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Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens )

“There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. The upper class knows very little about it. Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful. Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a ‘flush’. It is enough to make one ashamed of one’s species.” -Mark Twain

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), the author of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, and The Gilded Age, to mention only some of his best known works, became a legendary figure in American Life and Literature.

Humorist, satirist, social pundit, Mark Twain wrote about an America on the make; from the riverboat era, to the California Gold Rush and opening of the West, through the Civil War and the nation’s emergence as a world industrial power during the Gilded Age of the 1880s and ’90s. He crafted stories of adventure, tragedy and humor from the fabric of the American experience in the latter half of the 19th Century.

Twain wrote in a uniquely American style, one that captured the character, courage and contradictions of his generation. Using the vernacular; the language, slang and colloquialisms of common Americans — he dissected society, exposing its hypocrisies and laying bare its injustices in a manner that captured the country’s adoration.

The firstimportant author from the heart of America, Samuel Clemens was born in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri in 1835. As a young man he earned a riverboat pilot’s license and worked the Mississippi until the Civil War erupted in 1861, closing all river traffic.

Clemens next headed West to the Nevada Territory to strike it rich as a prospector. Unsuccessful, he started writing for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise to make ends meet. He took his pen name, “Mark Twain”, which meant two fathoms of safe depth from his riverboat days.

In 1865, Twain rewrote a tale heard in the gold fields. Called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, it told of a contest in which one frog was filled with lead shot so it couldn’t win. Twain’s story became a sensation and he became a nationally recognized writer. Over the next 25 years Mark Twain would write the books that made him an American icon.

From the riverboats of his youth, to the gold fields of the West, to the financial speculation of a young industrial nation, gambling was an inherent feature of the America that Mark Twain knew, wrote about, and of which he was so much a part.

Steamboat races were a favoritespectator and gambling event. Mark Twain considered a horse race “pretty tame and colorless in comparison.” He wrote, “Two red-hot steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, straining… every rivet in the boilers, quaking and shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam -; this is the sport that makes a body’s liver curl with enjoyment.”

He condemned hustlers wherever he found them. In his work, Life on the Mississippi, Twain tells the story of card cheats who try to rob a backwoods farmer. When the big pot developed, the sharpers bet all they had to get all the farmer had. “Four Kings, you damned fool!” declared the ringleader. “Four Aces, you ass!” thundered the farmer, pulling out a cocked revolver, “I’m a professional gambler myself and I’ve been laying for you duffers all this voyage!”

Cockfighting, popular throughout frontier America, was criticized as barbaric by the British. In his typically tongue-in-cheek style, Twain responded that while he considered it “inhuman sort of entertainment… still, it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than foxhunting for the cocks like it; they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is not thefox’s case.”

Mark Twain described Baccarat as “a game whereby the croupier gathers in money with a flexible oar, then rakes it home. If I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed.” He keenly observed that “a dollar picked up in the road brings more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at Faro or the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way.”

For his money, Mark Twain preferred Poker. Draw was his game. He learned it in his youth on the Mississippi. Apparently, the writer was a strong player; a contemporary who considered himself a good player remarked that Twain “can play poker equal to any man.”

Late in life, Standard Oil magnate Henry Rogers and Mark Twain became good friends when he helped the writer to avoid bankruptcy. Both shared a fondness for poker, billiards and liquor.

On one occasion, Rogers invited Twain, Congressman T.B. Reed, and few business friends aboard his yacht for a cruise through the Caribbean. Poker and politics were paramount topics. In his notes, Twain reports that Reed won 23 pots in succession! After that, he says, they made no more stops. When the ship’s captain announced an approaching porthe was told, “sail on and do not interrupt the game!”

Clearly, when Mark Twain died in 1910 at the age of 75, America lost a Son and poker lost a player.

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