Gold Miners & Guttersnipes

Tales of California

Mark Twain

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780877018810
• eBook ISBN: 9781452127781
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Mark Twain's legendary insight and wit shine throughout this new selection of his writings, the first to focus on California. As a young man, the celebrated author of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and other classics spent the mid-1860s in California. In this collection of essays, newspaper articles, fiction, speeches, and letters, Twain presents his notoriously unconventional views on a state booming in the wake of the gold rush. His wry humor and irreverent social commentary illuminate everything from fashion, politics, and art to earthquakes, religion, and urban crime. Drawn from hard-to-find sources as well as his ever-popular books, Gold Miners and Guttersnipes: Tales of California by Mark Twain is a fresh and distinctive assortment by one of America's favorite authors.

LAW & ORDER

We have a criminal jury system
which is superior to any in the world;
and its efficiency is only marred
by the difficulty of finding twelve men
every day who don’t know anything
and can’t read.

INTERESTING LITIGATION

[Morning Call, Sept. 15, 1864]

San Francisco beats the world for novelties; but the inventive faculties of her people are exercised on a specialty. We don’t care much about creating things other countries can supply us with. We have on hand a vast quantity of a certain kind of material and we must work it up, and we do work it up often to an alarming pitch. Controversy is our forte. Californians can raise more legal questions and do the wager of combat in more ways than have been eliminated from the arcana of civil and military jurisprudence since Justinian wrote or Agamemnon fought. Suits—why we haven’t names for half of them. A man has a spite at his neighbor—and what man or man’s wife hasn’t—and he forthwith prosecutes him in the Police Court, for having onions for breakfast, under some ordinance or statutory provision having about as much relation to the case as the title page of Webster’s Dictionary. And then, there’s an array of witnesses who are well posted in everything else except the matter in controversy. And indefatigable attorneys enlighten the Court by drawing from the witnesses the whole detailed history of the last century. And then again we are in doubt about some little matter of personal or public convenience, and slap goes somebody into Court under duress of a warrant. If we want to determine the age of a child who has grown out of our knowledge, we commence a prosecution at once against someone else with children, and elicit from witnesses enough chronological information to fill a whole encyclopedia, to prove that our child of a doubtful age was cotemporary with the children of defendant, and thus approximate to the period of nativity sought for. A settlement of mutual accounts is arrived at by a prosecution for obtaining goods or money under false pretences. Partnership affairs are elucidated in a prosecution for grand larceny. A burglary simply indicates that a creditor called at the house of his debtor the night before market morning, to collect a small bill. We have nothing but a civil code. A portion of our laws are criminal in name only. We have no law for crime. Cut, slosh around with pistols and dirk knives as you will, and the worst that comes of it is a petty charge of carrying concealed weapons; and murder is but an aggravated assault and battery. We go into litigation instinctively, like a young duck goes into the water. A man can’t dig a shovel full of sand out of a drift that threatens to overwhelm his property, nor put a fence around his lot that some person has once driven a wagon across, but what he is dragged before some tribunal to answer to a misdemeanor. Personal revenge, or petty jealousies and animosities, or else the pursuit of information under difficulties, keep up a heavy calendar, and the Judge of the Court spends three-fourths of his time listening to old women’s quarrels, and tales that ought, in many cases, to consign the witnesses themselves to the prison cell, and dismissing prosecutions that are brought without probable cause, nor the shadow of it. A prosecuting people we are, and we are getting no better every day. The census of the city can almost be taken now from the Police Court calendar; and a month’s attendance on that institution will give one a familiar acquaintance with more than half of our domestic establishments.

THE KAHN OF TARTARY

[Morning Call, June 29, 1864]

Lena Kahn, otherwise known as Mother Kahn, or the Kahn of Tartary, who is famous in this community for her infatuated partiality for the Police Court as a place of recreation, was on hand there again yesterday morning. She was mixed up in a triangular row, the sides of the triangle being Mr. Oppenheim, Mrs. Oppenheim, and herself. It appeared from the evidence that she formed the base of the triangle—which is to say, she was at the bottom of the row, and struck the first blow. Moses Levi, being sworn, said he was in the neighborhood, and heard Mrs. Oppenheim scream; knew it was her by the vicious expression she always threw into her screams; saw the defendant (her husband) go into the Tartar’s house and gobble up the partner of his bosom and his business, and rescue her from the jaws of destruction (meaning Mrs. Kahn,) and bring her forth to sport once more amid the——. At this point the lawyer turned off Mr. Levi’s gas, which seemed to be degenerating into poetry, and asked him what his occupation was? The Levite said he drove an express wagon. The lawyer—with that sensitiveness to the slightest infringement of the truth, which is so becoming to the profession—inquired severely if he did not sometimes drive the horse also! The wretched witness, thus detected before the multitude in his deep-laid and subtle prevarication, hung his head in silence. His evidence could no longer be respected, and he moved away from the stand with the consciousness written upon his countenance of how fearful a thing it is to trifle with the scruples of a lawyer. Mrs. Oppenheim next came forward and gave a portion of her testimony in damaged English, and the balance in dark and mysterious German. In the English glimpses of her story it was discernible that she had innocently trespassed upon the domain of the Kahn, and had been rudely seized upon in such a manner as to make her arm turn blue, (she turned up her sleeve and showed the Judge,) and the bruise had grown worse since that day, until at last it was tinged with a ghastly green, (she turned up her sleeve again for impartial judicial inspection,) and instantly after receiving this affront, so humiliating to one of gentle blood, she had been set upon without cause or provocation, and thrown upon the floor and “licked.” This last expression possessed a charm for Mrs. Oppenheim, that no persuasion of Judge or lawyers could induce her to forego, even for the sake of bringing her wrongs into a stronger light, so long as those wrongs, in such an event, must be portrayed in language less pleasant to her ear. She said the Kahn had licked her, and she stuck to it and reiterated with unflinching firmness. Becoming confused by repeated assaults from the lawyers in the way of badgering questions, which her wavering senses could no longer comprehend, she relapsed at last into hopeless German again, and retired within the lines. Mr. Oppenheim then came forward and remained under fire for fifteen minutes, during which time he made it as plain as the disabled condition of his English would permit him to do, that he was not in anywise to blame, at any rate; that his wife went out after a warrant for the arrest of the Kahn; that she stopped to “make it up” with the Kahn, and the redoubtable Kahn tackled her; that he was dry-nursing the baby at the time, and when he heard his wife scream, he suspected, with a sagacity which did him credit, that she wouldn’t have “hollered ’dout dere vas someding de matter;” therefore he piled the child up in a corner remote from danger, and moved upon the works of the Tartar; she had waltzed into the wife and finished her, and was already on picket duty, waiting for the husband, and when he came she smacked him over the head a couple of times with the deadly bludgeon she uses to elevate linen to the clothes-line with; and then, stimulated by this encouragement, he started to the Police Office to get out a warrant for the arrest of the victorious army, but the victorious army, always on the alert, was there ahead of him, and he now stood in the presence of the Court in the humiliating position of a man who had aspired to be plaintiff, but overcome by strategy, had sunk to the grade of defendant. At this point his mind wandered, his vivacious tongue grew thick with mushy German syllables, and the last of the Oppenheims sank to rest at the feet of justice. We had done less than our duty had we allowed this most important trial—freighted, as it was, with matters of the last importance to every member of this community, and every conscientious, law-abiding man and woman upon whom the sun of civilization shines today—to be given to the world in the columns, with no more elaboration than the customary “Benjamin Oppenheim, assault and battery, dismissed; Lena Oppenheim and Fredrika Kahn, held to answer.” We thought, at first, of starting in that way, under the head of “Police Court,” but a second glance at the case showed us that it was one of a most serious and extraordinary nature, and ought to be put in such a shape that the public could give to it that grave and deliberate consideration which its magnitude entitled it to.

PEEPING TOM OF COVENTRY

[Morning Call, Sept. 6, 1864]

An amorous old sinner, named John Fine, went to the North Beach bath-house on Sunday for a swim. Owing to the number of pounds he weighed, he was forced to wade—his weight being considerably over several stone he couldn’t swim, for who ever heard of stones swimming. In order to make up the deficit of fun, he went to the partition that screens the ladies’ department, and peeped through a crevice. Mr. Ills, the proprietor of the establishment, witnessed the untoward scrutiny, and ordered him away; but life’s charms riveted Fine to the spot, and he heeded not the Ills, when his person suffered under the weight of another stone. The proprietor sent a projectile which struck him in the face, near the left eye. Astronomically speaking, Fine saw stars, but didn’t think it a fine sight. He left at once and prosecuted Ills. Yesterday Mr. Ills was fined five dollars for assault and battery.

ADVICE TO WITNESSES

[Morning Call, Sept. 29, 1864]

Witnesses in the Police Court, who expect to be questioned on the part of the prosecution, should always come prepared to answer the following questions: “Was you there, at the time?” “Did you see it done, and if you did, how do you know?” “City and County of San Francisco?” “Is your mother living, and if so, is she well?” “You say the defendant struck the plaintiff with a stick. Please state to the Court what kind of a stick it was?” “Did it have the bark on, and if so, what kind of bark did it have on?” “Do you consider that such a stick would be just as good with the bark on, as with it off, or vicy versy?” “Why?” “I think you said it occurred in the City and County of San Francisco?” “You say your mother has been dead seventeen years—native of what place, and why?” “You don’t know anything about this assault and battery, do you?” “Did you ever study astronomy?—hard, isn’t it?” “You have seen this defendant before, haven’t you?” “Did you ever slide on a cellar door when you were a boy?” “Well—that’s all.” “Stay: did this occur in the City and County of San Francisco?” The Prosecuting Attorney may mean well enough, but meaning well and doing well are two very different things. His abilities are of the mildest description, and do not fit him for a position like the one he holds, where energy, industry, tact, shrewdness, and some little smattering of law, are indispensable to the proper fulfilment of its duties. Criminals leak through his fingers every day like water through a sieve. He does not even afford a cheerful amoun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• In the Metropolis of San Francisco
• Health & Death
• Politics
• Earthquakes
• Society Pages
• Children & Other Animals
• The Police
• Culture
• Forty-Niners
• The Romantic Itch
• One Reporter’s Life
• Law & Order
• Money & Poverty
• Religion & Morality
• In the House of the Spirits
• Observations, Opinions, & Advice
• Travels in California
• Selected Bibliography
• A Note on the Text
• About the Author