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.
From Austin E. Hutcheson, The Twainian Volume 8 Number 5 (1949)
Excerpt from Twain's Letters in San Francisco Call While a Reporter on The Enterprise
"Home Again,” the first Twain letter in the Call of July 9, 1863, herewith printed, was dated at Virginia City, July 5. On his return from his visit to San Francisco, Twain found B and C Streets swarming with men, horses, wagons and pack trains, which block traffic and cause an “infernal racket.” “O, for the solitude of Montgomery Street again!” in San Francisco. Building has been fearfully increased, the number of houses doubled without extending the boundaries of the city. Maguire has erected a spacious and beautiful theater on D Street, exactly after the pattern of his Opera House in San Francisco, and nightly it is crowded with admirers of Mr. Frank Mayo, Mrs. Julia Dean Hayne and other “theatricides” whose names are familiar to Californians.
Twain had returned by the Henness Pass route—north of Carson Pass, Lake Tahoe and Donner Pass—on the same stage with John Atchison, owner of the Buckeye Mill at Washoe City, Harris of the Coover and Harris Mill at Silver City, and other notables. Seventeen in all, his stage fellow-passengers had created a famine at every stage station. They met a stage which had suffered an upset. (Hank Monk, who drove Greeley on his famous stage ride from Carson to Placerville as described by Twain in “Roughing It,” was justly famed for his skill as a driver. He never suffered an upset, and for this received a gold watch, today in the Reno State Museum, from Senator George Hearst and others.) “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.”
See Barbara Schmidt's transcription of the letter at Twain Quotes
Mark Twain would write a few years later, in 1868, that he actually preferred the Henness Pass route over the much quicker incomplete Central Pacific Railroad line, which he took between San Francisco and Nevada on his Pilgrim's Life Tour.
July 2, 1863: Virginia City: The Twainian (Volume 11 Number 1, 1952) has letters to The Call from July 9 to 23, 1863.
July 26, White House Hotel fire:
From The Twainian Volume 11 number 2 (1952)
Mark Twain's Letters to San Francisco Call (July 30, 1863)
...
Apology For A Letter (July 26)
I just send this to show that I had commenced my regular letter, though I was never permitted to finish it, because of that fire at the White House, yesterday. I discovered that the room under mine was on fire, gave the alarm, and went down to see how extensive it was likely to be. I thought I had plenty of time, then, and went back and changed my boots. The correctness of my judgment is apparent in this instance; for, so far from having a week to fool around in, I came near not escaping from the house at all. I started to the door with my trunk, but I couldn’t stand the smoke, wherefore I abandoned that valuable piece of furniture in the hall, and returned and jumped out at the window. But I gathered up my San Francisco letter and shoved it into my pocket. Now do you know that trunk was utterly consumed, together with its contents, consisting of a pair of socks, a package of love-letters, and $300,000 worth of “wildcat” stocks? Yes, sir, it was; and I am a bankrupt community. Plug hat, numerous sets of complete harness—all broadcloth— lost—eternally lost. However, the articles were borrowed, as a general thing. I don’t mind losing them. But I had notes burned up there, from which I meant to elaborate a letter which all San Francisco would have read and been the better for it—been redeemed by it—so to speak. I had gossip in abundance, concerning San Francisco people sojourning among us. What I lost by the fire don’t amount to a great deal, but what they have lost in the non-completion of that letter, it is impossible to estimate. I started out with an apology—if I have done so, well; if I have not, I’m d-d if I read this note again to find it out.
MARK TWAIN
From The Twainian Volume 11 Number 2 (1952)
San Francisco Call Vol. XIV. No. 63
Thursday Morning, August 13, 1863
“MARK TWAIN’S” LETTER.
(Regular Correspondence of the Daily Call.)
Virginia City, August 8, 1863.
I hope it will afford you some gratification to know that I have a cough, and a cold in my head, and a sore throat, and a voice like a trombone; for, verily, it affords me none. I feel as cheerful as a funeral. However, Lake Bigler will restore me to the full enjoyment of a life of virtue and usefulness tomorrow.
The City of Virginia.
From an article written by Mr. Boruck, of the Spirit of the Times, I gather the following facts concerning Virginia. They will be interesting to such of our citizens as are sojourning in San Francisco, and also instructive to your own: “In all those which go to make up a great commercial and business emporium, Virginia is the second city on the pacific coast. Her population is nearly double that of Sacramento; is double that of Portland, Oregon, and is four times as great as that of Stockton or Marysville. Taking in the population of Gold Hill, which stands in the same relation to Virginia that the Mission Dolores does to San Francisco, we have at least twenty thousand inhabitants. This is well for a city only three years old. Did San Francisco surpass these figures in her infancy? The city contains upwards of twenty-eight hundred wooden houses, five of stone, eighty-seven of brick, already completed, twenty-eight in an unfinished state, and contracts out for thirty-seven more. The brick edifices are of all sorts and sizes, ranging from modest one story-and-a-half affairs affairs to imposing four-story buildings worthy of Montgomery street. Last year, the taxable property of Virginia amounted to six millions of dollars. This year it is eleven millions.” Permit one more extract: “The amount of business done in Virginia is positively immense and astonishing. It never ceases, and seems to grow by what it feeds on. In extent, value, and constancy, it is more like a city of ten times its age and population. It is remarkable in all the phases it presents, and is another high and enduring monument to the energy and enterprise of the American people. The completion of the Central Railroad will make Virginia a gigantic inland metropolis, and, independent of that, what I have already seen assures me that, five years from the present writing, by means of its own natural growth, it will have attained a population of forty or fifty thousand inhabitants.” That prophecy is certainly within bounds, and will infallibly be fulfilled.
August 11, Left for Lake Bigler (Tahoe)
August 12-16, Lake Tahoe
August 17, Steamboat Springs
From The Twainian Volume 11 Number 2 (1952)
San Francisco Call Vol. XIV. No. 78
Sunday Morning, August 30, 1863
“MARK TWAIN’S” LETTER.
(Regular Correspondence of the Daily Call.)
Steamboat Springs Hotel, August 20, 1863.
“Mark” Gets Invalided and Goes To Tahoe.
Editors Morning Call:—Some things are inevitable. If you tell a girl she is pretty, she will “let on” that she is offended; if seventeen men travel by stage-coach, they will grumble because they cannot all have outside seats; if you leave your room vacant all the forenoon to give the chambermaid a chance to put it in order, you will find that urbane but inflexible officer ready to begin her labors there at the exact moment of your return. These are patent—but I am able to add another to the list of inevitable things: If you get a week’s leave of absence for a visit to Lake-Bigler, or to Steamboat Springs, you will transcend the limits of your furlough. I speak from personal knowledge. I carried over to the lake a heavy cold, and acted so imprudently during a week, that it constantly grew heavier and heavier—until at last it came near outweighing me. Lake Bigler is a paradise to a healthy person, but there is too much sailing, and fishing, and other dissipation of a similar nature going on there to allow a man with a cold time to nurse it properly.
From Thence to Steamboat Springs.
I was exceedingly sorry to leave the place, but I knew if I staid there, and nothing interfered with my luck, I should die before my time—wherefore I journeyed back over the mountains last Monday, and have since been an interesting invalid at Steamboat Springs. These are boiling hot, and emit steam enough to run all the mills in the Territory. Learned men say the water is heated by a combination of combustible chemicals— the unlearned say it is done by a combination of combustible devils. However, like Governor Roop, I consider that it is no business of mine to inquire into the means which the Creator has seen fit to make use of in the consummation of his will regarding this or any other portion of his handiwork. [In reference to “The Great Landslide Case”]...
The Hotel and Its Occupants,
But I digress. Being in the vicinity of Dick Sides’ ranch, overcame me with the memories of other days. As I was saying, these Springs are situated in Steamboat Valley, something over twenty miles from Carson, and about half that distance from Gold Hill and Virginia, and are visited daily by stage-coaches from those places. There is a hospital, kept by Dr. Ellis, the proprietor of the Springs, which is neat, roomy and well-ventilated. The Steamboat Springs Hotel, kept by Mr. Stowe and Mr. Holmes, formerly of Sacramento, is capable of accommodating a great many guests, and has constantly a large number within its walls; the table is not as good as that at the Occidental, but the sleeping apartments are unexceptionable. In the bath houses near the hospital, twelve persons may bathe at once, or four times that number if they be individuals who like company. There are about thirty-five patients, suffering under all kinds and degrees of affliction, in the hospital at present; there are also several at the hotel. Some walk with canes, some with crutches, some limp about without artificial assistance, and some do not pretend to walk at all, and look dejected and baggy; they mope about languidly and slowly; there is no eagerness in their eyes, and in their faces only sad indifference; the features of some are marred by old sores, and—but if it is all the same to you, I will speak of pleasanter things. The steam baths here restore to health, or at best afford relief, to all classes of patients but consumptives. These must seek assistance elsewhere. Erysipelas, rheumatism, and most other human distempers, have been successfully treated here for three years. Scarcely a case has been lost; the majority are sent home entirely cured, and none go away without having derived some benefit.
The Effect of a Bath,
The boiling, steaming Springs send their jets of white vapor up out of fissures in the earth, extending in an irregular semi-circle for more than a mile; the water has a sulphurous smell, and a crust, composed of sulphur and other villanous drugs, is deposited by it in the beds of the little streams that flow from the Springs. The Indians (who don’t mind an offinsive smell, you know,) boil their meat, when they have any, poor devils! in this sickening water. When you are shut up in the little dark bath rooms, with a dense cloud of scalding steam rising up around you and compelling you to schottische whether you want to or not, you are obliged to keep your mouth open or smother, and this enables you to taste copper, and sulphur, and ipecac, and turpentine, and blood, hair and corruption—not to mention the multitude of other ghastly tastes in the steam which you cannot recollect the names of. And when you come out, and before you get to the cold shower-bath, you notice that you smell like a buzzard’s breath, and are disgusted with your own company; but after your clothes are on again, you feel as brisk and vigorous as an acrobat, and your disrespect for the fragrant bath lingers with you no longer.
...
August 23, Virginia City
September 5, Depart Virginia City for Carson, stayed the night with Orion and Mollie
September 6, Depart Carson on the Pioneer Stage for Sacramento
September 7, Sacramento
September 8, San Francisco and the Lick House
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]"
On October 9, Sam departed San Francisco for Carson City.