175.13 “Esmeralda” had just had a run] The principal town in the Esmeralda mining district was Aurora (claimed by both California and Nevada, until the resolution of the boundary dispute in the fall of 1863), which was located in the Sierra Nevada foothills about a hundred miles southeast of Carson City (see supplement B, map 3). Following the organization of the district in August 1860, Aurora experienced a boom, reaching a population of nearly two thousand by August 1861. Typical of the glowing reports from the area is this one from the Carson City Silver Age for early September: “Now is the time for capitalists to invest. Ground that can be bought at the present time for ten and fifteen dollars, in six months cannot be bought for five times that amount” (“Summary of Mining News,” Mining and Scientific Press 4 [5 Oct 61]: 5, reprinting the Carson City Silver Age; Kelly 1862,14,238–42; Paher, 466). Spurred by such reports, Clemens visited Aurora briefly in September 1861, returning in April 1862 for a five-month stay. Aurora’s prosperity reached its peak in early 1864; by the spring of 1865 half the population had left (L1, 122, 184–241; Angel, 418).
Chapter 26: note for 175.13," in Roughing It : an electronic text. 2016
"When Clemens arrived, Aurora consisted of about 3,000 men living in canvas tents, dugouts in the hillsides, wooden shacks and out in the open. With the recent stage service from Carson City, 25-30 newcomers arrived each day. Brick buildings, a symbol of faith in a mining camp, were rapidly being thrown up. Like other mining camps, Aurora was far from a supplu point. Food, feed and mining supplies were hauled 130 miles from Carson City. Food prices were high and the cost of feeding a horse for a week was astronomical." (Williams pg 12)
From Mark Twain's Aurora Cabins :
This once prosperous mining town had a population of over 5,000 at the height of the Civil War. By 1865 the town’s fortunes plummeted when the mines ran out of gold ore. Today it is deserted and its buildings are gone. The cabins where 26 year-old Sam Clemens wrote newspaper stories during the summer of 1862 that led to his first writing job have not only completely disappeared, their locations in Aurora have been lost and forgotten.
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[Sam] took up residence in Aurora during the spring of 1862, so he could personally attend to the many mining claims he and his brother had purchased. His first job at Aurora was as a miner digging and blasting tunnels in some of their more promising claims. Unfortunately, neither his labor as a miner, nor his speculation in Aurora’s mines, provided any income. Since his only paying job “as a common laborer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board” lasted only a week, Sam lived on money sent to him by his brother in Carson City.
The Clemens’s failure at Aurora was not unique as only about one in a thousand of Aurora’s countless mining claims ever amounted to anything.
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During the great stock fever of 1862, ‘63 and ‘64, the credulous and then comparatively inexperienced people of California were most wretchedly humbugged and swindled by having wild cats [worthless mines] of all kinds, sizes and colors palmed off upon them as genuine mines by unscrupulous stock sharps and swindlers.
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...Clemens began sending stories about mining life in Aurora under the pen name “Josh" to the editor of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Mark Twain described the importance of these letters ten years later in his book Roughing It: 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.
Sam's letters to the Enterprise so impressed the editor Joseph Goodman, he was offered a job as a local reporter in the fall of 1862.
Calvin Higbie, Clemens’s cabin mate and best friend in Aurora, witnessed Sam’s beginnings as a writer. In a 1920 article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “Mark Twain’s Partner,” Higbie states:
After we had lost out at the Wide West [mine] Sam began making his first attempts at literature. As he sat in the corner riding the bunk and spinning yarns for dear life he would stop suddenly, get out a little book, jot down something that occurred to him, and then go on with his story. I learned afterward that he was writing articles for the Virginia City Enterprise, which finally resulted in his going to work for that paper.
…. Clemens’s “first attempts at literature” at Aurora were undertaken while living in a small one-room cabin, like thousands of other miners across the Nevada and California frontier. Miners like Clemens lived in and around Aurora, in every conceivable kind of dwelling. One of the best descriptions of how these cabins were built comes from J. Ross Browne who visited Aurora and nearby Bodie, California in 1864.
Usually it is constructed of the materials nearest at hand. Stone and mud answer for the walls where wood is scarce; but if wood be abundant, a kind of stockade is formed of logs placed close together and upright in the ground. The roof is made of clap-boards, or rough shingles, brush-wood covered with sod, canvas, or anything else that may be available. I have seen roofs constructed of flour-sacks, cast-off shirts, coats, and pantaloons, all sewed together like a home-made quilt. Rawhide, with big stones on the corners, is very good in dry countries, but it is apt to become flabby and odorous in damp climates. The chimney is the most imposing part of the house. Where the location permits, the cabin is backed up against a bluff, so as to afford a chance for a substantial flue by merely cutting a hole through the bank; but where such natural facilities do not exist, the variety of material used in the construction of chimneys is wonderful. Stone, wood, scraps of sheet-iron, adobe-bricks, mud, whisky-barrels, nail-kegs, and even canvas, are the component parts."
…
Although Clemens owned portions of many mining claims, he never owned residential property in Aurora. He lived in at least two, possibly three, different cabins during his stay in the community. He shared cabins with Horatio G. Phillips, Calvin H. Higbie, Daniel H. Twing, and Robert M. Howland, all recent emigrants to Aurora from various mining districts in California.
Clemens’s first residence in Aurora was a cabin owned by his friend and fellow mining partner Horatio Phillips. Referred to by Clemens as “Raish” or “Ratio” in the letters he wrote from Aurora, Phillips was a friend he met in Carson City during a political convention in August 1861. In his second letter to his brother from Aurora, Clemens states “I am living with ‘Ratio Phillips.” Phillips and Clemens were most likely sharing this cabin with their mining partner Bob Howland.
Sometime during June or July Clemens had a falling out with Phillips and moved in with Calvin Higbie, his next-door neighbor and friend. “He [Phillips] is ad—d rascal, and I can get the signatures of 25 men to this sentiment whenever I want them.”'* Clemens first mentioned Higbie in a July 9 letter to his brother: “A friend of mine, C.H. Higbie . . .” In the same letter he complained about writing in a cabin: “Besides, I have no private room, and it is a torture to write when there is a crowd around, as it is the case here [in a cabin], always.” At the time Clemens moved in with Higbie, fellow mining partner Daniel Twing owned two lots adjacent to the Phillips’s lot. Because Higbie did not own residential property in Aurora until he bought Twing’s lots in August 1862, Higbie and Clemens were probably living in one of Twing’s cabins.
...
The cabin’s canvas roof and log siding pictured in the illustration from Roughing It are likely accurate, because Mark Twain was involved with the work’s many drawings and “clearly attended closely to the illustrations as they appeared in proof.” In his autobiography, Clemens described what it was like to live in the tiny cabin he shared with Higbie.
Higbie and I were living in a cotton-domestic lean-to at the base of a mountain [Lover’s Leap]. It was very cramped quarters, with barely room for us and the stove – wretched quarters, indeed, for every now and then, between eight in the morning and eight in the evening, the thermometer would make an excursion of fifty degrees. We had a silver-mining claim under the edge of a hill [Last Chance Hill] half a mile away in partnership with Bob Howland and Horatio Phillips, and we used to go there every morning, carrying with us our luncheon, and remain all day picking and blasting in our shaft, hoping, despairing, hoping again, and gradually but surely running out of funds.”
Higbie also described his cabin in a 1920 Saturday Evening Post article:
Soon after [Higbie arrived in Aurora], I acquired a large lot in the lower end of town with a cabin on the rear end of it. Our new home was just eleven feet square on the outside, constructed of slabs and with a canvas roof. It had, I remember, four pairs of rafters. I put a small stove in one corner, a small table in another, and a rude bunk of willow poles in the third. As a door occupied the forth corner there was barely room to thread one’s way amongst all this furniture.
.. Twas right on the main road leading to Bodie [Spring Street], I was young and strong, and healthy. I had every prospect of making my fortune within a short time, and I wouldn’t have traded that little shack for a mansion on Fifth Avenue, New York.
It is interesting to note that Clemens never mentioned living with Higbie in any of the letters he wrote while he was living in Aurora.
Clemens did, however, mention living with Daniel Twing in a letter to his sister: Dan Twing and I and Dan’s dog, “cabin” together - and will continue to do so for awhile -until I leave for- [presumably the White Mountain district, a trip he made soon after this letter was written]
The mansion is 10 x 12, with a “domestic” [canvas] roof. Yesterday it rained- the first shower for five months. “Domestic,” it appears to me, is not water-proof. We went outside to keep from getting wet. Dan makes the bed when it is his turn to do it -and when it is my turn, I don’t you know. The dog is not a good hunter, and he isn’t worth shucks to watch -but he scratches up the dirt floor of the cabin, and catches flies, and makes himself generally useful in the way of washing dishes. Dan gets up first in the morning and makes a fire -and I get up last and sit by it, while he cooks breakfast.
The last cabin Clemens may have occupied while he lived in Aurora was owned by Robert Howland. This cabin was supposedly moved by Clemens and Howland from Aurora’s “China garden” section, at the west end of town, to the east side of town. Clemens never mentioned living in a cabin owned by Howland. The source of this story is Howland who, during a trip to Aurora in 1879, was featured in an Esmeralda Herald article:
This gentleman arrived in town last Wednesday. He was on his way to Bodie and beyond, but upon arriving here concluded to stay a few days and look the old stamping-ground over. In years gone by, when Aurora was in its flush days and the inhabitants numbered in the thousands, Bob [Howland] and Mark Twain were pards here. Their old cabin, which they moved from below the China garden, still stands at the head of Pine street, and Bob showed us the very flag-pole he had nailed to the rafters fifteen years ago.”
... During the summer of 1862 this area was home to many miners who, like Clemens, lived in crudely made shanties. After Aurora’s population tripled about a year later, many of these shacks were replaced with businesses including a blacksmith shop, lumberyard, stable, slaughterhouse, and brewery. Most of these businesses, as well as the remaining miners, left this part of Aurora when the mining boom collapsed in the mid 1860s. A few years later this part of town was referred to as “China garden” after a small population of Chinese occupied the area. By 1915, the area was abandoned. Today, the “China garden” section of Aurora is part of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.
Mark Twain's "Authentic" Cabin:
... this building was located on the north side of Pine Street at the east end of town on the lot once owned by Howland. It is unlikely, however, that Clemens ever occupied this particular structure. The deed records previously mentioned indicate Howland did not own a lot on the north side of Pine while Clemens was living in Aurora. More important, the “Mark Twain Cabin” structure shown in the early photographs was most likely used as the District Recorder’s office during the 1860s, not as a residence. According the following story “which circulated for a number of years” Mark Twain never lived in a cabin with a roof:
It seems a shingle was taken from the roof [presumably from Howland’s cabin] and mailed to Clemens with a note saying he would probably like to have a piece of his old Esmeralda home. His reply was since there was no roof on his residence, there were therefore no shingles!"
According to a newspaper story by Dan De Quille, Mark Twain’s friend and former Enterprise associate, the “Mark Twain Cabin” at Aurora was still in pretty good shape in 1878:
Mark Twain’s Cabin- The cabin in which Mark Twain lived when he was an “honest miner” is still standing at Aurora in a tolerable state of preservation. The back end, which extended into the side of the hill, and was made of stones laid up with mud, has fallen in, but the front and sides, which were of rough lumber, still stand. The door is gone, little of the roof is left and what remains of the structure has a decided “dip” to the southwest.”
Although it is not clear which particular cabin this article referred to, the story was probably written about Howland’s old cabin on Pine Street because the description included walls made of “rough lumber.”
The growing worldwide fame and popularity of Mark Twain during the early 1900s made the cabin he supposedly lived in on Aurora’s Pine Street a boon to the few residents who still inhabited this once prosperous mining camp. Tourists from across the country made the long and arduous journey to this remote part of Nevada just to see his famous cabin, and “genuine” Mark Twain souvenirs were regularly sold to gullible tourists. According to a Nevada State Journal article, written after Twain’s death in 1910, souvenir hunters regularly tore off parts of his famous cabin:
In appearance it is a plain two-room affair with a small front stoop, and it appears upon the county assessor’s tax roll from year to year and up to the present time as ‘Mark Twain’s lot and cabin on Pine Street’. . .. it has been necessary to repair and reshingle it many times as tourists and relic hunters have stripped it bit by bit, of small pieces, parts of locks, hinges, a shingle or sliver of wood.”
Public concern for the preservation of the now famous cabin began to grow, particularly after Mark Twain’s death in 1910. By 1924, the Reno Chamber of Commerce proposed moving the cabin from Aurora to Reno as part of the upcoming 1927 T i Highway Exposition. A Nevada State Journal article, published in November of that same year, mentioned that Nevada Governor James G. Scrugham and Reno Mayor E. E. Roberts “assisted materially” in arranging the cabin’s move. The article went on to state that those involved with the relocation were convinced Mark Twain once lived in the cabin:
The authenticity of the Mark Twain cabin has been proved beyond a doubt and [Fried] Walker said yesterday that he has the table at which Mark Twain wrote “Roughing It” and many more of his most scintillating stories while he was a prospector at Aurora.”
Fried (short for Sigfried) Walker may not have been the best source for verifying the authenticity of the cabin, and he might not have actually had the table where Mark Twain wrote Roughing It. Walker was one of a handful of colorful characters who inhabited Aurora after it became a ghost town in the early 1920s. He was born in Switzerland and immigrated to Aurora in 1903, some forty years after Clemens had departed from Aurora. Walker lived in the town for fifty years and was referred to by many as “the mayor of Aurora.” He was Aurora’s “last inhabitant” when he died in 1955 at the age of ninety-one. “
Mark Twain's Cabin” was dismantled in Aurora and loaded on two large trucks bound for Reno in the fall of 1924. It arrived at Reno’s Idlewild Park on November 25. Sadly, over the next twenty five years, the cabin “was slowly dismembered piece by piece by souvenir hunters and skaters from the nearby pond” until it was “reported to have disappeared altogether” by the early 1950s.