He became a professional miner, but not a rich one.  He was at Aurora, California, in the Esmeralda district, skimping along, with not much to eat and less to wear, when he was summoned by Joe Goodman, owner and editor of the Virginia City Enterprise, to come up and take the local editorship of that paper.  He had been contributing sketches to it now and then, under the pen, name of “Josh,” and Goodman, a man of fine literary instincts, recognized a talent full of possibilities.  This was in the late summer of 1862.  Clemens walked one hundred and thirty miles over very bad roads to take the job, and arrived way-worn and travel-stained.  He began on a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, picking up news items here and there, and contributing occasional sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, and the like.  When the Legislature convened at Carson City he was sent down to report it, and then, for the first time, began signing his articles “Mark Twain,” a river term, used in making soundings, recalled from his piloting days.  The name presently became known up and down the Pacific coast.  His articles were, copied and commented upon.  He was recognized as one of the foremost among a little coterie of overland writers, two of whom, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, were soon to acquire a world-wide fame.

He left Carson City one day, after becoming involved in a duel, the result of an editorial squib written in Goodman’s absence, and went across the Sierras to San Francisco.  The duel turned out farcically enough, but the Nevada law, which regarded even a challenge or its acceptance as a felony, was an inducement to his departure.  Furthermore, he had already aspired to a wider field of literary effort.  He attached himself to the Morning Call, and wrote occasionally for one or two literary papers—­the Golden Era and the Californian—–­prospering well enough during the better part of the year.  Bret Harte and the rest of the little Pacific-slope group were also on the staff of these papers, and for a time, at least, the new school of American humor mustered in San Francisco.

The connection with the Call was not congenial.  In due course it came to a natural end, and Mark Twain arranged to do a daily San Francisco letter for his old paper, the Enterprise.  The Enterprise letters stirred up trouble.  They criticized the police of San Francisco so severely that the officials found means of making the writer’s life there difficult and comfortless.  With Jim Gillis, brother of a printer of whom he was fond, and who had been the indirect cause of his troubles, he went up into Calaveras County, to a cabin on jackass Hill.  Jim Gillis, a lovable, picturesque character (the Truthful James of Bret Harte), owned mining claims.  Mark Twain decided to spend his vacation in pocket-mining, and soon added that science to his store of knowledge.  It was a halcyon, happy three months that he lingered there, but did not make his fortune; he only laid the corner-stone.