Roughing It
could not live on that alone without occasional bread to wash it down
with). I had gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not
dazzled anybody with my successes; still the list was before me, and the
amplest liberty in the matter of choosing, provided I wanted to
work—which I did not, after being so wealthy. I had once been a grocery
clerk, for one day, but had consumed so much sugar in that time that I
was relieved from further duty by the proprietor; said he wanted me
outside, so that he could have my custom. I had studied law an entire
week, and then given it up because it was so prosy and tiresome. I had
engaged briefly in the study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time
trying to fix the bellows so that it would blow itself, that the master
turned me adrift in disgrace, and told me I would come to no good. I had
been a bookseller’s clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so
much I could not read with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a
furlough and forgot to put a limit to it. I had clerked in a drug store
part of a summer, but my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to
sell more stomach pumps than soda water. So I had to go.
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I had made of myself a tolerable printer, under the impression that I
would be another Franklin some day, but somehow had missed the
connection thus far. There was no berth open in the Esmeralda _Union_,
and besides I had always been such a slow compositor that I looked with
envy upon the achievements of apprentices of two years’ standing; and
when I took a “take,” foremen were in the habit of suggesting that it
would be wanted “some time during the year.”
I was a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot and by no means
ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two hundred and fifty
dollars a month and no board to pay, and I did long to stand behind a
wheel again and never roam any more—but I had been making such an ass of
myself lately in grandiloquent letters home about my blind lead and my
European excursion that I did what many and many a poor disappointed
miner had done before; said “It is all over with me now, and I will
never go back home to be pitied—and snubbed.” I had been a private
secretary, a silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to
less than nothing in each, and now—
What to do next?
I yielded to Higbie’s appeals and consented to try the mining once more.
We climbed far up on the mountain side and went to work on a little
rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it eight feet deep. Higbie
descended into it and worked bravely with his pick till he had loosened
up a deal of rock and dirt and then I went down with a long-handled
shovel (the most awkward invention yet contrived by man) to throw it
out. You must brace the shovel forward with the side of your knee till
it is full, and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your
left shoulder. I made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge of
the shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of my neck.
I never said a word, but climbed out and walked home. I inwardly
resolved that I would starve before I would make a target of myself and
shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled shovel.
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I sat down, in the cabin, and gave myself up to solid misery—so to
speak. Now in pleasanter days I had amused myself with writing letters
to the chief paper of the Territory, the Virginia Daily Territorial
Enterprise, and had always been surprised when they appeared in print.
My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to
me that they might have found something better to fill up with than my
literature. I had found a letter in the post office as I came home from
the hill side, and finally I opened it. Eureka! [I never did know what
Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any
when no other that sounds pretty offers.] It was a deliberate offer to
me of Twenty-Five Dollars a week to come up to Virginia and be city
editor of the Enterprise.
I would have challenged the publisher in the “blind lead” days—I wanted
to fall down and worship him, now. Twenty-Five Dollars a week—it looked
like bloated luxury—a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money. But my
transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent
unfitness for the position—and straightway, on top of this, my long
array of failures rose up before me. Yet if I refused this place I must
presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing
necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a
humiliation since he was thirteen years old. Not much to _be_ proud of,
since it is so common—but then it was all I had to _be_ proud of. So I
was scared into being a city editor. I would have declined, otherwise.
Necessity is the mother of “taking chances.” I do not doubt that if, at
that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the
original Hebrew, I would have accepted—albeit with diffidence and some
misgivings—and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.
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I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation. I was a rusty
looking city editor, I am free to confess—coatless, slouch hat, blue
woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to
the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt. But I
secured a more Christian costume and discarded the revolver.
I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do
so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in
order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and
a subject of remark. But the other editors, and all the printers,
carried revolvers. I asked the chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman,
I will call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do)
for some instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all
over town and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes
of the information gained, and write them out for publication. And he
added:
“Never say ‘We learn’ so-and-so, or ‘It is reported,’ or ‘It is
rumored,’ or ‘We understand’ so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get
the absolute facts, and then speak out and say ‘It _is_ so-and-so.’
Otherwise, people will not put confidence in your news. Unassailable
certainty is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most
valuable reputation.”
It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I find a
reporter commencing his article with “We understand,” I gather a
suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he
ought to have done. I moralize well, but I did not always practise well
when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too
often when there was a dearth of news. I can never forget my first day’s
experience as a reporter. I wandered about town questioning everybody,
boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything. At the end
of five hours my notebook was still barren. I spoke to Mr. Goodman. He
said:
“Dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry time when
there were no fires or inquests. Are there no hay wagons in from the
Truckee? If there are, you might speak of the renewed activity and all
that sort of thing, in the hay business, you know.
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“It isn’t sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks business
like.”
I canvassed the city again and found one wretched old hay truck dragging
in from the country. But I made affluent use of it. I multiplied it by
sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made
sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about
hay as Virginia City had never seen in the world before.
This was encouraging. Two nonpareil columns had to be filled, and I was
getting along. Presently, when things began to look dismal again, a
desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more. I never
was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life. I said to the
murderer:
“Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day
which I can never forget. If whole years of gratitude can be to you any
slight compensation, they shall be yours. I was in trouble and you have
relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear. Count me
your friend from this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor.”
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If I did not really say that to him I at least felt a sort of itching
desire to do it. I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to
details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret—namely,
that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work
him up too.
Next I discovered some emigrant wagons going into camp on the plaza and
found that they had lately come through the hostile Indian country and
had fared rather roughly. I made the best of the item that the
circumstances permitted, and felt that if I were not confined within
rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers I
could add particulars that would make the article much more interesting.
However, I found one wagon that was going on to California, and made
some judicious inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his
short and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly
going on and would not be in the city next day to make trouble, I got
ahead of the other papers, for I took down his list of names and added
his party to the killed and wounded. Having more scope here, I put this
wagon through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in
history.
My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the morning I felt
that I had found my legitimate occupation at last. I reasoned within
myself that news, and stirring news, too, was what a paper needed, and I
felt that I was peculiarly endowed with the ability to furnish it. Mr.
Goodman said that I was as good a reporter as Dan. I desired no higher
commendation. With encouragement like that, I felt that I could take my
pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and the
interests of the paper demanded it.
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CHAPTER XLIII.
However, as I grew better acquainted with the business and learned the
run of the sources of information I ceased to require the aid of fancy
to any large extent, and became able to fill my columns without
diverging noticeably from the domain of fact.
I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we
swapped “regulars” with each other and thus economized work. “Regulars”
are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, “clean-ups”
at the quartz mills, and inquests. Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we
had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set
down among the “regulars.” We had lively papers in those days. My great
competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the _Union_. He was an
excellent reporter. Once in three or four months he would get a little
intoxicated, but as a general thing he was a wary and cautious drinker
although always ready to tamper a little with the enemy. He had the
advantage of me in one thing; he could get the monthly public school
report and I could not, because the principal hated the _Enterprise_.
One snowy night when the report was due, I started out sadly wondering
how I was going to get it. Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted
street I stumbled on Boggs and asked him where he was going.
“After the school report.”
“I’ll go along with you.”
“No, _sir_. I’ll excuse you.”
“Just as you say.”
A saloon-keeper’s boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch,