No letters have been discovered for the next eleven months. As 1864 drew to a close Clemens continued to eke out an existence on the $12.00 or $12.50 per article he received from the California. Since he published only three articles at this time, on 12 November, 19 November, and 3 December (see ET&S2 , 108–33), his circumstances must have been straitened indeed. According to the chronology Clemens established in Roughing It, in early December 1864 he was coming to the end of his “slinking” period:
For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board. I became a very adept at “slinking.” I slunk from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar, I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I slunk to my bed. I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the worms. During all this time I had but one piece of money—a silver ten cent piece—and I held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was entirely penniless, might suggest suicide. I had pawned every thing but the clothes I had on; so I clung to my dime desperately, till it was smooth with handling. (Roughing It, chapter 59)
On 4 December Clemens escaped to Jackass Hill, in Tuolumne County, about one hundred miles east of San Francisco, a once-rich placer-mining region. “I took $300 with me,” he later recalled (2 July 71 to James N. Gillis, CCamarSJ). Clemens used this money, which possibly came from the sale of stock in the Hale and Norcross Silver Mining Company, to pay his board and other expenses during the next twelve weeks, while he was away from San Francisco and not working. Reportedly he had chosen Jackass Hill
at the suggestion of his friend, Steve Gillis, who had got into trouble with the San Francisco police by intervening in a saloon fight and whipping a bullying bartender. Mark had signed a straw bond for $500 and when it looked as though the police meant business both he and Steve decided to go away from there. Steve himself went back to Virginia City and consigned Sam to the hospitality of his brothers.
James and William Gillis were pocket miners on the hill, and [Richard] Stoker was their partner. Stoker was 46 and “gray as a rat,” a quiet, philosophic veteran of forty-nine who had chosen this quiet life and who was destined to spend thirty years more there and to die on the hill in 1896. Billy was only 23, and had joined his older brother, Jim, on the hill the year before. (West, 13, 18)
Clemens remained at Jackass Hill, living in the one-room cabin Stoker had built in 1850, until 22 January 1865. On that date he accompanied Jim Gillis (1830–1907) to nearby Angels Camp, in Calaveras County, where Gillis had a mining claim. Winter rains immediately stranded them in their lodgings and they were still confined eight days later when Stoker joined them. The rain stopped on 6 February, and presumably they were then able to do some mining. Mostly, however, through the rain and after, they and others passed the time exchanging tall tales and anecdotes. By the time Clemens and his two friends returned to Jackass Hill on 20 February, his notebook was stocked with material that he used in the months and years to come (see N&J1 , 63–90). Billy Gillis later recalled that Clemens immediately attempted to write out one of the tales he had heard at Angels Camp: “When Sam came back he went to work on the Jumping Frog story, staying in the cabin while we went out to work at our claims and writing with a pencil. He used to say: ‘If I can write that story the way Ben Coon told it, that frog will jump around the world’” (West, 18). Clemens started back to San Francisco, via Copperopolis and Stockton, on 23 February, arriving at the Occidental Hotel on the twenty-sixth. In chapter 62 of Roughing It he reported: “After a three months’ absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent. When my credit was about exhausted, (for I had become too mean and lazy, now, to work on a morning paper, and there were no vacancies on the evening journals,) I was created San Francisco correspondent of the Enterprise, and at the end of five months I was out of debt.”
In fact the Enterprise assignment was not Clemens’s first work after his return. Before undertaking that he resumed his contributions to the Californian, using some of his Tuolumne and Calaveras material in two of the sketches he published in the spring of 1865—“An Unbiased Criticism” and “Answers to Correspondents” (see ET&S2 , 134–43, 187–96). Probably by mid-June he had begun contributing to the Enterprise as well and soon afterward he began the daily correspondence for it that earned him a welcome $100 a month. That summer and fall he also published brief items in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle and the San Francisco Youths’ Companion (see ET&S2 , 233–35, 297–99, 240–45).
By early September 1865 Clemens’s Californian articles had won praise across the continent in the New York Round Table. The Angels Camp frog tale—transformed in mid-October into “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and published in the New York Saturday Press on 18 November— was to make him a budding literary celebrity before the end of the year (for detailed discussion and texts of Clemens’s 1864–65 publications, see ET&S1 and ET&S2 ). Not coincidentally, the day after Clemens completed the “Jumping Frog” and saw the Round Table praises reprinted in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, he acknowledged his “‘call’ to literature,” albeit ambivalently, in the next letter.