University of Virginia Library

The Chicago Tribune
24 December 1871
"MARK TWAIN."
A Few More Passages from the Great Humorist's Lecture at the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church — Lake Tahoe and Camp Life in Its Vicinity — Remarkable Recovery of an Invalid — Hunting Rocky Mountain Sheep — Mark's Great Sand Shifter — Duelling at Virginia City.

We have already given liberal extracts from the lecture which Mark Twain delivered in this city on Monday evening. The matter pans out so well, both in a literary and humorous point of view, that we append a few more passages taken from the copious notes of our reporter:

LAKE TAHOE.

One of the most attractive portions of the lecture, and also one of the most polished, was a description of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. It is situated many thousand feet above the level of the sea, and yet it never freezes. Not the thinnest film of ice is ever seen upon its surface. And yet Lake Donner, which is at about the same altitude, and not far distant, is covered thickly with ice every winter. Here is a nut for scientists to crack, said the humorist. The question is not why Lake Donner freezes, but why Lake Tahoe does not freeze. Silver mining, not furnishing the seeker after wealth very steady employment, a large portion of the time was spent in a boat on this beautiful lake. It was so clear that the pebbles on its bottom were visible at a great depth. The extreme depth of the water was about one-fourth of a mile. The audience was asked to imagine the number of church spires that could be placed one above the other before the surface was reached. The curative properties of the water, and the atmosphere of this region are most remarkable. Every consumptive invalid was urged to throw physic to the dogs and make their systems strong and perfect by a little camp life at Lake Tahoe. Said the speaker:

"If it don't cure them, I will bury them. I shall be glad to bury them — I shall be glad to do it. I will give them a funeral that will be a comfort to them as long as they live. But it will cure them. I met a man there — he had been a man once — now he was nothing but a shadow and a very poor shadow at that — and that man had come there deliberately to die, and what a sickly failure he made of it! He was in dead earnest. He had heard that this air was easy and soothing to breathe, as God knows it is; and he had simply come there to have what comfort he might whilst life ebbed away. And he had brought along a plan of his private graveyard, and pictures and drawings of different kinds of coffins and hearses, and such things, and he never did anything but sit around and study that graveyard, and figure at coffins, and such things, trying to make up his mind which kind he liked best, or which kind would be most becoming. And when I saw that man three months afterward he was chasing mountain sheep over a mountain seven miles high, with a Sharp's rifle. He did not get them, but be chased them all the same. And he has used up all his graveyards, and coffins — all his plans and pictures, for wadding — and sent for more.

"When I first saw him, his clothes hung about him — why, they did not fit him any more than a circus tent fits the tent poles, but now they clung to him like court plaster. He could hardly breathe without starting a seam. He weighed a ton — he weighed more than a ton. I throw in the odd ounces — eleven, I think it was. But I know what I am talking about, because I took him to the hay scales myself. There was a lot of us stood on there with him.

"But, really, that was a remarkable cure. I have exaggerated it a little. You might not have noticed it. But still it was a cure and a very remarkable one. I wish you would not heed my nonsense, but simply take note of my earnest word. I think if I could only persuade one invalid to go there I should feel as if I had done one thing worth having accomplished. I am really sincere about that."

ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP.

"If there is a sportsman is this audience, I say to him, shoulder your gun and go out there. It is the best hunting place on the face of the earth. You can hunt there year after year, and not find anything. You can find mountain sheep, but you cannot get near them. You can see plenty of them with a spy-glass. But that was the only game I saw that was worth speaking of, when I was there, except 'seven-up.' [For the sake of convenience, we omit the laughter, only stating that it was incessant. — REPORTER.] I will here remark that the mountain sheep is our American chamois — French pronunciation! He is the same kind they make the chamois leather of in other countries. We would here if we could catch him. He has enormous horns, and is a pretty large animal, too. He is so shy, so very shy, that it's almost impossible to get within rifle-shot of him. He inhabits the rockiest fastnesses of the mountains."

SHOVELLING SAND.

"I had to go to work in a quartz mill at $10 a week. A nice place, truly, for the proprietor of a hundred silver mines! But I was glad to get that berth. But I could not keep it. They did not want me. I did'nt know why. I was the most careful workman they had ever had. They said so. I took more pains with my work. I was shovelling sand. The technical term is "tailing." The silver rock is ground over once or twice and they clean it up and work it over again. Whenever I had a lot of that sand to shovel I was so particular that I would sit down for an hour and a half and think about the best way to shovel that sand. And if I could not cipher it out in my mind just so, I would not go shovelling it around heedless. I would leave it alone until next day. Many a time when I would be carrying a bucket full of sand from one pile to another, thirty or forty feet off, right in the middle, suddenly, a new idea would strike me, and I would carry that sand back, and sit down and think about it, and like enough get so wrought up, and absorbed in it, that I would go to sleep. Why, I always knew there must be some tip-top, first-rate way to move that sand. At last I discovered it. I went to the boss, and told him that I had got just the thing, the very best and quickest way to get that sand from one pile to the other. And he says, 'I am awful glad to hear it.' You never saw a man so uplifted as he was. It appeared to take a load off his breast — a load of sand, I suppose. And I said — 'What you want now is a cast iron pipe about 13 or 14 feet in diameter, and, say, 42 feet long. And you want to prop one end of that pipe up, about 35 or 40 feet off the ground. And then you want a revolving belt — just work it with the waste steam from the engine — a revolving belt with a revolving chair to it. I am to sit in that chair, and have a Chinaman down there to till up the bucket with sand, and pass it up as I come around, [illustrates with gestures] and I am just to soar up there and tilt it into that pipe, and there you are. It is as easy as rolling off a log.

"You never saw a man so overcome with admiration — so overwhelmed. Before he knew what he was about he discharged me."

THE CODE DUELLO.

From Esmarelda, the scene of his mining exploits, Mark went to Virginia City. Here he held a reportorial position on one of the papers for three years. After deserting the mining speculation, and the collapse that followed it, he said: "That was a singular town. They had some of the strangest customs — some of the most curious customs. When I finished reporting on that paper they made me chief editor. I lasted just a week. I edited that paper six days, and then I had five duels on my hands. I wouldn't have minded that if it had been the custom for those other people to challenge me. Then I would have simply have declined with thanks. But it was not so. If you abused a man in the paper, if you called him names — they had no rights there such as we have here — it the men didn't like it, you had to challenge him, and shoot him. Of course I didn't want to do this, but the publisher said it was the custom — society must be protected. If I could not do the duties of my position, he would have to hire somebody else.

"I didn't mind the first three or four men; but the other man — I was after him. I knew he didn't want to fight so I was going to make all the reputation out of him I could. He got touched at something I said about him — I don't know what it was now — I called him a thief, perhaps. He fought very shy of me at first, and so I plied him with bloodthirsty challenges all the more. At last be began to take an interest in this thing. It seemed as though he really was going to enter into it at last. All our boys were delighted at the prospect, but I was not. This was not a turn I was expecting in things.

"I had taken for my second a fiery, peppery little fellow, named Steve, full of fight, and anxious to have this thing fixed up right away. He took me over into a little ravine beyond the town to practice. It was the custom to fight with Colt's navy revolvers at five steps. We borrowed a stable door for a mark from a gentleman who was absent. We set up that stable door, and then we propped a fence rail up against the middle of it to represent my antagonist, and put a squash on it to represent his head. He was a very light thin man, very thin — the poorest kind of material for a duel — you could not expect to do anything with a scattering shot at all. But he made a splendid line shot, and it was the line that that I practiced principally.

"But there was no success about it. I could not hit the rail, and there was no need that I should hit the rail; the rail did not really represent him. It was a little too thin and narrow. But the squash was all right. Well, I could not hit the rail, and I could not hit the squash, and, finally, when I found I could not hit the door either, I got a little discouraged. But when I noticed that I crippled one of the boys occasionally, I thought it was not so bad — I was dangerous with a pistol, but not reliable.

"Finally, we heard some shooting going on over in the other ravine. We knew what that meant. The other party was practicing. I didn't feel comfortable. They might straggle over the ridge, and see what was going on, and when they saw no bullet-hole in that barn door, it would be too much encouragement for them. Just then a little bird, a little larger than a sparrow, lit on a sage bush near by. Steve whipped out his revolver and shot its head off. The boys picked up the bird, and were talking about it, when the other duelling party came over the ridge, and came down to see what was going on. When the second saw the bird he said, 'How far off was that?' Steve said about thirty steps. 'Who did that?' 'Why, Twain, my man, of course.' 'Did he, indeed! can he do that often?' 'Well, he can do that about four times in five.'

"I knew that little rascal was lying, but I didn't like to tell him so. I was one of those kind of men that don't like to be too frank or too familiar in a matter like that, so I didn't say anything. But it was a comfort to see those fellows under jaws drop; to see them turn blue about the gills and look sick. They went off, and got their man and took him home, and when I got home I found a little note from these parties, peremptorily declining to fight. How sore the boys were! How indignant they were! And so was I! But I was not distressed about it. I thought I could stand it, perhaps.

"Well, I was out of that scrape, and I didn't want to got into anymore of them. I turned the other four duels over to Steve, who wanted them. But when those people found out afterward that he did that shooting, he didn't get any good out of his duels. They wouldn't fight him.

"All that was in my younger days, when I didn't know much — which I do now. I didn't know any better then, but now I am bitterly opposed to duelling. I won't have anything to do with duelling. I think that duelling is immoral, and has a bad tendency, and I think it is every man's duty to frown down and discourage duelling. I do. I discourage it on all occasions. If a man were to challenge me now, I would go and take that man by the hand, and lead him to a quiet, private room — and kill him!

"Ladies and gentlemen, after thanking you very heartily for the attention you have given me this evening, I desire to wish you a very pleasant good night, and at the same time assure you earnestly that I have told nothing but the truth to-night, and I have hardly exaggerated that." [Laughter and applause.]