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Bargain
Travel West guide to unique destinations, sight-seeing, history and
culture, budget travel vacation ideas for the independent traveler
in the
western U.S., Canada and Caribbean.
Travel
Bargain destination in Nevada
MARK
TWAIN MUSEUM – VIRGINIA
CITY
Basement of the Territorial Enterprise
It is said success
has many fathers and failure is an orphan. Mark Twain, the great American
humorist would have probably agreed with this sentiment.
As one of America’s most successful authors, the origin of Mark
Twain’s success also has a few claimants, a conundrum Twain, who
honed his writing skills in the mining towns of the gold rush, would
have taken with a wink. Mark Twain is probably more associated with the
southern life of the Mississippi, where his more famous novels of “Tom
Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” were set, recalling
the days of his boyhood. His pen name was taken from his days on a Mississippi
Riverboat, meaning the sounding measurement of the river bottom, but
Twain’s writing career began in the ink stained daily newspapers
of the west.
Mark
Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, after the tragic death of his
younger brother in
a steamboat explosion, and riverboat traffic on
the Mississippi was suspended with beginning of the Civil War, Samuel
Clemens traveled west in 1861 with his brother, who’d been named
secretary to the governor of the new Nevada Territory.
While his brother set up in Carson City, Sam Clemens headed to Virginia
City, the rough and tumble town which had almost instantly spring up
around the Comstock Lode silver discovery. He tried his hand at mining,
but
having worked briefly as a typesetter apprentice in New York,
he soon found a job at the local town newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise,
which had just recently moved its office from Genoa (see Mormon
Station-Genoa). It was in Virginia
City that Sam Clemens first used the penname “Mark
Twain”, signing it on a humorous account of his travels with his
brother “A Letter from Carson”. He worked at the paper in
Nevada for about two and a half years, before heading out further west
to San Francisco in 1864, stopping for a summer in the California gold
hills of the Sierras, living in a log cabin near Angels Camp in Calaveras
County
(see Angels
Camp Calaveras).
The
name of Mark Twain gained fame with the publishing of “The
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” hilariously recalling the tale
of Smiley and his Frog with a belly full of buckshot. Now depending on
who’s telling the tale, Sam Clemens heard this story in a saloon
one rainy winter’s night in Angels Camp and merely repeated it.
Or he heard it on the wagon trek west from Missouri through Utah. In
Virginia City, you’ll hear he heard it in the drunken bars around
the faro tables there. In truth, it may have been a story he liked to
tell himself, honed and embellished over and over with contributions
from the many places he’d been and outrageous characters he’d
met among the miners of west.
In
Virginia City, a town mostly passed by the modern world, which lives
mostly
on tourist visiting its
living historic past, where you’ll find a street of
curious museums and saloons with historic gambling tables among the scattered
slot machines, the Mark Twain Museum is located in the basement of a
doll and clothing store on Main Street. The building housed the office
of the Territorial Enterprise where Samuel L. Clemens transformed into
Mark Twain. A fire which ravaged the town in 1875, burned the building
where the newspaper was printed to the ground (see Comstock
Fireman's Museum). Fortunately for posterity, it didn’t burn below ground.
Several pieces of equipment had been moved to the basement for storage,
including
a desk,
where
Mark Twain
may have sat to compose some of his reports of the happenings of Virginia
City, his humorous takes on miners, murders and ghosts, and even his
own “mugging” robbery staged by his friends.
Also in the
basement, now the Mark Twain Museum of Virginia City, you’ll
find composition tables and printing tools which were in use during
the author’s
time there, a steam operated printing press from 1863, as well as a
crapper head where the humorist more than likely sat on occasion, to
ponder a
story
angle,
though
no
particular
documentary
evidence survives of Mark Twain’s evacuatory habits. Other artifacts
of the printing trade and the history of Virginia City, the Comstock
Lode and the Territorial Enterprise can be found under the high ceiling,
a noted
feature of
Virginia City, perhaps to accommodate the tale tales.
In the
basement you’ll notice windows which would appear to look out
into the earth. In the early days of Virginia City, tunnels under the
streets
allowed for deliveries of goods below ground, apparently not to disturb
drunks in the mud on the streets above. The tunnels are no longer in
use, but the windows to nowhere remain a look into the past. The Mark
Twain Museum is well worth the few bucks to visit, open during store
hours. © Bargain
Travel West
Find the best hotel deals in Virginia City on TripAdvisor
Web Info
Virginia
City
These
articles are copyrighted and the sole property of Bargain Travel West
and WLEV, LLC. and may not be copied or reprinted without permission.
Some photos courtesy Great Reno Balloon Race.
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