How Not to Get Rich Page 5
You have promised me that you would leave all mining matters, and everything involved in an outlay of money, in my hands. Now it may be a matter of no consequence at all to you, to keep your word with me, but I assure you I look upon it in a very different light. Indeed I fully expect you to deal as conscientiously with me as you would with any other man. Moreover, you know as I well as I do, that the very best course that you and I can pursue will be, to keep on good terms with each other—notwithstanding which fact, we shall certainly split inside of six months if you go on in this way . . . Now Orion, I have given you a piece of my mind—you have it in full, and you deserved it—
Twain told Orion he would never look on their mother’s face again, or their sister Pamela’s, and that he would not get married “until I am a rich man—so that you can easily see that when you stand between me and my fortune (the one I shall make, as surely as Fate itself), you stand between me and home, friends and all I care for . . .”
WHEN THE CLEMENS COMPANY’S investments invariably went south, Twain struggled to hide his poverty.
During one eight-week stretch, Twain’s sole occupation
was avoiding acquaintances; for during that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board. I became very adept at “slinking.” I slunk from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar. I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful I robbed my generous land lady of, and [when] I slunk to my bed, I felt meaner and lowlier and more despicable than the worms.
Twain was a worm, perhaps, but a worm whose family had “vast” real estate holdings. There was always the land back in Tennessee. The possibility that his father’s investment could someday pay off might have been what sustained him in his poverty—that and his indomitable spirit. There were times when Twain pretended to live like a prince. At one mining camp, he and a friend in similarly reduced circumstances would sneak about the other cabins, gathering empty champagne bottles and fruit tins. These they would pile outside their own shack, adding whenever possible the containers of the few delicacies they somehow managed to obtain for themselves. “In the course of a few weeks,” a local newspaper reported, “the accumulation of cans that contained oysters, turkeys, jellies and other good things began to attract attention. Miners passing their cabin used to gaze upon the many cans and say, ‘By Jove, those fellows live like fighting cocks!’”
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“The Richest Place on Earth”
For anyone as resourceful and ingenious as Twain, there is always cause for hope. For several months in 1862 he had been contributing jokey letters to the Territorial Enterprise, a daily newspaper published in Virginia City, Nevada. In July of that year, the paper offered him a job. The pay was $25 a week—a considerable sum if you were broke, but almost an insult to someone who fully intended to be a multimillionaire and sometimes carried himself as if he already had achieved this lofty station. So, like the man who decides to work until something better comes along, Twain accepted the offer and set off on foot for Virginia City. It was there, on February 3, 1863, that for the first time one of his pieces appeared under the name “Mark Twain.”
Virginia City was the Silicon Valley of the Comstock Lode, with the swagger of the Vegas Strip. Thrown up almost overnight, clinging to the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, Virginia City existed for the sole purpose of supporting the mining that went on not only around it but, literally, underneath it. Shafts and tunnels were dug 3,000 feet below the town; shacks, saloons, and storefronts shook and rumbled whenever miners set off their explosives. With a near-instant population of 25,000, almost all of them newcomers, Virginia City was known as the “richest place on earth,” as Warren Hinckle says in his history of the town. “So fabulous were the fortunes produced and the manner of spending and squandering so superlative,” he writes, “that it burns through the fog of historical memory as a Cinderella city, a real-life, uniquely American Camelot devoted to the questionable art of conspicuous consumption.”
Naturally, Twain loved Virginia City, even if he sometimes felt constrained by having to work for wages. “I am very well satisfied here,” he wrote to his mother. “They pay me six dollars a day, and I make 50 per cent profit by only doing three dollars’ worth of work.” It wasn’t long before he got a raise, to $40 a week, but he rarely drew on his salary. There was no need: He was a newspaperman, and whatever he wrote about the mines could, and did, affect their value. Speculators routinely gave Twain presents of shares in their mines, and he found that he could sell these shares and live comfortably off the profits, which he did.
Reporters were given shares on the sensible and generally correct assumption that they would promote the mines in the newspaper—mines in which they themselves now owned stock. And reporters obliged. In the process, Twain learned valuable lessons in what we call branding and marketing. He learned the value of promoting a product, especially when it was worthless, and how to do so persuasively, with cunning. Mine owners didn’t care what the papers reported, provided they said something.
Consequently, we generally said a word or two to the effect that the “indications” were good, or that the ledge was “six feet wide,” or that the rock “resembled the Comstock” (and so it did—but as a general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you down). If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of the country, using strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very marvel in silver discoveries had transpired. If the mine was a “developed” one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn’t), we praised the tunnel, said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out of ecstasies—but never said a word about the rock.
The reporters “would squander half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of admiration of the ‘gentlemanly and efficient superintendent’ of the mine—but never utter a whisper about the rock.” Mine owners “were always satisfied. Occasionally, we patched up and varnished our reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving some abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones rattle—and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting notoriety thus conferred upon it.”
In such a heady environment, investment money came roaring in, and the price of shares kept pushing skyward. From San Francisco and other cities, even “washerwomen and servant girls” would pool their resources and send agents to buy shares for them. They, too, were only human, no better or worse than the seventeenth-century Dutch chimneysweeps who invested in tulip bulbs or the exotic dancer in the 2015 movie The Big Short who bought five houses.
Pretty soon, Twain had amassed boxes of stock certificates, and, in May 1864, he felt flush enough to resign altogether from the Territorial Enterprise and set off for San Francisco himself. For a man accustomed to shanty towns on sagebrush mountainsides, San Francisco “was Paradise to me. I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it.”
He had always longed to be a social butterfly, he admitted, and was finally one at last. “I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo.” He lived like “a man worth a hundred thousand dollars (prospectively), and likely to reach absolute affluence” as soon as any one of his holdings might make his fortune.
All the while, he held tight. Stocks went on rising. Speculation intensified. Then something unexpected happened—unexpected, that is, to people with what John Kenneth Galbraith called a “vested interest in euphoria”—and refused to see that a so-called
growth adjustment was inevitable. The market value of the Comstock mines, which had been $40 million, had fallen to $12 million in the summer of 1863 and then, on December 15, was down to $4 million. The boom went bust. Over the next two years, 10,000 people moved away from Nevada.
“The wreck was complete,” Twain recalled. “The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. I, the cheerful idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now fifty dollars when I gathered together my various debts and paid them.” He moved out of the hotel and into a modest boardinghouse and took a job as reporter for the Sacramento Union.
Orion, meanwhile, had lost his job. When Nevada had entered the Union as the thirty-sixth state in 1864, he had been considered a shoo-in to win election as its new secretary of state. Unfortunately, in what Twain called one of Orion’s “spasms of virtue,” he decided it would be improper to attend the Republican convention where he was to secure the party’s nomination, and therefore lost it to someone else. Orion had also taken an anti-whiskey position, which was not popular in the wide-open West. After trying unsuccessfully to support himself and his family as a lawyer in Carson City, he sold his home at a loss and moved back to Keokuk. There he started a chicken farm.
There was one additional unsettling development in this difficult period. One day Twain picked up the Territorial Enterprise (he kept the clipping but neglected to date it) and read how three San Franciscans had gone to New York City with ore from their mine in Nevada and sold it for $3 million. Twain recognized from the description of the mine that it was the “blind lead” that, for a few precious days, had been his. “Once more, native imbecility had carried the day,” he wrote, “and I had lost a million!”
FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS, he made do with a newspaperman’s pay. He was even gaining some regional notoriety with his satirical stories when he made one final, forlorn attempt to strike it rich in the West, this time prospecting for gold in California’s Tuolomne County, 100 miles east of San Francisco. From December 1864 through February 1865, he stayed in a cabin on Jackass Hill, one of maybe five such shacks in what had once been a town of 2,000 to 3,000. “When the mines gave out,” Twain wrote, “the town fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets, dwellings, shops, everything—and left no sign.”
Here the few stragglers who stayed continued to nurse their vain hopes of great wealth as they panned for gold. Twain’s duties were humbling. Mostly, he carried water for rinsing out the pans of dirt. At night, the men passed the time swapping yarns. When they were done, Twain would take notes.
Who knows? Someday, he thought, he could write up those stories. People might like to read them.
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“Poor, Pitiful Business!”
It was at Jackass Hill in early 1865 that Twain heard a story about a gambler and his frog—a shaggy frog story that, once on paper, changed Twain’s life. First published by the Saturday Press, a New York newspaper, in October 1865, the story was reprinted in various versions in other publications. Within months, it had reached a national audience, leading to Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, issued in 1867.
Reviews were encouraging. The New York Herald called it “a little book full of good hard sense, wit pure, sparkling and sharp as a diamond . . . and humor genial and inexhaustible.” Despite encouraging reviews, sales were not good. This, however, was no great disappointment to the author because he never seemed to have expected it to be a commercial success. “I don’t believe it will ever pay anything worth a cent,” he told his mother at the time of its release. “I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope of making anything out of it.”
But in terms of self-promotion—as an exercise in “personal branding,” we might say—the frog story was a hit. People found the tale wildly amusing, and editors wanted more from its author. Though still broke and “utterly miserable,” Twain told Orion that he had at last stumbled onto a career, though it was one he did not find especially inspiring. Although he had never before felt a real calling for any line of work,
I have had a “call” to literature, of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says that to do right you must multiply the one or the two or the three talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping, I would long ago have ceased to meddle with things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures. Poor, pitiful business!
Because readers liked his work, the enterprising newspaperman had little difficulty landing plum assignments. In 1866, he sailed to the Sandwich Islands (the Hawaiian Islands, as they are known today), to report on the islands’ sugar industry for the Sacramento Union. But with his characteristic curiosity and observational genius, he explored the islands and the islanders’ culture, wallowing in this exotic respite from his workaday newspapering.
Back in the States, meanwhile, Orion managed—or mismanaged—the family’s real estate interests in Tennessee. A year before Twain sailed away (it sometimes took months for news to travel), Herman Camp, a friend of his who had made a small fortune trading in mining stocks and had moved to New York, offered to buy the family land for $200,000. The man wanted to import European immigrants to grow Tennessee grapes on the acreage. Twain had the contracts drawn up and sent them to Orion for his signature. But by the time they arrived, Twain discovered, Orion had taken the pledge.
The temperance virtue was temporarily upon him in strong force, and he wrote and said he would not be a party to debauching the country with wine. Also, he said how could he know whether Mr. Camp was going to deal fairly and honestly with those poor people from Europe or not?—and so without waiting to find out, he quashed the whole trade, and there it fell, never to be brought to life again. The land, from being suddenly worth two hundred thousand dollars, became as suddenly worth what it was before—nothing, and taxes to pay.
When Twain learned the news, he told Orion’s wife, Mollie, he would “never entirely forgive” his brother. If he let the land be sold for taxes, “all his religion will not wipe out the sin. It is no use to quote Scripture to me, Mollie,—I am in poverty and exile now because of Orion’s religious scruples. Religion & poverty cannot go together.” Orion might save his own soul, “but in doing it he will damn the balance of the family. I want no such religion.” It appalled him to think of that land “going to the dogs when I could have sold it & been at home now, instead of drifting about the outskirts of the world, battling for bread.” Twain was aware that he might have “made Orion mad, but I don’t care a cent.”
HAWAII’S OCEAN BREEZES offered some consolation, and Twain’s life in poverty was soon to pass. Not content with filing a mere business story, Twain used his time in the South Pacific to write his early travel pieces, first for the Sacramento Union and, over the next several months, for other West Coast newspapers. His travel pieces were vivid and candid, and the sketches he wrote merely to amuse were widely read, enjoyed, and talked about. They were so popular that, upon his return to California, he began to give lively lectures about his experiences in Hawaii. More and more editors were becoming aware of his work, and more and more readers recognized his byline and looked forward to his articles.
As Twain’s fame rose, he entered an entirely new phase of his life. Over the next few years, he established himself as one of the country’s most popular (and well-compensated) lecturers. Bringing his own brand of standup comedy to packed houses coast to coast, he managed, in his own words, to “persecute the public for their lasting benefit & my profit.” He wrote the posters advertising his appearances. “Doors open at 7 o’clock,” one poster announced. “The tr
ouble to begin at 8.” Other speakers tended to be self-serious or bombastic or both; Twain was intimate and self-deprecating. A reviewer for the Brooklyn Daily Union described his “quaint, apparently unconcerned manner and comical drawling tone.” He could be irreverent, even coarse. Once he offered to demonstrate what he meant by the word “cannibalism,” if only someone in the hall would hand him a baby.
The book that established his brand not only throughout the United States but in Europe as well was The Innocents Abroad. In 1867, on assignment from the San Francisco Alta, Twain sailed to Europe and the Holy Land on the paddle-wheeler Quaker City, which carried well-heeled American tourists eager to see the world. That summer and fall, he wrote a series of letters for the Alta as well as for the New York Herald and New York Tribune, describing with disarming candor his response to sights ordinarily treated with reverence. He couldn’t stand the Old Masters, he admitted; shown a Madonna attributed by an Italian tour guide to St. Luke, Twain “could not help admiring the Apostle’s modesty in never once mentioning in his writings that he could paint.”
The letters caused a sensation, and when Twain returned from the voyage in November, he was approached by Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut. The American Publishing Company was in the subscription book business, which was comparable in its time to print-on-demand today, and very much like publishing for the Kindle. Such books were not sold in bookstores—the respectable and dignified way—but by commissioned sales agents who scoured the countryside, reaching customers who rarely got to town. These sales agents went farmhouse to farmhouse, carrying brochures and drumming up advance orders. In the twenty-five years following the Civil War, three-quarters of all books purchased in the United States were sold by these agents.