[begin page 4]
CHAPTER 2
The first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at St. Joseph
was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and fifty dollars apiece for ticketsⒺ per overland coach to Carson City, Nevada.
The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and hurried to the
starting-place. Then an inconvenience presented itself which we had not properly appreciated
before, namely, that one cannot make a
heavy traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage—because it weighs a
good deal more. But that was all we could
take—twenty-five pounds each. So
we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a selection in a good deal of a hurry.
We put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece
all in one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis again. It was a sad parting,
for now we had no swallow-tail coats and white
kid gloves to wear at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and no
stove-pipe
Ⓐ hats nor patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and
peaceful. We were reduced to a war-footing.
Each of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and “stogy” boots
included; and into the valise we
crowded a few white shirts, some
underclothing
Ⓐ and such things. My brother, the Secretary, took along about four pounds of
U. S.
Ⓐ statutes and six pounds of Unabridged Dictionary; for we did not know—poor
[begin page 5]
innocents—that such things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received
in Carson City the next. I was armed to the
teeth with
a pitiful little Smith & Wesson’s
seven-shooter
Ⓐ, which carried a ball like a homĵopathic pill, and it took the whole seven
to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be
a dangerous weapon. It only had one
fault—you could not hit anything with it
Ⓔ. One of our “conductors”
practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself
she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving
about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief. The Secretary had
a small-sized Colt’s revolver strapped
around him for protection against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried
it uncapped.
Mr. George Bemis
Ⓔ was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our fellow-traveler. We
had never seen him before. He wore in his belt
an old original “Allen” revolver, such
as irreverent people called a “
pepper-box
Ⓐ.”
Ⓔ Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the
trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and
presently down would drop the hammer, and away would
speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat
which was probably never done with an
“Allen” in the world. But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as
one of the stage-drivers
afterward said, “If she didn’t get what she went after, she would fetch something
else.” And so she did. She went
after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about
thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not
want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled
shotgun
Ⓐ and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon—the “Allen.” Sometimes
all its six barrels
would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about,
but behind it.
We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the mountains.
In the
matter of luxuries we were modest—we took none along but some pipes and five pounds
of smoking [begin page 6] tobacco. We had two large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains,
and we also took with us a little shot-bag of
silver coin for daily expenses in the way of breakfasts and dinners.
By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of the river.
We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled awayⒺ
and left “the States” behind usⒺ. It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.
There was a freshness
and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares
and responsibilities, that almost made us feel
that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been
wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along
through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the
great Plains. Just here the land was
rolling—a grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could
reach—like the stately heave and
swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm. And everywhere were cornfields, accenting
with squares of deeper green, this limitless
expanse of grassy land. But presently this sea upon dry ground was [begin page 7] to lose its “rolling”
character and stretch away for seven hundred miles as level as a floor!
Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous
description—an imposing cradle on wheelsⒺ. It
was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the “conductor,”
the legitimate captain of the craft;
for it was his business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter,
and passengers. We three were the only
passengers, this trip. We sat on the back seat, inside.
About all the rest of the coach was full of
mail-bags
Ⓐ—for
we had three days’ delayed mails with us
Ⓔ. Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof.
There was a great pile of it
strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full. We had twenty-seven
hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver
said—“a little for Brigham, and Carson, and ’Frisco, but the heft of it for the Injuns,
which is powerful
troublesome ’thout they get plenty of truck to read.” But as he just then got up a
fearful convulsion of his countenance
which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that his
remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean
that
we would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains
Ⓔ and leave it to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it.
We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the hard, level
road. We
jumped out and stretched our legs every time the coach stopped, and so the night found
us still vivacious and unfatigued.
After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and we three
had to take
turns at sitting outside with the driver and conductor. Apparently she was not a talkative
woman. She would sit there in the gathering
twilight and fasten her steadfast [begin page 8] eyes on a mosquito rooting into her
arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she had got his range, and then
she would launch a slap at him that would
have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with tranquil
satisfaction—for she never missed her mosquito; she was a dead shot at short range.
She never removed a carcase, but
left them there for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill thirty or
forty mosquitoes—watched her, and waited for
her to say something, but she never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself.
I said:
“The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.”
“You bet!”
“What did I understand you to say, madam?”
“You bet!”
[begin page 9] Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:
“Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. I did, b’
gosh. Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a bust’nⒶ muskeeters and wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then
I thot you was sick or crazy,
or suthin’, and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools
that couldn’t think of nothing to say.
Wher’d ye come from?”
The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great
deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty
nightsⒺ, metaphorically speaking, and buried usⒶ under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder
projecting above the tossing waste of
dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation!
How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after hour, till I was sorry
I ever
opened the mosquito question and gave her a start. She never did stop again until
she got to her journey’s end toward daylight;
and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we were nodding, by that
time), and said:
“Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o’ days, and
I’ll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good by edgin’ in a word
now and then, I’m right thar.
Folks ’ll tell you ’t I’ve always ben kind o’ offish and partic’lar for a gal that’s
raised
in the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants
to be anything, but when people comes along which is my equals, I reckon I’m a pretty sociable
heifer
after all.”
We resolved not to “lay by at Cottonwood.”
Explanatory Notes CHAPTER 2
Ⓔ a hundred and fifty
dollars apiece for tickets] Mark Twain evidently misremembered the actual cost.
The receipt
for the two fares, issued by the Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express
Company on 25 July 1861 for the trip from
St. Joseph to Carson City, indicates that after an initial payment of $300, another
$100 was due within thirty days,
bringing the total to $200 per passenger. Three months later, in October 1861, the
fare was reduced to $150, after the
start of the line was moved from St. Joseph to nearby Atchison, Kansas (receipt in
CU-MARK, facsimile in
L1
, 122; “The Overland Mail
Route,” San Francisco
Evening Bulletin, 24 June 61, 3; “Overland Mail” and “Greatly
Reduced Rates,” Atchison
Freedom’s Champion, 12 Oct 61, 2, 3;
Root and Connelley, 44).
Ⓔ a pitiful little Smith
& Wesson’s seven-shooter . . . you could not hit anything with it] Smith and Wesson’s
first
production, introduced in 1857, was a twenty-two-caliber “Patent Breech-Loading 7
Shot Revolver,” which weighed eight
ounces and had a barrel less than four inches long.
It was not accurate beyond ten or fifteen
yards: “In a day when large-calibered guns were the rule, it must have been regarded
as little more than a toy” (
McHenry and Roper, 27, 139–40, 182).
Ⓔ Mr. George Bemis]
Presumably Mark Twain invented Bemis. “Capt G. T. Hicher” and one other man accompanied
the Clemens brothers when they
called on Brigham Young in Salt Lake City (see the note at 92.22–93.3), but nothing
has been found to suggest that either man
accompanied them from St. Joseph.
Ⓔ an old original
“Allen” revolver . . . a “pepper-box.”] Bemis’s weapon was not properly
speaking a revolver (which has a single barrel), but a small-caliber pistol with six
barrels (see the illustration on page 5), first
manufactured by Ethan Allen in 1837.
Its hammer cocked automatically with each pull of the trigger
until all of its barrels, which revolved around a common axis, were fired. The name
“pepper-box” derived from its
resemblance (when viewed from the front) to the “perforations in the top of an old-fashioned
pepper shaker.” Such
pistols were very popular, in spite of their inaccuracy at a range of more than a
few feet (
Chapel, 84–88, 92).
Ⓔ
[begin page 577] We jumped into the stage . . . and we bowled away] Orion kept a journal of the trip,
which
Clemens borrowed to help him write the opening chapters (SLC to OC, 15 July 70,
CU-MARK,
in
MTL
, 1:174–75).
The
journal itself is no longer extant, but some—or possibly all—of its contents survive,
transcribed by Orion in a letter
of 8 and 9 September 1861 to his wife, Mollie. This journal transcript provides a
cursory account of the brothers’ journey,
from their 26 July departure from St. Joseph to their 14 August arrival in Carson
City, with a brief description of the stopover at
Salt Lake City on 6–7 August. It is printed in
supplement A, together with a
schematic comparison of Orion’s account with the account in
Roughing It. Maps 1A–1D in
supplement B show the overland route and locate all of the stagecoach stations and other
significant landmarks mentioned in the text and notes.
Ⓔ and left “the States”
behind us] After the travelers ferried across the river at St. Joseph they disembarked
in Kansas, which had become a state in
January 1861; they would not leave “the States” proper until they entered Nebraska
Territory (see the note at
12.18–19).
Ⓔ an imposing cradle on
wheels] The Concord coach, manufactured by the Abbot-Downing Company of Concord, New
Hampshire, was the standard vehicle used
on all the major western stage lines at the time. Its body “rested on stout leather
straps, called thorough braces, which
rocked the stage body back and forth in a motion more pleasant to passengers than
the ordinary jars of a wagon” and also
diminished “the violence of jolts transmitted from the coach to the animals” (
Hafen, 306;
Greever, 44).
Ⓔ we had three
days’ delayed mails with us] On 1 July 1861 daily mail service was begun over a central
overland route from St. Joseph
to Sacramento.
The Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company (which until
July had transported mail only semimonthly) was assigned responsibility for the line
from St. Joseph to Salt Lake City, and from there
the route was managed by the Butterfield Overland Mail Company, which until March
1861 had been carrying the daily mail over a
southern route. The Butterfield Company had abandoned this southern route because
of Confederate depredations, and, under an agreement
with the Central Overland Company, moved its stock and equipment to the central route.
The closure of the southern route, plus the
inability of steamers to depart New York City after 20 June, led by early July to
the accumulation of over twelve tons of mail at the
St. Joseph office, some of which no doubt accompanied the Clemens brothers (
Hafen,
92–94, 161, 211–14, 217–18;
Conkling and Conkling, 2:325–26,
337–38, “Progress of the Continental Telegraph—The Overland Mail Company—Complaints
as to the Newspaper
Carriage Answered,” San Francisco
Evening Bulletin, 6 Sept 61, 2).
Ⓔ
[begin page 578] we would unload the most of our mail . . . on the Plains] Contemporary accounts, including
the
postmaster general’s, confirm that in order to lighten their loads overland drivers
sometimes stashed mail (especially printed
material) along the route for a later stage to pick up, or even abandoned it altogether.
The San
Francisco Evening Bulletin commented in September 1861:
Our
literary folks subscribe for Harper and the Atlantic, and the people of the Great
Basin and eastward get them; our
“girls” subscribe for Bonner’s Ledger, and the girls over the mountains get them;
our babies’ mothers
“take Godey for the patterns,” and the Brigham Young and eastward babies have the
benefit of the patterns for their
Sunday dresses. (“Literary Overlanders,” 21 Sept 61, 3)
By June 1862 the problem had
become so acute that overburdened drivers were even accused of wantonly destroying
mail, sometimes while disguised as Indians (Blair, 561; Burton, 214; “The Overland
Mail Troubles,” San Francisco Alta California, 23 June 62, 1, reprinting the Carson City Silver Age of 19 June; Chapman, 264–67).
Ⓔ The fountains of her
great deep . . . forty nights] Genesis 7:11–12: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s
life
. . . were all the fountains of the great deep broken up . . . . And the rain was
upon the earth
forty days and forty nights.”