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Before he was famous, "Mark Twain" was frontier reporter, so he had many connections on the newspapers that reported his tour and reviewed his lectures. "Mark Twain," for example, first appeared as a byline in the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise, and that paper publicized his imminent return as an entertainer with typical western exhuberance: |
| "We received the following telegram from him last night dated at Colburn's: 'I am doing well. Have crossed one divide without getting robbed anyway. Mark Twain'" (Enterprise 24 April 1868). |
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"Crossing the divide" here means going through the Donner Pass over the Sierra Nevada. The reference to being "robbed" was a local joke that, when he published Roughing It four years later, MT shared with the whole country. One night during his 1866 lecture tour through Nevada and California, as he walked over the mountain from Gold Hill back to Virginia City, a group of disguised friends from his earlier days in the territory staged a mock stickup and pretended to rob him of his lecture receipts. On this next return to Virginia, the paper kept the joke going when it reported the following day: "Mark Twain arrived here at 5 o'clock yesterday morning in good health and without meeting a single footpad on the way. He will lecture at the Opera House on next Monday and Tuesday nights--sure" (25 April 1868). You can see a sampling of other notices through the links below. |
