Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [55]
The fight began over a sack of flour. For nearly a year, one Reuel Gridley (coincidentally, a former Hannibal classmate of Twain’s) had been hauling the sack from one Washoe town to the next. At each stop, Gridley jokingly auctioned off the sack to benefit the Sanitary Commission, the charity for Union soldiers that later evolved into the Red Cross. The winner of the auction never took the flour; it was just a novel way of raising money to help wounded soldiers.
When Gridley’s flour sack came to Virginia City, Laird’s Virginia City Union bid a hundred dollars. But Laird refused to pay—or so Twain claimed in the Territorial Enterprise. In retaliation Laird published an angry assault on Twain’s manhood. Twain demanded a retraction, in terms amounting to a challenge to a duel. Laird refused to apologize. After a few more increasingly hostile back-and-forths, Twain ran. Probably it was his first smart move during the whole business.
He’d visited San Francisco the year before, but this time he’d come to live. The city suited him perfectly, for though he described the homes as wooden and “old fashioned,” the truth is that they were anything but old. San Francisco was, in fact, the newest of cities, built on sand hills and crazed, seldom realized dreams of instant fortune. Before 1848, when gold was found near the Sierra settlement of Sutter’s Mill, maybe 850 people had lived in ramshackle houses among the dunes. Now there were over 56,000, a number that would again double by the end of the decade. San Francisco was a young, mostly male place, with so few women that the birthrate couldn’t maintain the population. Virtually everyone there was from somewhere else (and often very far indeed—the first, lesser-known wave of ’48ers hailed from Hawaii and Peru as often as from the far-off states of the Union, the nearest of which was Texas). New, wild, transient, irreverent—in many ways San Francisco was Twain’s spiritual hometown.
“I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union,” he recalled. Virginia City, where he’d taken up with a terrific group of newspapermen and writers at the Territorial Enterprise, had treated him very well. Still, he wrote, “after the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, [and] infested the opera.”
The “best hotel,” in Twain’s opinion, was the Occidental. The Occidental was becoming the unofficial meeting place of an early San Franciscan bohemia—Charles Henry Webb, Adah Menken, Ada Clare, and more had left behind Pfaff’s Cellar (and Walt Whitman) in New York to make a new home out west. Twain took a room at the Occidental with his great friend Dan De Quille,8 furnished with “a huge double bed, piles of bedding, splendid carpets and fine fittings of all kinds.” De Quille later wrote that “Mark and I agreed well as room-mates. Both wanted to read and smoke about the same length of time after getting into bed, and when one got hungry and got up to go down town for oysters the other also became hungry and turned out.”
By this time cooks had followed the prospectors (or else disappointed prospectors had become cooks); the city boasted dozens of restaurants staffed by Americans, English, French, Germans, Dutch, Pacific Islanders, Mexicans, Chileans, Chinese, and more. But when Twain and De Quille got hungry, they were probably going to an oyster house. Oyster houses were hugely popular places for men to gather, and eat, and (not incidentally) have a smoke and a drink or ten while standing about on a sawdust-covered floor. They’d remain vastly popular throughout the century until, in 1892, Americans would eat 197,639,000 pounds of oysters—and that’s dressed weight, counting only meat. It was the age of the