What to do next?
It was a momentous question. I had gone out into the world to
shift for myself, at the age of thirteen (for my father had
endorsed for friends; and although he left us a sumptuous legacy
of pride in his fine Virginian stock and its national
distinction, I presently found that I could not live on that
alone without occasional bread to wash it down with). I had
gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not dazzled
anybody with my successes; still the list was before me, and the
amplest liberty in the matter of choosing, provided I wanted to
work—which I did not, after being so wealthy. I had once been a
grocery clerk, for one day, but had consumed so much sugar in
that time that I was relieved from further duty by the
proprietor; said he wanted me outside, so that he could have my
custom. I had studied law an entire week, and then given it up
because it was so prosy and tiresome. I had engaged briefly in
the study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time trying to fix
the bellows so that it would blow itself, that the master turned
me adrift in disgrace, and told me I would come to no good. I had
been a bookseller’s clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered
me so much I could not read with any comfort, and so the
proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to put a limit to it. I
had clerked in a drug store part of a summer, but my
prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach
pumps than soda water. So I had to go.
I had made of myself a
tolerable printer, under the impression that I would be another
Franklin some day, but somehow had missed the connection thus
far. There was no berth open in the Esmeralda Union, and besides
I had always been such a slow compositor that I looked with envy
upon the achievements of apprentices of two years’ standing; and
when I took a “take,” foremen were in the habit of suggesting
that it would be wanted “some time during the year.”
I was a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot and by no
means ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two
hundred and fifty dollars a month and no board to pay, and I did
long to stand behind a wheel again and never roam any more—but I
had been making such an ass of myself lately in grandiloquent
letters home about my blind lead and my European excursion that I
did what many and many a poor disappointed miner had done before;
said “It is all over with me now, and I will never go back home
to be pitied—and snubbed.” I had been a private secretary, a
silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to less
than nothing in each, and now—
What to do next?
I yielded to Higbie’s appeals and consented to try the mining
once more. We climbed far up on the mountain side and went to
work on a little rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it
eight feet deep. Higbie descended into it and worked bravely with
his pick till he had loosened up a deal of rock and dirt and then
I went down with a long-handled shovel (the most awkward
invention yet contrived by man) to throw it out. You must brace
the shovel forward with the side of your knee till it is full,
and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your left
shoulder. I made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge
of the shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of
my neck. I never said a word, but climbed out and walked home. I
inwardly resolved that I would starve before I would make a
target of myself and shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled
shovel.
I sat down, in the cabin, and gave myself up to solid
misery—so to speak. Now in pleasanter days I had amused myself
with writing letters to the chief paper of the Territory, the
Virginia Daily Territorial Enterprise, and had always been
surprised when they appeared in print. My good opinion of the
editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me that they
might have found something better to fill up with than my
literature. I had found a letter in the post office as I came
home from the hill side, and finally I opened it. Eureka! [I
never did know what Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a
word to heave in as any when no other that sounds pretty offers.]
It was a deliberate offer to me of Twenty-Five Dollars a week to
come up to Virginia and be city editor of the Enterprise.
I would have challenged the publisher in the “blind lead”
days—I wanted to fall down and worship him, now. Twenty-Five
Dollars a week—it looked like bloated luxury—a fortune a sinful
and lavish waste of money. But my transports cooled when I
thought of my inexperience and consequent unfitness for the
position—and straightway, on top of this, my long array of
failures rose up before me. Yet if I refused this place I must
presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing
necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a
humiliation since he was thirteen years old. Not much to be proud
of, since it is so common—but then it was all I had to be proud
of. So I was scared into being a city editor. I would have
declined, otherwise. Necessity is the mother of “taking chances.”
I do not doubt that if, at that time, I had been offered a salary
to translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, I would have
accepted—albeit with diffidence and some misgivings—and thrown
as much variety into it as I could for the money.
I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation. I was
a rusty looking city editor, I am free to confess—coatless,
slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops,
whiskered half down to the waist, and the universal navy revolver
slung to my belt. But I secured a more Christian costume and
discarded the revolver.
I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a
desire to do so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular
sentiment, and in order that I might not, by its absence, be
offensively conspicuous, and a subject of remark. But the other
editors, and all the printers, carried revolvers. I asked the
chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman, I will call him, since
it describes him as well as any name could do) for some
instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all
over town and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions,
make notes of the information gained, and write them out for
publication. And he added:
“Never say ‘We learn’ so-and-so, or ‘It is reported,’ or ‘It
is rumored,’ or ‘We understand’ so-and-so, but go to headquarters
and get the absolute facts, and then speak out and say ‘It is
so-and-so.’ Otherwise, people will not put confidence in your
news. Unassailable certainly is the thing that gives a newspaper
the firmest and most valuable reputation.”
It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I
find a reporter commencing his article with “We understand,” I
gather a suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform
himself as he ought to have done. I moralize well, but I did not
always practise well when I was a city editor; I let fancy get
the upper hand of fact too often when there was a dearth of news.
I can never forget my first day’s experience as a reporter. I
wandered about town questioning everybody, boring everybody, and
finding out that nobody knew anything. At the end of five hours
my notebook was still barren. I spoke to Mr. Goodman. He
said:
“Dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry
time when there were no fires or inquests. Are there no hay
wagons in from the Truckee? If there are, you might speak of the
renewed activity and all that sort of thing, in the hay business,
you know.
“It isn’t sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks
business like.”
I canvassed the city again and found one wretched old hay
truck dragging in from the country. But I made affluent use of
it. I multiplied it by sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen
different directions, made sixteen separate items out of it, and
got up such another sweat about hay as Virginia City had never
seen in the world before.
This was encouraging. Two nonpareil columns had to be filled,
and I was getting along. Presently, when things began to look
dismal again, a desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy
returned once more. I never was so glad over any mere trifle
before in my life. I said to the murderer:
“Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a
kindness this day which I can never forget. If whole years of
gratitude can be to you any slight compensation, they shall be
yours. I was in trouble and you have relieved me nobly and at a
time when all seemed dark and drear. Count me your friend from
this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor.”
If I did not really say that to him I at least felt a sort of
itching desire to do it. I wrote up the murder with a hungry
attention to details, and when it was finished experienced but
one regret—namely, that they had not hanged my benefactor on the
spot, so that I could work him up too.
Next I discovered some emigrant wagons going into camp on the
plaza and found that they had lately come through the hostile
Indian country and had fared rather roughly. I made the best of
the item that the circumstances permitted, and felt that if I
were not confined within rigid limits by the presence of the
reporters of the other papers I could add particulars that would
make the article much more interesting. However, I found one
wagon that was going on to California, and made some judicious
inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his short
and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly
going on and would not be in the city next day to make trouble, I
got ahead of the other papers, for I took down his list of names
and added his party to the killed and wounded. Having more scope
here, I put this wagon through an Indian fight that to this day
has no parallel in history.
My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the
morning I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.
I reasoned within myself that news, and stirring news, too, was
what a paper needed, and I felt that I was peculiarly endowed
with the ability to furnish it. Mr. Goodman said that I was as
good a reporter as Dan. I desired no higher commendation. With
encouragement like that, I felt that I could take my pen and
murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and the
interests of the paper demanded it.
