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“At five minutes to nine o’clock last night, San Francisco was favored by another earthquake. There were three distinct shocks, two of which were very heavy, and appeared to have been done on purpose, but the third did not amount to much.” ---Mark Twain, The San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 23 June 1864

Thanks to the fantastic success of the Mark Twain complete autobiography — the first volume doesn't officially land in bookstores until next week and is already sitting atop the bestseller lists — Twain is once again the toast of the town. And his Bay Area roots run deep.

Even though Mark Twain only spent about two years of his life in the city, the time he spent as a roving reporter in the speculation-crazed, boisterous San Francisco of the 1860s would define his satirical writing style and ultimately launch his career — a career that shows no signs of slowing on the centennial of his death.

Mark Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens, came to San Francisco in May 1864 at age 28, after a long string of random jobs—including riverboat piloting, typesetting, and, his last stint before his move to San Francisco, mining in Nevada. By the 1860s, San Francisco had joined New York as one of  “the poles of the American avant-garde,” writes Ron Powers in "Mark Twain: A Life," and it boasted a vibrant literary scene. San Francisco's numerous saloons, which have been called the precursors of the Beat hangouts of the 1950s and ‘60s, were well known to Mark Twain, who joined literary figures like Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce.

"I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union," Twain wrote of his first months in San Francisco in his memoir, "Roughing It."

Millionaire Dreams

But when Twain first came to San Francisco, becoming a great writer was not yet on the horizon, although his frequent contributions to publications like the Virgina City Territorial Enterprise had already made a name for him in San Francisco. Rather, like most San Franciscans at the time, Twain was fixed on becoming a millionaire, according to Bernard Taper in "Mark Twain's San Francisco." “Speculation went mad,” Twain recalls in "Roughing It," “...what a gambling carnival it was!” Sure of his soon-to-be millions, Twain lived in some of the grandest hotels in town—the Occidental Hotel on Sutter and Montgomery Street and the Lick House—went to fancy parties and generally lived it up. But the bubble burst, and Twain suddenly found himself broke.

The San Francisco Daily Morning Call 

Twain was hired as a reporter on the Morning Call in June 1864, where he spent mid-morning to two a.m. going to saloons, operas and police courts for bits of news, according to Taper. It was a brutal job, and Twain’s differences of opinion with the paper’s owner, George Barnes, soon came to a breaking point. In one instance, Twain wrote a story about Irish hoodlums who were stoning a Chinese laundryman while the police looked on with amusement, only to find the story nixed by Barnes. Barnes claimed that the Call was the paper of the poor and depended on the support of Irishmen. After four months, Twain was fired by the Call, and began (and, in some cases, continued) writing for journals such as Golden Era, the Californian, the Sacramento Union, the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle and the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.

From Police Corruption to Hoop Skirts

Freed from the editorial constraints of the Call, Twain wrote some of his most creative and quirky stories. In an article entitled "Pioneers’ Ball," published in the Golden Era on November 26, 1865, Twain wrote about a socialite’s nose-blowing habit:

Miss C.L.B. had her fine nose elegantly enameled, and the easy grace with which she blew it from time to time, marked her as a cultivated and accomplished woman of the world; its exquisitely modulated tone excited the admiration of all who had the happiness to hear it.

And while some of Twain’s pieces render a barely recognizable San Francisco—in one piece, Twain refers to the din “of gobbling turkeys” on Pacific and Second as similar to a “well-stocked farm—many are eerily familiar. In "The Fashions," published in Territorial Enterprise on February 12, 1866, Twain offers some insights on the hoop skirt trend: “to critically examine these hoops—to get the best effect—one should stand on the corner of Montgomery and look up a steep street like Clay or Washington…” But not all of Twain's articles were humourous; he also spent a lot of time reporting on more serious issues, such as police corruption. 

Earthquake Poetics 

Some of Twain’s most entertaining articles are his earthquake articles, which are surprisingly poetic. In "Another of Them", published in the Morning Call on 23 June, 1864, Twain compares a recent earthquake to previous ones, which have a “soothing kind of undulating motion, like the roll of waves on the sea.”  On October 8, 1865, a relatively big earthquake struck while Twain was walking along Third Street near Mission: “such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the earthquake created, San Francisco never saw before,” he writes in "Roughing It."

The Original Tom Sawyer?

According to Taper, Twain enjoyed playing penny ante with a man named Tom Sawyer, whom he met at a Turkish Bath on Montgomery Block. Sawyer later hung a sign outside his tavern near Third and Mission: ALE AND SPIRITS: THE ORIGINAL TOM SAWYER: PROP. 

The Jumping Frog Story 

In December of late 1864, Twain left San Francisco for the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where he wrote his famous story about a jumping frog contest. "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" was his first story to receive a national audience when it was published in the New York Saturday Press on Nov. 18, 1865.

The Launch of Twain’s Literary Career 

Just before Twain left San Francisco for good, in the spring of 1866, Twain traveled to the Hawaiian Islands (then called the Sandwich Islands) on an assignment for the Sacramento Union. He gave his first lecture at the Academy of Music in San Francisco on October 12, 1866. Twain then came back to San Francisco once more in 1868, after his travels in Europe and Israel, to turn the letters he wrote for Alta California into the book  "Innocents Abroad," which became his first full-length work.

Sources: 

"Mark Twain's San Francisco," edited by Bernard Taper

"Mark Twain: A Life" by Ron Powers

"Roughing It" by Mark Twain