"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."
"9 January 1906: note for 251.32–38," in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. 2010
... when I came to Virginia in 1862 . . . forty dollars a week attached to it] Clemens arrived in Aurora, in the rich Esmeralda mining district claimed by both Nevada Territory and California, in April 1862. There, living hand to mouth, he immediately set about wielding pick and shovel while energetically speculating in mining “feet,” or shares, to the extent his limited funds allowed. That April he also began contributing letters, under the pen name “Josh,” to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Before the end of July, partly on the strength of the “Josh” letters, none of which survive, he was offered the post of local reporter, as a temporary substitute for the paper’s local editor, William Wright (1829–98), best known under his pen name, “Dan De Quille.” By late September 1862, having failed to strike it rich in Aurora, Clemens had relocated to Virginia City and was reporting for the Enterprise. His earliest extant articles appeared in the paper on 1 October 1862 (see ET&S1, 389–91). He remained on the Enterprise staff until he left Virginia City for San Francisco in late May 1864. For his vivid accounts of his experiences in Aurora and Virginia City see his letters of the period (10? Apr 1862 to OC through 28 May 1864 to Cutler, L1, 184–301) and chapters 35–37, 40–49, 51–52, and 54–55 of Roughing It.