Free Telling Tales by Melissa Katsoulis

never had the pleasure of reading any of Mark Twain’s journalism, here is an example of the kind of writing his devoted band of followers in 1860s Nevada grew to love. It tells of an accident which befell his editor and friend, Dan DeQuille:
    Our time-honored confrere, Dan, met with a disastrous accident, yesterday, while returning from American City on a vicious Spanish horse, the result of which accident is that at the present writing he is confined to his bed and suffering great bodily pain. He was coming down the road at the rate of a hundred miles an hour (as stated in his will, which he made shortly after the accident), and on turning a sharp corner, he suddenly hove in sight of a horse standing square across the channel; he signalled for the starboard, and put his helm down instantly, but too late . . . Dan was wrenched from his saddle and thrown some three hundred yards (according to his own statement, made in his will, above mentioned), alighting upon solid ground, and bursting himself open from the chin to the pit of the stomach. His head was also caved in out of sight, and his hat was afterwards extracted in a bloody and damaged condition from between his lungs; he must have bounced end-for-end after he struck first, because it is evident he received a concussion from the rear that broke his heart; one of his legs was jammed up in his body nearly to his throat, and the other so torn and mutilated that it pulled out when they attempted to lift him into the hearse which we had sent to the scene of the disaster, under the general impression that he might need it; both arms were indiscriminately broken up until they were jointed like a bamboo; the back was considerably fractured and bent into the shape of a rail fence. Aside from these injuries, however, he sustained no other damage. They brought some of him home in the hearse and the balance on a dray. His first remark showed that the powers of his great mind had not been impaired by the accident, nor his profound judgment destroyed – he said he wouldn’t have cared a d–n if it had been anybody but himself . . . Dan may have exaggerated the above details in some respects, but he charged us to report them thus, and it is a source of genuine pleasure to us to have the opportunity of doing it. Our noble old friend is recovering fast, and what is left of him will be around the Brewery again to-day, just as usual.
    In the early days of his career, before he had started writing in earnest and when he still went under his given name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain had travelled to Nevada as assistant to his brother Orion, whom Abraham Lincoln had made territorial secretary. The role of assistant was, however, decidedly nominal, and provided him with little to do. Worse still, it was presenting him no obvious way to raise enough money to pay off the considerable debts he was accruing, so he began to search for some more rewarding outlet for his profusely creative intelligence than taking notes and filing documents for his older brother.
    Being a young, energetic man in Carson City in 1861 must have been exciting. The city itself, full of prospectors and schemers, investors and get-rich-quick merchants, was the epitome of the optimistic young American town. Twain describes life there in his wonderful book,
Roughing It
:
    Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen. There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses,’ wide-open gambling palaces, political pow wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whisky mill every fifteen steps . . .
    This piece of writing was no hoax – times were flush, and