Mark Twain in Nevada

[2] It was under this agreement that Samuel and Orion Clemens left for Carson City, Nevada on July 18, 1861 on an overland stagecoach leaving from St. Joseph, Missouri that would take 19 days to arrive.

After seeing silver ore emerge from one of the mills of the Comstock Lode, Samuel Clemens (tired of working under his brother) began to spend much of his time in the mining districts of Humboldt and Esmeralda.

"[14] Historian Bruce Michelson concludes Twain used this hoax to both ridicule the local politician Sewall and mock a public who through gullibility were too quick to accept a mass of petrification reports.

[14] In a letter dated February 3, 1863 to the Territorial Enterprise from Carson City, complaining about a lavish party that kept him "awake for forty-eight hours" Clemens signed his work "yours dreamily, MARK TWAIN", the first use of the name under which he would become famous.

[10] The scrapbook Clemens kept while in Nevada initially was filled with newspaper articles that hailed secessionist opinions in the West, but by the end of 1862 he began pasting in editorials of leading citizens demanding that Orion purge the government of anyone with Southern sympathies.

[10] Twain would go on to protest a clause in a proposed Nevada constitution to disfranchise any that voluntarily bore arms for the Confederacy, claiming that, even in his Missouri days, he always had an underlying affection for the Union.

[19] Historian Louis J. Budd points out that, while in later life, Twain "distorted the sober nature of this assignment [of covering the Legislature] by stressing the margin of irreverence with which he had carried it out" this was a comic recasting of reality.

[5] As historian Louis J. Budd points out, "A neat example of how he shifted tactics as strategy demanded lies in his comments on a bill to grant twenty thousand dollars to the Sierra Seminary, a private school in Carson City with about forty students.

On January 14, 1864, he held that the 'money could not be more judiciously expended'; on February 16 he called the school 'a private affair,' hinted at boodling [political graft and fraud], and suggested support for a public mining college instead; on April 25 he had the gall to refer to the Sierra Seminary bill as a 'really worthy measure.

[16][page needed] Twain printed an especially poorly received piece of satire at the same time that he involved himself in an increasingly serious war of words, insults, and challenges with the editor of a competing paper.

The efforts were intended to send the money to the St. Louis Sanitary Fair that was occurring later that spring which was backed by the soon-to-be general of the Union Army Ulysses S. Grant[22] and Frederick Law Olmsted.

[25] With the local focus on fundraising for the Sanitary Commission, Twain decided to write a piece of satire that combined the story of the progress of the Great Austin Flour Sack with the events surrounding a May 5, 1864 Carson City fancy-dress ball held by prominent society ladies (including Mollie Clemens) to raise funds for the same purpose.

[25] On May 16, 1864 with editor Joe Goodman out of town Twain's unsigned piece (entitled the "Grand Ball at Los Angeles Plata"[18]) made its way into the hands of the printer for the Enterprise and appeared in the paper on May 17.

[16] Twain would later claim that he had been intoxicated when he wrote the piece, but historian Fulton states "his article is best understood in the context of election year Copperhead hoaxes and of his own early efforts such as "A Bloody Massacre Near Carson," "Petrified Man," and his reporting for the Third House.

"[16] Historian James Melville Cox points out that by being willing to bring the Sanitary Fund's reputation into question and linking it to miscegenation this was a "somewhat "confederate" accusation…revealing that Mark Twain's humor still showed a native if not a partisan Southern cast.

"[27] Historian Arthur G. Pettit states that in Twain's shift to support the Union "He was probably relieved to learn that coming down on the winning side did not require revision of his views about black people.

"[10] Historian Louis J. Budd also holds Twain's "latent Southern racism made possible his fatally clumsy wisecrack that local money for the Sanitary Fund would go to a "miscegenation society.

"[5] Historian Ben Tarnoff writes "Twain had located a sore spot in the collective psyche" the idea of sexual relations between the races "wasn't simply taboo; it also tapped an anxiety about the ultimate aim of the Civil War.

"[25][32] He asked Mollie to "Either satisfy those ladies that I dealt honorably by them when I consented to let Dan suppress that article…or else make them appoint a man to avenge the wrong done them, with weapons in fair & open field.

[22] Historian Roy Jr. Morris states that "although he could scarcely hold a pistol in his hand without threatening to shoot himself in the foot, he felt honor-bound to reply in kind to Laird's inflammatory words.

[22] This was especially irritating as eight months earlier the regular Enterprise editor-in-chief Joe Goodman had gotten into a heated war of printed words with one of Laird's Union editors (Thomas Fitch) and crippled his knee in a pistol duel at Stampede Valley.

[22] In the now publicly printed correspondence and in an afterword following it Twain called Laird "putrid,..grovleing, vulgar liar", an "ass", inflicted by such a condition through "general principles" and from "natural instinct".

"[15][22][25][32] Besides questioning Twain's integrity and honesty, the letter stressed "one thing was decided [about the funds raised], that they should go to the aid of the sick and wounded soldiers, who are fighting the battles of our country, and for no other purpose."

[22][25][33] On Sunday May 29, 1864, Mark Twain, having quit the Enterprise, boarded the stagecoach with his friend Steve Gillis and began his journey out of the Nevada Territory to San Francisco; no duel was fought.

[15] His fears were ended by a public invitation printed in the Enterprise signed by the governor Henry G. Blasdel and more than 100 leading citizens of Carson City, including two husbands of the Sanitary Commission ladies, saying that they had "none other than the most kindly remembrances of you"[33] and encouraging him to perform in their town.

[15][33][42] In response, he published a letter in the Enterprise thanking them for their tolerance "of one who has shamefully deserted the high office of Governor of the Third House of Nevada and gone into the Missionary business"[15] and pledging to "disgorge a few lies and as much truth as I can pump out without damaging my constitution.

Twain and his literary agent Denis McCarthy (a one-time co-proprietor at the Enterprise) were making the five mile journey at night in an area where only two days before a pair of stagecoaches had been robbed at gunpoint.

[34] Twain who had been shaken and remained seriously upset that they used real revolvers, tried to put on a brave face on the incident in his writing saying "they did not really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble they had taken.

[22] Twain wrote a humorous sketch about the affair titled "How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel" that appeared in Every Saturday on December 21, 1872,[4] and was retold in lectures for Roughing It,[4][44] in Tom Hood's Comic Annual for 1873[22] and in his autobiographical dictation in 1906.

"[44] Historian Forrest Glen Robinson says this is an example of "what we know about poor Clemens's tyrannical conscience, and his virtual incapacity to forgive himself for any of the real and imagined wrongs that lurked, undying, in his memory.