Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain

In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it’s time “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is trying to “sivilize” him, and Huck Finn can’t stand it—he’s been there before.

It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war.

A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun.

With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away.

With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.

CHAPTER 2

A FINE PLEASURE TRIP

BEFORE SAM AND ORION COULD GET TO NEVADA, they first had to reach St. Joseph, Missouri, the jumping-off point for the western frontier. On July 18, they went down to the St. Louis levee and boarded the Sioux City, a ramshackle packet boat, for a six-day trip up the Missouri River, the same river Sam Clemens had nearly been drafted to navigate for the Union Navy. Orion had left his wife, Mollie, and their five-year-old daughter, Jennie, with Mollie’s parents in Keokuk; they would rejoin him in Carson City once he got properly situated.

The Missouri, the longest river on the North American continent, is a notoriously winding and treacherous waterway. Its three-thousand-mile course traces an elliptical loop from just above St. Louis to Fort Benton, Montana, a bluff-lined, ever-changing river that makes the Mississippi look tame in comparison. “The Big Muddy,” as it was—and still is—called by travelers with no particular fondness for its turbid, dingy-brown appearance, was “unpoetic and repulsive—a stream of flowing mud studded with dead tree trunks and broken by bars,” in the words of New York Tribune reporter Albert Richardson. It rose twice yearly, in April and June, when the snowmelt from the Nebraska prairies and the Rocky Mountains uprooted trees and sent them flying like javelins through the silt-thick water. “I have seen nothing more frightful,” French explorer Jacques Marquette observed in 1673, and in his travels he had seen a lot of frightening things.

In many ways, the Missouri was more dangerous than the Mississippi. Except for its annual flood time, the Missouri baked down during the summer to a trickle of quicksand-studded shallows beneath glowering treeless bluffs. Many pilots relied too readily on “a wad of steam” to get them through the occasional rapids or over sandbars. The consequences could be deadly; dozens of Missouri River steamers blew up each year from boiler explosions. On Good Friday, April 9, 1852, the paddle wheeler Saluda exploded near Lexington, Missouri. Ill-fated Captain Francis Belt, leaning against the ship’s bell when the mishap occurred, found himself tumbling head over heels down a bluff several hundred yards inland, the bell clanging madly as it rolled downhill alongside him. The ship’s safe, with a watchdog still chained to it, and an unlucky clerk who happened to be passing by, were flung two hundred yards ashore, and a local butcher had the abject misfortune to be dismembered by a flying boiler flue. In all, the bodies of more than one hundred Saluda crewmen and passengers were eventually recovered up and down the Lexington wharf, making it the worst single disaster in the river’s disaster-strewn history.

The current trip was somewhat less perilous. Indeed, it was “so dull and sleepy,” recalled Twain, “that it has left no more impression on my memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many days.” Perhaps not, but he remembered enough about the trip to jab his professional judgment a decade later. The river, he said, presented “a confused jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other; and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then retired from and climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our crutches and sparred over.” The boat might as well have traveled to St. Joseph by land, said Twain, since “she was walking most of the time, anyhow.” The boat’s captain bragged that she was “a bully boat,” needing only more shear and a bigger wheel to make her perfect. Twain, with his jaundiced pilot’s eye, thought the boat actually needed a pair of stilts, but he “had the deep sagacity not to say so.” Richardson, who had made a similar voyage upriver four years earlier, had no such compunction. “Navigating the Missouri, at low water,” he wrote, “is like putting a steamer upon dry land, and sending a boy ahead with a sprinkling pot.”

The brothers arrived safely in St. Joseph on July 24 and went immediately to the business office of the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express stagecoach line, where Sam purchased tickets for the pair of them, at $150 apiece. Counting boat fare, he was now four hundred dollars out of pocket, with only a vague promise from his brother—he knew all about those—to put him on the government payroll once they reached Nevada. In choosing as their carrier the COC&PP, as it was known, the brothers had opted for the northernmost of the five established routes to the West Coast. (The Oregon Trail, which their route followed, diverged at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, and continued through the upper Northwest, but did not go through all the way to the coast.) Their itinerary followed the Little Blue River from Kansas into Nebraska, passing through Fort Kearny, then shadowed the Platte River to Cottonwood before cutting across the edge of Colorado and back into Nebraska to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, down to Fort Bridger, then to Salt Lake City, Utah, across the Great Salt Lake, and finally a straight shot across Nevada to Carson City. The trip was scheduled to take seventeen days and average a hundred miles per day. Passengers were expected to sleep sitting up inside the coach. It was a wearying prospect, but there was no other option; the first transcontinental railroad line would not be completed for another decade.

The fact that the stage line pulled into so many different forts along the way reflected the smoldering unrest, not yet a full-blown prairie fire, that was kindling within the various Plains Indian tribes whose ancestral homelands were being trampled daily by numberless thousands of white travelers. (On one day alone in August 1850, soldiers at Fort Laramie counted some 39,506 travelers rumbling westward aboard 9,927 wagons.) Among the tribes claiming territory abutting the COC&PP route were the Cheyennes, Pawnees, Poncas, Arapahos, Utes, Paiutes, and Gosiutes. Most had attended the great 1851 peace parley at Fort Laramie, where representatives of the American government, in return for the right to build roads and army posts on their land, had promised to pay the tribes annuities of fifty thousand dollars each for the next fifty years. The parsimonious U.S. Senate soon cut the number down to ten years.

It took less than three years for trouble to flare. In August 1854, a young Miniconjou Sioux warrior named High Forehead, summering with his tribesmen outside Fort Laramie, shot a stray cow that had wandered into their camp and (according to the Indians) run amok. The cow belonged to a passing party of Danish immigrants, who complained to the fort’s overworked commander, Lieutenant Hugh Fleming. Against his better judgment, Fleming sent Second Lieutenant John L. Grattan to investigate. Grattan, fresh out of West Point, was given to bragging that with ten good men he could defeat the entire Cheyenne nation. As it developed, he never got the chance (these were Sioux, anyway). On the morning of August 19, he rode out to arrest High Forehead. The warrior demurred. By the time negotiations had concluded, Grattan and his entire thirty-man force lay dead, Grattan’s body by grim coincidence bristling with twenty-four arrows—one for each year of his abruptly terminated life.

Sam Clemens may have heard about the Grattan massacre—he was in St. Louis at the time—and he certainly knew a garbled version of a second Indian massacre that had taken place two years later near Fort Kearny and involved a particularly luckless territorial secretary named Almon Whiting...