SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 32 (of 78)
Police Brutality, Jackass Gulch, the Jumping Frog, and an Epiphany (1864, 1865)
Chapter 32
Police Brutality, Jackass Gulch, the Jumping Frog, and an Epiphany (1864, 1865)
In November 1864, my five foot two inch high, 95-pound friend Steve Gillis got into one of his frequent barroom fights in San Francisco, and badly beat up a bartender. I signed a five-hundred-dollar bail bond to keep Steve out of jail for a time. Steve fled back to Virginia City—he had found out that the bartender he had thrashed was a close friend of the chief of police in Frisco, and didn’t think it would be good for his health to stick around. Since I had gone bail for Steve, after he skipped town I felt compelled to follow his lead in making myself scarce.
Besides, I was having problems of my own with the police. I had written some things in the papers exposing police corruption, ineptitude, and unjust abuse of Chinese immigrants. Word was out that it would not be safe for me to be seen in public there, either.
So Steve and I went east—he ultimately back to Virginia City, while I branched off to the foothills, to where Steve’s brother Jim lived in a cabin. Jim was a gold prospector up there—a pocket miner, to be more precise.
More precisely as to location, my place of concealment and refuge was in the southern mines of the gold rush area, specifically in Tuolumne and Calaveras counties, more specifically yet near Tuttletown in the former county (at Jim Gillis’ place in Jackass Gulch – it was named that before I moved there), and Angels Camp in the latter.
It was there in Angels Camp, in January of 1865, that I heard the story of a man who was an inveterate gambler and would even wager on the self-catapulting skills of bullfrogs.
While infesting a hotel in Angels Camp on a rainy day, I heard this tale told in the drollest manner imaginable, by a man who did not conceive the slightest humor in the tale—which made it all the more entertaining to me.
I took notes of what he had told me, and in what manner, and his choice of words, and then wrote it out.
To make a long story into a short one, my retelling of that tale eventually appeared in an eastern periodical, and was well-received throughout the nation. It was the beginning of true fame for me.
This increase in my reputation caused by the tale of the loaded frog led to another opportunity, another stop along the way, another turning-point, that propelled me along the path which eventually led me to what and who I became.
It was during that year of 1865 that I acquiesced as to what my career would be and remain. I determined that, low calling as it was, my best hold was as a writer, and indeed, an inferior sub-genre of the trade, one of humor.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain’s ire over mob violence directed against the Chinese and the brutality and corruption within the San Francisco police department expressed itself in exposés he wrote for his employer, the Morning Call. As they refused to print these pieces, though—afraid of alienating their readers—Twain gave one of these stories to his old Virginia City paper, the Territorial Enterprise. The result was a libel suit against him. And heat from the police.
As he recounts above, ultimately Twain’s criticism of the police was harsh enough that he felt the need to allow the authorities a cooling-off period, and he headed for the hills (literally). An example follows of what he wrote about the mistreatment of the much-maligned Chinese. This is from Roughing It, Twain’s book about his years in the west:
They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it—they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.
Twain also wrote the following about what he had witnessed in San Francisco:
“I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done him”
***
Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was originally titled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and also had several other names and variations through the years. It first appeared in the last issue of the Saturday Press just prior to Twain’s 30th birthday in 1865.
Twain’s own opinion of the story was not always overly favorable. In a January 10, 1866 letter to his mother Jane and sister Pamela, he wrote, “To think that after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!— “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.”
Twain was nevertheless apparently pleased with the praise, though, because he saved a newspaper clipping written by one of those “New York people” which said:
Mark Twain’s story called ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog’ has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark...It is voted the best thing of the day.
And in 1869, in a letter to his then-fiancée Olivia Langdon, Twain wrote: “Between you and I, privately, Livy dear, it is the best humorous sketch America has produced yet, and I must read it in public some day, in order that people may know what there is in it.”
In fact, Twain once referred to “Jumping Frog” as “the germ of my coming good fortune.”
***
It wasn’t until two years after first signing a dispatch “Mark Twain” that he finally accepted to himself and admitted to others that writing was to be his future.
Twain might have gotten his final push to go full throttle into the pursuit of humorous writing by means of notice given him by the New York Round Table in its issue of September 1865, in an article entitled “American Humor and Humorists”:
The foremost among the merry gentlemen of the California press, as far as we have been able to judge, is one who signs himself “Mark Twain.” Of his real name we are ignorant but his style resembles that of “John Phoenix” more nearly than any other, and some things we have seen from his pen would do honor to the memory of even that chieftain among humorists. He is, we believe, quite a young man, and has not written a great deal. Perhaps, if he will husband his resources and not kill with overwork the mental goose that has given us these golden eggs, he may one day take rank among the brightest of our wits.
The following month, in October of 1865, Twain wrote his brother Orion a letter wherein he claims that he got “the call” (perhaps viewing the above review as such) to humorous writing:
I never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, & the other a preacher of the gospel. I accomplished the one & failed in the other, because I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade—i.e., religion. I have given it up forever.
But I have had a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order—i.e., humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says that to do right you must multiply the one or the two or three talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping, I would long ago have ceased to meddle with things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures.
Poor, pitiful business! Though the Almighty did his part by me—for the talent is a mighty engine when supplied with the steam of education—which I have not got, & so its pistons and cylinders & shafts move feebly & for a holiday show & are useless for any good purpose.
You see in me a talent for humorous writing, & urge me to cultivate it …now, when editors of standard literary papers in the distant east give me high praise, & who do not know me & cannot of course be blinded by the glamour of partiality, that I really begin to believe there must be something in it. I will drop all trifling, & sighing after vain impossibilities, & strive for a fame—unworthy & evanescent though it must of necessity be—if you will record your promise to go hence to the States & preach the gospel when circumstances shall enable you to do so? I am in earnest. Shall it be so?
You had better shove this in the stove—for if we strike a bargain I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ & ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.
It almost seems as if Twain wanted his brother Orion to “take his place” as the preacher in the family; if only Orion would agree to do this, he himself would feel fully released from and relieved of that ambition and self-imposed obligation, and be able to turn his attention fully to writing, without any qualms of conscience weighing upon him. Let Orion receive and take up ‘the call’ to the ministry, and he could follow a different calling.
In an 1866 letter to his namesake nephew, his sister Pamela’s son Samuel Moffett, Twain wrote:
Dear Sammy—Keep up your lick & you will become a great minister of the gospel some day, & then I shall be satisfied. I wanted to be a minister myself—it was the only genuine ambition I ever had. I always missed fire on the ministry. Then I hoped some member of the family would take hold of it & succeed.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.