To Mayor Arick, Hon. Wm. Stewart, Marshal Perry, Hon. J. B. Winters,
Mr. Olin, and Samuel Wetherill, besides a host of others whom we
have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position,
we say to these gentlemen we acknowledge our faults, and, in all
weakness and humility upon our bended marrow bones, we ask their
forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for
anything but the best of feeling toward us. To “Young Wilson” and
The Unreliable (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no
apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have
given them. Toward these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man
could be—and we have always prided ourselves on this base quality.
We feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were. We will
now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days.
This in his own paper over his own signature was a body blow; but it had the effect of curing his cold. He was back in the office forthwith, and in the next morning's issue denounced his betrayer.
We are to blame for giving The Unreliable an opportunity to
misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great
extent at the result. We simply claim the right to deny the truth
of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all
apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public
commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more
cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns
the sportive jackass-rabbit of the Sierras. We have done.
These were the things that enlivened Comstock journalism. Once in a boxing bout Mark Twain got a blow on the nose which caused it to swell to an unusual size and shape. He went out of town for a few days, during which De Quille published an extravagant account of his misfortune, describing the nose and dwelling on the absurdity of Mark Twain's ever supposing himself to be a boxer.
De Quille scored heavily with this item but his own doom was written. Soon afterward he was out riding and was thrown from his horse and bruised considerably.
This was Mark's opportunity. He gave an account of Dan's disaster; then, commenting, he said:
The idea of a plebeian like Dan supposing he could ever ride a
horse! He! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they
saw him go by. Of course, he would be thrown off. Of course, any
well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like Dan
stay on his back! When they gathered him up he was just a bag of
scraps, but they put him together, and you'll find him at his old
place in the Enterprise office next week, still laboring under the
delusion that he's a newspaper man.
The author of 'Roughing It' tells of a literary periodical called the Occidental, started in Virginia City by a Mr. F. This was the silver-tongued Tom Fitch, of the Union, an able speaker and writer, vastly popular on the Coast. Fitch came to Clemens one day and said he was thinking of starting such a periodical and asked him what he thought of the venture. Clemens said:
“You would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara; set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur; start a literary paper in Virginia City; h—l!”
Which was a correct estimate of the situation, and the paper perished with the third issue. It was of no consequence except that it contained what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion, the composite novel. Also, it died too soon to publish Mark Twain's first verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit—“The Aged Pilot Man”—which were thereby saved for 'Roughing It.'