SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 36 (of 78)
Fake Holdup (1866)
Chapter 36
Fake Holdup (1866)
The practical joke played on me, which resulted in my returning east, occurred in this way: A couple of days before I lectured in Virginia City, two stagecoaches were robbed near the town. This event was on everybody’s mind when we arrived.
Thinking themselves clever, some supposed friends of mine took it into what passed for their minds to waylay my lecture agent and myself late one night as we were walking over the desolate “divide” back to Virginia City, after having lectured in Gold Hill.
The joke of these “highwaymen” friends of ours was mainly a joke upon themselves, though, for they had waited for us on the cold hill-top two full hours before we came, and there was very little fun for them in that. If the thermometer had been an inch longer they would all have frozen to death; they were so chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again.
Moreover, I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble they had taken. I was only afraid that their weapons would go off accidentally. Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no blood would be intentionally spilled. They were not smart; they ought to have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barreled shot gun, if they desired to see the author of these memoirs climb a tree.
Shortly after that incident, I took a berth in a steamship bound for New York by way of the Isthmus—a trip that was not much of a picnic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.
EDITOR’S NOTES: As livid as Twain was at the time about the practical joke played on him (see chapter 79 of Roughing It for the full story), in later years he apparently saw the matter differently, and even used the experience as humorous material in dinner speeches. In an 1893 letter to his wife Livy, he described one such occasion where he talked about “...the midnight highway robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the windswept and desolate Gold Hill Divide, [of which] no witness is left but me, the victim. All the friendly robbers are gone. These old fools last night laughed till they cried over the particulars of that old forgotten crime.”
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Beset by a raging storm, the ship on which Twain took passage nearly sank the first night of the voyage. The captain was Edgar “Ned” Wakeman, who would figure as a character in many of Twain’s tales and books thereafter, in various guises (such as Ned Blakely in Roughing It, and Eli Stormfield in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven).
That first night, one of the passengers said he “considered his time was come now.” Nevertheless, he added, “if anybody can save her it’s old Wakeman.”
Then cholera took its toll on many of the passengers. In Twain’s shipboard notebook, he recorded his dire forebodings: “There is no use in disguising it—I really believe the ship is out of medicines—we have a good surgeon but nothing to work with. … Verily, the ship is fast becoming a floating hospital. …When I think of poor ‘Shape’ & the preacher, both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I myself may be dead to-morrow. … all levity has ceased.”
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