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Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, by Roy Morris Jr.
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In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it’s time “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is trying to “sivilize” him, and Huck Finn can’t stand it—he’s been there before.
It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war.
A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun.
With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away.
With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.
- Sales Rank: #2149800 in Books
- Published on: 2010-03-02
- Released on: 2010-03-02
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.10" w x 6.25" l, 1.12 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
- ISBN13: 9781416598664
- Condition: USED - Good
- Notes: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Publishers Weekly
His 1872 Roughing It was Mark Twain's sanitized version of his trip west between 1861 and 1866, and Morris (Fraud of the Century) utilizes contemporaneous letters and diaries to separate fact from fiction about a watershed odyssey that transformed an itinerant printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, and Confederate guerrilla into journalist, author, and stage performer. Unsuited to soldiering, fun-loving 25-year-old Samuel Clemens accompanied his older brother Orion cross-country by stagecoach from Missouri to Orion's patronage appointment in the newly created Nevada Territory. Clemens's encounters included notorious gunfighter Jack Slade, with whom he shared an innocuous cup of coffee, and the indomitable polygamist Mormon leader Brigham Young, whom he found kindly and dignified. At a lively Nevada newspaper, Clemens launched his professional writing career and took the name Mark Twain; at a San Francisco paper, he honed his satirical skills and began a complicated friendship with writer Bret Harte; in 1866, he wrote the first modern description of Hawaiian surfing in a Sacramento paper. This latest Twain bicentennial volume is a tale of a high-spirited, gifted humorist finding his voice in the rough-and-tumble of the Wild West—an authoritative and engrossing slice of American history. (Apr.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In Lighting Out, Morris recounts how an aimless Sam Clemens—weary of futile maneuvers with inept Confederate guerrillas—gladly accepts an invitation from his brother to accompany him to the Wild West. Though soon disabused of his dreams of striking it rich with a mining pick, Clemens discovers a different fortune with a journalist’s pen. Readers follow Clemens as he alternately amuses and enrages his readers with the barbed humor that becomes his trademark. Morris carefully investigates just how that humor first appears under the byline of one “Mark Twain,” concluding that Twain’s own explanation of his nom de plume—just like his extended frontier memoirs in Roughing It—is artistically brilliant but factually unreliable. Readers will appreciate the way Morris exposes Twain’s “stretchers” without deflating his irrepressible humor. --Bryce Christensen
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 2
A FINE PLEASURE TRIP
BEFORE SAM AND ORION COULD GET TO NEVADA, they first had to reach St. Joseph, Missouri, the jumping-off point for the western frontier. On July 18, they went down to the St. Louis levee and boarded the Sioux City, a ramshackle packet boat, for a six-day trip up the Missouri River, the same river Sam Clemens had nearly been drafted to navigate for the Union Navy. Orion had left his wife, Mollie, and their five-year-old daughter, Jennie, with Mollie’s parents in Keokuk; they would rejoin him in Carson City once he got properly situated.
The Missouri, the longest river on the North American continent, is a notoriously winding and treacherous waterway. Its three-thousand-mile course traces an elliptical loop from just above St. Louis to Fort Benton, Montana, a bluff-lined, ever-changing river that makes the Mississippi look tame in comparison. “The Big Muddy,” as it was—and still is—called by travelers with no particular fondness for its turbid, dingy-brown appearance, was “unpoetic and repulsive—a stream of flowing mud studded with dead tree trunks and broken by bars,” in the words of New York Tribune reporter Albert Richardson. It rose twice yearly, in April and June, when the snowmelt from the Nebraska prairies and the Rocky Mountains uprooted trees and sent them flying like javelins through the silt-thick water. “I have seen nothing more frightful,” French explorer Jacques Marquette observed in 1673, and in his travels he had seen a lot of frightening things.
In many ways, the Missouri was more dangerous than the Mississippi. Except for its annual flood time, the Missouri baked down during the summer to a trickle of quicksand-studded shallows beneath glowering treeless bluffs. Many pilots relied too readily on “a wad of steam” to get them through the occasional rapids or over sandbars. The consequences could be deadly; dozens of Missouri River steamers blew up each year from boiler explosions. On Good Friday, April 9, 1852, the paddle wheeler Saluda exploded near Lexington, Missouri. Ill-fated Captain Francis Belt, leaning against the ship’s bell when the mishap occurred, found himself tumbling head over heels down a bluff several hundred yards inland, the bell clanging madly as it rolled downhill alongside him. The ship’s safe, with a watchdog still chained to it, and an unlucky clerk who happened to be passing by, were flung two hundred yards ashore, and a local butcher had the abject misfortune to be dismembered by a flying boiler flue. In all, the bodies of more than one hundred Saluda crewmen and passengers were eventually recovered up and down the Lexington wharf, making it the worst single disaster in the river’s disaster-strewn history.
The current trip was somewhat less perilous. Indeed, it was “so dull and sleepy,” recalled Twain, “that it has left no more impression on my memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many days.” Perhaps not, but he remembered enough about the trip to jab his professional judgment a decade later. The river, he said, presented “a confused jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other; and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then retired from and climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our crutches and sparred over.” The boat might as well have traveled to St. Joseph by land, said Twain, since “she was walking most of the time, anyhow.” The boat’s captain bragged that she was “a bully boat,” needing only more shear and a bigger wheel to make her perfect. Twain, with his jaundiced pilot’s eye, thought the boat actually needed a pair of stilts, but he “had the deep sagacity not to say so.” Richardson, who had made a similar voyage upriver four years earlier, had no such compunction. “Navigating the Missouri, at low water,” he wrote, “is like putting a steamer upon dry land, and sending a boy ahead with a sprinkling pot.”
The brothers arrived safely in St. Joseph on July 24 and went immediately to the business office of the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express stagecoach line, where Sam purchased tickets for the pair of them, at $150 apiece. Counting boat fare, he was now four hundred dollars out of pocket, with only a vague promise from his brother—he knew all about those—to put him on the government payroll once they reached Nevada. In choosing as their carrier the COC&PP, as it was known, the brothers had opted for the northernmost of the five established routes to the West Coast. (The Oregon Trail, which their route followed, diverged at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, and continued through the upper Northwest, but did not go through all the way to the coast.) Their itinerary followed the Little Blue River from Kansas into Nebraska, passing through Fort Kearny, then shadowed the Platte River to Cottonwood before cutting across the edge of Colorado and back into Nebraska to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, down to Fort Bridger, then to Salt Lake City, Utah, across the Great Salt Lake, and finally a straight shot across Nevada to Carson City. The trip was scheduled to take seventeen days and average a hundred miles per day. Passengers were expected to sleep sitting up inside the coach. It was a wearying prospect, but there was no other option; the first transcontinental railroad line would not be completed for another decade.
The fact that the stage line pulled into so many different forts along the way reflected the smoldering unrest, not yet a full-blown prairie fire, that was kindling within the various Plains Indian tribes whose ancestral homelands were being trampled daily by numberless thousands of white travelers. (On one day alone in August 1850, soldiers at Fort Laramie counted some 39,506 travelers rumbling westward aboard 9,927 wagons.) Among the tribes claiming territory abutting the COC&PP route were the Cheyennes, Pawnees, Poncas, Arapahos, Utes, Paiutes, and Gosiutes. Most had attended the great 1851 peace parley at Fort Laramie, where representatives of the American government, in return for the right to build roads and army posts on their land, had promised to pay the tribes annuities of fifty thousand dollars each for the next fifty years. The parsimonious U.S. Senate soon cut the number down to ten years.
It took less than three years for trouble to flare. In August 1854, a young Miniconjou Sioux warrior named High Forehead, summering with his tribesmen outside Fort Laramie, shot a stray cow that had wandered into their camp and (according to the Indians) run amok. The cow belonged to a passing party of Danish immigrants, who complained to the fort’s overworked commander, Lieutenant Hugh Fleming. Against his better judgment, Fleming sent Second Lieutenant John L. Grattan to investigate. Grattan, fresh out of West Point, was given to bragging that with ten good men he could defeat the entire Cheyenne nation. As it developed, he never got the chance (these were Sioux, anyway). On the morning of August 19, he rode out to arrest High Forehead. The warrior demurred. By the time negotiations had concluded, Grattan and his entire thirty-man force lay dead, Grattan’s body by grim coincidence bristling with twenty-four arrows—one for each year of his abruptly terminated life.
Sam Clemens may have heard about the Grattan massacre—he was in St. Louis at the time—and he certainly knew a garbled version of a second Indian massacre that had taken place two years later near Fort Kearny and involved a particularly luckless territorial secretary named Almon Whiting Babbitt. It was Babbitt’s remarkable misfortune to be attacked twice by Cheyennes within the space of thirteen days. He survived the first attack by managing to be absent when a war party set upon his supply train and killed various of his companions. Forewarned but not forearmed, the secretary was attacked again two weeks later, apparently by a different group of Cheyennes. This time he was killed. In his subsequent account of the episode in Roughing It, Mark Twain mislocated Babbitt’s attack by a good hundred miles and added: “I was personally acquainted with a hundred and thirty-three or four people who were wounded during that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives. . . . One of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrow-heads in his system for nearly seven years after the massacre.” According to Twain, Babbitt survived the massacre by crawling away on his hands and knees for forty hours, a singular feat since Babbitt was dead at the time.
With images of Indians dancing in his head (a drawing on page three of Roughing It shows the sleeping author innocently dreaming of Indians, wagon trains, buffalo hunts, steamboats, and gold mining, all lit by the rising sun), Sam climbed aboard a Concord stagecoach with Orion for the first leg of their journey. The Concord, named for the New Hampshire city where it was produced by the Abbot-Downing Company, was “a great swinging and swaying . . . cradle on wheels.” It weighed more than a ton, stood eight feet high, and could accommodate as many as twenty-one passengers—nine seated inside and a dozen more hanging precariously from the roof. Drawn by six horses, the Concord’s chief innovation was its flexible leather thoroughbraces, a pair of stiff, three-inch-thick leather strips that acted as primitive shock absorbers and produced the coach’s characteristic rocking motion. A conductor rode beside the driver, functioning more or less as his counterpart did on a railroad train, overseeing the driver, passengers, and bags of mail entrusted to his care. The body of the stagecoach was painted English vermilion, with scenic pictures decorating the outside door panels and the likenes...
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Shows influences on great writers
By Dave Schwinghammer
Prior to LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY, Samuel Clemons was an itinerant printer and a river boat pilot. He loved piloting the Mississippi so much he may have never left the profession if it hadn't been for the Civil War.
About the most instructive thing about this book is that it shows how much Mark Twain owed to his trip out west to strike it rich. There were lots of storytellers out there for one thing, and he listened. "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," his first big success, was owed to another miner, old Ben Coon, who told the story first. Twain rewrote and embellished other stories he heard in the mining camps in ROUGHING IT. He also owed his lecture style to Artemis Ward, whom he listened to carefully and imitated. And there was a stretch where he was either fired or quit his job on a San Francisco newspaper and contemplated suicide. Brett Harte offered him money to contribute to his literary magazine which may have saved his life.
Then there was Twain's trip to Hawaii, which furnished material for the first lecture he gave. He sent back "twenty-five or thirty" letters to the San Francisco Enterprise and also gained a lust for travel and a reputation as a travel writer that continued for most of his life. He also gained his first real "scoop" in Hawaii. Captain Josiah A. Mitchell, twelve crew members, and a pair of passengers survived the wreck of the clipper ship "Hornet" and spent forty-three days in a lifeboat, coming ashore on the Big Island, two hundred miles south of Honolulu. His reworked story was published in HARPER'S WEEKLY, with the byline Mark Swain.
We also get to see Twain's famous bad luck when it came to business investments. He owned "feet" in mining stock that he was living off of in San Francisco, but after he left for San Francisco, his partners sold their shares for something like three million dollars; his shares were worthless. Perhaps if Twain had been writing today his career never would have gotten off the ground. While at work on THE ENTERPRISE, a Virginia City newspaper, he fictionalized the massacre of a man and his family he entitled "The Dutch Nick's Massacre." Apparently this was Twain's idea of satire, as the murderer was Philip Hopkins, a mine owner driven mad by bad investments and crooked bankers. But just about everybody believed it. He apologized in print, saying "I take it all back."
Mark Twain died in 1910, leaving a three volume autobiography that was not to be published for a hundred years. This is the year, folks. One should remember, though, that he wrote the thing after he'd lost his wife and two daughters, which may be why the famously cynical Twain didn't want anybody to read it quite yet.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Laugh out loud
By brian lynch
This splendid book is a rare achievement - it actually adds to Twain's genius, mainly by supplying context and commentary but also by the quality of Morris's prose. I laughed out loud all the way through.
Brian Lynch
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Sam Clemens
By kevin gmiter
I'm a mark twain fan it's a awesome book
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