No letters are known to survive for the next seven weeks. Clemens left Virginia City bound for San Francisco on 29 May 1864. The Gold Hill Evening News of the following day observed:
Among the few immortal names of the departed—that is, those who departed yesterday morning per California stage—we notice that of Mark Twain. We don’t wonder. Mark Twain’s beard is full of dirt, and his face is black before the people of Washoe. Giving way to the idiosyncratic eccentricities of an erratic mind, Mark has indulged in the game infernal—in short, “played hell.” Shifting the locale of his tales of fiction from the Forest of Dutch Nick’s to Carson City; the dramatis personae thereof from the Hopkins family to the fair Ladies of the Ladies’ Fair; and the plot thereof from murder to miscegenation—he slopped. The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man, though sheathed with the brass and triple cheek of Mark Twain. . . . He has vamosed, cut stick, absquatulated; and among the pine forests of the Sierras, or amid the purlieus of the city of earthquakes, he will tarry awhile, and the office of the En[ter]prise will become purified, and by the united efforts of Goodman and Dan De Quille once more merit the sweet smiles of the ladies of Carson. (“An Exile,” 2, in MTEnt , 204–5)
The journey was marked by conviviality, however, not by penitence. Clemens had the companionship of Joseph T. Goodman as well as Steve Gillis. Goodman later recalled: “We all sat on the seat behind the driver on a Concord Coach. I intended to go only a little way out on the Geiger Grade [the road between Virginia City and Steamboat Springs, a distance of seven miles]; but the company was too good and I kept clear on to San Francisco” (Goodman to Albert Bigelow Paine, 7 Apr 1911, in Davis 1956, 4).
In San Francisco, Clemens and Gillis initially settled at the Occidental Hotel, which, Clemens informed his Territorial Enterprise readers around the middle of June, was “Heaven on the half shell”—a welcome respite from the sagebrush and desolation of Washoe (“‘Mark Twain’ in the Metropolis,” ET&S2 , 10). Around 6 June Clemens took a job as local reporter, which paid forty dollars a week, for the San Francisco Morning Call. The work soon proved tedious, and by July he was having serious doubts about pursuing his career as a writer. For a while Clemens even considered accepting “an appointment to act as a government pilot on the Mississippi, for a salary of $300 a month” ( ET&S1 , 28). Nevertheless, he remained with the Call for four months, during which time, as the next sequence of letters shows, he affirmed his decision to live by his pen (see also ET&S1 , 26–29, and CofC , esp. 1–35).