4 4 JOHN DAVID BORTHWICK WAS a freewheeling Scot who followed his whims into the world’s dark corners, but as an artist and journalist he mostly went to watch. In March 1851, at the age of twenty-seven and recently endowed with a nice inheritance, he joined sixty argonauts taking the Panama route from New York City to San Francisco. Like the rest of them he was seeking riches, but the gold this young fellow struck—and later refined into Three Years in California—was a bonanza of observations regarding the emerging western character.
Borthwick’s fellow travelers, having heard that weapons were like California tableware, stuffed their belts with bowie knives and never-fired revolvers. They set out down the Atlantic coast with a common spirit of adventure, spearing dolphins and musing about their fortunes, but as time wore on, and the crew got drenched by days of tropical storms, Borthwick saw a division forming in the ranks: between the few grudging travelers in rubber raingear who refused to share even a plug of chaw and the larger, more cheerful, more generous set. The stingy ones turned “quite dejected and sulky” and “oppressed with anxiety” when sheets of muggy rain wouldn’t quit; the merry ones maintained “a wild state of delight at having finished a tedious passage” and at the “novelty and excitement of crossing the Isthmus.” The killjoys, he reflected later, wouldn’t stand a chance in the diggings, where a sense of humor was standard equipment. But the fun lovers would have the times of their lives.
He cooled his heels for a while in Panama City, where he made another important observation. There was a basic difference between the rubes heading west (who “grumbled at everything, and were rude and surly in their manners”) and the comparatively “perfect gentlemen” on their way back. Both types came from the same lower social realms, but the latter had gotten their “California education.” As he explained it later, once he’d been there himself, even the coarsest folks who spent time in California “received a certain degree of polish from being violently shaken up with a crowd of men of different habits and ideas from their own.” Some of this violent “shaking” was lethal, of course, but the shocks that didn’t kill them—the educational shocks—were often ungoverned, ungodly fun.
The mostly male company of diggings and boomtowns hammered out their own social tools from the crudest of materials. There was no stable government, no stable class structure, no religious authority, no strong domestic sphere. Contracts were settled by honor-bound handshakes; character was tested by games and jokes; bonds were forged at faro tables and in the sweaty throng of miners’ “ballrooms.” Whether it was California in the 1850s, Nevada in the 1860s, or Deadwood in the 1870s, in these cultures of excitement and cutthroat competition, citizens schooled each other in manners that allowed a spirit of freedom to prevail. Keeping it light, having fun, and toughening their hides against petty offenses, they engineered new strains of sociability that challenged, alarmed, and enthralled the young republic.
A new species of newspaper—as irreverent, disingenuous, and playful as its readership—had a strong hand in upholding such standards. Since the New York Sun appeared in 1833, so-called penny papers (costing one or two cents an issue) had flooded the antebellum public sphere with an entertaining and widely accessible new journalism: they deemphasized politics, sensationalized crime, and appealed to the growing urban working class with practical advice and exhilarating fraud—such as the Sun’s 1835 Great Moon Hoax, an astronomer’s report of weird plants and weirder monsters peopling the lunar surface. Out west, the penny press found fertile new ground. In gold rush California and a decade later in silver rush Nevada, “news” took its cues from coarse frontier humor and miners’ rawhide attitudes. Tall tales, mad spellings, rivalries, and hoaxes inspired a journalism less concerned with facts than with spiking the social punch. A wild new permissiveness reigned in the West, and pseudonymous troublemakers like “John P. Squibob,” “Ben Bolt,” “Dan De Quille,” and above all “Mark Twain” modeled raffish public behavior that challenged readers to live by their wits.
IT ALL BEGAN in January 1848, when James W. Marshall found an ugly yellow nugget while building Sutter’s Mill in Coloma. Word leaked out. In no time some hundred thousand “forty-niners” were carving up California’s hills. By September 1849, when lanky Bayard Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old world traveler, arrived on assignment from Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, San Francisco’s fiery cosmopolitanism dazzled even his jaded eyes.
The streets were full of people, hurrying to and fro, and of as diverse and bizarre character as the houses: Yankees of every possible variety, native Californians in sarapes [sic] and sombreros, Chileans, Sonorians, Kanakas from Hawaii, Chinese with long tails, Malays armed with their everlasting creeses, and others in whose embrowned and bearded visages it was impossible to recognize any especial nationality.
Just as Borthwick would two years later, Taylor abhorred the “Northern barbarians” he encountered crossing the Panamanian isthmus—clods who barged in in the middle of church services and gawked at altars with their hats on; “miserable, melancholy men” whom the majority of travelers “generally shunned.” But he found Californians refreshingly sociable, especially, ironically, when the stakes were highest.
Californians gambled, fought, bought, and sold. They scurried to capitalize on the bum’s rush for capital. They lived for adventure, new excitements, and prided themselves on sportsmanship. Taylor was intrigued by this orgy “for action” and “intercourse with … fellows,” and though it wasn’t easy for him to throw aside his “old instincts,” he gradually warmed to the lax commercial attitudes that drove this “restless, feverish” society and to a generosity that put East Coast stinginess to shame. In particular, he saw a “disregard for the petty arts of money-making,” an unusual eagerness to repay debts, and a widespread confidence “in each other’s honesty” that he attributed in part to bare necessity, in part to “an honorable regard for the rights of others.” This liberal attitude seemed even freer in the camps, where, for instance, he watched a mule driver refuse the “beggarly sum” of three dollars for a pistol and hand over the gun as a gift instead. When the would-be purchaser laid his money “on a log,” insisting, “You must take it, for I shall never touch it again,” the gift giver tossed the money in the road, scoffing, “Then I’ll do what I please with it.” The apparent butt of this joke for Taylor is the Irishman who “raked in the dust for some time, but only recovered about half the money.”
His own ethnic slurs notwithstanding, Taylor admired Californians’ civility. From booming San Francisco to deep in the diggings, he witnessed what he called the general “disposition to maintain and secure the rights of all.” “In the absence of all law or available protection, the people met and adopted rules for their mutual security.” And this may have been so, but it must be noted how Taylor credits this civility to the recent spike in U.S. citizens—as opposed to the “thousands of ignorant adventurers” from Mexico, Peru, Chile, and China. His 1850 runaway best seller, El Dorado, seldom resists such jingoism.
The gold rush was no utopia. For the thousand natural shocks the West was heir to—rattlers, grizzlies, sunstroke, starvation, drowning, hypothermia, food poisoning, and so on—there were just as many societal ones. Any personal dispute could erupt in gunfire, usually with an audience to cheer it along. Grifters fudged maps, made false claims, and hooked greenhorns with fake guidebooks. Forty-niners imported their native bigotries, and the whole enterprise caused immeasurable destruction for the Native American population. And though California, which was rushed into statehood, outlawed slavery in 1851, one of the legislators’ most vocal concerns was that Southern miners, advantaged by slaves, would have a leg up on the rest. California featured America’s inequities in microcosm. As Sucheng Chan has shown, African Americans, while well represented in the major cities as well as in largely black boomtowns like “Nigger Hill,” were more disadvantaged than other races and ethnicities: “They struggled to gain freedom from slavery, the right to testify in court, the right to vote, and the right for their children to attend integrated schools.” Whites privileged whites, Mexicans Mexicans, Chinese Chinese, and so on, and the rising tide of American exceptionalism, shown in miniature by Taylor’s bigotry, was constantly pushing U.S. citizens up against internationals—especially against foreigners easily marked by their race or ethnicity. And of course, most starkly, it was a man’s man’s world where the majority of the minuscule women’s population worked as prostitutes.
That same year, 1849, a wave of revolutions spreading across Europe made the forty-niners’ race for lucre look pretty crass. In France, one month after the discovery at Sutter’s Mill, middle-class factions teamed up with socialists to overthrow King Louis-Philippe, effectively establishing the Second Republic and declaring universal male suffrage. This upheaval inspired subjects in Germany, Italy, and Hungary to rise up against royals and demand the kind of democratic representation that Americans had enjoyed for more than half a century. Similarly, in England and the young United States, where democracy still left a lot to be desired, turmoil over human rights and social decency roiled the Victorian public sphere. In 1849 abolitionists outgrew the pulpits and achieved political viability with the Free Soil Party. That summer Gerrit Smith, the Liberty Party’s presidential candidate, argued for the suffrage of women and blacks; women’s rights had been brought to the national attention at the famous Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The loudest voice in U.S. reform was the temperance movement, which combined Puritan values with revolutionary era rhetoric to urge American citizens—all of them—to emancipate themselves from “King Alcohol.”
Alcohol, always a staple of the American diet, was drunk with political fervor in the early nineteenth century, when cheap, abundant, and liberating liquors were touted by many as liquid democracy—a bias, as we’ve seen, that dates back to the Revolution. Factory workers demanded on-the-job drams as proof of their personal freedom. Men filled taverns to shrug off the reins of an emboldened domestic sphere. But when binge drinking exploded in the 1820s—obtaining, as the historian W. J. Rorabaugh observes, “ideological overtones” of “egalitarianism”—the then-fledgling and specialized temperance movement began to achieve mainstream appeal—especially when it linked drinking to Jackson Age rioting, much of which came spilling out of taverns. As sobriety-minded Americans had been doing for two hundred years (long before John Adams entered Thayer’s tavern), middle-class teetotalers now looked to temperance as a basic prerequisite of civic order; hard drinking, or so their argument went, brought out the worst in a sovereign public—theft, lying, agitation, murder. For decades this had been a minority opinion, but in 1826, an evangelical front formed the American Temperance Society (ATS) and ginned up the techniques—especially for publicity and mass organization—that persuaded America’s growing, professionalized middle class during this populist era. It wasn’t long before tsking over collective drinking had spread into a viable political movement.
Not content with just reforming hard drinkers, which had been the failed policy of their smaller-scale predecessors, the ATS went to the source, pillorying distillers and distributors and accusing them of corrupting American society. They also pricked the moderate drinkers’ consciences—shaming them for dragging a productive young nation down. The message took. By 1833, when the Second Great Awakening was vibrating the pulpits, the ATS had expanded to six thousand societies and a million national members. In the decade to follow they promoted full-on teetotaling—total abstinence, even from small beer, which had been drunk up until then like an early American soda pop. Unlike the patrician ATS, however, the more demotic and ragtag Washingtonians—and their women’s wing, the Martha Washingtonians—rose to prominence in the 1840s and represented the full sweep of the U.S. republic, drawing their numbers from all classes and persuasions and making temperance a mainstream cause. By 1851, the year J. D. Borthwick set sail for California, the concerted efforts of the American temperance groups had scored a major political goal—prohibition for Maine, the nation’s original frontier.
While Europe and the United States campaigned for reform, California was going feral: whoring, drinking, gambling, swearing, shooting, killing, and going for broke. During Borthwick’s three years in California, it impressed him that “the natural bad passions of men, with all the vices and depravities of civilization, were indulged with the same freedom which characterizes the life of a wild savage.” But what can be, and often is, easily seen as a septic sinkhole in American social history was likewise remarkably fertile ground. When these “wild savages” nurtured their “California education,” taking pains to enjoy each other’s freedoms, exotic new varieties of civility took root: rude varieties, fun varieties that could flourish only in the Wild West.
Preachers and teetotalers were far outnumbered. Borthwick saw sprouts of civilization cropping up in San Francisco—a “sufficiency of schools and churches for every denomination” and “the influence of the constantly-increasing numbers of virtuous women,” thanks to whom “the standard of morals was steadily improving.” But there were also “gorgeous temples for the worship of the mammon,” and the main currents of society congregated in bars, most profusely in Sidney Town’s round-the-clock carnival of gambling halls, saloons, and factory-like brothels.
Borthwick approved of what he called the Californian’s “intense rivalry in all pursuits”—particularly of the pluck required to survive it. “To keep one’s place in the crowd,” he said, “required an unremitted exercise of the same vigour and energy which were necessary to obtain it.” Mere survival called for a leathery social hide, and success in this “hand-to-hand struggle with [one’s] fellow-men” required “an excess of unscrupulous boldness and physical energy.” Among such fierce competitors, “a polished education”—an Old World training like Borthwick’s own—“was of little service, unless accompanied by an unwonted amount of democratic feeling.” Decorousness just didn’t cut it. Rivals and competitors in a lawless community needed common ground and mutual understanding, and nowhere was this “democratic feeling” stronger than in the saloons, where lonely men had the sorest need to overlook their differences.
Though Borthwick saw San Francisco’s weakest competitors surrender to the “disease” of “drunkenness,” he was impressed by the infrequency of alcoholism, especially “considering the enormous consumption of liquor.” The way he and other gold rush chroniclers presented it, the noon-to-night guzzling of booze in saloons set the standards for polite society. It may have looked barbarian: “here, at all hours of the day, men are gulping down fiery mouthfuls of brandy and gin, rendered still more pungent by the addition of other ingredients.” But in fact it disguised a delicate game:
No one ever thinks of drinking at a bar alone; he looks round for some friend he can ask to join him; it is not etiquette to refuse, and it is expected that the civility will be returned: so that the system gives the idea of being a mere interchange of compliments; and many men, in submitting to it, are actuated chiefly by a desire to show a due amount of courtesy to their friends.
The game grew rowdier, though strangely daintier, the farther he drifted away from the city. While traveling among the diggings—a few days after witnessing a lynching-by-jury in the Mexican camp of San Andres (the condemned man blew “a farewell whiff of smoke through his nostrils … and politely took leave of the world with ‘Adios, caballeros’ ”)—Borthwick paid a visit to Angels Camp, which he considered more “civilised” than San Andres, and in the pub of a jam-packed, ramshackle hotel, he encountered a roomful of mangy fellows in the throes of a miners’ ball.
Here he saw California society laid bare. All it took was a fiddler, and in this case a flute, to spring the most hardened miners to life. The fiddler shouted instructions to the crowd—“ ‘Lady’s chain,’ ‘Set to your partner,’ with other dancing-school words of command”—and the miners faithfully took their positions, despite the small inconvenience that “none of the fair sex were present.” No worries. Miners were used to making do, and in this case enough of them had volunteered to be “ladies”—marking their “inexpressibles” with distinctive canvas patches—that they could execute all the couples dances.
The dances themselves in the clapboard-walled ballroom were “very severe gymnastic exercise.” “For here the men danced, as they did everything else, with all their might.” Borthwick doesn’t say whether he joined the dance, but clearly he examined these “long-bearded men, in heavy boots and flannel shirts” for their fragile balance of courtesy and aggression. They executed steps with “a great deal of grace,” with “hearty enjoyment depicted on their dried-up sunburned faces,” all the while their “revolvers and bowie-knives” kept “glancing in their belts.” Just as menacing, and just as sweet, was the “crowd of the same rough-looking customers” who “stood around, cheering them on to greater efforts, and occasionally dancing a step or two quietly on their own account.”
Such happenings were common among the diggings, especially in camps lacking proper gambling halls. Some folks had adopted the practice on their way to California, either dancing all-male “cotillions upon the green prairie” or aboard the ships where Jack Tars had danced hornpipes for centuries. “Dame Shirley,” a doctor’s wife living in Indian Bar, delighted in the details of an 1852 “Holiday Saturnalia” in which the most “generous, hospitable, intelligent, and industrious” of men rejuvenated themselves for three therapeutic weeks of nights-long dancing, continuous binge-drinking, and an “amusing” mock trial of local teetotalers—only to regret her “duty” of recording its salacious details in what she called an “unpleasant letter.” But the Angels Camp event earned Borthwick’s full admiration: he knew he was seeing the California schoolhouse. In his exuberant ink drawing of the same event, he shows a mixed-race crowd in loose white blouses, gaping and laughing, guzzling and smoking, while three burly couples dominating the floor put centrifugal force to the test. The focal couple is pulled in tight, their opposing arms locked, their beards up close. They smoke and hold each other’s eyes with equal parts contest, defiance, and joy. If they weren’t dancing, surely they’d be fighting.
What the picture doesn’t show is the quaint détente, when “the ‘ladies,’ after their fatigues, tossed off their cocktails and lighted their pipes just as in more polished circles they eat ice-creams and sip lemonade.” But which of these men plays the “lady” ’s role? In Borthwick’s drawing it’s impossible to tell. Their easy display of this “domesticating” culture suggests that all of them do, and none.
This miners’ ball, as Borthwick presents it, swirled at the vortex of a gold rush Zeitgeist of excitement and antagonism. Men who lived lives of toil and danger, most of them thousands of miles from home, came together for orgies like this one that suited their peculiar needs. Part dance, part fight, part saucy masquerade, these mildly erotic democratic maelstroms were founded on the purest common pleasure.
“For here the men danced, as they did everything else, with all their might.” (J. D. Borthwick. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
IN MARCH 1849, nineteen-year-old Alfred Doten sailed from Plymouth, Massachusetts, to chronicle Merry Mount’s legacy in the West. That wasn’t what he set out to do, but California had a way of changing plans. His father, a sea captain, was a direct descendant of one of the Mayflower Compact’s two bondservants; his mother, Rebecca Bradford, descended from the governor himself. Alfred left his job as a cod fisherman and boarded a refurbished whaler, the Yeoman, to get his California education. In his subsequent half century out west (he died in Nevada in 1903), this New England teetotaler became a loose bon vivant (and eventual alcoholic) living at the center of American fun. He recorded nearly every day of it, either in his cheeky newspaper dispatches or in the lively, illicit, unflinching episodes that riddle his seventy-nine leather-back journals like bullet holes.
His Puritanism clung like barnacles, at first. Two months into his rocky voyage, he was one of twenty-five stalwarts to sign an anti-tobacco pledge, declaring it “a very good move indeed.” And just off Cape Horn, on July 4, a date that would soon become the annual peak of his otherwise raucous daily revels, Doten gloried in the reveille of guns, pipes, and drums, but he scoffed at the crew members who were such “slaves of King Alcohol” that they deigned to drink potato whiskey, “vile stuff.” His temperance held strong up the Pacific coast—he admired sober Chileans in the streets of Concepción, in contrast to “several of the Americans drunk”—but a short while after arriving in San Francisco, which he assured his father was “the most civil country in the world” (“stealing is a rare thing, and murder is scarce, although every body goes ‘armed to the teeth’ at the mines”), his Plymouth morals started to loosen.
It took him a while to warm his hands on serious gold rush fun. As late as 1851, despite confessing here and there to a “fandango” or to “cards,” he admired the miners who sang psalms more than the ones who spent their days “drinking and gambling.” He scorned the Chileans and “howling drunk” Mexicans who held “a big spree” on the Sabbath, and he prided himself on “singing sacred music.” But around 1852 his tune began to change. Holing up that September on the Calaveras River with some Chilean roughnecks (identified as “Alfaro & co”), he mused that they’d had “a hell of a spree and some of us got a little tight.” Three days later it was “a big fandango spree,” this time with “my four Mexicans from up the gulsh.” After that the party was never-ending, usually with Doten and his fiddle to blame. He “astonished” crowds deep into the winter months with his “playing and singing,” “broke the ice … with an old fiddle,” and instigated parties throughout the snowy diggings. The following February, after more than a week of debauchery, he declared, “This is one of the best ‘benders’ I have been on for a long time.” And so would it go in the years to come, as the Plymouth boy recorded firsthand accounts of California “jollification.”
Doten’s daily sketches of his first six years, when he chased down rumors of lucky strikes from Spanish Gulch to Fort Grizzly, also detail the labors and daily dangers that characterized diggings life. Many folks he encountered were impoverished or killed—by fighting, mining disasters, stupidity—and a few commit suicide in his thousands of pages. But Doten was a survivor and a devoted hedonist. The industrious lad could learn to build a kiln while killing two rattlers and reading Nicholas Nickleby, or he could devote an evening to baking a “plum cake” after spending the day digging “30 rods.” Like J. D. Borthwick and Bayard Taylor, Doten was curious about California society, but he was also more apt to join the party—or fire one up with his fiddle or banjo. In the manner of many African-American miners—who feature in countless journals and historical records for their dancing, fiddling, and banjo picking—Doten raised roof beams throughout the camps. And shaped though he was by his ingrained biases for Yankees over Southerners, Americans over Mexicans, whites over blacks and Indians, Doten moved freely throughout the populace, making friends wherever he went. He was keenly aware of racial tensions—like the near war among Chileans, Americans, and Italians that was narrowly avoided by a jury verdict; or that “Mexicans are robbing and killing the Chinese at a great rate.” He railed into his diary against “thieving Mexicans,” who he believed at one point were stealing his gold, and he lent a hand to hanging a Mexican convicted of murder, a somber duty he appeared to regret. And he slows now and then to mention a fistfight—or knife fight or even the occasional gun battle—but friendly conflict was more to his taste. His rule, if he had one, was fearless abandon, and whenever possible he kept an open guest list.
On an especially wild Christmas, in 1854, following a season of shovel-and-fiddle-breaking activity, as well as a kiln accident that nearly burned off his nose, Doten and some friends threw a housewarming party to celebrate their newly laid wooden floor. Their goal was to make “it perfectly thunder beneath”—in one of his daintier allusions—“the tripping of the heavy fantastic toe.” “The glorious old cognac flowed freely and fully entered into the spirit of the scene.” They danced to old standards like the “Highland Fling” and invented new ones, with western flair, like the “double-cowtird-smasher” and several “tird-run-variations.”
Sometime after midnight (who was keeping time?) two ruffians arrived from Spanish Gulch, one of them identified as “Cut-nosed-Bill.” Doten notes that they “were not invited but were no less welcome and entered into the spirit of jollification with us.” The singing and drinking doubled in volume—“the fun grew ‘fast and furious’ ”—and before long “all felt filled with the ‘milk of human kindness.’ ” Doten’s only regret during this “most glorious frolic,” which broke up after the blush of dawn, was the “two or three disgraceful little quarrels between Locke and cut-nosed Bill and others.” But all was saved. The majority had “interfered,” “prevented a fight,” and the spirit of jollification prevailed.
Doten grew so loyal to California fun that he started to evangelize in his hometown paper, the possibly unamused Plymouth Rock. Writing under the nom de guerre “Ben Bolt,” he had titillated his readers for years with the usual gold rush sensations: rattlers, grizzlies, vigilantes, gamblers, and the five-year explosion of San Francisco from the “little Spanish village of ‘Yerba Buena’ ” to a booming cosmopolis. But his missives celebrating the Fourth of July, the Golden State’s vaunted new holiday, provoked New England with a decidedly libertine vision of democracy. “As usual in California,” he wrote in 1854—a year when activists breathed fire for prohibition throughout the northeastern states—the Fourth “was celebrated by a most unusual amount of powder burning, cracker-popping, horse racing, whiskey-drinking, patriotism, and (where the case seemed to demand it), a small ‘tussle’ or two.” The diggings woke early when Juan Fernandez—“a native of Hindostan”—fired off a log fashioned into a bomb and initiated an all-day binge of shooting, dancing, hunting, and drinking. Things turned rather lurid after dark, when the men (“We had no ladies to grace the occasion”) let themselves go in an all-out “stag dance” reminiscent of Borthwick’s miners’ ball. After a pause for a few cigars and songs, “all sorts of steps were taken, from polkas and waltzes, down to the ‘fore and after,’ ” as well as giving another tip-off as to their interracial company, the “ ‘Juba.’ ” Doten knew his account would raise eyebrows—and hackles. Evidently that was his aim:
Let no “old fogy,” when he reads this, turn up his immaculate nose with a grim smile, at what he may term “follies.” Just let him be situated precisely as we are situated here, and then see how he would act. If he has any warm blood at all about his heart, he might easily do worse than we did.
On July 4, 1855, such antics hit a boil, as “Bolt” dutifully reported to the Rock. Doten and his friend George rose before sunrise and roused the town of Fort John by firing their rifles “as fast as [they] could load.” The miners dragged out with their “guns and pistols,” held a communal reveille, breakfasted together, “marched down town with drum and fife,” and went about gathering a band of “some 40—quite a force” to disport themselves throughout the day. Still feeling ornery after dinner, they marched six miles in single file with someone named “jackass at the head.” Their destination was Fiddletown, where they hurled three huzzas at the various “public houses,” made incendiary devices from the blacksmith’s four anvils, dined and drank in its various pubs, and warmed the floor of the Spanish Dance Hall.
The locals quickly rose to the challenge, forming a band called the “Fiddletown Doughheads” and marching “in opposition” down the middle of the street—their “five fiddles” trying “in vain” to drown out Doten’s band: “Our fifer, with protruding eyes and distending cheeks, blew his shrillest blast, while our ambitious drummer put in his prettiest licks. The fiddlers were nowhere; they lost their tune completely, not being able to hear their own fiddles. The ‘Doughheads’ gave us three cheers which we returned with earnest.” They marched three rings around the dance hall and exited town, again in formation, “to the tune of Yankee Doodle.” Back in Fort John, they “fired a volley in front of Vance’s, took a drink and dispersed quietly to [their] beds.” Faithfully reporting these events to the Rock, he added a poke at the temperance movement:
Whether any of the citizens of Fort John imbibed anything stronger than ginger-pop or soda water, we’ll not mention in this connection, but if there was “anything stronger,” “cocktails” or “sherry cobblers,” for instance, taken a “corrective of the stomach,” let us excuse it on the ground that the “Maine Liquor Law” has not yet extended its protecting arm over the benighted citizens of this barbarous region.… Perhaps the day may come when “Maine Liquor Riots” may become known in these parts, when sharp-nosed policemen will invade the log cabins and little tents of the miners, keen on the scent to discover some concealed bottle of whiskey.
The month before, Maine’s suppression of drinking through electoral politics had indeed led to an actual, violent riot. But the Siege of Fiddletown, for all its fun and loud restraint, resembled nothing nearly so much as the Sons of Liberty’s Stamp Act parade, right down to the three improvised cheers in front of every pub. Which is to say, it was radically civil.
By 1855, at the age of twenty-five, Doten had earned his California diploma.
MINERS HAD BEEN SCRAPING bits of gold from Nevada (then called the Washoe Territory) as early as 1850, but in 1859 it dawned on someone why the mud in these mines was blue. The greatest silver strike in U.S. history turned this sagebrush desert, hitherto inhabited mostly by Mormons, into a hub of cutthroat commerce. In a matter of two years, Virginia City, once a tent camp on the Comstock Lode, teemed with all the luxuries of a Wild West metropolis: fire companies, hotels, banks, brothels, gambling halls, and opium dens. The town constantly shook from underground explosions, trickled with steam from its natural hot springs, and whizzed with volleys between its rival newspapers, the Union and the Enterprise.
Alfred Doten quit mining in 1855, by which point the California gold fields had been gouged, picked, sluiced, and sifted of their very last nuggets, slurry, and dust. He took a crack at farming and ranching for a while, but he caught the gold bug again in 1862. He trekked his way across the Sierras, pausing here and there, as was still his wont, for trysts, benders, jollification, and the odd dispatch to the Rock. When he got to “far famed” Virginia City on July 1, it looked to him like a step back in time—to “San Francisco in ’49.” For the first time in fourteen years of journaling, Doten was flummoxed:
No use for my pencil to try & describe this place—can’t do it—big, bustling, noisy city—all process of creation—streets full of wagons, horses, omnibuses, crowd—sidewalk crowded with rushing crowd—500 houses being built … great circus performing here … lots of gambling saloons open to the public—crowded—Monte, faro, chuckerluck, rouge et noir &c—bands of music in orchestra … in the saloons also were dancing girls—hurdy gurdys, organs &c in the streets—lots of money flying around in this city & no mistake—
One thing is certain: it was a town mad for fun.
Three days later, on Doten’s favorite holiday, the blacksmiths exploded the customary anvils, and the clubs and fire departments held parades, but there were also “considerable drunks & some fights—several men got shot in rows & two were killed.” Such random violence was common in Nevada, part of the ambience, and Doten jotted it down with less ceremony than he did Martin the Wizard’s “fancy tricks”—“ ‘the vanishing coin,’ swallowing my jack-knife, ‘The one-armed fiddler’ &c.”—or the opening of a mill, two weeks later, for which three taverns spotted kegs of lager and a boisterous crowd trailed Doten’s bandwagon, singing “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia.” A minor riot broke out that night, leavened by gunfire and broken windows, but nobody was killed (thanks to a malfunctioning revolver), and the parties raged on for the rest of the summer. In August, he “got on a big spree, the wildest [he] ever saw, but still no fighting or anything disagreeable.” Nevada was proving to be Doten’s kind of place.
He set himself up in the town of Como, where he continued posting updates to the Rock and the odd correspondence to the Virginia Daily Union. That winter he kept warm with endless drinking, gambling, fiddling, and some “skylarking” that sent his friend Murphy’s arm slicing through a window. And early the following March, in the midst of his cotillions-and-billiards regime, he crossed paths with a rising local celebrity: “Evening stage brought a noted correspondent of the Territorial Enterprise who writes under the ‘nomme de plume’ of ‘Mark Twain’—his name is Samuel Clements [sic].” The journalists disported over the next couple of days. The minutes of this summit are unrecorded, but it is certain the conversation between these young troublemakers wasn’t fit for public consumption.
AT THE TIME “Mark Twain” was barely a month old. Samuel Clemens had arrived in the Washoe in 1861. His brother Orion had come to be Governor Nye’s factotum, and aimless Sam had tagged along. His résumé by then listed every last thing from printer’s devil to riverboat pilot to, most recently, Confederate militia deserter; in Nevada his career was no better focused. He cast about for a year or so, picking up odd clerical jobs, failing miserably as a prospector and a placer miner, but succeeding, during a spell of unrepentant loafing, at setting several forested mountains ablaze along the banks of Lake Tahoe. He admired this “sublime” and “beautiful” sight from the safety of a rowboat: “Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake!”
Clemens’s follies during this fallow period—the best of them later embellished in Roughing It—have made deep contributions to the popular belief that even the worst of the Wild West was fun. Whether it is Sam getting bucked off an unbroken “Mexican plug” (“Oh, don’t he buck, though!”), Sam having breakfast with the murderous “Slade” (“Here was romance, and I sitting face to face with it!”), Sam waking in a cabin filled with tarantulas (“It was dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a thing could be seen”), or Sam losing his rights to a million-dollar claim, Sam Clemens, neophyte argonaut, sports all the bluster and slack-jawed innocence that made America’s western adventure look like a lark. Like most U.S. citizens he was out of his depth, but he was dead set on giving every ride a whirl. Blind to danger, wired for novelty, always up for an endorphin rush, Sam was his own best picaro, a character he mined for all its comic gold.
In the summer of 1862, right around the time Doten hit Nevada, Clemens was flat busted in the mountain town of Aurora. A proven flop at mining, he had been sending squibs to the Territorial Enterprise and signing them simply, aptly, “Josh.” Writing with an ear for the region’s tall tales and its special taste for the rude and absurd, he joshed his readers with exaggerated mining claims, burlesques of the territory’s blowhard chief justice, and a spoof of an Independence Day oration. Joseph Goodman, the Enterprise’s armed-to-the-teeth editor, who had made his own career provoking the locals, thought the young firebrand was what the paper needed—for he was also suddenly understaffed: his prized editor and staff writer, the facetious Dan De Quille (William Wright), needed to visit his family in Iowa. When Clemens received the offer of $25 a week (the price of a steak in flush Virginia City), he was so elated, and so impoverished, that he closed the 130-mile distance on foot and arrived at the Enterprise reeking of sweat, bristling with straw from his makeshift beds, and bearded halfway down his chest. He cleaned himself up right there in the offices and went about getting a Nevada education: regarding the do’s and do’s of lying. Goodman advised him: “Unassailable certainty,” especially when the truth is far from certain, “is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation.”
This was all the permission Clemens needed. Still writing as “Josh,” a name that was steadily gaining prestige, he exaggerated dull agricultural statistics, dressed up skirmishes with handsome death tolls, and settled into the idea that he “could take [his] pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and the interests of the paper demanded it.” In October Josh sloughed off fact altogether and enjoyed the liberty of an all-out hoax—a practice he may have picked up from the humorist Artemus Ward, who had frightened readers of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer with his 1858 story of an escaped grave-robbing hyena. Clemens’s hoax of a “petrified man” tickled witty locals and wowed the credulous world. It reported the discovery of a century-old cadaver “sitting” in a cave with a curiously “pensive” bearing. Its success owed a lot to its riddling details:
the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the fore-finger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.
Close reading shows the Thinker to be thumbing his nose. Even “Judge Sewell or Sowell,” the Humboldt coroner lampooned in the piece for holding “an inquest on the body,” had to laugh at his own expense. But a medical journal, the Lancet, in far-off London, where they lacked the refinement of Washoe wit, cited the ridiculous marvel as fact.
In January 1863, as his stock was rising, Clemens traded “Josh” for the better brand “Mark Twain” and never looked back. He dined out for months on his Union rival, Clement Rice, a fellow statehouse reporter and traveling companion whom he worked up into a freeloading boor, the “Unreliable.” In a series of increasingly improbable dispatches, Twain and the Unreliable crashed candy-pulls, dance parties, senators’ conventions, and a wedding where the Unreliable kept requesting “the pea-nut song” and following the bride and groom “like an evil spirit.” Along the way “Mark Twain” grew unassailable, skewering politicians, sending up rivals, and paying his tabs with self-mocking puff pieces for hotels as far away as San Francisco. Almost overnight, at least by the time he met Doten in Como, “Mark Twain” had become the tallest lightning rod for Washoe’s firebolt sense of humor.
The capacity to tell a joke in the West, or at least to take one, was worth more than a service revolver. Jokes divided the men from the fools. One April 1 in San Francisco, Doten and friends made a day’s entertainment of taking in the gags: sealed envelopes, turned down on sidewalks, were addressed to “April Fool & Co.”; large crowds flocked to see a beached whale facetiously reported in the papers. “All sorts of fools traps were set and all sorts of people fell into them.” Among the many pranks Dan De Quille remembered from the Comstock, most were at the expense of gormless outsiders, like the recent arrivals who watched with horror as “that most incorrigible of jokers, Bill Terry” placed a restaurant order for “baked horned toad, two broiled lizards on toast, with tarantula sauce—stewed rattlesnake and poached scorpions on the side!” He was served straightaway by conspirators in the kitchen while the onlookers “nearly twisted their necks out of joint” trying to glimpse what he was eating. Some jokes took in great masses of marks, like the California miners who poured in from all around to see William Wilson’s legendary “12 pound nugget”—which turned out to be a healthy baby boy. “Each of the miners loved being had,” William Bennett wrote of the prank. “As each squad came out of the cabin, every man solemnly asserted that the Wilson nugget was the ‘boss,’ the finest ever seen.…Men came for two or three days and asked to be shown the nugget, some arriving from camps eight or ten miles distant.”
One famous prank, recounted in Roughing It and still commemorated in Nevada, pitted a whole town against the U.S. government. The incident that started it was rather improbable: an ostensible landslide in the mountains around Carson had dropped the entirety of Tom Rust’s ranch smack on top of Richard D. Sides’s ranch, “exactly cover[ing] up every single vestige of his property.” Apparently Rust liked the new arrangement and decided he would stay. When Sides went to fresh-off-the-coach territorial attorney general Benjamin B. Bunker, accusing Rust of “trespassing,” the indignant official took up the case. He pulled together a court, complete with winking lawyers and in-the-know witnesses, and put the intruding rancher on trial. The conspiring locals were up in arms, insisting the fallen ranchland still belonged to Rust. After days of burlesque testimony, and Bunker’s shrill closing statements notwithstanding, the court came back with the maddening verdict that Sides “had been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of God!” It took the attorney general a couple of months, but eventually the joke managed “to boor itself, like another Hoosac Tunnel, through the solid adamant of his understanding.”
Miners took pride in telling fact from humbug, lucky strikes from “salted” mines, and they made open examples of interlopers and idiots. Writers for the Enterprise played to this prejudice and whipped the public into a froth. As one historian puts it, two of the paper’s functions were “to provoke cascades of inextinguishable merriment” and “to give the gardaloo or raspberry to the great and saintly just for the pure, uninhibited hell of it.” At a time when eastern culture, as the historian and critic Ann Douglas has shown, was being aggressively “feminized” all throughout the United States under the widespread influence of middle-class Christian journalism, western culture, with the help of the papers, was flaunting its unwashed impropriety. The Enterprise may have been the worst offender, but many of Virginia City’s papers (they counted at least twelve by 1864) sent their rounders into the ring, fabricating news, talking trash in print, vilifying aspiring political candidates, and generally lowering the public tone. Hoaxes, pranks, irreverence, and slang appealed to the tastes of a mostly male demos who survived by grit and drank their nights away at the countless poker tables.
But in October 1863, Twain’s “Empire City Massacre” hoax succeeded in turning even this case-hardened readership’s iron stomach. In previous months, as the Civil War raged throughout the States and Nevadans traded blows over their constitutional convention, a rash of murders, gunfights, and hangings were keeping things interesting for Virginia City. Desensitized (or inspired) by this bellicose atmosphere, Twain dreamed up an outrageous story meant to shame the San Francisco Bulletin for publishing misleading investment information. Like any worthwhile hoax, however, its only real virtue was riling up readers.
The story was gruesome. Philip Hopkins, a father of six who lived in the “great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” slaughtered his family with an axe. He also slashed the throat of a witness, who galloped four miles to Carson City with Hopkins’s wife’s “reeking scalp” as evidence—then died. The destitute Hopkins, the story concluded, had been impoverished by “the newspapers of San Francisco.” The details were ludicrous, but even the canniest readers missed Twain’s tip-offs that the whole thing was a fraud: Nevada had no pines, Dutch Nick’s was a tavern in Empire City, Philip Hopkins was a well-known bachelor, and no Paul Revere slashed ear to ear could weather such a nightmare ride. The next morning, over breakfast, Sam and Dan watched with interest while a hapless reader absorbed the news: “Presently his eyes spread wide open, just as his jaws swung asunder to take in a potato approaching it on a fork; the potato halted, the face lit up redly, and the whole man was on fire with excitement.”
The sensation, the excitement, seized the territory, where the Daily News reprinted the story that afternoon. Only the Evening Bulletin, given time to cool off, called it “as baseless as the fabric of a dream.” Twain issued a one-line response: “I take it all back.” The News called it “a lie,” to which Twain belittled their use of “small caps.” But the fun, of course, was far from over, and “fun,” needless to say, was the bone of contention. Among the many complaints was the Bulletin’s opinion that “the man who could pen such a story … and sen[d] a pang of terror into the hearts of many persons, as a joke, in fun, can have but a very indefinite idea of the elements of a joke.” Twain replied that the writer was an “oyster-brained idiot” and that he himself felt not one “pang of remorse,” as if to suggest that he in fact had a very definite idea “of the elements of a joke.” Indeed, a gag that kept readers wringing their hands as late as January over their “shock[ed]… moral sense” had struck the bull’s-eye of Nevada’s social irony: citizens of the murderous, decadent Washoe Territory needed a bulletproof “moral sense” if they were to have any such thing at all.
DAN DE QUILLE’S History of the Big Bonanza, written years later in Clemens’s Hartford mansion, pays keen attention to the “fun,” “frolic,” and “deviltry” that educated the average miner. One 1860 mining excursion, when Dan and his companions follow a sketchy rumor of “gold as large as peas,” shows how reckless fun helped even quick-to-murder rogues sharpen their so-called moral sense.
Deep in the El Dorado canyon, when the men have to cross the Carson River, one miner, Tom, hires another one, Pike, to lug him on his back. Midway through the ford, sunk to his knees in mud, with Tom clinging to his hip “as closely as a young Indian,” Pike starts to panic, shouting “Snake! snake!” and begging Tom to dismount. “A snake is biting me all to pieces.” Tom, thinking Pike is pulling a prank, reaches around and socks him in the mouth. Their fisticuffs culminate in Tom’s awkward attempt to murder Pike with his waterlogged revolver. Only when Pike explains that Tom’s needle-sharp spurs were “causing him to think he [is] being bitten on all sides by water-snakes” can the men laugh it off, shake hands, and move on.
A few days later, when they have arrived in El Dorado and been thoroughly disabused of any hope of pea-sized gold, Tom is the last to rise for breakfast. Pike watches with relish as Tom pulls on his boot and lets go with a horrendous scream. “Pull off my boot, quick, somebody! There is a scorpion in it!” Pike rushes to Tom, who rolls on the ground, but insists the boot can’t be removed. Tom’s foot is too swollen: the boot needs to be cut. “ ‘Cut it off then!’ roar[s] Tom, ‘cut it off, I can’t die this way!’ ” The boot is cut, the foot removed, and a prickly pear is found clinging to the heel of Tom’s stocking. When the laughter subsides, everyone is surprised by Tom’s calm reaction—everyone but Pike, in whose violent imagination Tom is lying low to kill him.
When they are alone in the ravines later that day, prospecting for measly specks of gold, Dan updates Tom on how frightened Pike has gotten, noting that “men are killed in this country for more trifling things.” Tom’s response reveals a coarse sense of civility: “I don’t want to kill any man, but I do want to play even on Pike. It was mean on him to put that thing into my boot after we had shook hands down at the river.” The terms were clear: a handshake was as good as a contract in the land of grizzlies and rattlesnakes, and even a joke has its time and place. Tom knows Pike is “a great coward,” and his intention is to “scare the life out of him before this trip is over.”
Reports in the region of eleven armed Paiutes “going eastward at a dog-trot” start bands of miners packing for Carson. Craven Pike wants to pack out, too, but Tom and Dan and the rest of the connivers argue they are safer staying put for the night, on the ruse that they have heard the Indians are lying in wait for prospectors between there and the river. The thought that they are cut off terrifies Pike, who turns jumpy and paranoid but tries to save face by boasting they would have some “fun a fightin’ Injuns ’fore mornin’.” (Little did he know.) Tom baits his fear by lighting a campfire and hollering a song about a yokel “from Pike.” Pike himself hallucinates the rustling of predators and “lay awake a long time listening for Indians.” When he finally passes out after midnight, the others sneak away into the hills, having been planning the prank all day. On cue they ambush him through the clattering shale rock, “leaping and making as much noise as though old Winnemucca and half the Piute tribe were coming down the mountain.” They shout and curse and return imaginary fire, and a half-dead Hank staggers into camp, demanding of the panicked Pike, “Carry me off!” Pike hauls Hank about “two rods” before chucking him into some “thorny bushes” and disappearing into the night.
The next day, after fearing Pike has been drowned in the river and swearing off such “deviltry” for good, the men find him on Chinatown’s main street, regaling a crowd with his tale of valor. Unable to resist one last prank, Tom’s men deny every word of it and lead Pike to believe it was all a dream.
In the devilish hands of fun-loving miners, even the diggings’ deadliest threats—vipers, murderers, hostile Indians—could be fashioned into marvelous playthings. The western prankster, like Brother Rabbit, did not shrink from the high-stakes game. His taste was for gunpowder, riches, and power, and his practical jokes followed suit. He also used the tricks of his trade to jostle society for its biggest laughs. Poltroons like Pike and buffoons like Attorney General “Bunscombe” went against the grain of free-spirited communities that survived by sociability, courage, and wits. Whereas vigilantes made examples of desperadoes by hanging them from the highest trees, pranksters called out hotheads and fools who threatened to drag society down, and in doing so they buoyed society up.
WHEN ARTEMUS WARD (Charles Farrar Browne), the celebrity lecturer and humorist, hit Virginia City in time for the 1863 Christmas bacchanalia, he, Sam, and Dan—Ward called them the “Three Saints”—indulged in a notorious two-week binge that found them glorified in print, entertaining packed houses, and taking a midnight tour of the rooftops that was rudely halted by Virginia City police. Ward, who was famous for crazy spellings and hedonism, soberly concluded that the town was “very wild” but “that a mining city must go through with a certain amount of unadulterated cussedness before it can settle down and behave itself in a conservative and seemly manner.” These “Saints” were connoisseurs of unadulterated cussedness; they left seemly manners to the cattle train of latecomers.
By January 4 Clemens had already tapped his famous friend’s connections and published a bona fide Washoe missive in the New York Sunday Mercury. Twain’s first eastern publication, offering “‘opinions and reflections’ upon recent political movements,” calls to mind Doten’s baiting letters to Plymouth Rock. It aims to shock the uppity eastern states with its mockery of religion, government, and babies, but it also fires a political skyrocket, as if celebrating a New Year’s Eve of territorial independence. “Satisfied” that Nevadans will shoot down the state constitution, on the grounds that it calls for the taxation of mines, Twain puts all the nominated officials up for sale. As advertised, some are more useful back east than out west: “One Governor, entirely new. Attended Sunday-school in his youth, and still remembers it. Never drinks. In other respects, however, his habits are good.” Some, like the “second-hand” treasurer, are good to nobody but themselves: “Took excellent care of the funds—has them yet.”
“The Story of Pike and Tom,” a tale of brinksmanship and one-upmanship. (Courtesy of Special Collections, Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy.)
The freedom with which Twain skewered politicians, much like the freedom with which he needled public sympathies and roared away his nights with other drunk reporters, was enabled on some level by the permissiveness of the West, and by the viral mistrust of authority and control, but it also sprang from his fascination with community—especially reckless, chaotic community. He liked watching society run its rocky course, and he bristled when oligarchs got in the way. Twain was nobody’s radical democrat. He despised Nevada juries—“composed of two desperadoes, two low beer-house politicians, three barkeepers, two ranchmen who could not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkeys!”—but he was thrilled by dance halls and theaters in uproar; delighted by Nevada’s “infinitely varied and copious” slang; amused, then scared, then ultimately enlarged by the widespread sensations caused by his hoaxes, for here was humanity at its most excitable.
The noblest fun he witnessed along these lines—“the wildest mob Virginia had ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable”—was during his last month in Virginia City, when the citizens “rose as a man” and heaped their accumulated riches on the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a medical brigade serving both sides of the Civil War. Nevadans’ “flush-times” munificence met their wartime patriotism and gave way to an extraordinary prank that evinced the territory’s sterling character.
Reuel Gridley, Clemens’s childhood classmate, was living in the nearby town of Austin. That March, when he lost Austin’s mayoral race, Gridley also lost a bet with his Republican opponent and had to haul a fifty-pound flour sack through the streets, followed by townsfolk and a marching band. When someone suggested he auction the sack “for the benefit of the Sanitary,” the crowd went wild. The first winner bought it for $250, then turned around and auctioned it off again. By the end of the day it had been bought and sold so often that it had earned a stunning $8,000. Virginia City caught wind of the gag and, not to be bested, called for the sack themselves. They were disgusted when they could raise only $5,000, and they thought they might get another chance the next morning when a parade of carriages blared its way down the high street, led by Gridley and his flour sack, “the latter splendid with bright paint and gilt lettering.” But the wagons kept going out the other side of town, leaving Virginians with their wounded pride. It was a warm spring day, and the glittering procession (Clemens included) merrily rolled on over the sagebrush mountains to the mining towns of Gold Hill, Silver City, and Dayton, announcing their arrival with “drums beating and colors flying” and greeting mobs of “men, women and children, Chinamen and Indians” who had been alerted in advance by telegram.
Gridley’s traveling orgy of absurd largess rolled all the way to Carson City, and eventually on to San Francisco, where its reputation preceded it. The prank held on for three months straight, and the sack was last sold at “a monster Sanitary Fair” in St. Louis, where it was displayed alongside its final purchase price, valued in bricks of Nevada silver ($150,000!), and was baked into platters of costly cakes.
WHAT J. D. BORTHWICK CALLED a “California education”—the “polish” argonauts got “from being violently shaken up with a crowd of men of different habits and ideas from their own”—conjures up lessons in plain moral sense. Borthwick’s phrasing is remarkably similar to that of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the eighteenth-century father of “moral sense” philosophy and Thomas Hobbes’s fiercest philosophical rival. Unlike bitter and cynical Hobbes, who believed people entered into society out of selfish motives, Shaftesbury thought people were naturally good citizens, who, when left to their own devices, achieved their aims through brisk give-and-take. In the throes of open public discourse—as in barrooms and around campfires, where civility turns coarse and often boisterous—folks are free to rail and joke, even on occasion, in his words, to “fight.” Such conflict is safe, by and large, when the majority are interested in the common good. In a society that is motivated by the generality’s good, even etiquette can afford to be feisty. In fact, as Shaftesbury argued, it has to be. “All Politeness,” he wrote, “is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Men’s Understandings. ’Tis a destroying of Civility, Good Breeding, and even Charity it-self, under pretence of maintaining it.”
The argonauts Borthwick saw heading east from California showed the marks of many “collisions,” “amicable” or otherwise. Californians and Nevadans were connoisseurs of collision. It toughened their hides and steeled their wills. It was also a surefire source of pleasure. The excitement and adventure that had propelled them westward—that which drove Taylor, Doten, and Twain—had also thrown them into makeshift society where cursing, pranks, gambling, song, and the capacity to hold their fiery drink were counterweights to honor and bravery. While the growing eastern middle class was minding their manners and shuttering their taverns, these emigrants and westerners pursued a radical civility that had been on the run since Merry Mount: the social bonds and personal thrills of risky, rebellious fun.
The American frontier was a woolly place, incomparable to Shaftesbury’s courtly world. With its Indian wars, claims disputes, lawless justice, deadly predators, extreme weather, runaway riches, and (most often) desperate poverty, it laid the workings of society bare—often to reveal that they were badly damaged. The stakes for not getting along were high—typically isolation, mutilation, or death—and yet nobody was rewarded for acting skittish. On the contrary, as it emerges in these Sierra Nevada stories the celebrated citizens were the boldest ones—the practical jokers, rousing musicians, willing combatants, and impious journalists. These folks didn’t shy away from fray; they exploited its pleasures and voiced its freedoms. In a land that demanded backbreaking participation in order simply to survive, they modeled rude and playful civility. They made a mockery of the stingy and scared and dared other citizens to join in. Their coarse behavior was delicious, infectious, and their elaborate pranks and hoaxes and parties formed spontaneous and volatile communities bound by excitement and hilarity. And when the papers and publishers spread their fame back east, this Wild West attitude riveted the nation. These creatures of slang and daring and pluck became paragons of American liberty, their fame growing into instantaneous legend.
Such boldness in the face of adversity and restraint characterized the best early American fun. Boldness in the face of Puritans, the British, slave owners, and reformers. The principals were spark plugs like Thomas Morton and Samuel Adams, charismatic figures like old King Charles, tricksters and troublemakers like Alfred Doten and Mark Twain, but in all of these cases their willing associates—sometimes numbering into the thousands—lent their fun its civic force. The crowd rose up and gave its assent, happy to join in the rebellious dance, glad to show they got the joke, ready to make wild contributions of their own. The joy of these free and lawless crowds affirmed, in flashes, the experience of democracy. It allowed citizens that would otherwise have been pushed away to feel brief thrills of liberty and equality.
……………
IN ALL OF THESE CASES there were environmental conditions—fundamentally American conditions—that made the fun possible, made it necessary. Untamed wilderness. Unchecked tyranny. A world of everything and nothing to lose that benefited only the hardest characters. Whether they were adventurers tussling for ideological freedom, colonists rallying for a political identity, slaves asserting their pride and humanity, or emigrants risking life and limb to bust their fortunes out of rocks, the protagonists in these stories were attracted to conflict for all of its generative possibility. That they were advocates for group pleasure, not selfish domination, has helped to establish the coarse civility that continues to thrive in the national consciousness. The pleasure of tangling with opponents and rivals, of not backing down, of not giving up, all the while proving your style and wit, is a virtue that Sons of Liberty paraded and that Pinkster Boys reveled in. It was a survival tactic in the Wild West. Had Americans not risked such amicable collisions, but resorted only to violence or submission, they would have joined the low ranks of criminals and cowards who tried to keep the people apart.
Instead they were authors of a national culture that remains our greatest social resource.