By early 1863 Sam had begun to wear out his welcome in Virginia City. He admitted to his mother and sister in mid-February that Goodman had given him leave, “about the first of the month, to stay twenty-four hours in Carson, and I stayed a week.” The editors may not have “much confidence in me now, he conceded. “If they have, I am proud to say it is misplaced” because, though paid six dollars a day, “I make 50 per cent profit by only doing three dollars’ worth of work.” To be sure, at the time Joe Goodman thought Sam's colleague De Quille the more promising writer. “If I had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, Dan de Quille or Sam, would become distinguished,” Goodman admitted, “I should have said De Quille. Dan was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. Of course, I recognized the unusualness of Sam's gifts, but he was eccentric and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that I should have prophesied fame for him then.” Even Sam admitted a dozen years later that the “first big compliment I ever received was that I was ‘almost worthy to write in the same column with Dan de Quille.” In the spring of 1863, moreover, some of the other locals had already begun to turn their guns on him. On April 2 the Virginia Evening Bulletin upbraided Sam for his “merciless” humor and added that “when acrimony and bitterness is [sic] exhibited, wit is no more genuine than a bar of gilded brass is gold.” He took a leave of absence from the Enterprise on May 2 and left with Clement Rice for San Francisco, his first excursion to the Bay Area. At the time, the cosmopolis had twelve daily newspapers and 231 liquor stores serving a population of 115,000, about one-sixth of them Chinese immigrants.
The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871, page 194
Sam reveled in San Francisco and indulged his taste for luxury for two months. “After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me,” he wrote in Roughing It. He “infested the opera” and “learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it.” He had “longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo. . . . I spent money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye and looked to see what might happen in Nevada.” He and Rice roomed first at the Occidental Hotel on Bush and Montgomery Streets and later at the Lick House on Sutter and Montgomery, the two toniest hotels in the city. Fitz Hugh Ludlow considered the comfort of the Occidental “like that of a royal home.” Not even in New York had Ludlow ever seen its equal “for elegance of appointment, attentiveness of servants, or excellence of cuisine.” Sam once facetiously called it the “Incidental Hotel.” He and Rice “fag ourselves completely out every day, and go to sleep without rocking, every night,” Sam wrote his family in St. Louis. “We dine out, & we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were. After breakfast, I don't often see the hotel again until midnight—or after.” They took day trips to Alameda, Benicia, Oakland, and San Leandro and frequented “the dingy horrors of San Francisco's pleasure grove, ‘the Willows,’” modeled on the Jardin Mabille in Paris. They attended an eclectic mix of high- and low-brow entertainments, both musicales at Maguire's Opera House and a variety show at the Bella Union Melodeon on Washington Street, where the ‘lovely and blooming damsels” were dressed “like so many parasols,” he reported. When he was in San Francisco in 1865, Samuel Bowles marveled at the fashionable dress of San Francisco women “when they go out to the opera, or to party, or ball. Their point lace is deeper, their moiré antique stiffer, their skirts a trifle longer, their corsage an inch lower, their diamonds more brilliant.” In one of the letters Sam sent the Enterprise from the Bay Area during these months he satirized the haute couture of the trophy wives (e.g., “Mrs. J. B. W. wore a heavy rat-colored brocade silk, and trimmed with organdy, and studded with large silver stars’),
Soon enough Sam declared his intention to return to Nevada, however. He was, after all, able to ride the wave of prosperity with less effort there than in San Francisco, whatever attractions the city held for him, and besides he had agreed to become the Virginia City correspondent of the San Francisco Morning Call. He may also have been lured back by a raise in his Enterprise salary to forty dollars a week. Virginia City was booming like never before, but he dreaded the day: “it seems like going back to prison to go back to the snows & the deserts of Washoe, after living in this Paradise,” he admitted to his mother. During these two months of prodigality and trading in mining stocks, by his own estimate he had spent eight hundred dollars and sent his mother two hundred more. He still left San Francisco with twelve hundred dollars, or so he claimed, though it is impossible now to know if he based his net worth on the real value, appraised or assessed value, or speculative value of his stocks. At the very least he owned a couple of shares in the Gould & Curry Mine. He returned to Virginia City on July 1, 1863.
(pages 196-8)
Sam and "The Unreliable" are reported in DBD to have traveled over the Henness Pass enroute to San Francisco. If so, Sam would have traveled the same route he took for the 1866 lectures in Nevada.
Sam wrote of his return over Henness Pass in a letter to the San Francisco Morning Call (July 5, 1863):
THE HENNESS PASS.
I came by the Henness Pass route. I don't like it. I brought my other shirt along, and they charged me extra baggage. Besides, [Uncle John Atchison], [Mr. Harris] and [Mr. Chapelle] were in the party, and they created a famine at every station we stopped at. They fell upon the Barnum Restaurant in Sacramento, and ate the proprietor out of house and home; then they attacked the first station this side of [Lincoln], and brought ruin and desolation upon it. I am a mighty responsible artist at a dinner-table myself, when I get a chance—but I never got one until we arrived at Lake City, on Wednesday evening. We met the down stage there, with five or six men in it who were considerably battered and bruised by a recent upset. They were unable to eat. But the landlord lost nothing by it—I disposed of those extra rations. The only man among the wounded who was seriously hurt was a Mr. Tomlinson, from Humboldt Bay—shoulder dislocated. We seventeen passengers, however, traveled without fear of accident on this part of the route—from Nevada to Tracy's—as our driver was the best in the world except Woodruff (they call him Wood), who drives on the Placerville route from Genoa or Carson to Strawberry. They gave us a fish breakfast at Hunter's, on the Truckee—trout, Uncle John said, but it was hardly tender enough for that—I expect it was whale. We dashed by the Ophir on Thursday morning at half-past eleven o'clock, twenty-nine hours out from Sacramento—which reminds me of an anecdote, one of [Mr. Merritt's, President of the Imperial Gold and Silver Mining Company].
Sam returned to San Francisco on the 8th of September. (See 62. Letter from Mark Twain 17 September 1863 ) According to Fears: "He would spend four weeks relaxing and recuperating. He moved in high society, attending the theater, attending balls, and playing billiards at the Lick House [MTL 1: 265]"