The Complete Letters. Mark Twain

die; otherwise look out for 28, 31, 34, 47, and 65; be careful — for you are not of a long-lived race, that is on your father’s side; you are the only healthy member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like the certainty of attaining to a great age — so, stop using tobacco, and be careful of yourself….. In some respects you take after your father, but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the long-lived, energetic side of the house…. You never brought all your energies to bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it — for instance, you are self-made, self-educated.

      S. L. C. Which proves nothing.

      MADAME. Don’t interrupt. When you sought your present occupation you found a thousand obstacles in the way — obstacles unknown — not even suspected by any save you and me, since you keep such matters to yourself — but you fought your way, and hid the long struggle under a mask of cheerfulness, which saved your friends anxiety on your account. To do all this requires all the qualities I have named.

      S. L. C. You flatter well, Madame.

      MADAME. Don’t interrupt: Up to within a short time you had always lived from hand to mouth-now you are in easy circumstances — for which you need give credit to no one but yourself. The turning point in your life occurred in 1840-7-8.

      S. L. C. Which was?

      MADAME. A death perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and made you what you are; it was always intended that you should make yourself; therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as early as it did. You will never die of water, although your career upon it in the future seems well sprinkled with misfortune. You will continue upon the water for some time yet; you will not retire finally until ten years from now…. What is your brother’s age? 35 — and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an office? Well, he stands a better chance than the other two, and he may get it; he is too visionary — is always flying off on a new hobby; this will never do — tell him I said so. He is a good lawyer — a, very good lawyer — and a fine speaker — is very popular and much respected, and makes many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their confidence by displaying his instability of character….. The land he has now will be very valuable after a while —

      S. L. C. Say a 50 years hence, or thereabouts. Madame —

      MADAME. No — less time-but never mind the land, that is a secondary consideration — let him drop that for the present, and devote himself to his business and politics with all his might, for he must hold offices under the Government…..

      After a while you will possess a good deal of property — retire at the end of ten years — after which your pursuits will be literary — try the law — you will certainly succeed. I am done now. If you have any questions to ask — ask them freely — and if it be in my power, I will answer without reserve — without reserve.

      I asked a few questions of minor importance — paid her $2 — and left, under the decided impression that going to the fortune teller’s was just as good as going to the opera, and the cost scarcely a trifle more — ergo, I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other amusements fail. Now isn’t she the devil? That is to say, isn’t she a right smart little woman?

      When you want money, let Ma know, and she will send it. She and Pamela are always fussing about change, so I sent them a hundred and twenty quarters yesterday — fiddler’s change enough to last till I get back, I reckon.

      SAM. It is not so difficult to credit Madame Caprell with clairvoyant powers when one has read the letters of Samuel Clemens up to this point. If we may judge by those that have survived, her prophecy of literary distinction for him was hardly warranted by anything she could have known of his past performance. These letters of his youth have a value to-day only because they were written by the man who later was to become Mark Twain. The squibs and skits which he sometimes contributed to the New Orleans papers were bright, perhaps, and pleasing to his pilot associates, but they were without literary value. He was twenty-five years old. More than one author has achieved reputation at that age. Mark Twain was of slower growth; at that age he had not even developed a definite literary ambition: Whatever the basis of Madame Caprell’s prophecy, we must admit that she was a good guesser on several matters, “a right smart little woman,” as Clemens himself phrased it.

      She overlooked one item, however: the proximity of the Civil War. Perhaps it was too close at hand for second sight. A little more than two months after the Caprell letter was written Fort Sumter was fired upon. Mask Twain had made his last trip as a pilot up the river to St. Louis — the nation was plunged into a four years’ conflict.

      There are no letters of this immediate period. Young Clemens went to Hannibal, and enlisting in a private company, composed mainly of old schoolmates, went soldiering for two rainy, inglorious weeks, by the end of which he had had enough of war, and furthermore had discovered that he was more of a Union abolitionist than a slaveholding secessionist, as he had at first supposed. Convictions were likely to be rather infirm during those early days of the war, and subject to change without notice. Especially was this so in a border State.

      III. LETTERS 1861-62. ON THE FRONTIER. MINING ADVENTURES. JOURNALISTIC BEGINNINGS.

      Table of Contents

      Clemens went from the battlefront to Keokuk, where Orion was preparing to accept the appointment prophesied by Madame Caprell. Orion was a stanch Unionist, and a member of Lincoln’s Cabinet had offered him the secretaryship of the new Territory of Nevada. Orion had accepted, and only needed funds to carry him to his destination. His pilot brother had the funds, and upon being appointed “private” secretary, agreed to pay both passages on the overland stage, which would bear them across the great plains from St. Jo to Carson City. Mark Twain, in Roughing It, has described that glorious journey and the frontier life that followed it. His letters form a supplement of realism to a tale that is more or less fictitious, though marvelously true in color and background. The first bears no date, but it was written not long after their arrival, August 14, 1861. It is not complete, but there is enough of it to give us a very fair picture of Carson City, “a wooden town; its population two thousand souls.” Part of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens, in St. Louis:

      (Date not given, but Sept, or Oct., 1861.) MY DEAR MOTHER, — I hope you will all come out here someday. But I shan’t consent to invite you, until we can receive you in style. But I guess we shall be able to do that, one of these days. I intend that Pamela shall live on Lake Bigler until she can knock a bull down with her fist — say, about three months.

      “Tell everything as it is — no better, and no worse.”

      Well, “Gold Hill” sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down; “Wild cat” isn’t worth ten cents. The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quick silver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris, (gypsum,) thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, coyotes (pronounced Ki-yo-ties,) poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits. I overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was “the d — -dest country under the sun.” — and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest — most unadulterated, and compromising sand — in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, “sagebrush,” ventures to grow. If you will take a Lilliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire — set them one foot apart and then try to walk through them, you’ll understand (provided the floor is covered 12 inches deep with sand,) what it is to wander through a sagebrush desert. When crushed, sage brush emits an odor which isn’t exactly magnolia and equally isn’t exactly polecat but is a sort of compromise between the two. It looks a good deal like greasewood, and is the ugliest plant that was ever conceived of. It is gray in color. On the