The Truth About That Humboldt Trip
As Told by Gus Oliver to A. B. Paine
by Wesley A. DeLaney
The Twainian Volume 7 Number 3 (1948)
Judge A. W. (GUS) OLIVER, immortalized as “Oliphant” in “Roughing It” and as “The Uncomplaining Man” in Chapter XXVII of “Innocents Abroad,” has long departed for his abode in that celestial Virginia City—or wherever erstwhile Washoe friends of Mark Twain foregather after death. It is to be regretted that this pioneer judge of early Nevada never got around to the writing of his memoirs. His sidelights on frontier history and frontier jurisprudence would be invaluable to present-day students of Twainiana and the old West.
There has fortunately been preserved a reminiscent letter Judge Oliver wrote to Albert Bigelow Paine about Mark Twain and from which excerpts are quoted in the “Biography” (Chapter XXXIII, Vol. I, pp. 183-187). In the interest of Twain research the entire letter is herewith published with a modicum of annotation necessary to preface it.
Gus Oliver was in Carson City reporting the Territorial Legislature for the Alta California when he first met Sam Clemens in August, 1861, soon after the arrival, overland, of Sam and his brother, Orion, in that city. Oliver, a lawyer just out of school, had come, by way of California, to the newly organized Territory of Nevada to launch his career, gaining a livelihood from a newspaper job until he could get started in his chosen field.
The silver rush to the Nevada mines in 1859-1860 has more aptly been described as “the backwash of the gold rush to California.” Hundreds of miners, professional men (like Gus Oliver and Billy Clagget), gamblers, swindlers and other flotsam and jetsam of humanity came over the divide from California. “Washoe County” became the Mecca of the seekers of fortune the world over.. The Alta California had not hesitated to engage the educated, enterprising young lawyer Oliver as its Nevada correspondent. The historical goings-on of that first Nevada Territorial Legislature that had been convoked on October 1, 1861, by Territorial Secretary Orion Clemens, were of paramount news interest to California readers.
At the time Nevada was organized as a territory, the extreme western portion was locally considered as a part of California, known as “Washoe County,” although the civil government had been under the jurisdiction of the Territory of Utah. President Buchanan signed the bill creating the Territory of Nevada on March 2, 1861, as one of the last important measures of his administration. It was left for President Lincoln to organize the new Territory. James W. Nye of New York was appointed Governor and Orion Clemens, a brother of Mark Twain, was appointed Secretary of the Territory.
Orion Clemens had secured his appointment through his friendship with Edward Bates in whose St. Louis law office he had studied. Bates, being influential in national politics, had become Attorney General in Lincoln's cabinet. When impecunious Orion was given the appointment he didn’t have the means to pay his overland stagecoach fare to Nevada.. Sam agreed to pay the fares if he could be the secretary to the Secretary of the Territory—he had, fortunately, saved some money from his earnings of $250 a month as Mississippi River pilot, left jobless with the outbreak of the Civil War.
Although Orion and his brother—printer, pilot and late “second lieutenant,” C.S.A, had themselves only arrived at Carson on August 14, 1861, Mark, in “Innocents Abroad,” unblushingly portrayed Gus Oliver as the tenderfoot: “He (Gus) found that country, and our ways of life there, in those early days, different from life in New England or Paris. But he put on a woolen shirt and strapped a navy revolver to his person, took to the bacon and beans of the country, and determined to do in Nevada as Nevada did.”
The fact is that Gus actually had been a resident of Carson for some two weeks preceding the arrival there of our hero, who, with his stogy shoes, Kentucky jean pants, hickory shirt and straw hat, was himself equally as strange to this young town of Carson with its motley population of 1466 rugged, dynamic pioneers.
The ambitious Oliver had somehow wangled from Governor Nye an appointment as Probate Judge in the newly created Humboldt county. This county had come into existence in the summer of '61 through a rush to a silver strike in Star Canyon, situated in the Humboldt mountains east of the Humboldt river on the Overland Trail, a few miles east of what is now Rye Patch.
On November 25, 1861, the swiftly functioning Legislature had divided the Territory into nine counties, and four days later fixed the county seat of each one. Five of these counties bordered California on the west. Three of the counties to the east--Humboldt, Churchill and Esmeralda -- extended from the Oregon state line to the northern boundary of New Mexico and included about four-fifths of the total area of Nevada. Humboldt county, named for the river that coursed through it, was second only to Esmeralda in size. Unionville, then a mining community with but eleven cabins, was made its county seat and owing to the fact that a majority of the first residents were Confederates, the settlement was first called Dixie. Later, as Union men gained the majority, the town’s name was changed to Unionville.
It was as the newly-appointed Probate Judge of vast Humboldt county that Gus Oliver joined the famous prospecting party — the “Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-Tillou combination” — that left Carson, headed for Unionville, in early December, 1861.
Sam Clemens, of course, had but one purpose in joining the expedition—to mine silver. He had come to Nevada as secretary to the Secretary of the Territory. It was agreeable to everyone that he should have the job but when he and Orion had digested the book of instructions for the Territorial Secretary which “were so numerous,” Mark said, “that the two of them had to read a chapter for breakfast every morning,” they found that there was no salary provided for the secretary to the Secretary. Sam soon discovered that he had little to do. That was agreeable to him, but the lack of income for doing it was not. The Comstock stock was booming. Frenzy shook the land—south in Esmeralda county and north in Humboldt county.
In the early winter of 1861, Sam was at first lured by tales of rich strikes in Esmeralda, but Humboldt exerted a more powerful spell—the Territorial Enterprise had just announced: “A week or two ago an assay .. . made returns of $7,000 to the ton.” Conjuring up visions of vast riches, Mark straightway decided to prospect in the Humboldt district when he learned that William H. (Billy) Clagget, an old friend whom he had known back in Keokuk, was making preparations to go to Unionville, a formidable 200 miles northward.
Clagget, a young lawyer and son of the famous Judge Clagget of Iowa, had visions of the right handsome returns of a Notary Public commission in the new county of Humboldt. Later on in life, Billy conceived the madcap scheme of striking it rich by rejuvenating hundreds of thousands of acres of worn-out land in Virginia with the alkali soil of Nevada, but abandoned the idea when he found that he had overlooked the stupendous freight costs from Nevada to Virginia on the millions of pounds of soil that would be required.
The fourth member of the celebrated combination was one Cornbury Tillou, Mark Twain's famed blacksmith, “Ballou”—an elderly Frenchman who was a veteran miner and a sort of jack-of- all-trades.
Mark Twain with his three companions, team of horses and wagon, set out from Carson for Unionville on a chilly December afternoon of the winter of 61-62—an intolerably severe one in Nevada.. The Paiute Indians suffered intensely from the cold, and again they held the white men responsible. These Indians were well armed—good fighters, deadly marksmen with bows and arrows. The route to Humboldt, some two miles northeast of Carson, followed down the Carson river to Ragstown, cut across the Forty-Mile Desert to the Humboldt Meadows, where the road turned eastward toward the Humboldt mountains for some twenty miles.
The four travelers rode in style at the start, but soon climbed out of the wagon—first to walk, then to push. “We really could have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until too late, so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when we might have saved half the labor.”
All the world is familiar with Mark Twain's hilarious account of this trek to the Humboldt mines and of the Humboldt mining experience, set forth in “Roughing It.” Mark’s letter to his mother, dated Carson City, Jan. 30, 1862, published in the Keokuk Gate City, also described the adventure. This letter was dutifully written the day following his arrival in Carson after enduring the hardships of the return trip from Unionville.
Judge Oliver, whom Mark accused of being “very fond of digging poetry out of himself—or blasting it out when it comes hard,” had a keen appreciation of his friend's extravaganza as a fellow artist striving for literary effect, but in order to set the record straight, disclaims in his letter to Paine the presence of cows or women in Unionville. In the words of Paine: “The cow was perhaps only a literary cow, though in any case it will long survive. Judge Oliver’s name will go down with it to posterity.” When that “literary cow” crashed through the canvas roof of Oliver’s cabin—the denouement in Mark’s tall tale of the "uncomplaining man” in "Innocents Abroad”—Mark affirmed that Oliver “resigned his judgeship and left Humboldt county.” Again for the record, it should be mentioned that Gus Oliver was re-elected Probate Judge of Humboldt county in September, '63, and again in January, ’64,
Mark’s sojourn in the lower Humboldt country ended within a month —an unlucky venture for him. He departed for Carson in company with the “fat-witted arrogant Prussian named Ollendorf (Capt. Hugo Pfersdorff)”" and “Ballou” (Cornbury Tillou). He remained a brief time in Carson and then moved south to the Esmeralda country where he hoped his properties would make him and Orion millionaires within months.
Although abandoned by Mark Twain, Unionville later had its boom years. Billy Clagget remained after Mark's departure and within three years had become widely known as the brilliant lawyer and marvelous orator of Humboldt county, according to the late Judge C. C. Goodwin who did a sketch of him in “As I Remember Them.” He served three terms in the Nevada Territorial Legislature and about 1866 was a candidate for Congress.. He practiced law for many years in Nevada, then left to settle in Montana when it was a Territory. There he was elected to Congress. After a while he went to Wilamette valley in Oregon, then moved onward to make his home in Idaho. Two or three years before his death he was a candidate for U. S. Senator in that state but was defeated.
Cornbury Tillou’s final days are unknown to Twain researchists up to this writing, but thanks to Mark, this perspicacious Frenchman is assured of pictured perpetuity. Attached to Judge Oliver’s original letter to Paine is a photograph of “old Ballou,” taken by F. G. Ludlow, Carson City photographer, circa 1870. It reveals a gaunt figure, a shaggy head, sallow cheeks, high forehead, keen twinkling eyes, a nose and chin very much like Mark's and a luxuriant handle-bar mustache.
Judge Oliver’s letter to Paine, written three days after Mark's death and here published in its entirety for the first time, follows:
Long Beach California
April 24, 1910
Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine
Dear Sir:
Your letter of 17th Jan. would have been answered sooner had not illness in my family occurred at that time. Since learning of Mr. Clemens’ death, I am sorry that I let anything hinder my prompt reply. It is with profound sorrow that I received the news of the passing of my old friend and fellow traveler of those pioneer days. Fifty years have passed; yet the scene and incidents of our brief stay in Carson City, the first Territorial Legislature, and our long tramp to the Humboldt mines are very fresh in my memory.
Those were truly “Roughing It” days. Many desperate characters had fled from the Vigilance Committee of San Francisco and for a time, brought a veritable reign of terror into Carson and Virginia City.
I saw Billy Mayfield, a refugee from San Francisco justice drive a long dirk knife through the body of Sheriff Blackburn of Ormsby county, who had a warrant for his arrest. I was one of a squad armed with double barrel shotguns to guard the little wooden shack where Mayfield was imprisoned as the report went out that his pals from Virginia City were coming to set him free. The first thing I saw on alighting from the stage, after my ride across the mountains, was a pistol duel in the little public plaza. One man was afoot, the other on horseback. Soon the mounted man, his whole shirt bosom crimson with blood, reeled and fell to the ground.
“Who was killed last night?” was the first question asked when friends met in the morning. I was standing in the court room while a man was being tried on the charge of murder. A bullet struck the window casing where I was standing. This was to intimidate the jury. I helped to carry to his lodgings in a blanket the president of the senate of the first legislature. He had been beaten into insensibility in one of the saloons. I was at the time reporting the legislature for the Alta California.
Such was the condition of society in Carson when I first met Sam Clemens. We became friends at once and I have always cherished the memory of our trip together. Of the four who made up our little party, I am now the only one left. There were three young men: Billy Clagget, Sam Clemens and Gus Oliver. We took took along a Frenchman, an elderly man, Cornbury S. Tillou (Mark Twain's blacksmith, “Ballou”). He was supposed to be a jack-of-all-trades, and we thought we might need him. We had a light wagon and two horses. Mr. Clemens furnished one and I the other. We loaded the wagon with pious care. An Indian war had just ended and on our journey we occasionally passed the charred ruins of a shack, and a rude cross to mark the spot where the owner was buried.
We found Sam to be a very original character, and exceedingly interesting. When the nights were cold we three young men slept together, as we were rather “shy” on blankets. Sam usually slept in the middle. After we had eaten supper, he would light his pipe, and then, if he were in the humor, he would spin yarns of yore in his inimitable drawl. When the mood moved him, he would keep us convulsed with laughter till long past midnight. Then there would be a reaction and he would rarely speak for a day or two. He was the life of our camp on that 200-mile trip. One day a pack of wolves chased us and the hound Sam speaks of, never stopped to look back till he reached the next station many miles ahead.
Relative to the cow incident-—our cabin was built into the side of a hill, and the roof had the same slope. There were no cows or women in Unionville where we located the first winter we were there. There were a few horses. You could always rely on Sam's prolific fancy to supply any needed figures.
One incident of our trip has never, so far as I know, been published. We were crossing the 40-mile desert. We had been traveling all day, and about three o’clock the next morning, thoroughly worn out, we reached the other side.. The sun was high in the heavens, when we were aroused from our sleep by a band of Paiute warriors. We were upon our feet in an instant. The picture of the burned cabins and the lonely graves we had passed, were very suggestive. Our scalps were still our own and not dangling from the belts of our visitors. Sam pulled himself together, put his hands upon his head as if to make sure he had not been scalped and then in the exuberance of his gratitude and in his inimitable drawl, he turned to us, and as nearly as I can recall his words: “Boys, they have left us our scalps; let’s give them all the flour and sugar they ask for.” And we gave them a good supply for we were grateful. I regard this as the most dramatic incident of our journey and it has always seemed strange that he has not mentioned it.
I regret that my note had not been sent earlier, so that I might have received a line from my old friend before he sailed for the Bermudas.
Some time ago I saw a statement that gave Mark’s age the same as mine. I now learn that he was about five years my senior. If in your biography you can use any facts or incidents that I can furnish, I shall be pleased to send them.
Very sincerely,
A. W. OLIVER.