Explanatory Notes
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Apparatus Notes
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CHAPTER 21
[begin page 137]

CHAPTER 21

We were approaching the end of our long journey. It was the morning of the twentieth day. At noon we would reach Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, but on the contrary depressing.

Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren, snowclad mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no vegetation but the endless sage-brush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated

contemplation.
across the plain like smoke from a burning house. We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the mail-bags, the driver—we and the sage-brush and the other scenery were all one monotonous color. Long trains of freight wagons in the distance enveloped in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on fire. These teams and their masters were the only life we saw. Otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence and desolation. Every twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burthen, with its dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs. Frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated the passing coach with meditative serenity.

By and by Carson City was pointed out to us. It nestled in the edge of a great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away to look like an assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a [begin page 138] grim range of mountains overlooking it, whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship and consciousness of earthly things.

We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. It was a “wooden” town; its population two thousand souls. The main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high enough. They were packed close together, side by side, as if room were scarce in that mighty plain. The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to rattle when walked upon. In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was the “plaza” which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains—a large, unfenced, level vacancy, with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the plaza were faced by stores, offices and stables. The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering.

We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office and on the way up to the Governor’s from the hotel—among others, to a Mr. Harris, who was on horseback; he began to say something, but interrupted himself with the remark:

“I’ll have to get you to excuse me a minute; yonder is the witness that swore I helped to rob the California coach—a piece of impertinent intermeddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted with the man.”

Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with another. When the pistols were emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending a whip-lash), and Mr. Harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his hipsexplanatory note; and from them issued little rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse’s sides and made the animal look quite picturesque. I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it recalled to mind that first day in Carson.

This was all we saw that day, for it was two o’clock, now, and according to custom the daily “Washoe Zephyr” set in; a soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view. Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting [begin page 139] to new comers; for the vast dust-cloudemendation was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air—things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust—hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a skurryingemendation storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lotsexplanatory note.

the washoe zephyr.

It was something to see that much. I could have seen more, if I could have kept the dust out of my eyes.

But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stage-coachemendation over and spills the passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are looking skyward after their hats. Carson [begin page 140] streets seldom look inactive on summeremendation afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around their escaping hats, like chambermaidsemendation trying to head off a spider.

The “Washoe Zephyr” (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevadaexplanatory note) is a peculiarly Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth “whence it cometh.”explanatory note That is to say, where it originates. It comes right over the mountains from the westemendation, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find any of it on the other side! It probably is manufactured on the mountain-top for the occasion, and starts from there. It is a pretty regular wind, in the summer time. Its office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the next morning; and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or two to leeward of the point he is aiming at. And yet the first complaint a Washoe visitor to San Francisco makes, is that the sea winds blow so, there! There is a good deal of human nature in that.

the governor’s house.

We found the state palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory to consist of a white frame one-story house with two small rooms in it and a stanchion supported shed in front—for grandeur—it compelled the respect of the citizen and inspired the Indians with awe. The newly arrived Chief and Associate Justices of the Territoryexplanatory note, and other machinery of the government, were domiciled with less [begin page 141] splendor. They were boarding around privately, and had their offices in their bedrooms.

dark disclosures.

The Secretary and I took quarters in the “ranch” of a worthy French lady by the name of Bridget O’Flanniganexplanatory note, a camp follower of his Excellency the Governor. She had known him in his prosperity as commander-in-chief of the Metropolitan Police of New York, and she would not desert him in his adversity as Governor of Nevada. Our room was on the lower floor, facing the plaza, and when we had got our bed, a small table, two chairs, the government fire-proof safe, and the Unabridged Dictionary into it, there was still room enough left for a visitor—maybeemendation two, but not without straining the walls. But the walls could stand it—at least the partitions could, for they consisted simply of one thickness of white “cotton domestic” stretched from corner to corner of the room. This was the rule in Carson—any other kind of partition was the rare exception. And if you stood in a dark room and your neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your canvas told queer secrets sometimes! Very often these partitions were made of old flour sacks basted together; and then the difference between [begin page 142] the common herd and the aristocracy was, that the common herd had unornamented sacks, while the walls of the aristocrat were overpoweringemendation with rudimental fresco—i. e., red and blue mill brands on the flour sacks. Occasionally, also, the better classes embellished their canvas by pasting pictures from Harper’s Weekly on themexplanatory note. In many cases, too, the wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and other evidences of a sumptuous and luxurious taste.* We had a carpet and a genuine queenswareemendation washbowl. Consequently we were hated without reserve by the other tenants of the O’Flannigan “ranch.” When we added a painted oil-clothemendation window curtain, we simply took our lives into our own hands. To prevent bloodshed I removed up stairs and took up quarters with the untitled plebeians in one of the fourteen white pine cot-bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one sole room of which the second story consisted.

the irish brigade.



*Washoe people take a joke so hard that I must explain that the above description was only the rule; there were many honorable exceptions in Carson—plastered ceilings and houses that had considerable furniture in them.—M. T.

[begin page 143] It was a jolly company, the fourteen. They were principally voluntary camp followersemendation of the Governorexplanatory note, who had joined his retinue by their own election at New York and San Francisco and came along, feeling that in the scuffle for little Territorialemendation crumbs and offices they could not make their condition more precarious than it was, and might reasonably expect to make it better. They were popularly known as the “Irish Brigade,” though there were only four or five Irishmen among all the Governor’s retainers. His good-natured Excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his henchmen created—especially when there arose a rumor that they were paid assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the Democraticemendation vote when desirable!

Mrs. O’Flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for it. They were perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found that notes that could not be discounted were but a feeble constitution for a Carson boarding houseemendation. So she began to harry the Governor to find employment for the “Brigade.” Her importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle desperation at last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the presence. Then, said he:

“Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for you—a service which will provide you with recreation amid noble landscapes, and afford you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds by observation and study. I want you to survey a railroad from Carson City westward to a certain point! When the legislature meets I will have the necessary bill passed and the remuneration arranged.”

“What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains?”

“Well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!”

recreation.

He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and turned them loose in the desert. It was “recreation” with a vengeance! Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas. “Romantic adventure” could go no further. They surveyed very slowly, very deliberately, [begin page 144] very carefully. They returned every night during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly. They brought in great store of prodigious hairy spiders—tarantulas—and imprisoned them in covered tumblers up stairs in the “ranch.” After the first week, they had to camp on the field, for they were getting well eastward. They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that indefinite “certain point,” but got no information. At last, to a peculiarly urgent inquiry of “How far eastward?” Gov.emendation Nye telegraphed back:

“To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!—and then bridge it and go on!”

This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from their labors. The Governor was always comfortable about it; he said Mrs. O’Flannigan would hold him for the Brigade’s board anyhow, and he intended to get what entertainment he could out of the boys; he said, with his old-time pleasant twinkle, that he meant to survey them into Utah and then telegraph Brigham to hang them for trespass!

the tarantula.

The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish. If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a fight in a minute. Starchy?—proud? Indeed, they would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress. There was as usual a furious “zephyr” blowing the first night of the Brigade’semendation return, [begin page 145] and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch. There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the Brigadeemendation in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisle between the bed-rows. In the midst of the turmoil, Bob H—— sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with his head. Instantly he shouted:

“Turn out, boys—the tarantulas is looseexplanatory note!”

No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried, any longer, to leave the room, lest he might step on a tarantula. Every man groped for a trunk or a bed, and jumped on it. Then followed the strangest silence—a silence of grisly suspense it was, too—waiting, expectancy, fear. It was as dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a thing could be seen. Then came occasional little interruptions of the silence, and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his voice, or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or changes of position. The occasional voices were not given to much speaking—you simply heard a gentle ejaculation of “Ow!” followed by a solid thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy blanket or something touch his bare skin and had skipped from a bed to the floor. Another silence. Presently you would hear a gasping voice say:

“Su-su-something’s crawling up the back of my neck!”

Every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble and a sorrowful “O Lord!” and then you knew that somebody was getting away from something he took for a tarantula, and not losing any time about it, either. Directly a voice in the corner rang out wild and clear:

“I’ve got him! I’ve got him!” [Pause, and probable change of circumstances.] “No, he’s got me! Oh, ain’t they never going to fetch a lantern!”

The lantern came at that moment, in the hands of Mrs. O’Flannigan, whose anxiety to know the amount of damage done by the assaulting roof had not prevented her waiting a judicious interval, after getting out of bed and lighting up, to see if the wind was done, now, up stairs, or had a larger contract.

[begin page 146] The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but was not to us. Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks and beds, and so strangely attired, too, we were too earnestly distressed and too genuinely miserable to see any fun about it, and there was not the semblance of a smile anywhere visible. I know I am not capable of suffering more than I did during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas. I had skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every time I touched anything that was furzy I fancied I felt the fangs. I had rather go to war than live that episode over again. Nobody was hurt. The man who thought a tarantula had “got him” was mistaken—only a crack in a box had caught his finger. Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There were ten or twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success. Did we go back to bed then? We did nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it. We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy.

light thrown on the subject.
Editorial Emendations CHAPTER 21
  dust-cloud (C)  ●  dust cloud (A) 
  skurrying (C)  ●  scurrying (A) 
  stage-coach (C)  ●  stage coach (A) 
  summer (C)  ●  Summer (A) 
  chambermaids (C)  ●  chamber-  |  maids (A) 
  west (C)  ●  West (A) 
  maybe (C)  ●  may be (A) 
  overpowering (C)  ●  over-  |  powering (A) 
  queensware (C)  ●  queen’s-ware (A) 
  oil-cloth (C)  ●  oil-  |  cloth (A) 
  camp followers (C)  ●  camp-followers (A) 
  Territorial (C)  ●  territorial (A) 
  Democratic (C)  ●  democratic (A) 
  boarding house (C)  ●  boarding-house (A) 
  Gov. (C)  ●  Governor (A) 
  Brigade’s (C)  ●  brigade’s (A) 
  Brigade (C)  ●  brigade (A) 
Explanatory Notes CHAPTER 21
 Mr. Harris . . . rode by . . . with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his hips] John (Jack) Harris was a notorious stagecoach bandit who nevertheless enjoyed the “general esteem” of the Nevada community, which considered the stage company to be among “the biggest robbers in all the world.” No jury would convict him, even when a member of his gang turned state’s evidence against him (Considine 1923b; Angel, 568). The gunfight that Mark Twain describes here, which occurred on 14 August 1861, was reported in the Enterprise: Harris, who “had some grudge against” a man named Julien, fired on him and missed; he himself was wounded in the chest and thigh (“Shooting Scrape,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 21 Aug 61, 3, reprinting the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise of 17 August). Harris later went to Pioche, in eastern Nevada, where Wells, Fargo and Company hired him to prevent his depredations; Harris still managed to hold up the stagecoaches, taking a shortcut back to the station in time to meet them upon their arrival. Shortly before his death in 1875, allegedly caused by “a general breaking up of the system” (the result of his having been shot “several times” over the years), he confessed that his real name was Amos Huxford, and that he had been raised in Maine by a relative named Harris (Ashbaugh, 31; “Death of a Noted Character,” San Francisco Alta California, 3 May 75, 1, reprinting the Pioche [Nev.] Record of 27 April).
 the daily “Washoe Zephyr” set in . . . a skurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots] Exaggerated claims and comic tales about the Washoe winds were a staple of 1860s Nevada journalism. [begin page 613] Dan De Quille (William Wright), a colleague of Mark Twain’s on the Enterprise, wrote his share of such items, as did J. Ross Browne and Mark Twain: see Lillard, 257–60, which presents a full discussion of the subject and reprints items by Wright in the Cedar Falls (Iowa) Gazette, as well as a passage from “A Peep at Washoe” (J. Ross Browne 1860–61, 289–90). Two items that appeared in the Enterprise local column in late 1862 have been attributed to Mark Twain: “A Gale” and “Blown Down” (SLC 1862d, 1862j). In the latter piece he remarked, “At sunset yesterday, the wind commenced blowing after a fashion to which a typhoon is mere nonsense, and in a short time the face of heaven was obscured by vast clouds of dust all spangled over with lumber, and shingles, and dogs and things.”
 Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada] “Washoe” comes from the word “washiu,” which means “person” in the language of the Washo Indians. The Washo, traditional enemies of the Paiute, were a small tribe inhabiting the region around Carson City and Lake Tahoe; in 1859 they numbered only about nine hundred (Hodge, 2:920).
 Scriptural wind . . . “whence it cometh.”] John 3:8.
 newly arrived Chief and Associate Justices of the Territory] Upon the creation of Nevada Territory in March 1861, President Lincoln appointed George Turner (d. 1885) as chief justice, and Gordon N. Mott (see the note at 128.2) and Horatio M. Jones as associate justices. Mott was already in Carson City when the Clemenses arrived; but Turner, a lawyer and jurist from Ohio, and Jones, who was born in Pennsylvania but had become a resident of Missouri, did not arrive until the second week in September ( L1 , 126 n. 2, 128–29 n. 2, 243 n. 4; James W. Nye to William Seward, 19 July 61, Territorial Papers ; Marsh, 691 n. 255).
 Bridget O’Flannigan] A fictional name for Mrs. Margret Murphy, whose boarding house was on the north side of the plaza ( L1 , 134 n. 2; Kelly 1862, 85).
 

made of old flour sacks . . . pictures from Harper’s Weekly on them] This description is similar to a passage in the letter Clemens published in the Keokuk Gate City on 20 November 1861. He may have referred to a clipping of the letter to refresh his memory:

The houses are mostly frame, and unplastered; but “papered” inside with flour-sacks sewn together—with the addition, in favor of the parlor, of a second papering composed of engravings cut from “Harper’s Weekly;” so you will easily perceive that the handsomer the “brand” upon the flour-sacks is, and the more spirited the pictures are, the finer the house looks. (SLC 1861)

 voluntary camp followers of the Governor] Only three of these “camp followers” are known by name: Will H. Wagner, James Neary, and Clement T. Rice (see the notes at 147.17–19 and 278.11–12).
  [begin page 614] Bob H——sprung up . . . the tarantulas is loose] This anecdote was evidently based on an actual incident, which Clemens recorded in his notebook in February 1865: “Time Bob Howland came into Mrs. Murphy’s corral in Carson, drunk, knocked down Wagners bottles of tarantulas & scorpions & spilled them on the floor” ( N&J1 , 80). Clemens first met Robert Muir Howland (1838–90) in late August 1861 when Howland, who lived in Aurora (in the Esmeralda mining district), stayed at Mrs. Murphy’s while serving as a delegate to the Union Convention in Carson City. A native of New York, he emigrated to California and then, in the summer of 1861, to Nevada Territory. He was the co-owner and superintendent of several mines in Aurora, marshal of that town, and, in 1864, was appointed warden of the territorial prison in Carson City by Governor Nye. In later life he continued his mining activities and acted as a mining consultant. For many years Howland and his wife, Louise (whom he married in 1867), maintained a friendship with Clemens and his wife, chiefly through correspondence ( L1 , 142 n. 2; “Married,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 12 Nov 67, 3).