CLEMENS REACHED HELENA, his next stop, on August 3, 1895, almost three weeks after leaving Elmira. Today the green, well-tended town seems heavenly after Butte and Anaconda. Grassy hills studded with ponderosa pine roll into the tree-shaded town. Downtown, the Montana Club stands on the piers of the original club, a magnificent Gothic Revival building in which the town’s millionaires entertained Clemens after his performance.
In 1885, when the club was founded, Helena was enjoying a skyrocketing boom, fueled by its position as capital of the state, its proximity to gold fields and silver and lead deposits, and the arrival two years before of the Northern Pacific Railway, which soon quadrupled the population and substantially increased the traffic of goods into and out of the town. By 1888 the town was crawling with millionaires, fifty in all, about one for every 250 people. But by the time the Clemenses arrived, the town was less opulent. The Panic of 1893 had destroyed the boom, and Helena never regained its once fabulous prosperity.
The Montana Club was among the first of the dozens of men’s clubs that were to honor Clemens during his world tour. Such dinners were formal, stag affairs offering numerous courses and plenty of wine. Champagne would accompany each of the eight or so scheduled toasts. In response to the obligatory toast in his honor, Clemens would give an extemporaneous talk, which usually caused the club members to explode with laughter.
On the night the club entertained Clemens, a few guests had come from Virginia City, Nevada, in order to see the man they had known thirty years before. One of them, now very rich, interrupted the toast to Clemens. “Hold on a minute,” Pond recorded him as saying. “Before we go further I want to say to you, Sam Clemens, that you did me a dirty trick over there in Silver City, and I’ve come here to have a settlement with you.” After a dreadful silence, Clemens drawled, “Let’s see. That — was — before — I — reformed — wasn’t — it?” One of the guests, former U. S. Senator Wilbur Fisk Sanders, defused the tension by suggesting that since the man from Silver City had never reformed, Clemens and all the others should forgive him and drink together. Clemens told stories until after midnight and then walked back with Pond to their hotel, “up quite a mountain,” according to Pond, who observed that Clemens was getting strong. This was Clemens’s first hard walk since leaving Elmira.
It was in Missoula, the Clemenses’ next stop, that Pond saw “the first sign of the decadence of the horse: a man riding a bicycle … leading a horse to a nearby blacksmith shop.” Pond photographed the scene at Clemens’s suggestion. They were riding in a horse-drawn bus to the Florence Hotel, which offered all modcons including steam heat, electric lights, and electric bells. When the hotel was rebuilt in 1941, having burned down twice before, it included a parking garage, for automobiles, not bicycles.
By 1895, when automobiles or horseless carriages were merely a rich man’s toy, bicycles had become such a craze that commentators predicted the death of the horse. Livery stable owners complained bitterly about declining business. The danger of colliding with cyclists induced some timid souls to give up their carriages, while others, particularly the younger set, preferred the bicycle to the horse. Merchants in Chicago claimed that no one had any extra cash because everyone was either saving money for a bicycle or buying one on the installment plan. Buyers were found even among those who figured their expenses so closely that a day’s outing with their friends meant that they could not afford a streetcar fare for several weeks. Still, according to an article in The New-York Times, “the cycle will stay; progression is the law, and events do not move backward.”
The bicycle is unlikely to have become popular if it had remained in its earlier form, the high “ordinary,” with its huge front wheel and tiny rear one, derisively known as the “penny-farthing,” after the largest and smallest British copper coins in circulation. The small back wheel set up an uncomfortable vibration, the rider had to pedal very quickly in order to maintain a decent speed, and, with the seat placed next to the handlebar above the tall front wheel, the rider was often pitched overboard when the tire encountered a small obstacle. (The expression “to take a header” is said to derive from the consequence of your front wheel’s stopping suddenly.) In Hartford, during the mid-1880s, Clemens hired a young man to teach him to ride the penny-farthing. “Mr. Clemens,” the young man said, “it’s remarkable — you can fall off a bicycle more different ways than the man that invented it.” In an essay burlesquing his difficulties in learning to ride, Clemens advised his readers to get a bicycle. “You will not regret it, if you live.”
The bicycle that supplanted the penny-farthing, and the one Pond saw in Missoula, was the modern, rear-driven “safety,” with wheels of equal or nearly equal size. After pneumatic tires were introduced in 1888, bicycles became hugely popular. Within two years, the safety monopolized the field. The postal service, the army, and the police used it. Delivery and messenger boys used it. Rich and poor used it both for exercise and for transportation.
Bicycle schools sprang up all over the world. Ten days after the Clemenses reached Australia, the premier of Victoria joined a class held in a gloomy, circular arena in downtown Melbourne. A reporter from the Argus recorded the scene. The premier “grasps the handles, and fixing his eyes about fifteen feet in front (as instructed), just the distance of the front Opposition bench, swamps the tiny seat, and … announces that he is ‘ready to begin!’ The teacher catches hold of all he can find of the saddle, and with a few preliminary wobbles, jactitation of legs commences. Slowly and gravely, almost painfully, the stately figure, with its supporting attendant, moves away into the heavy shadows, the white shirt-sleeved arms, like teapot handles, being the last portion of the citizen swallowed up in the darkness.”
Although the hire of horses and light wagons declined, the horse was by no means dead. Well into the twentieth century, hitching posts and mounting blocks lined the streets of American towns. Just as filling stations, car dealerships, and auto accessory shops mark the modern urban landscape, so livery stables, feed barns, blacksmiths, and wagon and harness shops were everyday features of late-nineteenth-century towns. So was manure swarming with flies. New York City’s horses were said to deposit two and a half million pounds of manure and sixty thousand gallons of urine per day
It was a wagon fitted with seats and drawn by four mules that transported Clemens to Fort Missoula, four miles from town, the day after his performance at Missoula’s Bennett Opera House, where the audience was composed mainly of officers from the fort and their families. The commander, Lieutenant Colonel Burt, had invited the whole party to lunch. Clemens had decided to walk slowly to the fort by himself— he thought it would do him good — but had taken the wrong road and did not discover his mistake until he had walked five or six miles. He was retracing his steps when Major Pond, who was being driven out to the fort, having been preceded by Olivia and Clara Clemens and Mrs. Pond, sighted him and picked him up. Clemens was “too tired to express disgust.”
The fort was staffed by seven companies of the Twenty-fifth U.S. Colored Regiment. (Military segregation, abolished only after the Second World War, meant that white and black enlisted men served in separate units. Officers of black units were usually white.) When Clemens stepped out of the wagon, he was met by a sergeant who told him he was under arrest. The soldier marched him unprotesting across the parade ground to the guardhouse, where Colonel Burt met him and apologized for the practical joke. It was an old gag, which Clemens recognized.
The Clemenses and the Ponds heard a thirty-piece band, “one of the finest military bands in America,” according to Pond, and watched a military drill. Clemens confessed to his journal that during the trooping of the colors, he had to be reminded to remove his hat and then to dispose of his cigar.
Pond reported learning that “colored soldiers were more subordinate and submissive to rigid drill and discipline than white men,” and were less prone to desertion. Clemens noted in his journal that the soldiers looked like gentlemen, that the younger ones, educated in the public schools, could perform clerical duties, and that the black chaplain was saluted just like any other officer. Thirty years after the conclusion of the Civil War, most Americans viewed the second-class citizenship of blacks as an acceptable fact of life. Booker T Washington, regarded by whites as the leader of the Negro race, declared in 1895 that the Southern white man was the Negro’s best friend. The status of black American citizens had reached its nadir.
The night before the Clemenses left for Cleveland, a mob of seventy-five white men removed two black prisoners from an Arkansas jail. The two had been accused of murdering a white man. The horde took them to a nearby forest, gave them a moment to pray, and hanged them. The lynchers made no effort to conceal their identities.
The 1890s averaged more than 150 lynchings per year. Most of the victims were black, and most were killed in the South, where, a few years after the end of the Civil War, it had become an unwritten rule to lynch every black charged with assault, rape, or murder of a white person. Lynch victims were hanged, shot, even burned at the stake. Respectable, churchgoing citizens defended such practices as an unfortunate but necessary deterrent. Whether or not lynching performed this function, it could serve other purposes: in 1893, white pioneers in Oklahoma bragged about frightening away black land claimants by threats of lynching. “That’s right,” their neighbors told them, “we don’t want any niggers in this country.”
The 1890s witnessed the heaviest toll of lynchings in American history, as well as an increase in Jim Crow laws. Lynching so outraged Clemens that, moved by an atrocity in Missouri a few years after the conclusion of his tour, he proposed to his publisher an encyclopedia of American lynching. He even wrote an introduction, “The United States of lyncherdom,” an essay that bitterly castigated the moral cowardice of the majority of American citizens, North and South, who opposed such barbarism but were afraid to speak out against it.
The day before I left Elmira for Cleveland, I submitted myself to a barber. He asked me what I was doing in Elmira. After I told him, he said that he remembered a tailor who had once served Mark Twain. The tailor had described him as “overbearing and demanding.” “Of course I didn’t know Mark Twain,” continued the barber, “but I did know Ernie Davis.” Ernie Davis was another local hero, the first black recipient of the Heisman Trophy.
“What was he like?”
“He was a nice guy. He knew his place.”
“What do you mean?”
“He always came to the back door.”