Alex Wright

During a New Years' visit to Lake Tahoe we made a pilgrimage out across the Sierras to Virginia City, where amid all the tacky tourist trappings lies a buried shrine to a bygone age of American journalism: the Territorial Enterprise.

Three dollars gets you into the "museum" - a charitable designation for the cold basement of a souvenir shop hawking t-shirts and shot glasses - which presumably constitutes a more profitable enterprise than curating an important but largely forgotten piece of America's literary legacy.

An affable old timer - sporting overalls and a Kris Kringle beard - greets you at the cash register, takes your money and points you to the basement door, then you're on your own.

Down in the cold brick cellar sits a dusty mausoleum to the early days of American newspapers, in the proto-industrial age before telegraphs and linotype machines. In the center of the room stands a big 1850s-era Hoe press, a cylindrical contraption that ran on steam power by way of a turbine fueled by a large high-pressure water pipe suspended overhead. The water turbine powered the printing machines below by way of several long leather straps hanging from the ceiling. Letterboxes line the walls, where printers' devils (more politely known as typesetters) would pull the type and set it on composing sticks, then putting the report together, letter by letter, in a wooden frame or "chase" laid out on a big slab of marble.

In the corner of the room sits an old wooden desk where "that beef-eating, bleary-eyed, hollow headed, slab-sided ignoramous -- that pilfering reporter, Mark Twain" (as a rival reporter once described him) first adopted his nom de plume (dropping the earlier, rather less catchy pseudonym "Josh") and started turning out the newspaper stories that launched his literary career.

Most of the original copies have long since disappeared, but they formed the basis for a few chapters in Roughing It.

Today, the Enterprise stands as a forgotten memorial to another literary age - when Twain and his now-mostly-forgotten colleagues (like William Wright, aka Dan De Quille) turned out stories that often had little or no basis in traditional, er, reporting: tall tales like The Petrified Man and The Traveling Stones of Pahranagat Valley first appeared in The Enterprise. It was the kind of paper where, to paraphrase Twain, they never let the facts never stand in the way of a good story.

Finally, it seems appropriate to share a parting new year's wish from Mark Twain, taken from The Territorial Enterprise, January 1, 1863:

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. To-day, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.

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