§ 85. Supernatural Impudence
24 August 1864
(This headnote is repeated in numbers 82–85.)
These four sketches appeared in the San Francisco Morning Call while Clemens was working as its local reporter. Although they are of course unsigned, Clemens' authorship is assured by the fact that all four are preserved as clippings in his scrapbooks, and by the fact that Albert S. Evans, who is ridiculed in the last two sketches, publicly acknowledged Clemens as the author.
The subject of the series is the opening of the San Francisco temple of the Ning Yeung Association, a social and quasi-judicial organization that was formed in 1854 and became the largest of the Chinese Six Companies.1 Clemens may have culled some facts from his scrapbook clip- [begin page 39] pings when he described the Ning Yeung Association in chapter 54 of Roughing It. There he explained:
On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die. . . . The Ning Yeong Company . . . numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple. . . . In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked.2
The careful but informal description in the opening sketch, with its subdued, friendly humor and casually inserted information, gives way in the second piece to broader comedy: a burlesque portrait of “the old original Josh.” In the third sketch Clemens finds himself in danger of “becoming imbued with Buddhism” and losing his national identity, but is recalled by the prospect of a drink to his “noble American instincts.” This in turn leads to his ridicule of Evans, his counterpart on the San Francisco Alta California.3
Comic feuding among reporters and editors was a standard feature of Nevada journalism which Clemens brought with him when he moved to San Francisco and started working for the Call: two months before he wrote these sketches on the Josh House, he had begun baiting Evans in his local items column. Evans, who returned the compliment, created a character whom he called Mr. Stiggers, or Armand Leonidas Stiggers, a rather pathetic and dandyish fellow who was apparently meant as a parody of bohemians like Clemens. Perhaps to annoy Evans, Clemens regularly identified Stiggers with his creator, as he does in the third sketch here, where he accuses him of having consumed the temple's entire liquor supply. In the fourth sketch he extends this attack by quoting from Evans' Alta article on the new temple4 and predicting that “Mr. Stiggers, of the Alta” will reply to his ridicule. Of course Evans did precisely that, addressing his remarks to “the gentle aborigine from the land of sage brush and alkali, whose soubriquet was given him by his friends as indicative of his capacity for doing the drinking for two.” Evans [begin page 40] went on to explain why Clemens found the temple's liquor cabinet empty, saying that the Chinese barkeeper maintains
two liquor cases—one from which to treat gentlemen who look as if they were disposed to indulge moderately and keep out of the calaboose, and the other, an empty one, which he shows to those whose faces indicate unmistakably that they can't be trusted when liquor is free. . . . There was a time . . . when you might have wrung in and got a drink with the rest, but that happy time is past, long past—Mark that, my boy, and go on with your weeping.5
Clemens continued to bait Evans for the next two years, not only in his columns in the Call, but also in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle.
William Hay, The Chinese Six Companies (San Francisco: The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, 1942), pp. 5, 16.
For additional information about Evans and Mark Twain's continuing public feud with him, see “Mark Twain Improves ‘Fitz Smythe’ ” (nos. 129–134), as well as Appendix B, volume 2, which reprints a number of attributed items about Fitz Smythe.
“Opening of a New Temple,” San Francisco Alta California, 23 August 1864, p. 1.
“That's What's the Matter,” San Francisco Alta California, 24 August 1864, p. 1.
All that Mr. Stiggers, of the Alta, has to say about his monstrous conduct in the Ning-Yong Temple, day before yesterday, in drinking up all the liquors in the establishment, and breaking the heart of the wretched Chinaman in whose charge they were placed—a crushing exposure of which we conceived it our duty to publish yesterday—is the following: “We found a general festival, a sort of Celestial free and easy, going on, on arrival, and were waited on in the most polite manner by Ah Wee, whoⒶemendation although a very youngⒶemendation man, is thoroughly well educated, very intelligent, and speaks English quite fluently. With him we took a glass of wine and a cigar before the high altar, and with a general shaking hands all aroundⒶemendation our part of the ceremonies was concluded.” That is the coolest piece of effrontery we have met with in many a day. He “concluded his part of the ceremonies by taking a glass of wine and a cigar.” We should think a man who had acted as Mr. Stiggers did upon that occasion, would feel like keeping perfectly quiet about it. Such flippant gayety of language ill becomes him, under the circumstances. We are prepared, now, to look upon the most flagrant departures from propriety, on the part of that misguided young creature, without astonishment. We would not even be surprised if his unnatural instincts were to prompt him to come back at us this morning, and attempt to exonerate himself, in his feeble way, from the damning charge we have fastened upon him of gobbling up all the sacred whiskey belonging to those poor uneducated Chinamen, and otherwise strewing his path with de- [begin page 48] struction and devastation, and leaving nothing but tears and lamentation, and starvation and misery, behind him. We should not even be surprised if he were to say hard things about us, and expect people to believe them. He may possibly tremble and be silent, but it would not be like him, if he did.
The first printing in the San Francisco Morning Call for 24 August 1864 (p. 2) is copy-text. Copy: clipping in Scrapbook 4, p. 7, MTP. Mark Twain quoted Albert S. Evans' article “Opening of a New Temple,” San Francisco Alta California, 23 August 1864, p. 1 (Alta), near the beginning of his sketch. Either he or the compositor corrected one ambiguity (by supplying a comma after “easy” at 47.7) and made three other changes. We have retained the correction, but emended the other changes by restoring the readings in the first printing of Evans' sketch. There are no textual notes.