SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, JOURNALIST APPROVED: Major Professor fvsLwJj A Consulting Professor Minor Professor ' g'S>; Cji, Chairman of t£ie Department of English Dean 6f the Graduate School SAMUEL L. CLEMENS 9 JOURNALIST THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By i Christine M. Zwa^Len, B. A. Denton, Texas August, 1970 PREFACE At the age of eleven, Samuel L. Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, became a printer's devil, thereby beginning an association with the journalism profession that would last the remainder of his life. His career in the fourth estate included the full scope of journalistic involvement: journey- t man printer, occasional letter contributor, reporter, travel correspondent, editor and part owner of a metropolitan news- paper, free lancer, and magazine writer. His experiences helped shape the man, Samuel Clemens, and the writer, Mark Twain. His interest and knowledge of printing caused him to invest, and lose, a fortune in the invention of a typesetting machine. His Western newspaper articles inspired his first book; his special travel assignments inspired his second, which was an immediate success and launched his career as an author. Also, through his travel assignments, he discovered another lucrative profession: lecturing. Although he is more famous for his books than for his newspaper and magazine contributions, the early years he spent as a journalist were important to his development as a writer. They provided the fundamental training that preceded his achievement as an author. A study of his career as a journalist is necessary in order to understand where the special qualities of his books originated and'how they matured. iii In 194-1 at the University of Missouri, William Roger Swann undertook this same task for his master's degree thesis. His study was adequate for the information then available. But since that time, a great deal more of Clemens' newspaper writing has been discovered and published, including six books devoted entirely to collections of his reporting for the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise, for the San Francisco, California, Morning Call, for the San Francisco Alta California, and the Sacramento, California, Dally. Union. Articles from the Buffalo, New York, Express, some of which are known to be written by Clemens and others of which are probably by him, are contained in another book. Numerous other articles, penned by him for a wide variety of journals, have been discovered and published for Twain scholars. In addition, a host of other books, written by critics and dealing with his literary development as an author, have been published since 19^1. Time for a new appraisal of Clemens as a jour- nalist has arrived. The purposes of this thesis are two-fold-: 1) in light of the information which is now available, to record accurately the events of the long newspaper career of Samuel L. Clemens; and, 2) to attempt to assess the influence of his journalistic experiences on him as a man, as an observer of humanity, as a reporter fulfilling his assignments, as a developing artist, and as a future author of books. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. PRINTER AND PILOT 1 II. NEVADA NEWSPAPERMAN 36 III. METROPOLITAN REPORTER 82 IV. SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT 117 V. TRAVELING CORRESPONDENT ........ 139 VI. PROPRIETOR AND EDITOR 180 VII. CONCLUSION 205 BIBLIOGRAPHY 211 v CHAPTER I PRINTER AND PILOT Samuel L. Clemens' initiation into professional journalism was not as a journalist, as might be expected of so prolific a writer, but as a printer's devil in his eleventh year. When John L. Clemens died on March 2K3 lQkJ3 he left a very poor family, hard pressed for sustenance. Samuel's older brother Orion was working as a journeyman printer in St. Louis. Living with Samuel's mother, Jane, were an older sister Pamela, who gave music lessons to help the family income, Samuel, and a younger brother, Henry. Daily existence was difficult for the Clemens, so Samuel, being the oldest male at home, was expected to assume mature responsibilities. Samuel Clemens, at seventy-two, remembered that he had been removed from school and had been apprenticed to Joseph P. Ament, editor and proprietor of the Missouri Courier, immediately after his father's death. As is the case with many of Clemens' remembrances, the facts do not agree. Ament's Courier was being published in Palmyra when John Clemens died. In 18^8, a year later, Ament bought the Hannibal Gazette and merged the two papers under the older Courier name."'" Also, Dixon Wecter •^•DeLancey Ferguson, Mark Twain, Man and Legend (Indianapolis, 19^-3)* P- 33* Hereafter cited as Ferguson, Man and Legend. 1 points out that the 1850 census shows that Clemens did attend school during the year of his father's death. He writes, "There seems little question that he continued his education at least until some time in 1849* while helping to support himself by working after hours or between whiles."^ Thus Clemens probably started working for the Gazette in the summer of 1847 as a delivery and office-boy, with the apprenticeship beginning after Ament bought the paper. Clemens' memory of the Mexican War supports this conjecture. He erroneously recalled being circulation chief in charge of printing the extras during the last months of the war. According to DeLancey Ferguson, His always creative memory associated this work faith the latter part of his apprenticeship, but Chapultepec, the last major battle of the war, was fought less than six months after John Clemens died. Hence, Sam, instead of printing the extras, only delivered them, and such must have been his work for six months or more, until Ament took over the paper and the real apprentice- ship began.3 No money was involved in apprenticeships of the period, but the cub was provided with board and clothes as he learned a trade. The usual training period was two years. Such was Clemens' arrangement with Ament. The Courier editor did not fulfill his terms of the deal to Clemens' satisfaction. In his Autobiography Clemens wrote: ^Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston, 1961), p. 131. Hereafter cited as Wecter, Hannibal. •5 -Terguson, Man and Legend, p. 33* The clothes consisted of two suits a year but one of the suits always failed to materialize and the other suit was not purchased so long as Mr. Ament's old clothes held out. I was only about half as "big as Ament, consequently his shirts gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus tent, and I had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them short enough.^" Clemens also resented the fact that Ament's workers had to eat in the kitchen with the old Negro cook and her mulatto daughter. The food was so meager that the boys often raided the cellar for onions and potatoes which they cooked on the printing-office stove. Later they were invited to the family dining table, but the servings of food did not increase. Here they endured the1agony of watching Mrs. Ament dole out sparse amounts of brown sugar into their coffee for sweetening. The apprentices slept on pallets on the printing shop floor and went to the Ament house only for food. Wecter observes that Clemens 1 chores were typical of any printing apprentice: He built fires on winter mornings, brought water from the neighborhood pump, swept out the office after picking up yesterday's scattered type from the floor, and as befitted a good devil, sorted out the good for the pi pile from the broken type which he dumped into the hellbox. On Saturdays he wetted down the paper stock and turned it on Sundays. During week days he turpentined the inking-balls, made paste, started up the lye hopper, oiled the platen-springs, manipulated the rollers, and then washed them in the sink along with the forms. With the weekly sheets printed, he folded them and delivered them around town at ^Samuel L. Clemens, The Autobipgraphy of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider (New York, 1959)> pp. 95-9^ Hereafter cited as Samuel Clemens, Autobiography. dawn Thursday—his chief occupational hazard being the short-tempered dogs that saved their spleen for the carrier.-5 Young Clemens was quick to learn the trade. When he had been with Ament about a year, he could, as Albert Bigelow Paine says, "set type as accurately and almost as rapidly as Pet McMurry, wash up the forms better than Pet, and run the Job-press to the tune of 'Annie Laurie' or 'Along the Beach „6 at Rockaway,1 without missing a stroke or losing a finger. He became Ament's favorite and a kind of sub-reditor who had the job of finding more copy when needed to fill pages just before a deadline. Alex Lacey, who in 1910 reminisced about working with Clemens in Hannibal, said that what he remembered most about young Clemens was that he could get more ink on his face and arms for the amount of work he did than any other 7 person in the shop. Clemens remembered himself to be a 8 green and lazy cub, but Orion's testimony indicated that Samuel's judgment was unjustified. Orion recalled that when his brother came to work for him, he was a fast and clean 9 printer, turning out a good proof. Apparently he had learned his job well at Ament's shop. ^Wecter, Hannibal, p. 206. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography (New York, 1912), I, 78* Hereafter cited as Paine, Biography.