SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 64 (of 78)
At Bottom a Sterling Man (1897)
Chapter 64
At Bottom a Sterling Man (1897)
My older brother Orion—the oldest of my parents’ children—died in December of 1897, fifty years after the death of our father, and seven years after that of our mother. Born a decade before me, Orion was seventy-two years old. I have outlived him. I have outlived all of my siblings, although at seventy-four I am not yet as old as Pamela was when she died. She was just short of seventy-seven. I have no burning ambition to overtake her in that way, though.
Orion was always mercurial; full of passion for some new idea wrought from the forge of his brain and the furnace of his heart each day, and discarded for a new one the next. And in-between the laying down of one enterprise and the taking up of the next, periods of dense gloom would descend upon him.
Orion’s life was spent pursuing careers as varied as raising chickens and serving as Secretary of Nevada Territory—and as part of that latter office, often serving also as acting Governor in the frequent absences of that august personage. Besides those forays into politics and poultry, Orion also tried his hand at printing, editing, inventing, running a boarding house, and even writing and lecturing.
He could have become successful as a politician, because he was loved by all and recognized as an honest man of principle. Perhaps for that very reason he was really unsuited rather than suited to be a politician. It is possible that, due to being subconsciously aware of this lack of his, he deliberately sabotaged himself from continuing in that line of endeavor by suddenly taking up the cudgels for temperance in Nevada at the time of that region’s transition from Territoryhood to Statehood. Had
Orion at least kept dark on the subject for a time, he probably could have become the first Governor of the State of Nevada. But it was not to be, as temperance was decidedly unpopular in Washoe. So, he returned to the Midwest and his more accustomed way of life, living hand-to-mouth and eventually becoming reliant on me to subsidize his flights of fancy.
Let it be said nonetheless, though, that Orion’s heart was made of the purest gold, purer than any ever mined and assayed in California. He was always truthful; he was always sincere; he was always honest and honorable. Born and reared among slaves and slave-holders, Orion was yet an abolitionist from his boyhood to his death.
It was the abolitionist in Orion which impelled him to support Lincoln in the Rail Splitter’s 1860 run for the presidency, which resulted in Orion being rewarded with the appointment as Secretary of the new Nevada Territory. That allowed me an opportunity to go along with him. Although I paid the stage tickets for both of us—as Orion had no money at the time—it was really he who made a way for us to go there.
If I had not gone West, then, what would have happened in my life? What would have become of me? Gone into the penitentiary or the pulpit, no doubt. I could easily say I owe everything from 1861 on to Orion. Or to Abraham Lincoln. Or even to Osawatomie Brown. Or, perhaps, to Harriet Beecher Stowe, our former neighbor in Hartford. It all depends on how far back you want to take things and how deeply you are willing to examine them.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Based on Twain’s description of Orion, he probably would have been diagnosed as bipolar in our times. On fire with enthusiasm for some new venture at the beginning of each day, then in the depths of despair later on the same day.
As an example of Orion’s changeableness (or “eccentricities”), Twain wrote the following about him, as recorded in his autobiography:
One morning he was a Republican, and upon invitation he agreed to make a campaign speech at the Republican mass meeting that night. He prepared the speech. After luncheon he became a Democrat and agreed to write a score of exciting mottoes to be painted upon the transparencies which the Democrats would carry in their torchlight procession that night. He wrote those shouting Democratic mottoes during the afternoon and they occupied so much of his time that it was night before he had a chance to change his politics again; so he actually made a rousing Republican campaign speech in the open air while his Democratic transparencies passed by in front of him, to the joy of every witness present.
He was a most strange creature—but in spite of his eccentricities he was beloved all his life in whatsoever community he lived. And he was also held in high esteem, for at bottom he was a sterling man.
***
Twain mentions Harriet Beecher Stowe as possibly having a great influence on his life due to her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On meeting her, Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War?”
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