Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on Nov. 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. Several years later, in 1839, the family moved to nearby Hannibal, where Clemens spent his boyhood years.
During his youth, Clemens had a strong tie to the Mississippi River, along which his town was located. Steamboats landed at the prosperous town three times a day, and Clemens' boyhood dream was to become a steamboatman on the river.
Clemens' newspaper career began while still a boy in Hannibal. In 1848, a year after his father's death, he was apprentice to printer Joseph Ament, who published the Missouri Courier. By the age of 16, in 1851, Sam was working for his brother Orion's Hannibal Western Union, for which he wrote his first published sketches and worked as a printer. Over the next two years, he continued at the Western Union, occasionally taking stints as editor in Orion's absence. In 1852, Sam published several sketches in Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post.
Clemens left Hannibal in 1853, at age 18, and worked as a printer in New York City and Philadelphia over the next year. During his trip east, he published travel letters in the Hannibal Journal. Upon returning to the Midwest in 1854, Clemens lived in several cities on the Mississippi; the most prominent of these was Keokuk, Iowa, where his brother Orion founded the Keokuk Journal.
By 1857, a 21-year-old Clemens was in New Orleans, seeking a berth on a ship going to South America, when he met steamboat pilot Horace Bixby. He persuaded Bixby to accept him as an apprentice and teach him the Mississippi for a fee of $500. After living on the river for two years as a cub pilot, Sam received his pilot's license in 1859, at the age of 23.
With the start of the Civil War, in April 1861, river traffic on the Mississippi was suspended, and Clemens' steamboat pilot career came to an end. He joined a volunteer militia group called the Marion Rangers, which drilled for two weeks before disbanding. By the summer of 1861, Sam accompanied Orion to the Nevada Territory by stagecoach; Orion had been appointed by President Lincoln as secretary of the new Territory, and Sam was to be his secretary.
In 1861, the Nevada Territory was being inundated with gold and silver prospectors, inspired by the 1858 discovery of the Comstock Lode, one of the largest metal deposits in the world. Almost immediately upon reaching Nevada, Clemens became involved with mining, travelling to some of the most promising prospecting regions, including Humboldt, Esmeralda, and Aurora. Clemens never did strike it rich, and was forced to work in a quartz mill to support himself.
Clemens had been sporadically contributing humorous letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the territory's most well-known newspaper, and, by September 1862, was accepted a job to be a reporter for the paper, at $25 a week. Clemens covered the territorial legislature, local news items, and contributed humorous pieces. During his stint at the Enterprise, the 27-year-old Clemens was greatly influenced by Joseph Goodman, the paper's founder, and Dan De Quille, a star writer; both men would be friends of Clemens for years to come.
After 17 months, Clemens left the Enterprise for San Francisco, apparently to avoid antiduelling laws after challenging a rival editor to fight. Arriving in San Francisco in 1864, Clemens went to work for the Call, a local paper, as a full-time reporter, and then was the Pacific correspondent for the Territorial Enterprise.
Clemens was based in San Francisco for the next four years, writing for Golden Era, the Californian, and other publications. He was a central figure in the literary scene of the city, which included Bret Harte, C.H. Webb, and others. In 1866, he took a four-month trip to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union. Upon returning to San Francisco, a 30-year-old Clemens capitalized on the success of his "Sandwich Islands" letters by organizing a lecture on the topic. The success of this venture prompted him to arrange his first lecture tour, a two-month swing through northern California and western Nevada. For the remainder of his life, Clemens was to be one of the most loved and coveted speakers in the United States.
Clemens left California at the end of 1866, and headed to New York City. Shortly after arriving there, he arranged to be a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California aboard the Quaker City, which was departing for a voyage to Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Before departing on the trip, Clemens arranged to publish his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County, And Other Sketches, a collection of published stories from his Western days. He also performed his Sandwich Island lecture at the Cooper Union, New York's largest hall, and took a lecture tour through the Missouri and Iowa, including a return stop in Hannibal. Through his lecture tours and his popular letters from the Quaker City, the 31-year-old Clemens was becoming quite a well-known celebrity.
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