Traveling with Bears: in Search of Mark Twain

By Jack Dold

Mark Twain is high on the list of America’s great travel writers. His amazing life took him to more than 35 countries and two-thirds of the states and provinces of North America. Jack Dold has highlighted these travels with a series of journals describing unique tours conducted for the University of California, Berkeley, where the majority of Mark Twain’s writings are housed at the Bancroft Library. Those tours were all accompanied by Bob Hirst, the general editor of the Mark Twain Papers Project, whose stated goal is the publication of every word the author penned. Jack’s journal descriptions are enhanced by Mark Twain’s own observations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728344133

Jack Dold

In the course of my 81 years, I have seen a great deal of the world. From my early years in Berkeley, through education at Saint Mary's High, Saint Mary's College, and U.C.L.A., I have been blessed with experiences that have far exceeded my dreams. The lessons learned from my teaching days at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland provided the base for almost forty years in the travel business. And both of those careers have given me the inspiration for my retirement work as an author.

Book preview

© 2020 Jack Dold. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/24/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4414-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4412-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4413-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020901092

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Book One

Mark Twain & The Mississsippi

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Book Two

The Homes of Mark Twain

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Book Three

Mark Twain In The West

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Book Four

Mark Twain In India

I

II

III

IV

Book Five

Mark Twain In Hawaii

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Afterthoughts

Acknowledgment

This book is dedicated to

Watson (Mac) Laetsch

My friend, mentor, and fellow traveler

Who inspired and shared twenty-eight

Wonderful adventures with

U.C. Berkeley Alumni

INTRODUCTION

I have often theorized that there is no author in American literature, or even the world’s for that matter, who could inspire by their life an almost endless series of tours. Over the years Mark Twain has inspired five tours with the Golden Bears, the alumni of the University of California Berkeley, six if we count our time in India a few years ago. Jack London and Robert Lewis Stevenson traveled a great deal, but they are far surpassed by Twain. The fact is, Sam Clemens/Mark Twain was a world traveler, and his experiences are all documented beautifully, as we found out a couple of years ago in Hawaii. He was a natural-born travel writer.

For more than twenty-five years, I have traveled with a notebook in hand, keeping a journal that would later remind me of travel details, restaurants, contact names, etc. Being a tour operator made such a journal seem normal, not to mention important. I think I first had an inkling that in Samuel Clemens I had found a travel soul mate when I read Roughing It. I was amazed when he dredged from his notes the names of most of Nevada’s rivers and reported that many of them ended in sinks. He even included the Reese River, one of the great geographic trivia names available.

Over the years, I have written and escorted scores of tours for the University of California Alumni, in programs that were part of Bear Treks and later Cal Discoveries. Primarily with Professor Watson (Mac) Laetsch, we have wandered throughout America on historic trails such as Lewis and Clark, the Oregon Trail, Santa Fe Trail, Route of the Klondike, Route 66 and the Lincoln Highway. With Mac, I also traveled to India twice and with Cal through much of Europe and Asia. But perhaps the most unusual of those trips were designed to follow Mark Twain around the world.

One of the treasures to be found at U.C. Berkeley are the Mark Twain Papers. The massive inventory of writings from this prolific author, passed after his death through the hands of a series of editor/executors: Albert Bigelow Paine, from 1910 to 1937; Bernard DeVoto at Harvard (1938-1946); Dixon Wecter (1947-1950) at the Huntington and Bancroft Libraries. It was he who brought the papers to the Bancroft Library in Berkeley in 1949. Henry Nash Smith edited the collection from 1953 to 1964 and Frederick Anderson, also at the Bancroft, from 1971 to 1979. Most of the original collection of documents was bequeathed to the University of California Regents in 1962 by Samuel Clemens’ middle daughter, Clara Clemens Samoussoud.

It is a massive collection, of an estimated 11,000 letters by Clemens and his family and over 17,000 letters received by them, about 50 notebooks kept by the author and 600 manuscripts unpublished or unfinished, and photocopies of the manuscripts of all his major works known to be extant. In addition there are books from his personal library, many annotated in the margins, and innumerable business documents, photographs, scrapbooks, clippings and other ephemera from the author’s life.

In 1980, Robert Hirst was named as editor of the papers, creating the Mark Twain Papers Project, with the stated aim of publishing every word that Mark Twain ever wrote. It is a daunting task. To date, the letters alone have been edited and published in six volumes, comprising only those up to 1875!

Bob Hirst, now in his 39th year as General Editor, remains as energetic and enthusiastic as ever. And as accessible. He is always willing to share his expertise with anyone interested in Mark Twain, and he shares that knowledge in the most congenial way. It took only a suggestion from Mac to begin a series of tours on the life of Samuel Clemens to get Bob to agree to accompany the tours as a lecturer. To date, that includes five tours, four of which are included in this book (Mark Twain in the West was repeated once.) Also included, although Bob did not accompany us, are notes from a Cal Alumni tour to Calcutta and Darjeeling, which formed a major part of the author’s lecture tour to India, chronicled in Following the Equator.

The world was Mark Twain’s home. By the end of his life his travels had taken him to at least thirty-seven countries, using today’s political borders. He lectured in twenty-three states and four Canadian provinces and visited many more. And throughout his travels, he catalogued the people, the cultures, the landscapes and the governments he encountered, always with an eye for detail, and humor. He is unquestionably one of the world’s great travel writers. He filled his wonderful travel books, Roughing It, Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, and Following the Equator, with insightful and detailed descriptions of the land and people he encountered. Among countless numbers of such descriptions, many stand out for me. I admire his description of South Pass in Wyoming which the wagon trains crossed on the Oregon Trail. Most of the travelers didn’t even realize that they were actually cresting the Rockies. Sam Clemen’s description is as poetic as it is accurate.

Through his eyes, the reader can travel confidently to New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., London, Calcutta, San Francisco, Hawaii, South Africa, Paris, Rome, and hundreds of other places, and be confident that he is seeing those places as they looked in the author’s day.

BOOK ONE

Mark Twain & The Mississsippi

page%209.jpg

I

In true Twain fashion, at least during his initial few weeks in San Francisco, we gather tonight at the elegant Sheraton Palace Hotel. It is the kick-off of our first Bear Treks’ tour on Mark Twain, which combines a two-day California segment, a six-day bus tour along the Mississippi and a seven-day cruise on the Mississippi Queen riverboat from Memphis to New Orleans. It will feature Bob Hirst, Director of the Mark Twain Papers & Project at UC’s Bancroft Library, as well as Watson (Mac) Laetsch, professor emeritus of botany and former vice chancellor at U.C. Berkeley. I am in charge of logistics and paying bills. Pretty top-heavy in administration!

Dinner at the Palace is scheduled in the French Parlor overlooking the famous Garden Court, and tonight will be serenaded by one of the six or seven weddings that paraded through the Palace lobby this afternoon. One of them has taken over the entire Garden Court on a Saturday night, no little assault on the wallet of the father of the bride, and my fears are aroused by six-foot speakers I see down there that are certain to bombard our senses and rattle our tonsils up on the mezzanine. By the time our salads arrived, I knew my fears were well placed. We shouted our way through dinner, and I started looking around for a lecture site for Bob, whose voice won’t have a chance against those woofers.

I found a large rather elegant room nearby with an impressive barrel vault ceiling and we adjourned after coffee to hear Bob introduce Mark Twain. The subject for Bob, tonight and tomorrow morning is Mark Twain in San Francisco, a logical place to start, since he lived only a few blocks from where we are staying and describes in his letters and sketches much of the region from south of Market to the financial district to the Cliff House.

54220.png

Born in 1835 in the almost invisible village of Florida, Missouri, Sam Clemens was twenty-five years old when he arrived in Nevada in 1861, joining his brother Orion to escape the Civil War, and unsuccessfully attempting to avoid catching the silver bug. He began writing as a local reporter for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, generally poking fun at most everything. He came for a short visit to San Francisco in May and June, 1863, before returning once again to Virginia City.

In May, 1864, he returned to San Francisco with his friend, Steve Gillis. Sam scoured the city, scraping up material for a column in the Morning Call. Financially he was often in dire straits but he and Gillis generally terrorized the city. On December 4, 1864 he was encouraged to leave town, having put up bail for Gillis who had come into problems with the law. Gillis jumped bail, escaping back to Virginia City, leaving his friend with a bill he couldn’t pay. Sam also left, joining Steve’s brothers, Jim and Billy, in a cabin on Jackass Hill, outside of Angels Camp in the heart of the gold country. He stayed for three months, (eighty-four days), during which time he tried to write his now famous story of the Jumping Frog of Calavaras County.

By now having adopted his famous pen name, Twain returned to San Francisco where he stayed from late February, 1865 to March 7, 1866. From that period of his life only four letters have survived. But one of those was of utmost importance in Sam Clemens’ life.

In March, 1866, securing a commission for the Sacramento Union to report on the sugar industry, he moved to Hawaii. Returning to San Francisco from Hawaii in November, 1866, he launched his career as a humorous lecturer.

It was the beginning of Mark Twain’s remarkable career as a lecturer and an orator. The Sandwich Island Lecture was the first in a long string of subjects he would unleash on the world, beginning with a series of lectures from San Francisco to Virginia City, and then moving to the Midwest, Canada and the Eastern seaboard. In all he would lecture in twenty-three states and four Canadian provinces.

II

This is my wife Mary’s day, September 9, California Admission Day, commemorating that day in 1850 when we officially became a state, some years before, the wags would say, it degenerated into a state of mind. Mary appeared this morning clad in a white sweatshirt, the Bear Flag emblazoned across her chest. Bear flags decorated her ears. A faux leather purse, made in India, also bore the flag on one side, and a California license plate on the other. I wondered aimlessly if the factory worker in Delhi had the slightest idea of what she was making, but Mary is an irrepressible collector of flags and the origin of the item doesn’t matter in the least, as long as there is a bear, a star and a white field. Having been wed to her for thirty-eight years, I know that her undies were probably bearing bears as well and socks would be completing the ursine theme. I used to get embear-assed by all this patriotic fervor, but long ago decided that if she could appear in public decked out like that, the least I could do is record her for the great grandkids.

Bear flags were already common by the time Sam Clemens arrived in California, ushering in, at least for us out West, the most famous period of his life. It usually comes as a surprise to his fans that he was only here for five years because most of us associate him with jumping frogs and tall tales of gold rush and Wild West. We mentally claim his river days as western and certainly lump the Sandwich Islands into the same geography. Most Californians probably couldn’t begin to place him in New York, much less Connecticut.

Today we are determined to find Sam Clemens in San Francisco, a neat trick since the city has completely scrubbed his 1860s world from its face, filling in the coves, asphalting the lanes, demolishing the houses and hotels in favor of high rises. Buildings today have the effrontery to stand defiant even to major earthquakes, a fact that would cause the writer to tremble visibly with disappointment. No, Sam would not enjoy the modern San Francisco, at least not the part he frequented. His stays in the city were varied in style, from elegant to slinking. He left one of the great descriptions of the former and followed it up a month later with something less grand.

Bob Hirst immediately began to stir life into the lost San Francisco world of Sam Clemens/Mark Twain with a series of readings and observations, beginning with a description of two young hooligans rampaging through the city.

It was not a prosperous time for the young writer as he slunk from meal to meal and scoured the city for material for his daily local squibs for the Call. He lived on Minna Street, south of Market in a place owned by Gillis’ mother, a house now long gone. If anyone had been stirring on Minna this morning they must have wondered what on earth a tour bus was doing stopped in the vicinity of 44 Minna Street in the center of blank, bare concrete walls and completely nondescript surroundings, a district Twain described as full of gardens and shrubbery. Today a single dead weed provided the color to this alley.

Twain wandered this world in search of stories, often falling back on the frequent earth tremors which will always be associated with San Francisco. His first he called the great earthquake, which stirred the reporter to considerable eloquence.

I have always been surprised that everyone outside of California thinks that we endure a continuous string of devastating earthquakes out here, a myth that may go back directly to Mark Twain whose reports seem to make that claim.

54216.png

Bob had written up a marvelous tour of the city, but we were forced to make radical cuts in it, because this morning the city is hosting its first ever Grand Prix bike race and the whole waterfront is barricaded off. We were fearful that even the financial district, the area of the city that was frequented by Mark Twain and his friends, would be impacted, but traffic was surprisingly Sunday-light.

We were able to double-park to get off the bus and gawk at a new archaeological project—the unearthing of the General Harrison, a 126-foot vessel that had been abandoned in 1849 and buried in the land fill of Yerba Buena Cove. It has rested all these years beneath the Jang Sing Dim Sun Restaurant. The old ship is only one of several that support the skyscrapers of the commercial district.

The only indication that Mark Twain ever resided in San Francisco is old Merchant Street, which has been renamed for the author recently. Only a few facades remain from his day, among them that of the old mint on Commercial Street. The offices of the Hudson Bay Company, the Call, and the Alta Californian, the old Olympic Club, the restaurants and hotels are all long gone, even the Occidental Hotel, heaven on the half shell, which saw the young reporter whenever he had money or presumed credit. Or his favorite Lick House where he put on the most disgusting airs.

Twain’s world around Montgomery, Sacramento, Clay and Bush is difficult to recognize. Even the Monkey Block was demolished to put up the Transamerica Pyramid. I suppose that during this trip the least we can to is to offer up a toast to this lost world of Mark Twain, fittingly tipping a glass filled with one of his own concoctions:

Mac is totally in favor of having an Earthquake party this evening, since he publicly moaned I have been very concerned about people lately because they have not been drinking enough to stay healthy. A good earthquake jolt should remedy that.

Following Twain’s advice we finished our San Francisco tour with an excursion to the Cliff House, returning to the hotel via Golden Gate Park.