The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twains Wild Years

---

Lighting Out for the Territory. Great Speeches by Mark Twain. Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 1 A Message to Garcia and Other Essays.

Join Kobo & start eReading today

The Days of Henry Thoreau. A Will to Be Free, Vol. Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 6 Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 2 Mark Twain and the River. Mark Twain for Kids. The Old Leather Man. A History of American Literature Since American Men Of Mind. Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The Magazine Articles of Frederick Douglass. The Life of Mark Twain. Mark Twain in Washington, D.

Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 3 Slavery, War, and a New Birth of Freedom. Mark Twain Samuel Clemens. Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman. Mark Twain as a Literary Artist. Mark Twain, A Literary Life. Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 5 Bygone Stories From a Kentucky Newspaper. Life On The Mississippi, Part 5. The Man with the Axe. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long.

Your display name should be at least 2 characters long. At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. You submitted the following rating and review. Fortunately, the city had at least fifty, and Harte landed at one of the best: The Era enjoyed an immense readership, especially among miners and farmers.

Within its densely printed lines, amateurs could play at being a Browning or a Burns—a sort of literary karaoke for people whose days were spent in the least literary ways imaginable, sifting for gold in freezing rivers or tilling soil under the hot sun. To frontier Californians, the Era was a cherished institution. The Era could count on the rural market. By , San Francisco had outgrown the gold rush. The makeshift houses of clapboard and canvas had given way to sturdier ones of stone and brick.

The plush hotels Twain would patronize were about to be built, and in the ultrafashionable neighborhood of South Park, the wives of powerful men were serving seventeen-course dinners on teakwood tables to their corseted and crinolined guests. Joe Lawrence hoped to capture a greater slice of this lucrative city market. To succeed, he would need new talent. The twenty-three-year-old may not have been brilliant at the type case—he set too slowly—but he could certainly write. He had already contributed to the Era while living up north; now he became a regular.

Lawrence, whose grandfatherly warmth endeared him to all his writers, gave Harte every encouragement. Soon he was supplying poems, stories, and sketches—within the month he even had his own weekly column. His prose grew more playful, more propulsive. It revealed a mind nourished on long rambles through the city and an omnivorous delight in its peculiar customs and characters.

What made the deepest impression were the trade winds, those whistling ocean zephyrs that kept San Francisco in perpetual motion. A legend grew up that Harte set his Era pieces into type directly, without first writing them down. Regardless, Harte conquered the Era. She loved the sea and the sky.

It was like living in the bow of a ship, she wrote. But in California she commanded special respect, on account of the two legendary men whose names she bore: A disciple of Thomas Jefferson, Benton thundered early and often in Congress on behalf of western expansion. His daughter would carry this idea with her to California. He collaborated with his wife on the published reports of these journeys, crafting rip-roaring adventure stories that became hallmarks of American popular literature.

They also provided a wealth of practical information for westward emigrants in the s, and became an indispensable guide to those traveling overland during the gold rush. On the eve of the Mexican-American War in , he waved the Stars and Stripes within sight of the Mexican garrison at Monterey before retreating. She had enjoyed his Era pieces, and requested his presence at her parlor at Black Point. He swallowed his social anxiety and accepted. He came on a Sunday, his only free day, and on many Sundays after that, with his manuscripts under his arm.

A gardener, she liked watching things grow. Now she had something new to nurture: As ground on to its catastrophic conclusion, with the election of Abraham Lincoln in November and the secession of South Carolina the following month, the mood at Black Point turned grim. In the chaos of early , as one Southern state after another seceded, Jessie mobilized to ensure California would remain steadfast.

Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian minister. In places like Missouri, the struggle over secession would be fought with guns. In California, it would be fought with words: He gave Californians what they wanted: Harte, too, answered the call. The moral clarity of the moment exhilarated him. He made an American flag out of flannel, which he flew proudly from his house. He wrote patriotic poems, which King read aloud at pro-Union speeches throughout the state: A product of New England, King knew many of these luminaries personally, and persuaded them to contribute original verses, which he then delivered to crowds of enraptured Californians.

To be honored by these distinguished men, whose volumes graced their shelves, whose poems they memorized and recited as solemnly as Scripture, made westerners swell with pride. In his sermons he praised the natural beauty of the Far West, and urged Californians to create inner landscapes as majestic as the ones outside.

When King told Californians they belonged to America, they listened. When he told them that they, too, could create great literature, they believed. This revelation struck one young girl more literally than most. On her way home from school, she crept into a shaded street to escape the Los Angeles sun. It was midsummer, and the heat made the pepper trees sink toward the ground. A gust of wind brought a torn scrap of newsprint fluttering to her feet. On the paper she found lines of poetry, and far more powerful than the verses themselves was the staggering realization that they had been written by a Californian: Edward Pollock, a popular poet of the pioneer days.

In later life, Ina Coolbrith would date her literary awakening to this moment. Rhyme came naturally to her, she discovered. Her face breathed poetry through every pore, from the melancholy eyes to the teasing mouth, an expression too enigmatic to unscramble but inexhaustibly interesting. Sometimes it strode with epic strokes; other times it skipped lightly along like a limerick.

But its dominant key was what Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, called glukupikron: Her first memories were those of mourning. She was too young to remember the funeral for her father, who died five months after she was born in But she remembered that of her sister, held when Ina was two. Death pervaded her childhood—not only in the form of illnesses and accidents but through violence of the most vicious kind. Her uncle was Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. Mormonism faced more than just mockery, however. When Ina was three, her uncle died in an Illinois jail, murdered by a mob. In , she married a non-Mormon named William Pickett and left the church.

She promised her husband to conceal her past and instructed her children to do the same. In , her stepfather led the family West. He had read reports of gold in California and, after waiting for the spring grass to grow tall enough for the oxen to eat, piled his wife and children into a covered wagon and wheeled off across the plains. The young girl loved the colors of the landscape: She hated fording rivers. The wagons crossed by raft, while the oxen swam. The memory tormented her forever. At the foot of the Sierra Nevada came the most picturesque portion of the journey. The family met Jim Beckwourth, a freed slave turned Crow chieftain and a renowned mountain man.

Ina remembered him in dazzlingly romantic hues: He wore his hair in two long braids, tied with colored string, and rode without a saddle. He had recently discovered a path through the Sierras—the Beckwourth Pass, a popular early trail—and wanted Ina and her sisters to be the first white children to cross it. Or so Ina remembered almost eighty years later. In memory, her life acquired a more poetic coloring.

The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain’s Wild Years

But it was an adventurous childhood by any measure. The family settled in Los Angeles in A town of about two thousand, its adobe-lined streets had changed little since its pueblo days. A wondrous and terrifying place, it boasted beautiful orange orchards and one of the worst murder rates in the country. Cowboys, crooks, and gamblers staged frequent shoot-outs. Racial animosity between Mexicans and Americans ran high. A minister from Massachusetts who arrived the same year as Ina tallied ten murders in his first two weeks. In his diary he recorded the sounds of an average Sabbath: Yet there was another Los Angeles, to which Ina belonged.

The old Californio families of Spanish Mexican descent who once ruled the region—the Sepulvedas, the Figueroas, the Picos—held glorious fiestas. The girl who crossed the continent in a covered wagon had grown into a glamorous woman, and she became a radiant fixture of local society. She also found fame as a poet, after publishing her first verses at fifteen in the Los Angeles Star.

Fortunately, the poet was nowhere near as gloomy as her verse.

At seventeen, she fell in love. He earned a living as an ironworker, and occasionally blacked his face with burnt cork to play in minstrel shows.

On October 12, , he returned from one such performance in San Francisco suffering from a murderous fit of paranoia. He accused his wife of imagined infidelities and called her a whore. Deranged with jealousy, he tried to kill her and her mother, and nearly succeeded. Once the darling of Los Angeles, she had become another victim of its violence. Once an object of admiration, she now inspired pity. Worse, she suffered another tragedy, one too painful for her to reveal.

The details are obscure, but her relatives would divulge the secret long after her death: Then she faces the shattering fact of his absence: It bred a depressive streak that tempered the wilder impulses of her girlhood, made her reticent, yet also unusually solicitous toward people in pain. She loved Lord Byron, and her ordeal made her more Byronic: Like Byron, she went into exile, embarking for San Francisco in Her family decided to join her.

She buried her history and started over. Californians often reinvented themselves. She made friends slowly and returned to verse only haltingly. She found work as an English teacher and helped her mother around the house. She read the Golden Era every week. She plundered the shelves of the Mercantile Library. On November 4, , she saw Thomas Starr King speak for the first time, at a benefit for families of Union army volunteers. During his opening address, King read the poetry of his friend Bret Harte, as he often did—a writer Coolbrith had been hearing about since her arrival.

America was being reborn: Coolbrith was ripe for a similar renaissance. That fall, the Unitarian minister could be seen all over town. Thomas Starr King was in perpetual motion, this erudite Bostonian who skewered Copperheads and quoted Seneca and spoke of California as the new Canaan.

Yet somehow he still found time to read the Golden Era closely enough to notice a new contributor whose poetry pleased him—Pip Pepperpod, the pixieish pen name of a nineteen-year-old bookstore clerk named Charles Warren Stoddard.

Inside, its clerk was constantly dusting. Not because he cared much for cleanliness, but because the monotony of the motion made it easier for his mind to wander.

As he sank deeper into his daydream, the feather duster in his hands became a palm tree. He longed for the tropics. He had fallen in love with them eight years earlier, while crossing Nicaragua on his way to California. He remembered the syrupy taste of the oranges and the mist that sprayed when he broke their skin.

He remembered the bright plumage of the birds, flickering against the relentless green of the jungle. Most of all he remembered the natives, who adorned their nearly naked bodies with necklaces and wreaths. Celebrities had been in the shop before, but never one whom Stoddard held in such high esteem. Stoddard said he did.

He added words of encouragement to his favorite lines, and invited Stoddard to visit him with more work. He also presented tickets to his upcoming lecture series on American poetry, where he would be discussing those distinguished New Englanders whom Stoddard had read as a schoolboy. Both were slender and delicately built; both had large, expressive eyes—not unlike King himself. Harte kept most people at a distance; Stoddard held on to them for dear life. Stoddard was deeply lovable; Harte was not. What people loved best about Stoddard was his vulnerability. Twain concealed his insecurities with bravado and wit.

Navigation

Harte hid behind a fastidious exterior and a hermetic home life. Coolbrith remained guarded after her recent trauma.

Yet Stoddard aired his passions in public—and they all loved him for it. Like Harte, he endured abuse from schoolyard bullies because he looked too feminine. Yet for someone who found solace in the written word, he lived in a world with no words for what he was, where gay love was not only forbidden but invisible—enciphered in metaphor, perhaps, but never plainly discussed. Stoddard first came to San Francisco in , at age eleven. His father had found a job at a merchant firm, and the rest of the family went West to join him.

The gambling houses beckoned: In May , the murder of a newspaper editor triggered a vigilante uprising that came down hard on the neighborhood. The vigilantes lynched the killer, James Casey, along with another infamous character named Charles Cora, who had murdered a US marshal. Stoddard remembered seeing a pair of black-hooded figures with nooses around their necks, swinging into space.

Product details

So Ned took a clipper ship around Cape Horn, and Stoddard tagged along to keep him company. Ned soon returned to San Francisco, leaving Stoddard at the mercy of their grandfather, a man whose infinite capacity for cruelty was rooted in a particularly grim Presbyterianism. In California, the world had looked brighter. Finally, his father sent money for his fare and he fled New York, returning to San Francisco in The city had grown in his absence. Thirteen thousand people arrived in that year alone. The gamblers and prostitutes were still there, but the new civic mood had forced them to become more discreet.

Commerce, not vice, now reigned supreme. There were fourteen gristmills, eighteen breweries, nineteen foundries, eighty-four restaurants, seventeen banks, and one sugar refinery. New neighborhoods had sprung up on land once occupied by sand hills. Its many newspapers offered a way to put his mind-pictures into print. His heart beat frantically. He passed the mailbox at the door of the Era several times without pausing.

Then he sprinted to the box, slipped his envelope through the slot, and ran away in a cold sweat. After this harrowing initiation, he became an Era regular. He used his pencil like a scalpel, trying to toughen the timid young dream-builder into a more mature poet like Harte. He even encouraged Stoddard to return to school. So Stoddard submitted, entering City College in early An indifferent student, he had trouble concentrating. When the semester ended in May, he dropped out. If Stoddard proved especially prone to distraction, San Francisco in the spring and summer of was an especially distracting place.

On the Montgomery Street promenade, Mark Twain could be seen visiting from Washoe, shaking alkali dust from the folds of his flannel, telling meandering stories in his signature drawl. While Twain thumbed his nose at the intricacies of urban couture, another high-profile personality embraced them. Bret Harte presented a very different silhouette to the spectators on Montgomery. Seated cross-legged in his chair, he looked a bit like Santa Claus, with his flowing beard and meerschaum pipe. His cheerful disposition aided the resemblance, as did his openhanded generosity, plying potential contributors with kindness and cocktails at the Lick House bar.

Harte and Stoddard both wrote regularly. On June 7, the paper added another young writer to its roster: After a long winter, she was ready to bloom. The same could be said of California. Bolstered by a steady stream of silver from the Comstock Lode in Nevada and the invigorating economic effects of the Civil War, the Pacific coast soared. Only a decade and a half earlier, the gold rush pioneers had imported everything. They lit their lamps with gas produced from Australian coal and chilled their liquor with Alaskan ice.

By the s, however, California had learned to grow its own crops, and was busy building its own industries. Now, in the pages of the Era , it had begun creating its own culture. Harte led the charge. In unsparingly ironic prose, he showed Californians to be sillier, stupider, and generally more human than they considered themselves. He cracked a few memorable quips: Harte made an unlikely Bohemian. The word referred to a tribe of penniless artists seen around the seedier districts of Paris and New York.

They drank to excess, contracted venereal diseases. They shivered to death in drafty garrets, toiling over masterpieces that would never be printed. To the young writers of the Era , Bohemia offered a home, albeit an imaginary one. Harte, Twain, Coolbrith, and Stoddard differed widely in lifestyle and literary technique.

In , their paths were about to intersect. Under the banner of Bohemia, these four writers competed, collaborated, traded counsel and criticism. Some remained friends their entire lives. Others became bitter enemies. What connected them was their contempt for custom, their restlessness with received wisdom. Click to share on Twitter Opens in new window Click to share on Facebook Opens in new window Click to share on Pocket Opens in new window Click to share on Instapaper Opens in new window Click to email this to a friend Opens in new window.

Posted by Longreads on February 6, Member Pick , Nonfiction , Story. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.

• Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine (Arts and Traditions of the
• American Auto Trail-New Yorks U.S. Highway 11 (American Auto Trails)
• A Tale Of Two Goblins (Dulcie ONeil Book 2)
• Funky de ahora en adelante (Especialidades Juveniles) (Spanish Edition)
• I Hear You Calling Me
• From Across the Rainow Bridge (The Bridge Trilogy Book 2)
• Silicon Valley Poems: Velvet Stride