ocean.
Penny slots, one-armed bandits, Nevada, and gambling that had been the dream, and to make it rich and return triumphant. Lo! Life had another plan for me.
Rolling east across the Mohave desert, the once 19th-century farm wagon was no more, replaced by a late 20th-century Volkswagen Bug. Still hot, still dusty, less room but more efficient.
My travels came from my girlfriend’s family home, along the mixed-up track of several numbers roads and byways, until I sped down the ramp of Interstate 15. Because I had no firm plan other than to find lodging and seek work, I promised to call her once I got to wherever I was going.
My only company for the next few hours would be the AM radio, news/talk, classical music, and Jesus. I rotated through them as their signals weakened to a cacophony of garbled sounds or faded to a soft hiss.
Las Vegas came into view after dark. Blinding and exciting, though still many miles away.
Housing was a series of motel rooms at first in the drearier areas of the city, not that the Strip was any better as I would soon learn. Whores and hustlers, loud noises, and even brighter lights.
All of this was before the transformation to a family-oriented village-like atmosphere. Casino guards still carried guns and would use them to defend their employer’s gambling chips without being asked.
Through November, the wind blowing dust from everywhere, walking the sidewalks in search of my dream proved impossible. I took a job flipping burgers.
To work in the daytime, I saw stereotypical scenes.
A black man, driving a bright-yellow Cadillac boat, a small fedora atop his head, and a fat stogie drooping from his oversized lips. Red Foxx one-liners rang through my head followed by raucous laughter.
Chicano teens in bright white wife-beater tees and cream-colored chinos, decked out, with gold chains, head bandanas, and Keds. Cheech and Chong, the Other White Album, “Dave’s Not Here,” skits.
This time I laughed.
Queers, trannies, hustlers, crossdressers, the homeless, a myriad of others, and who have avoided or failed to find classification. They have become societies jetsom and flotsam.
Nobody laughs.
From work, after dark, I’d see other stereotypical scenes.
Women, women, and more dressed to the nines, standing along the boulevard they called the Strip. They stood amid the litter of handouts offering the latest and best escort services, hoping to make some lucky tourist’s day.
Around the dirtier corners and back alleys home to my one-room abode, the less fashionable of the trade wandering and shouting com-ons to lost the passerby and those simply trying to get home so they could do it all again.
It all fascinated me. What made them sell their bodies, if not their souls.
One woman sees me looking out the window and waves. I return the polite gesture. Still, she stands there looking at me. With an angry shrug of her rabbit-pelt-clad shoulders, she turns her back on my face and steps into the gutter to talk with a “john” who has pulled up.
Abandonment, money, survival, it was always the same. The sadness is so overwhelming I think of killing myself.
Two months, then three, and I was ready to return to the more genial life I had left along California’s North Coast. But pride forbade me to go home, and instead, I packed my version of the Connie and headed north to the Biggest Little City.
No map, no plan, I went ‘north young man.’ No sooner had I debarked from Sin City than I came to an elevation that presented itself with snow.
Snow came from the east, from the west. It pushed at me from behind and bogged my little Bug down to crawling speed. But like the pioneers of yore, I pushed on.
Then my wipers died, and I had to reach out of the driver’s side window to remove the freezing snow as it slammed and stuck to the windshield. I cursed my rotten luck as I wheeled through one sleepy and darkened town, nearly striking a tree growing in the middle of the road. I’ve often wondered where that happened, but even with the advent of the Internet, I’ve never been able to learn its location and return to that near-fatal spot. Then my heater followed the way of the wipers, and I cursed my misfortune even more as I now had to roll my window up after scratching out a viewpoint on my windshield.
A few months before, because it started leaking oil and blowing black smoke, I had to rebuild the engine, which was no small task, nor inexpensive as I had a 911 Porche mounted in the rear end. Three years later, the same thing happened, and I ended up trading her in for a Hyundai and to this day, I still mourn losing that Bug, not because of what it was, but for what it represented. A simpler time.
As for the Hyundai, it ran like a champ for nearly 13 years. It began to overheat and blew two hoses to the radiator before it caught on fire along the Interstate, and I had to pull over and get my son and his stepbrother out of the back seat before it was completely engulfed.
The fire department and police arrived about the same time, and while a friend was taking the boys to school, the cops cuffed me up for arson. It would take an act of God and the fire marshal to clear my name and prove it was not my fault.
Even though I studied to be a law enforcement officer and worked as a deputy reservist for a time, I have found myself on the wrong side of the law. I threw away $1,200, which became grand larceny-theft; nine years later, I received stolen property, a video camera a manager loaned me without the proper paperwork. Finally, I called my son’s middle school principal a name and got busted for disturbing the peace.
There are two takeaways from the above tale: law enforcement officers will follow the law as long as they don’t have to work to bring justice to a situation. And the justice system is rigged, forcing a person to act against their better judgment.
Unfortunately, I am not lubricated enough to make my argument sound any more uncomplicated than I’ve done. Maybe later.
All night I slugged my way north, through unknown towns and burgs, uphill, downhill, and sharp curves, both left and right. I saw only two other vehicles that night and into the early morning. Both were parked on the side of the road, going no place, evidence of intelligence and self-awareness.
How I found Interstate 80, I have not a clue. I did have an idea of east and west, so I turned left. Still, I pushed on into the dark morning, to what I hoped would be Reno. Suddenly, between two massive walls of a rocky canyon, I saw the first hint of my prize. Bright lights in an inkiness I had only experienced once before as I rolled east towards Vegas. It would be another three or four months before I dove east on that road and saw all the splendor I had missed in the dark. It is still a fascinating drive to this day.
My heart leaped for joy and my butt unpuckered. It would soon be okay, and I could find rest, relaxation, and refreshment after my long, freezing journey. The price for a room at the MGM was far too steep, so I decided to sit down and toss a few quarters in a machine and hope a waitress would offer me a cocktail for free.
Broke and still no waitress and still no cocktail. Only a rising ball of bile in my stomach and the ringing of bells, coins in the metal pans of the slot machines, “Cigarettes, cigars, gum,” and a dizzying world of lights and no way of registering the time. Disappointed in myself, my weakness, my loss, I walked to the men’s room and splashed water on my face. I turned, and an old black gentleman handed me a hand towel to dry myself.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Sorry, I don’t have a tip to offer you.”
“Don’t worry, but let me offer some advice, don’t gamble. The house always wins.”
“Thank you.”
As I walked by the seat where I had blown much of my cash, an older woman was beaming, having won the 100-thousand dollar jackpot and the new car sitting on the carousel, center stage of the bank of slot machines. There is a reason they are called one-armed bandits. And there is the reason why I do not gamble.
Wandering the casino floor grew irksome, especially when told to move along by security officers. It would be a year before I understood the ‘eye in the sky’ had been tracking my every movement in that cavernous room with the loud carpet. Down the long walkway, I finally took to strolling. Posters of old movies, many I’d seen, and statuettes once owned by actors and actresses I had watched on television, lined the walls.
Then there was the famous stairway, where at 4 a.m., a lucky couple had their wedding photographs taken. Above them glimmered an opulent chandelier, beaming rainbow light streaks over the area below. I’ve always wondered if their marriage succeeded a shame if it didn’t. At any rate, it was easy to patrol back and forth and daydream of what could be.
Making an abrupt change of direction is dangerous in a casino, especially when filled with hobnobbers seeking their next party. For me, my danger was Joe Montana, San Francisco 49’er Quarterback, whom I walked into and who knocked me back on my derriere. Not many without a jersey can claim such an embarrassing moment. I did get an autographed photo out of the ordeal though.
The next two weeks found me slugging it out with MGM security, moving my Bug from one lot to the next as I did my best to live in that cramped space. Finally, down to my last few bucks, I had a change in fortune and found a room at a boarding house for $50 a week. As a side note, I went to work for the MGM, but only after it had become the Reno Hilton. Talk about coming about “full circle.”
With a place to lay my head and address to use for work, I quickly found myself employed as a writer. But don’t get too excited about that queer descriptor, as I wrote keno at the Cal-Neva, not the career choice one selects when numbers look like scribbles and scratches.
“You’re not dressed for work. Where are your ‘black and whites?’
“Black and whites?”
“Yeah, black pants, white shirt, black tie, black shoes.”
“I don’t own anything like that.”
“Well, go buy some or don’t come back.”
“You can get them cheap across Virginia at Woolworths,” someone offered.
As fast as possible, I rushed across the street and bought a shirt, a pair of pants, a belt, and a tie. Then I sprinted downstairs at the casino to change, so I might get a few hours in before I got fired.
The black man at the shoeshine booth, guarding the bottom of the stairwell and restroom doors, offered me a free shine.
“At least nobody gonna say you ain’t spiffy.”
Smiling, I handed him a two-dollar tip. Now, I had less than five bucks to my name, and I had to make that last through payday, still weeks away.
Three months later and more success. I landed a job doing radio overnight on the weekends.
The program director liked the letter I had sent him and every other program director in the valley whose name I could learn. I also sent him an air check from a radio station I’d worked for before embarking on my sojourn. He was less impressed with that than the fact that I had been the voice for Paul Bunyan for four years.
“I was the spieler for a tourist attraction.”
“A spieler? What’s that?”
“A P.A. announcer.”
“Oh, like a carnival barker.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
I got the job, but it did not last, because I found another one, which didn’t last either.
Then I left the Cal-Neva for John Ascuagua’s Nugget in Sparks. Again, I was a writer, but not the kind of writer I dreamed of being. Pitfalls to this job came daily, as I had a disability that prevented me from understanding numbers. I made many an adding error that the desk had to correct.
Further, twice in one day, I wrote a $50,000 ticket and was removed from the game to sit in the manager’s office to ‘cool off.’ Worse still was being disallowed from going downstairs to collect the $5,000 tip one of the winners had offered. Blessed keno.
I lasted another three years before finally landing a full-time radio gig, where at least I could rewrite some of the promotions I repeated from shift to shift. Nightly, I returned home smelling like cigarette smoke and feeling so defeated that I couldn’t find the emotional energy to pick up my pen. At least I had my radio show.
Before landing a full-time radio gig, I had a brief interlude where I came and went in the blink of an eye. Because I had worked in a couple of professional photo labs, I went to a career placement center, and they sent me to a lab in Carson City. I was there only two days when the manager decided I wasn’t a good fit for her business, leaving me unemployed for three months.
Slowly, I became a night owl, sleeping during the day and working at night. It wasn’t the penny slots I dreamed of all those years before. It was better because I had started writing for a radio magazine and nationally televised nighttime show host and comedian Jay Leno.
Watching someone open a secured door allowing a knife-wielding crazy man into the building, a shoe box with electrical wiring hanging from it, coworkers found dead in an empty studio, and calls from listeners requesting to hear this song or that tune. After bashing the knife-wielding crazy man in the head with a disused teletype machine and then having to pay for damaging it, I found myself canned. Another time I was in a recording studio when two women walked in off the street. Blamed for leaving the door unlocked, I got the ax.
Still, in our newlywed phase, I came home one Saturday morning, stripped off my duds, and crawled into bed for a two-hour nap before going to my other job at the casino. I was snoring pretty hard when I was violently shaken awake by my bride.
“What’s this?” she said, holding up a folded envelope I had forgotten was in my back pocket.
“Well…uh…I can explain.”
“You’d better!”
“Every Saturday and Sunday morning as I start my shift, I say good night to the cowboys and truckers for the ladies working out at the ranch. And so, they sent me those free passes as a way of saying ‘thanks.’”
Never saw that envelope again.
Always wanting a touch more, I landed jobs working in the movies. It started before I left the Northcoast with a small film about an alien left behind and nearly falling into government clutches. Shaking a two-by-four attached to a line of trees isn’t much, but it was a start.
Ever struggling to make ends meet, I washed dishes, mopped floors, washed bedsheets, and then found myself working on the third film in a series of movies I’d never seen. Enter Mark Hamill’s stand-in and eventual stunt double. I still have the autographed picture that reads, “To Tom (Luke II!) from a galaxy far, far away. Mark Hamill.” That and a handful of call sheets.
Carrie Fisher and I even became lovers for three weeks. Her boyfriend, singer Paul Simon wanted to fight me, he was so angry about our ongoing rendezvous.
“What would you like to do tonight after we wrap?”
“Same thing we always do, let’s fuck all night long.”
“Damn, you’re my kind of woman.”
“Hey, you, fucking asshole, you know who I am?”
“Yeah, and so what?”
“You’re screwing my future wife.”
“I doubt that.”
“Why, I’m going to kick your ass.”
Simon’s bodyguards, he had two of them, intervened by lifting him off the ground and carting him off. I had no idea he was such a short-statured man. And I still think I could have beaten him in a good old-fashioned fistfight. Hell, who knows, the two of us could have even ended up being drinking buddies afterward. She was sweet, and I miss Carrie. And she never did marry Paul Simon. Disappointment rolled in early the following year when neither my face nor my name appeared on film. It was hard to look friends in the eye because I was sure none of them believed me.
Once settled in Reno, I found all sorts of movies to be a part of, from Starman, the T.V. show, to Pink Cadillac and Sisterhood, Cobb and The Cooler. There were others, all as an extra, and I’ve put them from my mind. The Cooler is the closest I ever came to having a speaking part. As one of the two stickmen at the craps table, actor William H. Macy tosses me a casino chip, and I say ‘thanks’ before tapping the chip on the edge of the table. The shot was so far away that not only could you not make out my face, but then the film was speeded up to show how a ‘hot’ game can ‘cool’ rapidly and then returned to standard speed as I tapped on the table’s edge.
One late night, after the set wrapped, I got on the elevator. Actor Alec Baldwin followed, moving past me to the rear of the carriage.
“Have a good night, Mr. Baldwin. Hope you get some sleep.”
Crickets and a side-eye were his response. I never spoke to him again, though we rode the elevator together several times.
Eventually, these things ran their course, and I found myself seeking work I never imagined doing when I was younger. Hired to drive fence posts into hardpacked earth, string barbed wire, and chase cows and horses, I learned about cowboy poetry and collected ideas for a story or two.
At least once, I literally found myself wrapped up in my work. That is to say, a rather lengthy piece of barbed wire came uncoiled and found it necessary to wrap itself about my body, head to foot.
It was a painful lesson, but not nearly as excruciating as being dragged through a cactus patch because your horse got spooked by a tumbling sage bush and decided to quit you. Days and weeks, of plucking needles from places one cannot reach on one’s own come and go in uncomfortable ways.
But being wrapped in barbed wire happened only once. Getting knocked from a horse occurred more frequently than my body would like to remember, and it was usually caused by my negligence, a failed dally, or a sudden, violent jerk down from a roped heifer or steer.
Dislocated shoulders and long, bumpy truck rides to the doctor are not fun. And it is hard to wipe one’s bum or even pick one’s nose with a handful of dislocated digits.
Other times stupidity followed where the whiskey or beer bottle flowed. A cowhand, recovering from the night before, was sure that the old and fragile mountain cat that was trailing us, and that I pointed out, was a danger.
It was all I could do to not laugh because I had been dropping bits of jerky for the old guy to eat since he was getting too weak to hunt. I can be tender that way.
Perhaps, blowing up a privy by accident with someone seated on the hole and because he was plan ornery isn’t your kind of fun. Then neither will the tale of a guy getting knocked head over heels by a wild bull running through the outhouse he is using, only to end up landing in the trench below.
Nor will I share my exploits as an emergency medical technician and the odd things I’ve witnessed over the years. Suffice it to say that violent death is the worse while live birth is often the best.
However, there was that one time when I was on the radio during a breech birth, and I had asked for another ambulance with specialized equipment to respond. I quickly learned that the baby was coming with or without their arrival.
“So you want her knocked her out?”
While waiting for a response, the ambulance driver clipped the mother on the chin, knocking her out. Had it not been for the headphone and mic set I was wearing, I would have murderized that man.
The headphones plugged into the overhead console prevented me from reaching him as he ran from me. I hit the end of the cord and bounced on my keester.
Poor choice of words on my part, but mom gave birth to a healthy baby girl anyway.
One afternoon a man exited his car into the street without checking what was coming behind him. He bounced several feet after a bus hit him and his car door.
Arriving, we assumed he had severe injuries, so we planned to ‘scoop and run’ instead of ‘stay and play.’ As we packaged him for transport, he asked jokingly, “Did anyone get the license plate of the bus that hit me?”
I knew at that moment that the man would survive his ordeal.
Being on an ambulance crew is fine for a while, but the burnout rate is phenomenal. I decided to save what sanity I had left and become an instructor. I even had the fortune of speaking to the legislature one Fall afternoon to convince them that Washoe County should not have the final authority over who is qualified or not to be an EMT.
All my training came in handy as I spent four months nursing my parents back from the brink of death. It is the first and only time I returned to the North Coast to live, and I never want to reside there again.
Writing it down makes it suddenly sad to say, but the truth is the truth. Besides, only my sister and her family live there. The rest are either dead, moved away, live elsewhere, or as in the case of my son and daughter-in-law, are less than 15 minutes from me.
It took me 20 years to finally find that sweet spot and land a job as a news reporter. It lasted less than a year, but what a wild ride I had in the meantime.
There is so much dirty politicking happening at the state and federal levels. I found my niche and rolled in it like a pig in a mud pit as I went after one bad apple after another.
Guys like the younger George Bush and Harry Reid were always in play, and I thought them fair game as they sidestepped the Constitution all the time and without a hint of remorse. I also found that I could become a target, so to speak, as Internet outliers used the web to beat me into submission.
After a local politician blamed me for his failing campaign in a letter to my editor, I lost my job. I didn’t help myself by publishing the letter on my blog for all the world to read. I take full responsibility for what went down. Ah, the good old days. That sent me packing back to radio, where I languished between swing and graveyard shifts for seven years. It was the first time in my career that I was happy to have been canned, though I didn’t enjoy how it happened.
Let me say this: if you call a spade a spade, don’t be surprised when that spade buries you.
A few miles east of the city limits of Sparks on Interstate 80 there used to be a rest stop. Between the rushing freeway and placid Truckee River, that now empty spot secretes a group of Native American petroglyphs. It is easy to miss and is not often visited.
These petroglyphs were carved over centuries, chipped into the desert varnish, depicting everything from animal prints and horned humanoid figures to the arrival of the horse in the 16th century and a wide range of inscrutable squiggles and symbols. The rock’s oldest glyphs are believed to be roughly 2,000 years old, and only a short railing and a few feet of space separate visitors from two millennia of recorded Native American history.
When looking at one of these petroglyphs, there is an awful urge to decipher its symbols and understand its meaning. A common feeling.
These are the first true Sagebrush writings of Nevada, however, without the ability to decipher nor understand their means, the unspoken words nor fully comprehend what they say to the modern White man, if they speak at all. Everything understood would be mere guesswork and misguided conjecture.
It is even more impressive when considering the length of time a petroglyph can survive the elements, including man. Newspaper lasts less than one hundred years, books, between 200 and 300 years if bound properly and it is difficult to conceive even the Internet lasting the eons that these first Sagebrush writings have.
If that sounded daunting, it is liberating also.
On a cold December night in Mormon Station, two men fit the final components of their printing press into place. Assembled, they pulled out their letterboxes and set up, letter by letter, upside down and backward, six columns of text.
With everything in place, they ran ink over the press plate, loaded a blank sheet of paper, and pressed. Although the two printers in that drafty winter shack could not have anticipated it, that first pressing catalyzed a remarkable phenomenon in American literature.
Nevada’s first newspaper, “The Territorial Enterprise” was well-timed. Within a year of its 1859 founding, a rich vein of silver would be discovered at The Comstock Lode, leading thousands to head into the Great Basin.
Booming mining camps filled the valleys on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, and such communities as Virginia City, Gold Hill, and Dayton became makeshift metropolises.
Soon the sparsely populated Great Basin Desert would be home to a strangely disproportionate number of talented novelists and journalists who captured American expansion during its feverish peak. Known for their wit, humor, truth-stretching, and blistering criticism of corruption, this loose association of writers is today known as the Sagebrush School.
What are we even talking about, here?
Perhaps more than any other place on earth, the American West is associated with a single literary genre, the romantic adventure tale set within a historical period that lasted, in purest form, for a few decades. Within that genre is the Sagebrush School.
Sagebrush School is a term applied to a group of writers who spent their creative years, mostly in Nevada from the 1860s to the early twentieth century, and whose work was never republished from the periodicals in which it first appeared and today remains largely unknown to many scholars and aficionados of Western literature. The movement included various genres such as drama, essays, fiction, history, humor, journalism, memoirs, and poetry.
The name Sagebrush School was coined by Ella Sterling Mighels, herself a Sagebrush writer, who stated: “Sagebrush school? Why not? Nothing in all our Western literature so distinctly savors of the soil as the characteristic books written by the men of Nevada and that interior part of the State where the sagebrush grows.”
Ella Sterling Mighels was a California pioneer, author, and literary historian. She was born in Mormon Island, California, on May 5, 1853, but grew up in Aurora, Esmeralda County, Nevada, leading her to adopt the pen name, “Aurora Esmeralda”.
She founded the California Literature Society in 1913 and was named the “First Literary Historian of California,” six years later.
Mighels published two books on California literature and its authors. In The Story of the Files (1893), Ella told of California writers, in a volume published for the California World’s Fair. In Literary California, Poetry, Prose, and Portraits (1918), Ella published selections and portraits of California authors.
She died December 10, 1934, in San Francisco, buried in Oakland, California at the Mountain View Cemetery.
Several characteristics of this movement distinguished it from others, including hoaxes, wit, audacity, or an irreverent attitude. The inspiration for the movement began with Joseph T. Goodman of the Virginia City, Nevada Territory’s Territorial Enterprise.
Goodman was born on September 18, 1838, in Masonville, New York. In 1856 he moved to California with his father and began working as a typesetter at The Golden Era, a leading literary newspaper in San Francisco. In less than five years he became the owner and editor of the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada. Goodman grew the Enterprise from a struggling local paper into one of the preeminent West Coast newspapers with a national following.
It was known for its expert reporting on the mining industry, its literary quality, and its editorial stances against corruption in business and government. The Enterprise was financially independent and Goodman was fearless in his editorial stances.
Early on he exposed the corruption of the Nevada Territory Supreme Court and forced the entire bench to resign. He denounced the formation of a diamond-mining corporation as a swindle that was soon to be exposed as the diamond hoax of 1872.
That same year, he opposed the Senate candidacy of William Sharon, the wealthiest and most ruthless financier on the Comstock. Sharon lost the election, in large part due to Goodman’s opposition.
In 1862 Goodman hired Samuel Clemens as a local reporter. Although Clemens had published short stories previously, his work under Goodman’s editorship at the Territorial Enterprise was credited with giving the author his initial “start” due to the extensive circulation of the newspaper.
Goodman and Clemens became friends and corresponded for many years. In 1871 Goodman visited Clemens in New York to assist him with the composition of Roughing It.
The Enterprise formed the nucleus of a group of writers that would eventually become known as the Sagebrush School of Literature. Goodman was a writer in this tradition along with Clemens, Dan DeQuille, Rollin M. Daggett, and several other writers who worked in Virginia City at some point in their careers.
Goodman was fond of Clemens but said that if he were to predict who would achieve fame, it would be De Quille: “Dan was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. Of course, I recognized the unusualness of (Twain’s) gifts, but he was eccentric and seemed to lack industry.”
DeQuille was probably the school’s most prolific writer. Beyond writing for “The Territorial Enterprise” and other Western newspapers, he was a novelist who wrote the first major work of the Comstock’s history.
Like Twain, he was fond of hoaxes, and his pieces shared around the U.S., were praised for their clarity and humor. Others deserving recognition are Sam Davis, Henry Mighels, Fred Hart, Rolin Dagget, and many others
In 1870 Goodman traveled to Europe, sending letters to the Enterprise detailing his experiences. They were published on the front page under the title, “Somewhat from Abroad (From an Irregular Correspondent.)”
With co-author Rollin M. Daggett, Goodman authored the play The Psychoscope, produced in Virginia City in 1872, starring James Cassius J.C. Williamson and the touring cast of the California theatre, and ran for five performances in four days. Its raw depiction of prostitution in action caused a storm of controversy in the local newspapers.
When its theatrical run ended, it was never again commercially produced, although leading actors acclaimed it and a lucrative offer for rights to it was made. All but a few copies of its limited printings were subsequently lost.
The play exceeded Victorian sensibilities by portraying the inner workings of a brothel and was never again presented in the 19th century. It has been offered that The Psychoscope might have influenced Twain’s composition of the literary fragment from the 1880s called “Clairvoyant.”
As for Daggett, while editor of Territorial Enterprise at the time of the play, he was born in Richville, St. Lawrence County, N.Y., on February 22, 1831, crossing the plains to the Pacific coast in 1849, failing to find his fortune in the goldfields. However, in 1852, he started the Golden Era in San Francisco, the San Francisco Mirror in 1860, uniting it with the San Francisco Herald moving to Nevada in 1862 and settling in Virginia City.
Daggett was elected a member of the Territorial Council in 1863 and became connected editorially with the Territorial Enterprise a year later. He clerked for the U.S. district court from 1867 to 1876 and was elected as a Republican to the Forty-sixth Congress, serving from March 4, 1879, to March 3, 1881.
After a failed attempt at reelection, Daggett was appointed Minister Resident to Hawaii on July 1, 1882, and served until April 10, 1885, when he resigned. He was engaged in editorial work in San Francisco, Calif., until his death there November 12, 1901, and is interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery.
Goodman sold his Virginia City newspaper in 1874 to Sharon, who bought it to ensure his candidacy as he again ran for the U.S. Senate. Goodman moved to San Francisco, took a seat on the Pacific Stock Exchange, and made a fortune in various mining investments including a silver mine he purchased with John P. Jones.
He also continued to work as a journalist and writer, becoming managing editor of the San Francisco Post and founding The San Franciscan, a distinguished literary magazine. Later, in the early 1880s, Goodman purchased a large raisin vineyard near Fresno and lived there for several years.
During that time he became interested in the glyphs of the ancient Mayas and devoted many years to deciphering them.
Goodman credited Gustavus A. Eisen for directing his attention to the problems of the Maya inscriptions and calendars. Eisen was a scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, who owned a vineyard in the Fresno area. With Eisen’s encouragement, professional contacts, and research materials, Goodman set to work.
His research was initially guided by previously published research and photographic documentation of molds and glyphs. Most of the photographs were supplied by Alfred Maudslay, an English archaeologist who contributed significantly to Central American archeology. His most important breakthrough occurred when he came across the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán by Bishop Diego de Landa written in 1566 but never published until 1864 when it was uncovered by the French antiquarian, Brasseur de Bourbourg.
Goodman spent 12 years puzzling over the glyphs and ultimately determined that more than half of the inscriptions were related to mathematics and the Maya calendar. One of his most important contributions was his calculation correlating the Maya and Gregorian calendars.
This became the basis for the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation.
Goodman had hoped that the California Academy of Sciences would publish his findings but they declined. Instead, Maudslay arranged to include it as an appendix to his volume on Maya archaeology, published in 1897.
In 1897 Goodman moved to Alameda, California where he resided until his death on October 1, 1917.
Called “the dean of Nevada newspapermen,” Alfred Doten was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on July 21, 1829. Like many others trying their luck in the California goldfields, he arrived in 1849.
He became a journalist for the Como Sentinel in Como, Nevada in 1863, the editor of the Virginia Daily Union in 1864, an editorial writer for the Virginia Enterprise in 1866, and subsequently the editor of the Gold Hill News.
In June 1860, the discovery of gold in the Pine Nut Mountains south of Dayton marshaled a camp called Palmyra. Slow to grow, by 1862, Palmyra had only 400 residents and a small business district.
Meanwhile, the camp of Como developed a half-mile away and quickly overshadowed Palmyra. By 1863, Como had four hotels, including the National, and an equal number of dry goods stores, two livery stables, eight saloons, one brewery, a tin shop, a blacksmith shop, and numerous houses.
In 1864, the town gained a steam-driven mill built by J.D. Winters and a weekly newspaper, the Como Sentinel, though it moved to Dayton three months later. It was around this time that Doten arrived at Como.
While presiding over six mining companies, Doten wrote the “Como Letters,” sending them to the Comstock twice weekly proclaiming that Como would soon develop into a major mining center similar to Virginia City. Unfortunately, before the end of 1864, the ore ran out, and the mines began to close.
Abandoned the following year, Como did undergo two revivals from 1879-81 and again from 1902-05. Though these later revivals were more profitable, Como never boomed again.
In June 1935, a 300-ton flotation mill was placed into operation by the Como Mines Co. It quickly failed, and Como has remained silent ever since.
Curiously, the most famous resident of Como was Paiute Chief Truckee, father of Chief Winnemucca. He had been a scout for Kit Carson and John C. Fremont during their early explorations in Nevada and later helped wagon trains as they pressed into Nevada.
While Doton died on November 12, 1903, it would take another 70 years before his diaries were made public. But it wouldn’t happen without a bit of disputation.
Edited by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who also wrote the famed book “The Oxford Incident,” the family directed him to excise some of the more scandalous parts of the manuscript to avoid embarrassment. Upon learning this, Comstock historians wanted all the details from his journals.
Clark is characterized as one of Nevada’s most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and was the first inductee into the “Nevada Writers Hall of Fame” in 1988. Two of his novels, The Ox-Bow Incident and The Track of the Cat, were made into films.
As a writer, Clark taught himself to use the familiar materials of the Western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues.
Born in East Orland, Maine, on August 3, 1909, Clark grew up and graduated from Reno High School in 1926, then went to college at the University of Nevada, where his father, Walter Ernest Clark, was president of the University of Nevada.
His first published novel, The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), is often considered the first modern Western. The story is about a lynch mob mistaking three innocent travelers for cattle rustlers suspected of murder.
After the hanging, the mob learns that the supposed murdered man is still alive and that the cattle were sold to the three now-dead men. The themes include an examination of frontier law and order and accountability.
The novel was well-received, gave Clark literary acclaim that was unusual for a writer of Westerns, and in 1943 was adapted into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan.
Over the next decade, Clark published two more novels: The City of Trembling Leaves (1945) and The Track of the Cat (1949). In 1950, a collection of short stories, The Watchful Gods and Other Stories was released.
Since they began appearing in national magazines during the 1940s, his short stories gained national recognition and earned the O. Henry Prize five times, between 1941 and 1945. Although he continued to write sporadically after 1950, Clark published no more fiction works during the remaining two decades of his life.
Clark subsequently devoted his creative energies to teaching and lecturing. From 1954 to 1956, he was a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Then he began teaching a workshop for writers at San Francisco State University in the summer of 1955, before moving to San Francisco in 1956, once hired full-time to establish a formal Creative Writing Program. He remained there until 1962.
Clark would return to Reno to serve as the writer-in-residence at the university from 1962 until his death from cancer in Virginia City on November 10, 1971, at 62. He spent his last ten years editing The Journals of Alfred Doten.
Two years after Clark’s death, the Univerisity of Nevada, Reno, published a three-volume, hardbound set. They contain a code that reveals much more about the life of Doten on the Comstock. Most recently, there has been a movement afoot to re-edit the journals so that their entirety would again find their place as an incredible piece of Nevada literature history.
Samuel Post Davis is the last member of a fraternity of writers known as the Sagebrush School. Born in Branford, Connecticut, in 1850, Davis began his trek westward early and became a typesetter for several newspapers before he became a writer. He was writing for a San Francisco newspaper in 1875, and when that paper folded he headed to Virginia City to write for the “Virginia Evening Chronicle.”
The “Chronicle” was owned by Denis McCarthy, who a decade earlier had been journalist Joe Goodman’s partner at the “Territorial Enterprise.” Davis would have remained at the “Chronicle” had it not been for the death of Carson City’s “Morning Appeal” publisher Henry Rust Mighels on May 27, 1879.
Not only did Mighels leave behind a newspaper, but also his wife, Nellie, and four children. Nellie desperately needed an editor to manage the paper. Six months after her husband’s death she hired Davis.
They made a great team and soon their platonic relationship turned more serious. Sam made it official on July 4, 1880, when he married his boss and became part-owner of the paper. Their marriage produced two daughters, Lucy and Ethel.
Sam remained at the paper for the next two decades, where he became a relentless watchdog for Ormsby County. He fought with his adversaries, both in print and with his fists. One of the people Sam called out was U.S. District Attorney Charlie Jones, whom he criticized for the way he handled a bribery case. The men met by chance on the morning of Nov. 18, 1896, on the steps of the Carson City post office, and duked it out
Two years after his scrape with Jones, Davis resigned as editor to run for state controller on the Silver Party Ticket. He won the seat in the election of 1898 and was re-elected to office again in 1902.
Davis was largely responsible for the John Mackay statue at the University of Nevada, Reno. At the time of Mackay’s death in 1902, Davis contacted Mackay’s son, Clarence, in New York and was promised financial backing for the enterprise.
The iconic piece was sculpted by Gutzon Borglum for $30,000 and was dedicated on June 10, 1908. Borglum would later take on the greatest challenge in his career when he and a team of carvers created Mt. Rushmore.
Throughout his career, Davis penned some of the best short stories, poetry, and “quaints” written at the time. Quaints are short fictitious stories written to make readers believe they are reading the truth.
DeQuille is credited as the father of the quaint but Davis’ pieces about the imaginary “Wabuska Mangler” newspaper and its editor equaled the best work from DeQuille’s pen. The Wabuska Mangler was entirely made up by Davis and used to get outrageous opinions into the Appeal by attributing them to somebody else.
The Mangler was a “wicked little sheet,” Davis wrote, and its editor “a disgrace to journalism.”
One of Davis’s more far-reaching quaints was of a horse cart invented by a local blacksmith. It featured a belly band, four feet wide beneath the horse, which enabled the driver to turn a crank and raise the horse off the ground allowing both cart and horse to coast to the bottom of a hill from its top.
The story, fed by follow-ups in the Appeal including an illustration, spread around the country until fellow editors called his bluff.
“Of all the liars on the face of the earth,” wrote a St. Louis journalist, “we believe the Nevada newspaper liar is the most prodigious outside of Missouri.”
Davis was also a prolific poet as evidenced by “The Lure of the Sagebrush.”
Have you ever scented the sage-brush
That mantles Nevada’s plain?
If not you have lived but half your life,
And that half lived in vain.
No matter the place or clime
That your wandering footsteps stray,
You will sigh if you know of her velvet fields
And their fragrance of leveled hay.
You will loiter a while in other lands,
When something seems to call,
And the lure of the sage-brush brings you back,
And holds you within its thrall.
You may tread the halls of pleasure
Where the lamps of folly shine,
‘Mid the sobbing of sensuous music
And the flow of forbidden wine.
But when the revel is over,
And the dancers turn to go,
You will long for a draft of the crystal streams
That spring from her peaks of snow.
You will ask for a sight of beetling crags,
Where the storm king holds his sway,
Where the sinking sun with its brush of gold
Tells the tale of the dying day.
And when you die you will want a grave,
Where the Washoe zephyr blows.
With the green of the sage-brush above your head,
What was needed to plant the rose?
Davis was in San Francisco in 1917 when he suffered a stroke. His condition was such that doctors had to amputate one of his legs to save his life.
He knew his time was short and wanted to spend his remaining days at the Larkwood Ranch, which he and Nellie owned, just miles north of Carson City. Davis died there on March 17, 1918, a month shy of his 68th birthday.
He is interred in the Davis family plot at Lone Mountain Cemetery in Carson City.
Not only did he successfully defend the Earp Brothers, who were charged with murder after the most famous gunfight in the American West, but he also defended Moron leader Brigham Young in a polygamy case. Thomas Fitch wrote for and edited several newspapers and served in multiple political offices over his lifetime.
In 1864, while living in Virginia City, Nevada, as editor of the Virginia Daily Union, he met and became friends with Mark Twain.
Born in New York City on January 27, 1838, his father was a merchant, and he attended public schools. In the summer of 1860, he arrived in San Francisco, writing for the San Francisco Gazette and becoming editor of the Times.
In 1862, he moved to the California foothills and El Dorado County, writing for the Placerville Republican. In 1863, he became the editor of the Virginia Daily Union.
On August 1, 1863, Twain told his boss Goodman that Fitch had challenged Goodman to a duel because Goodman had written an insulting article about Fitch. While Goodman had not written the article, he stood behind it anyway and accepted the challenge.
Before the duel, Goodman learned that Fitch was unfamiliar with guns. With the first shot, Goodman deliberately wounded Fitch below the knee.
Goodman instantly ran to Fitch’s side and apologized, insisting on taking care of Fitch until he healed. The two men became friends.
Clemens, however, reported the duel differently: “They went out to fight this morning, with navy revolvers, at fifteen paces. The police interfered and prevented the duel.”
Fitch started his own eight-page weekly literary journal, The Weekly Occidental, including a serialized novel using stories from himself, his wife Anna, Goodman, DeQuille, Daggett, and Twain. The journal was published from October 29, 1864, until April 15, 1865, but ceased before Twain could contribute.
Twain wrote about an 1866 lecture he was giving on the Sandwich Islands to a crowd in Washoe City, which Fitch also attended:
“When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard.” Fitch told him, “Clemens, your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin, the unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced.”
He died at a Masonic home in Decoto, California, on November 12, 1923, and was interred in Cypress (later renamed Chapel of the Chimes) Cemetery in Decoto (later Hayward), California.
Western writers have long known the power of the sagebrush to transport the Eastern reader to an exotic, almost otherworldly place, beginning with one of the genre’s earliest and most popular novels, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. Rendered in his florid, sentimental style, Grey’s purple hillsides are a landscape from an alien planet, and his characters are always speaking, half in allegory, about going “to the sage,” or riding “in from the sage,” or being “alone on the sage.”
As a child, many hours were spent reading Will James, Louis L’amour, and Zane Grey who wrote, Riders of the Purple Sage. Along with Jack London, Grey visited Del Norte and Humboldt Counties.
Imagine the surprise when traveling through the Nevada desert and never seeing this vast sea of purple-flowered sage. To this day, the debate goes on about which plant Grey was so reverently and repetitively writing about. The West’s sagebrush-covered hills and valleys are not all that purple.
The species most commonly called “purple sage,” Salvia dorrii is not sagebrush at all, and it doesn’t grow in expanses “ten, fifteen, twenty miles” across, the way Grey described. That could only be big sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata, or its cousins, none of which stray too far from their familiar gray-green hue.
A hundred years’ distance, and Grey’s prose, make it difficult to know whether he meant to refer only to one plant or the other throughout the book, or both at different times, or if he was just letting his imagination get the better of him. Perhaps, we can blame the confusion on the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition, who published the first English-language descriptions of Artemisia tridentata after encountering it in Montana in 1805.
“There is a kind of wild sage or hyssop, as high as a man’s head, full of branches and leaves, which grows in these bottoms,” wrote the expedition’s Patrick Gass, whose journal was the first published and widely read.
“Sage” is a misnomer, a botanical blunder indeed, it may be history’s first recorded instance of the kind of mistake that white settlers would make again and again in the ensuing centuries, imposing Old World thinking onto a harsh new landscape that was unlike much of what they’d ever seen before. Presumably more for its aroma than anything else, the plant was grouped by Gass and others of the expedition with the Mediterranean sages, the Salvias, used medicinally and culinarily by Europeans since ancient times.
In taxonomic terms, the explorers’ classification was off not just by an entire family, but an entire order, the sagebrush is an Artemisia, most similar to wormwood or mugwort, and more closely related to daisies and sunflowers than to true sages or mints. Trained naturalists arrived in the West and attempted to correct the record, dutifully classifying and naming its various Artemisias, but it was too late.
As scientifically illiterate as it may have been, and as much confusion as it may still cause today, the Americans of the early 19th century were unquestionably correct in deciding that description of “twisted, aromatic wormwood,” as one explorer put it in 1834, simply weren’t a match for such a singular shrub. Whatever other aesthetic failings Western literature may have, it hasn’t afflicted the reading public with two centuries of rhapsodizing about the Great Basin’s shimmering sea of mugwort.
Americans have never known what to make of “the everlasting sage-bush of this desolate region,” as Horace Greeley put it in his widely-read 1860 Western travelogue.
In Roughing It, Mark Twain described the shrub as “an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature,” and of lazy afternoons lying in its shade, imagining himself Gulliver among the Lilliputians. The more enduring simile, of course, is the “Sagebrush Sea,” rolling over hillsides, waving in the wind, swallowing us up in its vastness.
If there’s an essence of the West and its art, this is it: not the sagebrush itself, but the conditions that created it, the slow process of learning and adapting to them. A discontinuity, the dawning sense that this is a place unlike anywhere we’ve been before, or, if we were born here, that we live according to systems and structures that weren’t made for it.
Lawrence Berkove assembled an exceptional collection that rescues the lively works of the Sagebrush School from the dusty archives in which they have languished. Berkove is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, editor of The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus: Stories and Essays by Dan De Quille and The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain, and co-editor of The Short Fiction of Ambrose Pierce.
The Sagebrush Anthology Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West enlarges Mark Twain’s circle to encompass the Sagebrush Bohemians through a compelling blend of humorous and serious fiction, memoir, nonfiction, letters, and poetry. These selections convey the experiences shaped by Nevada’s rough-and-tumble culture, abounding in wit and humor, with a fondness for literary hoaxes, that was the last major formative influence on Twain.
The anthology contains sixty-eight selections, seven by Twain, representing outstanding work by accomplished Sagebrushers Dan De Quille, Sam Davis, Joe Goodman, and Rollin Daggett, plus pieces by lesser-known writers such as Arthur McEwen, Alf Doten, and Bret Hart. Berkove’s introduction recounts the school’s history and identifies and analyzes its main thematic and stylistic characteristics.
He shows that Sagebrush literature records and reflects the collision of the last generation of frontiersmen with the new culture of technology, industry, and big business, men of talent, imagination, and integrity driven to work out distinctive ways of coping with an unresponsive system of justice, an economy tilted toward the rich and a society that impinged on individual liberties. Although many critics have noted the influence this had on Twain when he lived in Virginia City, few have delineated the influence of specific writers on his style.
The Sagebrush Anthology not only shows that some of the ideas and literary techniques credited to Twain can be seen as characteristics of the school that he assimilated and refined, but it also fosters an appreciation of these other writers in their own right, showing that their work encompassed topics and genres that Twain barely addressed. By casting new light on the movement, it invites students and general readers to appreciate a silver flowering of Western literature that remains entertaining and instructive for our own time.
The sudden influx of immigration was remarkable—even blistering—but while other parts of the West also experienced large-scale immigration, early Nevadan communities were different. Those who came were not settlers in the general sense: they aimed to get rich and get out.
The towns were also not small. The hard-scrabbling prospector who panned a stream with his burro sidekick was not likely to find much success in Nevada. Unlike the California gold rush a decade earlier, ore extraction at strikes like The Comstock Lode required the collaboration of many.
Along with miners and laborers, wealthy speculators, lawyers, surveyors, and engineers were among the first residents in the towns. Many of those who came expected a cosmopolitan lifestyle and refused to give up their East Coast luxuries: theaters, opera houses, billiards halls, saloons, and high-quality newspapers.
At the onset, corruption reigned in the remote territory. With so much wealth pouring from the mountains, powerful barons arose who could influence law enforcers and lawmakers. Silver-spooned mine speculators could drum up investment in a project they knew to be worthless. Early Nevada was known as the “rotten borough.”
In this lawless Petri dish of transients, boomtowns, treasure, and opportunity, the Sagebrush School was born.
The writers who came to The Comstock sought wealth, fame, and excitement; they also chased the next big strike as they hauled their printing presses from mining camp to mining camp. On the East Coast, their talent might have been diluted in the major population centers but held sway on public opinion during the half-century the movement was active.
Sagebrush School is a modern construction, reflecting writers who shared commonalities in background and style. Nearly all were well educated, and referenced Shakespeare or Homer, but were also fond of blending the vernacular of the common folk into their works.
They were often prolific, many starting their papers that cranked out multiple editions per day. While they worked in journalism for the paycheck, they pursued novels, published poetry, and wrote non-fiction including history and biographies.
In a society where everyone scrambled to get their own, the writers saw themselves as the voice for humanism and morality. They publicly arraigned villains and applauded heroes who stood up for their principles, even if that meant circumventing the law. They were skeptical, even critical of the political, financial, and justice system, and were not afraid to call out corruption.
Finally, many writers were known for their “quaints” or hoaxes, known better today as “fake news.”
One famous quaint is Dan DeQuille’s article, “Solar Armor,” which regales readers with reports of an inventor who constructed an air-conditioned suit. The article supplies interviews and scientific details, giving it a voice of authenticity.
Readers are tipped off when DeQuille reports the invention was too successful, as the inventor was found, frozen in the desert with an icicle hanging from his nose.
Goodman was fond of both Twain And DeQuille, but said that if he were to predict which one would achieve fame, it would be DeQuille: “Dan was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. Of course, I recognized the unusualness of (Twain’s) gifts, but he was eccentric and seemed to lack industry.”
De Quille was probably the school’s most prolific writer. Beyond writing for “The Territorial Enterprise” and other Western newspapers, he was a novelist who wrote the first work of Comstock history.
Henry Rust Mighels was the editor and publisher of Carson City, Nevada’s Nevada Appeal. He was born in Norway, Maine on November 5, 1830, and served in the Union Army during the American Civil War as assistant adjutant general, with the rank of captain, and was wounded in action.
In 1868, he was elected State Printer and served a two-year term. In 1876, he was elected to the Nevada Assembly, serving as Speaker in 1877. The following year, he ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor of Nevada.
He was also an artist, painting stills and landscapes. His one book, Sage Brush Leaves, consists of literary essays. He died of cancer on May 27, 1879, in Carson City and is buried at Lone Mountain Cemetery next to his wife Nellie Verrill Mighels Davis who subsequently married Samuel Post Davis.
Their son, Henry J. Mighels Jr. took over as editor of the Appeal in 1898.
Perhaps one of the most delightful pieces of Sagebrush literature comes from Mighel’s book, Sage Brush Leaves,” where he writes:
“If a dog does not think, what makes him dream? If a cat does not think, what makes her teach herself not only to come straight to the kitchen door to get into the house but lift the latch and open the way for herself? Instinct!? Well, isn’t that an evasion, a dodging of the question, another name for thinking? Don t your dog know you and your habits, and when you have got as much as your small wine-bearing capacity will carry? We know a dog who knows when Sunday comes; a hen who will, in spite of all obstacles, lay her eggs on the boy’s bed; a cat who is acquainted with his most sympathetic friend, and interprets his thoughts not only thinks but interprets! And we know a chipmunk who won’t listen to the reading of prose, but who has an absolute passion for hearing one read Tennyson, Browning, Shakspeare, or Lucy Larcomb!”
Larcomb was one of the first teachers at Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) in Norton, Massachusetts, teaching there from 1854 to 1862. During that time, she co-founded Rushlight Literary Magazine, a submission-based student literary magazine that is still published.
From 1865 to 1873, she was the editor of the Boston-based Our Young Folks, which merged with St. Nicholas Magazine in 1874.
In 1889, Larcom published an account of New England childhood in her time, A New England Girlhood, an autobiographical text that covers the early years of her life in Beverly Farms and Lowell, Massachusetts.
The Mississippi River steamer Nebraska arrived in St. Louis late in the evening on May 21, 1861, delivering 25-year-old Sam Clemens into a city riven by the onset of the Civil War. The Nebraska, which had left New Orleans a week earlier, had been among the last civilian vessels allowed north through the Union blockade at Memphis and Clemens, who had once thought he’d found a lifelong vocation as a steamboat pilot, had a series of pivotal decisions to make, starting with which side to take in the conflict over slavery that was rapidly engulfing the country.
Like the state in which he was born, Clemen’s loyalties were muddled; for a few weeks in June, he joined some friends from his hometown in a ragtag secessionist militia but soon deserted. In July, when his brother Orion, a loyal Lincoln Republican who’d nabbed a minor sinecure as secretary to the governor of the Nevada Territory, offered him a chance to escape to the West, Clemens leaped at it.
None of this history appears in Roughing It, the Western travelogue that Clemens, who by then had adopted the pen name Mark Twain, published a decade later. In nearly 600 pages chronicling 1861 to 1867, the Civil War is alluded to only once or twice in passing.
If anyone ever needed proof of the 19th-century frontier’s function as America’s safety valve, letting tensions between North and South dissipate westward, here was the West serving as a place where one of its most celebrated artists, destined to play a leading literary role in its moral reckoning with the horrors of slavery, could hide out and pretend that the singular event of both his lifetime and the country’s history simply didn’t exist.
When we did, we were immediately struck, that every time we go back to Mark Twain, by the familiarity of the prose, and its sense of continuity with just about every other piece of American writing published in the last 150 years or so. Reading Hawthorne or Melville from just a decade or two prior can feel archaeological, an act of dusting off faded vocabularies and cobwebbed syntaxes to try to get a glimpse at the past; the same can be said for many of Clemens’ contemporaries, even some of those he’s most closely associated with, who gave into the gravitational pull of the Boston Brahmins and their stiff, continental conservatism.
But Roughing It, like much of Twain’s other work, reads like something that could have been published in an American magazine in the last century and a half.
Clemens left behind the constraints of Eastern formality and in the wilds of the West found a voice, conversational, documentary, self-aware, that’s echoed through American literature ever since. Mark Twain, the not-quite-alter-ego that Clemens invented in the Nevada Territory in 1863, didn’t leave behind the Wild West’s most vivid portrait of a desert mountainside or its most visceral account of a barroom shootout, but it’s that voice, more than anything else, that makes Roughing It feel more alive than perhaps any other text that survives from the period.
As a boy, Clemens had been among the first American schoolchildren to learn English from the McGuffey’s Readers, an unorthodox series of textbooks authored by an itinerant Ohio grammar-school teacher and first published in 1836.
For the emerging American middle class, the Readers replaced the New England Primer and other colonial-era tomes that relied on rote memorization and harsh, Puritan didacticism, instead offering young learners a more immersive approach that blended vocabulary and grammar lessons with passages from the Bible, Shakespeare, poetry and popular fiction. Hawked by traveling salesmen to families and teachers across the rapidly populating American countryside, the Reader would sell an estimated 120 million copies and produce, writes Twain biographer Ron Powers, “the first mass-educated and mass-literate generation in the modern world.”
Of course, Mark Twain did much more than just passively slip mid-stream into a new, more voluminous current of American language; he did more than anyone else to chart a path towards, as Powers puts it, “purging American literary English of its heavy Victorian ornamentation.”
In a memorable bit of stranger-than-fiction metaphor recounted in Roughing Its opening chapters, Clemens and his brother made their stagecoach trip across the plains weighed down by ten pounds of U.S. federal statutes and an unabridged dictionary in their luggage.
“Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other,” Twain writes, “the Unabridged Dictionary would come too, and every time it came it damaged somebody.”
Though Roughing It was only Twain’s second published full-length manuscript, it shows him already having come into his own as his country’s foremost folk linguist, a self-taught literary critic with a masterful ear for the peculiarities of American speech. Twain’s travelogue is as much of a guide to the geography and wildlife of the West as it is a primer for “the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains”; he writes of a traveler who “rained the nine parts of speech [in] a desolating deluge of trivial gossip,” and of a drunk who spoke by “now and then tugging out a ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it.”
After a year spent failing to make his fortune in either silver or timber, Clemens began his writing career in earnest in September 1862 as a correspondent for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the following February, in a series of dispatches from the legislature in Carson, he was signing off as “Mark Twain,” a reference to his riverboating days. It was in Nevada, and later San Francisco, where he first rubbed elbows with some of the era’s best-known writers, including Artemus Ward, who came through Virginia City on a lecture tour and encouraged Clemens to submit his work to Eastern papers, and Bret Harte, who edited him at The Golden Era, California’s first true literary journal.
Charles Farrar Browne, better known under his nom de plume, Artemus Ward, as a character, an illiterate rube with “Yankee common sense”, Browne played in public performances. His birth name was Brown but he added the “e” after he became famous.
Browne was born in Waterford, Maine. He began his career as a compositor and occasional contributor to the daily and weekly journals.
In 1858, in The Plain Dealer newspaper of Cleveland, Ohio, he published the first of the “Artemus Ward” series, which, in collected form, achieved popularity in both America and England. Brownes’ companion at the Plain Dealer, George Hoyt, wrote:
“[H]is desk was a rickety table which had been whittled and gashed until it looked as if it had been the victim of lightning. His chair was a fit companion thereto, a wabbling, unsteady affair, sometimes with four and sometimes with three legs. But Browne saw neither the table, nor the chair, nor any person who might be near, nothing, in fact, but the funny pictures which were tumbling out of his brain. When writing, his gaunt form looked ridiculous enough. One leg hung over the arm of his chair like a great hook, while he would write away, sometimes laughing to himself, and then slapping the table in the excess of his mirth.”
In 1860, he became editor of the first Vanity Fair, a humorous New York weekly that failed in 1863. At about the same time, he began to appear as a lecturer who, by his droll and eccentric humor, attracted large audiences. Browne was also a member of the New York bohemian set including leader Henry Clapp Jr., Walt Whitman, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and actress Adah Isaacs Menken.
In 1863, Browne came to San Francisco to perform as Artemus Ward. An early expert at show business publicity, Browne sent his manager ahead by several weeks to buy advertising in the local papers and promote the show among prominent citizens for endorsements.
On November 13, Browne stood before a packed crowd at Platt’s Music Hall. Writer Brett Harte was in the audience that night and he described it in the Golden Era as capturing American speech:
“[H]umor that belongs to the country of boundless prairies, limitless rivers, and stupendous cataracts, that fun which overlies the surface of our national life, which is met in the stage, rail-car, canal, and flat-boat, which bursts out over camp-fires and around bar-room stoves.”
“Artemus Ward” was a favorite author of President Abraham Lincoln. Before presenting “The Emancipation Proclamation” to his Cabinet, Lincoln read to them the latest episode, “Outrage in Utiky”, also known as “High-Handed Outrage at Utica”.
When Browne performed in Virginia City, he met Mark Twain and the two became friends. Of reaching Virginia City, Ward writes:
“My arrival at Virginia City was signalized by the following incident:
I had no sooner achieved my room in the garret of the International Hotel than I was called upon by an intoxicated man, who said he was an Editor. Knowing how rare it was for an Editor to be under the blighting influence of either spirituous or malt liquors, I received this statement doubtfully.
But I said, “What name?”
“Wait!” he said and went out.
I heard him pacing unsteadily up and down the hall outside.
In ten minutes he returned, and said, “Pepper!”
Pepper was indeed his name. He had been out to see if he could remember it and was so flushed with his success that he repeated it joyously several times, and then, with a short laugh, he went away.
I had often heard of a man being “so drunk that he didn’t know what town he lived in,” but here was a man so hideously inebriated that he didn’t know his name. I saw him no more, but I heard from him, for he published a notice of my lecture, in which he said I had a dissipated air!”
Ward, considered America’s first stand-up comedian, was at the height of his fame for his folksy written witticisms when he took to the stage of Maguire’s Opera House, (now Piper’s Opera House) in Virginia City on December 22, 1863.
Twain wasn’t a household name yet but Twain held one of the best seats in the house that night as he sat in the “printers pew” reserved for the town’s reporters. He was in that stage adjacent seat, peering upwards at a prophetic vision.
Standing before him and the full house of Twain’s fellow Comstockians was a gangly, awkward man with a mustache as big as a push broom and hair as curly and unruly hair, as unsuccessfully tamed as a camel on the Comstock. Ward dropped pearls of wisdom and humor like drunken miners dropped silver dollars between wooden floorboards.
Twain would wait for a beat after the crowd had finally stopped laughing after a joke and then let out a horse-like laugh of his own. This would bring all eyes, even Wards’, to Twain multiple times through the show.
“This proves that old saw that he who laughs last laughs best!” Ward said about Twain’s outbursts during his performance.
Ward’s performance, titled “Babes in the Woods” was so successful it went from one night to several performances through the end of that year. Twain found a kindred spirit and a mentor in Ward and with fellow Territorial Enterprise newspaper reporter Dan DeQuille, would run around Virginia City, finding all kinds of hijinks and misadventures.
Following one performance, Browne, Twain, and DeQuille were trekking on a (drunken) rooftop tour of Virginia City until a town constable threatened to blast all three with a shotgun loaded with rock salt.
In 1866, Browne visited England and attracted a large following to his playing Artemus Ward, as a lecturer, and for his literary contributions to Punch. But within a year his health gave way and he died of tuberculosis at Southampton on March 6, 1867.
In England, Browne was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, but his remains were removed to the United States in 1868 and buried at Elm Vale Cemetery in Waterford, Maine. He was 32 years old.
Clemens would spend the early stages of his career in Harte’s shadow, grateful for his mentorship but increasingly envious of his celebrity. The New York-born Harte had arrived in the Golden State as a 17-year-old in 1853, and he was among the first Western writers to catch the eye of the Eastern literary establishment, enrapturing audiences with exotic accounts of life among the forty-niners.
Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart is best remembered for short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning over four decades, he also wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches.
As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. and later to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, however, his Gold Rush tales have been those most often reprinted, adapted, and admired.
Born on August 25, 1836, in New York’s capital city of Albany, he was named after his great-grandfather, Francis Brett. When he was young, his father, Henry, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte.
Henry’s father was Bernard Hart, an Orthodox Jewish immigrant who flourished as a merchant, becoming one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. Later, Francis preferred to be known by his middle name, but he spelled it with only one “t”, becoming Bret Harte. Harte was of French Huguenot and Dutch ancestry and descended from prominent New York landowner Francis Rombouts.
An avid reader as a boy, Harte published his first work at age 11, a satirical poem titled “Autumn Musings,” now lost. Rather than attracting praise, the poem garnered ridicule from his family.
As an adult, he recalled, “Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse”.
His formal schooling ended when he was 13, in 1849. Harte moved to California in 1853, later working there in several capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist. He spent part of his life in the northern California coastal town of Union, now Arcata, a settlement on Humboldt Bay established as a provisioning center for mining camps in the interior.
The Wells Fargo Messenger of July 1916, relates that, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a living in the gold camps, Harte signed on as a messenger with Wells Fargo & Co. Express. He guarded treasure boxes on stagecoaches for a few months, then gave it up to become the schoolmaster at a school near Sonora, in the Sierra foothills.
Among Harte’s first literary efforts, a poem was published in The Golden Era in 1857, and, in October of that same year, his first prose piece on “A Trip Up the Coast.” He was hired as editor of The Golden Era in the spring of 1860, which he attempted to make into a more literary publication.
Mark Twain later recalled that as editor Harte struck “a new and fresh and spirited note” which “rose above that orchestra’s mumbling confusion and was recognizable as music”. Among his writings were parodies and satires of other writers, including The Stolen Cigar-Case featuring ace detective “Hemlock Jones”, which Ellery Queen praised as “probably the best parody of Sherlock Holmes ever written”.
The 1860 massacre of between 80 and 200 Wiyot Indians at the village of Tuluwat, near Eureka in Humboldt County, California was reported by Harte in San Francisco and New York. While serving as assistant editor of the Northern Californian, Harte was left in charge of the paper during the temporary absence of his boss, Stephen G. Whipple.
Harte published a detailed account condemning the slayings, writing: “a more shocking and revolting spectacle never was exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Old women wrinkled and decrepit lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long grey hair. Infants scarcely a span long, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds.”
After he published the editorial, Harte’s life was threatened, and he was forced to flee one month later, moving to San Francisco.
Minister Thomas Starr King recommended Harte to James T. Fields, editor of the prestigious magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, which published Harte’s first short story in October 1863. In 1864, Harte joined Charles Henry Webb in starting a new literary journal called The Californian. He became friends with and mentored poet Ina Coolbrith.
In 1865, Harte was asked by bookseller Anton Roman to edit a book of California poetry; it was to be a showcase of the finest California writers. When the book, called Outcroppings, was published, it contained only 19 poets, many of them Harte’s friends, including Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard.
The book caused controversy, as Harte used the preface to attack California’s literature, blaming the state’s “monotonous climate” for its bad poetry. While the book was widely praised in the East, many newspapers and poets in the West took umbrage at his remarks.
In 1868, Harte became editor of The Overland Monthly, another new literary magazine, published by Roman Anton to highlight local writings. The Overland Monthly was more in tune with California’s pioneering spirit and excitement. Harte’s short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” appeared in the magazine’s second issue, propelling him to nationwide fame.
When word of Charles Dickens’s death reached Harte in July 1870, he immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming issue of the Overland Monthly for 24 hours so that he could compose the poetic tribute, “Dickens in Camp”.
Harte’s fame increased with the publication of his satirical poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” in the September 1870 issue of the Overland Monthly. The poem became better known by its alternate title, “The Heathen Chinee”, after being republished in a Boston newspaper in 1871.
It was also quickly republished in other newspapers and journals, including the New York Evening Post, the New York Tribune, the Boston Evening Transcript, the Providence Journal, the Hartford Courant, Prairie Farmer, and the Saturday Evening Post. Harte was chagrined, however, to find that the popularity of the poem, which he had written to criticize the prevalence of anti-Chinese sentiment among the white population of California, was largely the result of its being taken literally by the very people he had lampooned, who completely misconstrued the ironic intent of Harte’s words.
Determined to pursue his literary career, he returned east with his family in 1871 to New York and eventually to Boston, where he contracted with the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly for an annual salary of $10,000, “an unprecedented sum at the time.” His popularity waned and by the end of 1872, he was without a publishing contract and increasingly desperate.
He spent the next few years struggling to publish new work or republish old, delivering lectures about the gold rush. The winter of 1877–1878 was particularly hard for Harte and his family.
He later recalled it as a “hand-to-mouth life” and wrote to his wife Anna, “I don’t know, looking back, whatever kept me from going down, in every way, during that awful December and January”.
After months of soliciting for such a role, Harte accepted the position of United States Consul in the town of Krefeld, Germany, in May 1878. Mark Twain had been a friend and supporter of Harte’s until a substantial falling out, and he had previously tried to block any appointment for Harte.
In a letter to William Dean Howells, Twain who had just a few years earlier credited Harte for having “trimmed & trained & schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness” complained that Harte would be an embarrassment to the United States because, as he wrote, “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery…To send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much”
Harte borrowed money constantly from his writer friends, including Clemens, and begged him to collaborate on various projects; the pair ultimately fell out over a disastrous attempt to co-write a play in 1877.
Eventually, Harte was given a similar role in Glasgow in 1880. In 1885, he settled in London.
Throughout his time in Europe, he regularly wrote to his wife and children and sent monthly financial contributions. He declined, however, to invite them to join him, nor did he return to the United States to visit them.
His excuses were usually related to money. During the 24 years that he spent in Europe, he never abandoned writing and maintained a prodigious output of stories that retained the freshness of his earlier work.
He died in Camberley, England, in 1902 of throat cancer, and is buried at Frimley. His wife Anna Harte died on August 2, 1920.
The couple lived together only 16 of the 40 years they were married.
In Round the World, Andrew Carnegie praised Harte as uniquely American: “A whispering pine of the Sierras transplanted to Fifth Avenue! How could it grow? Although it shows some faint signs of life, how sickly are the leaves! As for fruit, there is none. America had in Bret Harte its most distinctively national poet.”
Rudyard Kipling also showed himself to be an admirer of Harte’s writing, in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel, while in San Francisco: “A reporter asked me what I thought of the city, and I made answer suavely that it was hallowed ground to me because of Bret Harte. That was true: ‘Well,’ said the reporter, ‘Bret Harte claims California, but California don’t claim Bret Harte…’ He could not understand that to the outside world the city was worth a great deal less than the man.”
Mark Twain, however, characterized him and his writing as insincere. Writing in his autobiography four years after Harte’s death, Twain criticized the miners’ dialect used by Harte, claiming that it never existed outside of his imagination.
Additionally, Twain accused Harte of “borrowing” money from his friends with no intention of repaying it and financially abandoning his wife and children. He referred repeatedly to Harte as “The Immortal Bilk.”
Harte’s stories are full of what Twain, in a drive-by skewering of James Fenimore Cooper midway through Roughing It, called “just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer as a Broadway clerk might make after studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks.”
Harte’s flight eastward eventually took him across the Atlantic, where he lived out his days peddling Gold Rush tales to European audiences for whom they still had some novelty.
Perhaps only Clemens, with his genius for language as it was spoken, could have heard the cacophony of voices marching across the continent, in a country literally at war with itself, and managed to synthesize it all into something intelligible.
“All the peoples of the earth had representative adventurers in the Silverland,” he wrote excitedly in Roughing It, “and as each adventurer had brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world.”
Twain, like Harte, would eventually leave the West in search of fame and fortune among the Brahmins, but would succeed where Harte failed in large part because his time in the silver camps and goldfields, in Powers’ words, “awoke him to the ecstasies of an expressive style unthinkable to the saints of literature back east.”
In 1865’s “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” a short sketch that was written at Ward’s urging and gave Twain his first taste of national acclaim, a prim Eastern narrator introduces the frame story and then steps aside, letting an old forty-niner tell his tale in fluent slang: “I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once.”
It was Mark Twain, instead, who achieved Harte’s dream of acceptance by literary gatekeepers like William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic, who perhaps had his friend Clemens in mind when, in 1880, he described “the best sort of American” as a “Westerner … with Eastern finish.”
Mark Twain secured a place in the canon by injecting some much-needed populist realism into American letters. It was Mark Twain, wrote historian Vernon Louis Parrington in 1930, who finally gave the country a literary tradition that was wholly its own:
“Here, at last, was an authentic American, a native writer thinking his own thoughts, using his own eyes, speaking his own dialect, everything European fallen away, the last shred of feudal culture gone … the very embodiment of the turbulent frontier that had long been shaping a native psychology, and that now, at last, was turning eastward to Americanize the Atlantic seaboard.”
While Clemens, who a few weeks before buying his stagecoach tickets had taken up arms for the Confederacy, would go on to be something like the country’s imperfect literary conscience on slavery, he certainly didn’t discover in the West anti-racism that passes muster today. He wrote open-mindedly in Roughing It about the West Coast’s growing number of Chinese immigrants, moralizing against “the scum of the population,” including “policemen and politicians,” who abused them, but the book abounds in slurs and stereotypes, a section maligning the Goshute people of Nevada and Utah stands out as especially hideous.
Roughing It is often celebrated as having punctured some of the country’s most treasured myths about its Western frontier, even as an “autopsy of the American Dream,” as Twain scholar Hamlin Hill put it.
“Having left home for the first time to seek romance, freedom, success, wealth and fame in the West,” Hill wrote, “the narrator finds instead cold-blooded murderers, rigged juries, paper speculation in stocks, and blighted hopes, including his own.”
Undoubtedly, Clemens’ experiences in Nevada, chronicled in Roughing Its hilarious middle chapters on the iniquities and absurdities of the silver boom, helped awaken him to the Gilded Age venality that he would spend much of the rest of his career assailing. In the book’s final paragraph. helpfully labeled “MORAL,” he offers readers simple advice: “Stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence.”
But even as Mark Twain ridiculed the get-rich-quick delusions of prospectors and speculators across the West, Sam Clemens found himself permanently afflicted with the fortune-seeking impulse that he first felt combing the hillsides outside Virginia City for specks of silver. Quite apart from any literary ambition, he harbored a lifelong desire to join the ranks of the country’s burgeoning industrialist elite, leading to a series of ruinous investments in everything from railroad stocks and a publishing company to a newfangled typesetting machine and “Plasmon” protein powder, a kind of turn-of-the-century Soylent.
He was saved from bankruptcy in the 1890s largely thanks to the interventions of his friend Henry Huttleston Rogers, a ruthless Wall Street monopolist who had helped John D. Rockefeller build Standard Oil. “Hell Hound Rogers” leaned on Clemens, in turn, to ingratiate himself with literary figures like S.S. McClure and Ida Tarbell, managing to be the only robber baron portrayed relatively sympathetically in the latter’s muckraking history of Rockefeller’s company.
It was all a far cry from what Twain had wished for in his lowest moments in Roughing It, when his hopes of striking it rich had been dashed and recalling the simple decent living he had made piloting riverboats, he “long[ed] to stand behind a wheel again and never roam anymore.”
Twenty years later, in the memoir Life on the Mississippi, the thought was still on his mind: “Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed, and hoped, that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came.”
After the war, the riverboats kept running, they’re still running today, but there was no going back to how things were. Mark Twain may have exposed the frontier as a place that was lawless and unromantic, a place where a few winners got ahead of the rest only through dumb luck and brutal violence, but America and its most famous author turned out to like that place just fine.
While many Sagebrush writers left the Comstock area forever, there is one who could not permanently leave it or any reservation the federal government assigned her to. She also is the only woman officially listed among an otherwise all-male class of Sagebrush School writers.
Sarah Winnemucca was born near Humboldt Lake, Nevada, and forced to study in a Catholic school in Santa Clara, California. When the 1860 Paiute War started between the Pyramid Lake Paiute and settlers, Sarah and her family escaped to Virginia City, where for five years, she and her family would travel from the reservation to perform “A Paiute Royal Family” at Maguire’s Opera House.
During an 1865 raid by the U.S. Calvery for “stealing cattle,” Sarah’s mother and 28 others died. Subsequently, Winnemucca became an advocate for the rights of Native Americans. To this end, she published Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1884), a book that is both a memoir and history of her people during their first 40 years of contact with European Americans.
Like Twain, Sarah delivered nearly 300 lectures throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, creating awareness of injustice against Native Americans.
In Boston, she met the sisters Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann, who helped her compile and prepare her lecture materials for publication as Life Among the Piutes. The book, published in 1883, is the “first known autobiography written by a Native American woman” and the first U.S. copyright registration secured by a Native American woman.
And though, not of the original class, but as important to the history of the Sagebrush School is a New York columnist who moved to Virginia City in the 1950s and restarted the historical forerunner of this celebrated broadsheet is now a member of the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame.
Lucius Beebee, who died in 1966, was formally inducted into the hall of fame at the annual convention and awards banquet for the Nevada Press Foundation on Sat., September 18, 2021, in Reno.
Beebee joined the New York Herald Tribune in 1929, writing a syndicated column called “This New York,” chronicling the metropolis’s fancier restaurants and social establishments from the early 1930s through 1944 before he and longtime partner Charles Clegg moved to Virginia City.
When we say partner, we mean that in the most loving way. You see, long before there was G.L.A.A.D. or any other advocacy group, Messrs. Beebee and Clegg were an established and accepted couple on the Comstock.
And much like today, when Cowboy Barbie hikes up and down C Street, bullhorn in hand, shouting support for Former Pres. Trump, hauling political flags before unsuspecting visitors, we don’t care about the advocacy of one group over another. It is a fact that we see and have always seen everything and everyone as “fair game.”
Beebee and Clegg bought the floundering Virginia City News, relaunching it as the Territorial Enterprise in 1952, thus restoring the banner where Samuel Clemens had written under his famous pen name, Mark Twain. As for Beebee, he wrote a column called “That Was the West” for the T.E., covering everything from economics, politics, journalism, religion, history, morals, justice, finance, and travel along with the art of choosing, cooking, and eating food.
He and Clegg sold the Territorial Enterprise in 1961.
He died at 63 of a sudden heart attack at his home in Hillsborough, Calif. Twenty-six years later, Beebe became a member of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
And how can anyone interested in the Comstock area and its unique history not find this article by Brutus Howl from the current paper of record, The Comstock Chronicle, fascinating?
We have heard that there has been a dark, swarthy man wandering up and down C Street looking for a camel to purchase. When asked if he would like one hump or two, he always returns with the question, “What hump?”
Virginia City Tourism Director Deny Dotson said plans to hold the event will proceed.
“We’re able to regenerate and bring back a long-time event, a historical event,” he said. “Depending on what’s going on, we may have to make adjustments whether it’s COVID related or weather-related, but we’ll continue to do what we need to do and make sure people have an opportunity to enjoy their freedoms and enjoy Virginia City.”
The Camel Races begin today, Friday, September 10, and run through 12.
This evening beginning at 5 p.m., are Hot Camel Nights, a “locals” evening show. You can purchase your ticket for $10 at the Virginia City Visitor Center during business hours.
Then tomorrow, September 11, at 10 a.m. and again at 2 p.m., the town honors first responders with a 20th-anniversary salute that includes a military flyover and a first responder tribute. Then on Sunday, September 12, starting at noon, Dolan Family Day, where the first 100 children will receive a free camel ride before the show.
Besides the mysterious dark, swarthy man, another mystery has been begging for an answer: how did this begin? The easy answer is the need for four inches of newspaper copy.
A more convoluted answer comes from the archives of the Territorial Enterprise to wit: a September 2, 1959, article written by managing editor Bob Richards.
I’ve rid on mean ‘gators in Floridy’s swamps,
Catamounts, bull calfs, and mule critters too;
But each one is a saint to a camel which ain’t
Good for nothin’ but eatin’ and spittin’ at you.
— Old U. S. Army Camel Driver’s Song, 1857
“With two camels already entered and another “possible” that may yet beat the entry deadline; with bands of music, antique automobiles, members of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus and a corps of Pretty Waiter Girls on hand to lend color to the festivities and with a trophy called the Territorial Enterprise Perpetual Camel Race cup to be awarded the winner, the 1960 running of the Annual Virginia City Labor Day Camel Race promises to be one of the most outstanding observances in the history of the event. That was the confident prediction offered this week by the Camel Race Committee, Edward D. Gladding, Chairman, as area interest in the re-enactment of an episode in Virginia City’s rich early day history rapidly mounted.”
“It’s going to be a lallapaloosa,” was the considered statement of Mrs. Beulah Haddow, Publicity Chairman, and herself together with Justice of the Peace Edward Colletti, a long-time prime mover of the annual affair.
Already entered and due to arrive in Virginia City tomorrow, September 3, for a period of pre-race conditioning are Izmir Kufte, a dromedary sponsored by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Old Heenan, a Bactrian carrying the silks of the Phoenix (Ariz.) Gazette. Bactrianstorians recall that Old Heenan was the name of the last of the camels who once carried salt from the Esmeralda marshes to the Virginia City mills and that after retirement, he lived for many years on a ranch near Dayton before dying in the early 1880s.”
Also applying for entry, which at the time of writing needs confirming, is the Indio, Cal., Junior Chamber of Commerce, sponsor of the Annual Indio Date Festival in which the ungainly creatures play a prominent part.
“Since the camels used in the U. S. Army’s unsuccessful desert transport experiment of the mid-nineteenth century also roamed this section of the West, we feel we have a legitimate historical precedent for our participation,” said Indio J. C. spokesman.
Signed on to ride the Chronicle and Gazette camels are John Huston, noted motion picture director now in the area for the shooting of the Gable-Monroe film “The Misfits,” and Billy Pearson, San Francisco art dealer, and former jockey. Since neither of the riders has ever ridden a camel, and since so far as is known neither of the camels has ever been ridden, this will amount to a maiden race for all hands.
In charge of the camels during their Comstock sojourn will be Carey Baldwin, a director of San Francisco’s Fleishacker Zoo, and an assistant.”
Richards came to Virginia City in 1954 eventually hiring on as a writer with the Territorial Enterprise, owned by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, who purchased the paper in 1952. Richards became managing editor, staying with the Enterprise until it sold in 1960.
And while credited with creating the hoax in 1959, he began the farce in 1957, long before the first official race took place in 1960.
During the shooting of the Misfits, which took the entire summer of 1960, there were many stops and starts. At one point, Huston and Pearson decided they needed something to do.
Having read about the mock camel race, Huston challenged Pearson to a bona fide camel race. Hotel owner Charles Mapes was told about it and agreed to pay for the camels and provide prize money for the winner.
The event gathered even more momentum when the San Francisco Chronicle and the Phoenix Gazette agreed to sponsor competing animals.
Nearly canceled because some saddles failed to arrive, Huston saved the day when he noted that one of the camels was a Bactrian, a two-hump camel. Huston, at six-foot-four, said he could straddle the camel between its humps and would not need a saddle.
Being game, Pearson said he could maintain his balance on the single-hump camel, a dromedary. However, a piece of used netting had to be wrapped around the camel so that Pearson, more than a foot shorter than Huston, could hang on.
Meanwhile, Mapes served as valet to Huston while San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen was second to Pearson.
The mount ridden by Huston made for the stables at the finish line, the clear winner. However, Pearson and his ride detoured through the gathered spectators and into Piper’s Opera House.
There is nothing in the record about where the race began or was to end. Furthermore, no details are available describing the exact route the camel took to get into the opera house or if it had to pay full fare for the show given there.
After the lopsided race, the notables retreated to the Sharon House for refreshments and a private all-night shindig.
Bob Richards died of a heart attack on Wed., Jun. 26, 1968. He was 57 years old.
That Friday, the Territorial Enterprise carried a front-page obituary for Richards. It read in part: “We have lost a great Nevadan, a man who will be sorely missed. The Territorial Enterprise can only carry on. And it will carry on in the proud tradition of the people who made it a great newspaper. In the tradition of Mark Twain, Lucius Beebe and Bob Richards.”
Stationed at the south end of C Street in Virginia City, affixed to the north end of a railroad car, is a bronze memorial plaque dedicated to Richards describing him as “a touch of Twain revisiting the Comstock.”
The final question asked is “Why ostrich racing?”
Unfortunately, we have little to no information other than to say, “birds of a feather flock together,” good luck to the rider of the plumed one, and the plucking of tail feathers is not only in poor taste, frowned upon, but is also expressly forbidden.
Now, about those “Pretty Waiter Girls…”
Pure School of Sagebrush journalism and writing.
Though the more learned might say the era of the Sagebrush School ended in 1914, there is a differing opinion, believing that as long as Nevada exists and the resident writer toils over their work, whatever it might be, there will always be a Sagebrush School.
In truth, this author thinks of himself as one of these people.
Success met, but how much I had to do with it is debatable. That word ‘success’ is an odd one. It means nothing to one fellow and a lot to the other, yet neither has the corner market on its outcome.
In a conversation with my son, he asked, “So, are you a success?”
“I don’t know. Guess it would depend on what you are measuring it by.”
“Well, how do you measure it?”
“Another good question that I don’t have an answer for.”
“Could you hazard a guess?”
“Sure,” I answered after a few seconds of uncareful thought, “Success is enjoying what you have and having what you enjoy.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“My point exactly,” I said, adding, “For a guy who set out to make his fortune at penny slots, daydreaming his time away while watching the ocean swell and ebb, it has been an adventure. The ups and downs of life, should a person care to study the two, would see, not sinewaves, but rather, a flat glassy effect that has a sudden beginning and a most abrupt ending.”
“I get that, but it still doesn’t answer my first question, ‘Are you a success? It’s a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question.”
“Yes.”
Damn it! I still need to learn to listen!
Life is never very far from sad news. Such is the case with the passing of my friend Angela Mann. She was not just a friend but a mentor and the first editor I ever worked for, and she also, at one point, along with her husband Richard, owned the Comstock Chronicle and the Dayton Dispatch.
She taught me the finer details of news reporting by assigning me the sad task of writing obituaries. The hours I spent in the newspaper morgue researching names of the deceased came full circle as I typed the headline: Former Owner and Publisher of Comstock Chronicle Dies.
“Angela Mann, 74, the former owner and publisher of the Comstock Chronicle, passed away at her Reno home on Sunday, December 31, 2023. A devoted wife, mother, and community leader, Angela’s life was about commitment to family, faith, and the betterment of the communities she called home.
Born in Contra Costa County, Calif., on Wednesday, September 21, 1949, Angela’s journey led her to become a passionate journalist and editor. After graduating from El Cerrito High School in 1967 and California State University, San Francisco, in 1971, she embarked on a remarkable three-decade career.
Angela’s dedication to her craft was evident as an editor at the Reno Gazette-Journal and Sparks Tribune, having earned numerous awards as a long-time member of the Nevada Press Association.
In 2007, Angela and her husband Richard became the owners of the Comstock Chronicle, where she left an indelible mark as a writer, editor, designer, and photographer.
Known for her enthusiasm and meticulous planning, Angela extended her influence beyond the newsroom, actively participating in local and regional activities. Her tireless efforts and positive attitude earned her the nickname “Iron Lady” after 20 years of volunteering with the Knights of Columbus, where she served as a Eucharistic minister, photographer, and bulletin editor. Angela’s involvement also extended to various community organizations, including the Boy Scouts of America and the Sparks Republican Women.
In 2015, after eight years, Angela and Richard sold the Comstock Chronicle to embark on a busy retirement, focusing on family and cherished hobbies. Angela’s love for sewing, quilting, gardening, and cooking found expression in her interactions with her two grandchildren in Reno. She also enjoyed sharing her culinary skills by preparing delicious entrees, desserts, and specialty items.
Her impact reached far beyond her professional and community engagements as she leaves behind a rich tapestry of memories, a testament to a life well-lived. Surviving Angela is her loving husband Richard, children, grandchildren, and a community grateful for her enduring contributions.
A memorial service to celebrate Angela’s life is today at 11 a.m. Friday, January 19, at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, 2900 North McCarran Blvd, in Sparks. Donations in Angela’s memory, in place of flowers, can be sent to Immaculate Conception Catholic Church.”
Her passing allows me to finally share the real story behind my firing from the Sparks Tribune all those many years ago. While outwardly, it appears to be a simple breach of trust because I posted to my website a letter sent to her, it was far worse than many knew.
It was a time shortly after the passage of the “Patriot Act,” and it had not accounted for how the media used connections to develop news stories. At the time, I had a friend in the National Security Agency that I used as a source. She has since retired and is enjoying a beach somewhere in the world, so I can tell this without getting her in trouble.
In reflection, it was stupid to extend the energy I did to track down a person using a pre-paid credit card to pay for a website attacking a friend. She had no problem identifying this person because of their Internet Protocol (IP) address used while writing their blog posts.
When I explained to Angela what I was doing and how I planned to expose this person, she told me not to because she didn’t think it was legal or ethical. I listened and didn’t publish the person’s name, but then I did publish the letter that either she shared with me or someone else sent. So I screwed myself anyway.
She turned me out after asking “If you had it to do all over again, would you publish the letter?”
“Yes, because some politicians have a habit of blaming others for their failings, and people need to know about that.”
“While I agree with you in spirt,” Angie said, “You violated my trust.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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