by Hap Rocketto
In my most grandiose daydreams about my writing I like to reflect that Mark Twain, one of my favorite authors, and I have much in common. We both lived in Connecticut, were educated in Missouri, we both had humorous and undistinguished military careers, and we both wrote short stories.
Twain, of whom no less a literary light than Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since” began writing in Virginia City, Nevada during the days of its booming silver rush for the Territorial Enterprise, a prosperous newspaper that was for many years the most powerful western journal outside California.
The demand for news was so great that Enterprise Editor William Wright hired a down on his luck miner named Samuel Clemens to help fill column inches. A life time friendship soon began and both eventually adopted nom de plumes that would go down in literary history. Wright became Dan DeQuille and authored the definitive study of Virginia City’s boom years History of the Big Bonanza, sub titled An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History, and Working of the World Renowned Comstock Silver Lode. In his time he was a highly regarded newspaperman and humorist widely considered by contemporaries to be on the same plane as his friend Clemens, who had changed his name to Mark Twain.
Growing up and living on the nation’s frontier Twain was, of necessity, familiar with firearms and their quirks and advised that one should not,”…meddle with old unloaded firearms. They are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old rusty muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes me shudder.”
In his highly imaginative account of his early days in the west, Roughing It, Twain, who was aware of the dangerous nature of sidearms and pocket pistols, wrote about George Beemis who, “wore in his belt an old original “Allen” revolver, such as irreverent people called a “pepper-box.” Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an “Allen” in the world. But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, “If she didn’t get what she went after, she would fetch something else.” And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon–the “Allen.” Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it.”
Twain grew up in an age when firearms were common companions to men and boys and he knew his way around them. From his writings we can also presume that he knew that firearm safety was a state of mind and not a mechanical device. He certainly carried one from time to time as it was often that said the journalists who worked for the Territorial Enterprise “usually carried three essential tools of their trade: a notebook, a pen and a revolver.” I would like to think that I also fit into that adventuresome mold when I cover Camp Perry and other shooting events, except I would simply substitute rifle for pistol.
One day, and I know that day will never come, I would be delighted to find a Hap’s Corner included in an anthology of short stories alongside “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” For all of our perceived similarities I know it won’t ever happen. Let’s face fact, if the Nobel laureate Hemingway does not consider himself in the same class as Twain, who never received the accolade from the Noble Foundation, then certainly neither can I. My situation is best put in the words of another Nobel laureate and one of my favorite authors, Rudyard Kipling: “never the Twain shall meet.”
American literature, like our views on history and politics, is shaped by a distinct American ideal of ourselves. It’s direction was refined by a select few who truly have the capacity to impact generations with their insight and abilities.