Anniversary of 150th Birthday : He’d Have Hated It--but Town Honors Mark Twain

A big party was thrown in the best restaurant in town Saturday, and a banner blaring birthday greetings waved over Joaquin Gulch, the main street of this tiny gold country town.

But no one expected to see the guest of honor because the guest of honor was Mark Twain--one of the nation’s literary giants and a former resident of nearby Jackass Hill.

Twain joined the world 150 years ago Saturday as Samuel Langhorne Clemens in a flyspeck town called Florida, Mo., so people in Twain Harte, along with folks in other places across the country, marked the day festively.

Twain himself undoubtedly would have disdained such foolishness.

“What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries?” he once grumbled. “Mere killing would be too light.”

But anniversaries are difficult to ignore when they involve the man after whom one’s hometown is named, so the people of Twain Harte (pop: 1,369), which was also named after Bret Harte, Twain’s friend and rival, celebrated nonetheless.

They gathered--about two dozen or so--in the old Eproson House Inn, and they made toasts, read Twain’s tales aloud and paid their respects.

They also swapped stories of their own about Twain’s colorful exploits in the Mother Lode, much as Twain himself listened to yarns that passed through the tumbledown taverns of the area.

Among the celebrants was Fred Thienes, great-grandson of Steve Gillis, Twain’s closest California friend. Thienes, who still lives next to Twain’s old shack on Jackass Hill, said his great-grandfather spun wonderful yarns about his Gold Rush adventures and jealously guarded the complete autographed set of Twain’s works.

Documents on Display

Elsewhere, the University of California’s Bancroft Library put some of its rare Twain documents on display in the lobby of the Chevron Building in San Francisco. The exhibit, financed by Chevron, runs until Dec. 10 and includes 600 literary manuscripts, first editions, personal papers and photographs.

Twain’s daughter, Clara, bequeathed an incomparable collection of her father’s manuscripts to the library, including everything Twain had in his possession when he died--more than 600 literary manuscripts, 45 notebooks and journals and several thousand letters.

Twain did not linger in these gently rolling hills shadowed by the Sierra Nevada. Indeed, he stayed atop Jackass Hill for only three months during the winter of 1885-86.

But the time he did spend here--along with his decided dislike for the heavy labor of mining gold--seemed a catalyst for his writing.

His experiences here resulted first in his short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and later in much of the book “Roughing It.”

Stories told him by his friends, the Gillis brothers, eventually reappeared, polished and transplanted to Missouri, in Twain’s masterpiece, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

His “Celebrated Jumping Frog,” which he picked up at a tavern in nearby Angels Camp, not only assured his career as a humorist, but it eventually was credited by scholars as one of the first literary uses of a new, distinct “American” language and one of the earliest examples of a new, distinctly American consciousness.

Twain’s mastery of this vernacular American English in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” penned a decade later, led to Ernest Hemingway’s famous observation that American literature truly began with Huckleberry Finn.

But Twain was an adventurer before becoming a literary icon, and people around here delight in recalling his introduction to the nearly played-out “pocket” gold mines around Jackass Hill just outside of town.

Twain left his beloved Mississippi River soon after “resigning,” or deserting, from the Confederate Army in 1861. He came West to help his brother, Orion, administer the Nevada Territory, but soon drifted into prospecting and eventually journalism in Virginia City, Nev.

He left in 1864--after breaking the law by letting himself, a terrible marksman, be goaded into challenging a man to a duel--bound for San Francisco.

He had with him his best friend, Gillis; his pen name, Mark Twain; and a job as correspondent for Virginia City’s popular newspaper, Territorial Enterprise.

His sharp attacks in the Enterprise against corrupt San Francisco officials made him less than welcome in his new home.

Twain decided to move on little more than a year later, said local historian Ken Gosting, after Gillis got involved in a nasty barroom brawl that appeared to give authorities an excuse to arrest both of them.

Gosting said police suspected Gillis in the death of “Big Jim” Casey, a Howard Street saloon keeper. Gillis, who was literally half Casey’s size, had conked the bartender over the head with a beer pitcher during a fight.

The pair fled to Jackass Hill, where Gillis’ brother had a cabin and worked as a prospector. Twain disliked mining there as much as he had disliked it in Nevada, leading his fellow argonauts to marvel at his “genuine laziness.”

Rather than digging and sluicing the gold-veined quartz of the Mother Lode, Twain took notes on the lives of his fellow fortune-hunters. The notes later were used for Twain’s early stories and novels, which helped define the wide-open West for wide-eyed Easterners.

Twain soon left Jackass Hill, going to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union. In 1868, he left the West entirely for a trip to the Holy Land, where he wrote a hilarious series of dispatches to the San Francisco Alta California.

After a collection of his sketches sold well, Twain’s articles in Alta California were collected for his very successful second book, “Innocents Abroad.”

After his marriage to Olivia Langdon and an unsuccessful attempt at running a Buffalo, N.Y., newspaper Twain moved to Hartford, Conn.

There, he wrote most of his best-known works, including “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Even when saddled with tragedies--the premature deaths of his wife and two of their three daughters--Twain, like his own Tom Sawyer, remained a rascal, smoking, drinking and lampooning human behavior as a lecturer.

Indeed, among the folks here in the gold country, Twain’s near-legendary aversion to physical labor is his most endearing quality.

People here are especially fond of telling about the time--one of the few times--Twain agreed to help his friend Gillis pocket-mine for gold. Gillis did the hard work, digging and sluicing, while Twain carried water in buckets from a nearby creek.

After a time, the story goes, both Twain and his patience were exhausted, and he refused to carry another drop from the creek--”not even if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan,” as he was quoted in some Gillis family records.

Twain was not far off. Gillis, unable to work alone, dropped the pan of dirt on the spot. Several days of rain were said to have uncovered some sizable nuggets in the pan, but because Gillis could not drag Twain back to the site, the gold went undiscovered.

Undiscovered, that is, until two other prospectors happened upon the site. They saw the nuggets and sat on Gillis’ claim until it expired. Then they proceeded to unearth $20,000 in gold in less than two weeks.