Orion Clemens

"In my schoolboy days, I had no aversion to Slavery. 

I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. 

The local papers said nothing against it. 

The local pulpit taught us that god approved it, that it was A Holy Thing, and that the doubter need only look in The Bible if he wished to settle His Mind, and then The Texts were read aloud to us to make The Matter sure. 

If The Slaves themselves had an aversion to Slavery, they were wise and said nothing." 

One of his most lasting childhood memories was of a dozen men and women chained together, waiting to be shipped downriver to The Slave Market. 

"They had," he said, "The saddest faces I ever saw." 

In 1847, John Marshal Clemens was caught in a sleet storm, developed pneumonia, and on March 24, died. To help His Family get by, Sam had to leave school and go to work as a printer's apprentice. 

At 14, he got a job at a brand-new paper in town-- The Hannibal Journal. 

His Boss was His Older Brother Orion, who had inherited His Father's Gift for Financial Failure. 

Over the course of two years, Orion never once paid his brother the $3.50 a week he had promised. 

Ron Powers, Writer : 

"Orion was a schlemiel, but he did, in his bumbling, lure Sammy into The World of Words and Ideas. 

Becoming A Printer's Apprentice gave him an almost tactile possession of Words. 

He could now lay his hands on those letters, and he could set the words in type, and he could feel The Words."

Narrator: sam made the most of the experience. He read everything he could find--shakespeare and the bible, histories and novels, newspapers from everywhere-- and he now began to write occasional light verse and humorous sketches under the pseudonym of w. Epaminondas adrastus blab, "Anything," he later said, "To make the paper lively." man as twain: "Hannibal journal, may 6, 1853. Terrible accident! 500 men killed and missing!! We had set the above head up, expecting (of course) to use it, but as the accident hasn't happened, yet, we'll say... (to be continued.)" [steam whistle blows] narrator: by the time sam was 17, hannibal seemed too confining. After solemnly promising his mother not to drink or gamble, he packed his bags and set off down the river to make a name for himself. It was the beginning of a lifetime of wandering. He set type in st. Louis, new york, philadelphia, keokuk, iowa, and cincinnati, where he also wrote humorous articles at $5.00 each under the pen name thomas jefferson snodgrass. None of it satisfied him. In the spring of 1857, he boarded a steamboat called the paul jones bound for new orleans with the grand ambition of going on to brazil to make his fortune trading in coca plants, but on his way down the river, an old dream was reawakened. Man as twain: "When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village. That was to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns. The first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life. Now and then, we had a hope that if we lived and were good, god would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn, but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained." [steam whistle blows] narrator: by the time sam clemens reached new orleans, he had convinced the pilot of the paul jones to take him on as an apprentice in exchange for the first $500 of his wages. Sam soon realized just how difficult the job was. A riverboat pilot needed to commit to memory every landmark on both sides of the big river, 1,200 twisting miles from new orleans to st. Louis, know the difference between riffles on the water's surface caused by wind and those created by dangerous reefs, learn to note the changing depths at every crucial spot where the leadsmen dropped their knotted rope lines and sang out their measurements-- quarter-twain, half-twain, and the most pleasant sound of all to a pilot--mark twain, meaning two fathoms, or 12 feet. Safe water. A pilot had to digest all this information and then be able to apply it day and night, in clear weather and impenetrable fog. Man as twain: "The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book, a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long 1,200 miles, there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread and lost, never one that you would want to skip thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye, these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter." [steam whistle blows] narrator: in the spring of 1858, sam, now a cub pilot on the side-wheeler pennsylvania, persuaded his younger brother henry to join the crew as a clerk. The two brothers had always been close, and sam was grateful for henry's companionship, happy to have launched him on a career. But sam got into a quarrel with the pennsylvania's pilot and was transferred to another boat in new orleans. The brothers agreed to meet at their sister's house in st. Louis, and henry set out upriver on the pennsylvania. Sam followed two days later on another boat. At greenville, mississippi, someone from shore shouted to sam's boat that the pennsylvania's boilers had blown up and she had gone down near memphis. In arkansas, sam was relieved when he got a newspaper that listed henry among the uninjured, but then sam began seeing corpses bobbing in the water, and farther upriver another paper reported that henry had been hurt. When he finally arrived in memphis and rushed to the makeshift hospital, he found his brother, still alive, but badly burned and not expected to survive. Man as twain: "Memphis, tennessee, friday, june 18, 1858. The horrors of 3 days have swept over me. They have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. For 48 hours, I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother. Long before this reaches you, my poor henry will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness." narrator: on june 21, henry clemens, just 19 years old, died. Sam blamed himself for having lured henry onto the river in the first place and especially for not being there when his little brother had needed him most. Ron powers, writer: henry clemens' death was the culminating sorrow of his boyhood, and I think it annealed a great sorrow in him and a great sense of remorse that he never lost. He seemed to believe himself in some way responsible for all of the sorrows around him, and that's a feeling that persisted into old age, but he also had recourse to a way of repairing this sorrow, and that was through humor. He once wrote that the source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow. He said, "There is no laughter in heaven." narrator: in the spring of 1859, a year after henry's death, samuel clemens received his official riverboat pilot's certificate. He soon began earning $250 a month--as much, he liked to point out, as the vice president of the united states. Man as twain: "A pilot in those days was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. His movements were free. He consulted no one. He received commands from nobody. So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words." narrator: nearly 1,000 steamboats were churning up and down the mississippi and its tributaries, carrying more cargo than all the nation's oceangoing vessels combined. Sam served on at least 19 of them, including the white cloud and the crescent city, the arago, the aleck scott, the city of memphis, and the john j. Roe. Man as twain: "For a long time, I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. Ferryboats used to lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died waiting for us to get by. This boat, the john j. Roe, was dismally slow. Still, we often had pretty exciting times racing with islands and such things." narrator: his time on the river was his schooling, sam said later, in which "I got personally acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history." everywhere he went, he stored up memories of places, scenes, and people. [workmen talking] ron powers, writer: he was an enormous noticer. He was a prodigious noticer. He was always noticing whether people had their hands in their pockets or not or what was in their pockets. He was noticing manners of dress, the way people held themselves. He was noticing affects and pretenses, and this same fascination with noticing, which I think came from those early childhood nights on the farm, noticing the nuances of the slave songs and the folk tales--that same noticing transferred itself to absorbing the river. Hamlin hill, twain scholar: the mississippi became for mark twain his harvard and his yale, the way that melville says the whaling boat was his harvard and his yale. He announced that every character he had ever written, created in his literature, he had met on the mississippi river. Narrator: sam clemens assumed he would live out his days as a pilot and "Die at the wheel," he said, "When my mission was ended." [explosion] but on april 12, 1861, the civil war began and all commercial traffic on the mississippi stopped. The clemens family was divided. Sam's mother made no secret of her hatred of yankees, but his brother orion had become a republican and had campaigned for abraham lincoln. Sam just hoped that the war would be over soon so that he could return to the river. When several childhood friends helped form a confederate militia company called the marion rangers, sam signed on, too, simply for something to do, but after two weeks spent hiding in the woods from even the rumor of approaching union troops, the marion rangers disbanded. Most of sam's friends enlisted in the regular confederate army. Sam did not. He skedaddled. Man as twain: "When I retired from the rebel army in '61, I retired in good order. It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat, it was not badly done. I had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it." 

Meanwhile, President Lincoln had rewarded Orion for his support by appointing him Secretary of the brand-new Territory of Nevada. 

Sam, now 25 years old, begged his brother to take him along. Others could go to war. Sam clemens was going west. Man shouting: hyah! [horse whinnies] hah! Hah! [horses whinny] man as twain: 

"We jumped into the stage. The driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left the states behind us. There was a freshness and breeziness and an exhilarating sense of emancipation." 

On July 26, 1861, The Clemens Brothers left St. Joseph, Missouri, on the Central Overland and Pike's Peak Express Company stagecoach. 

Sam brought along his pipes, 5 pounds of tobacco, and a pistol, he said, that had only one fault-- "You could not hit anything with it." 

They crossed Kansas, then Nebraska, stopping every 10 to 15 miles to change horses at station houses made of sod. 

"It was the first time," Sam noted, "We had ever seen a man's front yard on top of his house." 

On warm days, he perched on top of the stagecoach, clothed only in his underwear, drinking in the fresh air and admiring the endless empty spaces. 

"It was a comfort to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard-boiled eggs while our spiritual natures reveled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. 

Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs-- ham and eggs and after these, a pipe, an old, rank, delicious pipe. 

Ham and eggs and scenery, a downgrade, a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart -- these make happiness. 

It's what all the ages have struggled for." 

[horse whinnies] 

narrator: 3 weeks after leaving missouri, they pulled into carson city, the raw new settlement that was the capital of nevada territory. 

But as Orion started His Job as Territorial Secretary, Sam realized that being Secretary to The Secretary carried with it no duties and no pay. 

He decided to try his hand at gold and silver mining along with the thousands of other men who had flooded into nevada on the promise of easy riches. He was a complete failure. Man as twain: "My dear mother, the country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, thieves, murderers, desperadoes, lawyers, christians, indians, chinamen, spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, coyotes, poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits." narrator: in september 1862, he gave up mining and moved to virginia city, a nevada boom town built atop the comstock lode, the richest body of silver ore ever discovered in america. Virginia city was also the home of the territorial enterprise, the most-read newspaper between chicago and san francisco. Its editor offered sam a job covering local events at $25 a week. Clemens loved the reporter's life. He haunted saloons, theaters, whorehouses. He drank, smoked, played cards and billiards with other newsmen late into the night. Ron powers, writer: going west brought him accidentally into the company of a great proto-psychedelic, counterculture newspaper society out west in nevada-- a bunch of talented wild men improvising a whole new newspaper art form with tall tales and lies and hoaxes and great writing. Narrator: 

With his new career under way, sam clemens decided to take on a new name-- one that would stick with him the rest of his life and eventually become the most celebrated in all of american literature. On february 3, 1863, at the end of a dispatch written from carson city to the territorial enterprise, he signed himself "Mark Twain." 

Ron Powers, Writer: 

"There's a lot of ambiguity in that. 

Two fathoms -- Mark Twain -- is the point at which Dangerous Water becomes Safe Water, or the point at which Safe Water becomes Dangerous Water, and I think Mark Twain was always on that margin. 

That's where he lived -- on The Edge -- between The Lightness and The Dark, between Safety and Danger, but always on The Flow of The River.