MAJOR JAMES B. POND AND HIS WIFE MARTHA accompanied the Clemenses along the North American leg of their journey. Pond, one of America’s top lecture agents, began his career by managing the speaking tour of Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young’s mutinous nineteenth wife. In 1884-85 he had managed Clemens’s successful joint tour with George Washington Cable, the New Orleans writer. Now, ten years later, he was administering the North American portion of Clemens’s world tour.
Like many veterans of the Civil War, Major Pond kept his military title. In 1863-64, as commander of a small force in Baxter Springs, Arkansas, he repulsed an attack by Confederate guerrillas who were disguised as Union soldiers. One of a handful of survivors, he was commended for gallantry by his superior officers. Thirty-two years later, in coping with a tired, sick, and irascible Samuel Clemens, he needed not only bravery but skill.
Pond left a remarkable record of the 1895 North American tour. Not only did he publish a lively account of the journey, but he also photographed it. Both his journal entries, which were the basis for his published account, and his snapshots were published in 1992 by the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Quarry Farm.
The snapshots, taken with an 1888 Kodak box camera (“You press the button, we do the rest”), show the party traveling and sightseeing across the northern tier of states, with forays into Canada. We see them on board the SS Northland, a luxurious Great Lakes steamship, which took them from Cleveland to Sault Ste. Marie. Clemens, in a dark three-piece suit and thin bow tie, wears a visored flat-topped cap, from which his grayish white curls escape, cascading down the sides and back of his head. A watch chain loops across his vest. Holding a pipe in his left hand, he sits with his back against a wall. He is looking up at a smiling Mrs. Clemens, who bends toward him, speaking. According to Pond, she is urging her husband, who is susceptible to bronchitis, to wear his overcoat on this cold day on the lake. She herself has donned a short cape. The thinnest of veils, attached to a confection of ribbons and artificial flowers atop her head, covers her face, which is viewed here in profile. At forty-nine, ten years younger than Clemens, she is still a good-looking woman.
In another photo, she is seated next to her husband. The twenty-one-year-old Clara stands between them, her head slightly bowed, apparently speaking. Shading her heart-shaped face is a dark straw boater. Her leg-of-mutton sleeves sheath her lower arms from elbow to wrist and meet the tops of her shiny leather gloves. Around her tiny waist hangs a leather purse. The photograph does not show to advantage her “ink-black hair” or her “large dark eyes,” features that a Sydney newspaper was to mention in September. Her hat covers most of her hair. Her eyes are lowered. Even so, she is enchanting. Pond wrote that she was the loveliest girl he ever saw.
The three Clemenses, with their dark clothes and sober expressions, might have been waiting for a funeral to begin. Theirs was not a pleasure excursion. They had recently parted from Clara’s two sisters, who had been left under their aunt’s care at Quarry Hill and whom they could not see again for at least a year. A creditor had threatened to seize their luggage in Cleveland. Clemens was dissatisfied with his debut. His wife faced a more formidable job than usual of soothing, encouraging, and protecting him.
Still, Clemens was pleased that Pond had arranged an itinerary that would take them by steamers and ferries to towns along the Great Lakes before they headed out by train for the rest of the North American tour. The Great Lakes steamers were like oceangoing vessels, which Clemens, perhaps the most traveled writer of his generation, enjoyed. The Northland, for example, with its spacious promenade decks, boasted its own ice plant, producing five tons of ice daily. “I have seen no boat in Europe,” he wrote in his journal, “that wasn’t a garbage barge by comparison.”
On the second day out, when he appeared on deck for the first time, many passengers made excuses to speak to him. One young man asked him if he had ever seen a shaving stone and then handed him one. It was, reports Pond, “a small, peculiar, fine-grained sandstone, the size of a miniature grindstone, and about the size of an ordinary watch.” The young man explained that if you rubbed it along your face, you would become clean shaven.
Clemens moved it along his unshaven cheek, expressed astonishment at the result, and transferred it to his pocket. “The Madam,” Pond reported Clemens as saying, “will have no cause to complain of my never being ready in time for church because it takes so long to shave. I will put this into my vest pocket on Sunday. Then, when I get to church, I’ll pull the thing out and enjoy a quiet shave in my pew during the long prayer.” At this time the city of Elmira was enforcing a state law prohibiting barbers from operating on Sunday. “A man may, indeed, shave himself,” wrote a local paper that summer, “but unless he has practiced the art in youth, it is a fearful task, and for a middle-aged gentleman whose beard on a Sunday shows like a stubble field, there is no hope.” This was several years before the introduction of Gillette’s safety razor with its replaceable, double-edged blades.
When the Northland approached Port Huron, it sailed through a narrow passage with a row of summer cottages on one side. In his journal Clemens described the ship’s progress through the corridor, with “groups of summer-dressed young people all along, waving flags and handkerchiefs, and firing cannon — our boat replying with four toots of the whistle and now and then a cannon and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed people waving — the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown far-reaching flat lands, with little glimpses of water away on the further edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of gold on the water — well, it is the perfection of voyaging.”
Clemens did not mention that the warm greeting was for himself, his presence on the vessel having been announced. The waving and cannon were a salute to his courage and gallantry in setting out upon a world tour in order to pay his debts, an intention well reported in the press. He was an inspiration during that period of depression, one of the worst in American history.
Following the Panic of 1893, scores of railroads, hundreds of banks, and almost 16,000 businesses failed, and more than two million workers lost their jobs. The Sunday, July 14, 1895, edition of The New-York Times contained only four notices in the “Help Wanted — Male” column, compared to sixteen times that number in the “Situations Wanted — Male” column. For women, no “Help Wanted” notices appeared at all, whereas more than ninety notices for “Situations Wanted — Female” were listed. (Women then represented about twenty percent of the labor force outside the home.)
Most of the positions in the situations-wanted columns were for domestic work, particularly as coachmen, butlers, cooks, and chambermaids. A “young girl, lately landed,” sought housework or upstairs work. An “elderly lady, good housekeeper” sought “any light work,” giving an address that was good for two days.
The average annual wage of a manufacturing worker at the turn of the century was $435. Female sweatshop workers took home four dollars a week. Young girls tending a textile loom made as little as two dollars a week.
Postage for a first-class letter cost two cents, The New-York Times three cents (to be reduced to a penny three years later), a ride on an electric tram five cents, and a vaudeville ticket twenty-five cents. In Elmira, during the week in which the Clemenses left for Cleveland, Hyland and Brown offered men’s sweaters for twelve and a half cents; Coykendall carried summer corsets for thirty-three cents; and Elmira Crockery sold one-hundred-dish dinner sets for $4.50.
It is with these incomes and prices in mind that we must view Clemens’s debt. He could pay his firm’s creditors fifty cents on the dollar after the assets of the defunct firm were sold. If he was to repay his firm’s obligations in full — to banks, printers, binders, and dealers in various publishing materials — he would have to raise another $70,000. Rogers reported Clemens’s reaction upon learning how much money was involved: “I need not dream of paying it. I never could manage it.” But, said Rogers, “he stuck to it.”
In 1995 dollars, $70,000 would be equivalent to about $1,280,000. This is a formidable sum to most of us, but relatively small change to a handful of superstars, who earn millions per year. None of them is more celebrated or more successful than was Mark Twain in his day, yet his debt was anything but trivial. Although his books were best-sellers around the world, in English and in translation, the market for them was smaller than it would be today, both in the number of readers and in their buying power, and the means for promoting them were less powerful, so they earned relatively less than they would now. Movie and television rights were, of course, years away. As for his performances, none could be attended by more than a few thousand souls, whereas audiences of millions are available today. Consequently his value as a writer, performer, and celebrity was less than it would be today, when he could promote huge book and product sales, advertising revenues, and box-office receipts.
Were Clemens alive today, he could settle a debt of one or two million dollars with relative ease. On the other hand, given his passion for sudden wealth and given the investment opportunities available to a star of his wattage, he is likely to have made a proportionally devastating plunge. Be that as it may, both he and his contemporaries viewed his net debt of $70,000, the debt remaining after all the assets of his firm had been sold, as catastrophic. This was the debt that motivated his world tour.