“[n]iggers, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese, and some the Lord no doubt originally intended to be white, but the dirt on whose faces leaves one uncertain as to that fact, block up the little, narrow street… to wade through this mass of human vermin… would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived.”

Clemens returned to Missouri at the age of twenty-one and trained as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, famously chronicled in his 1883 book, Life on the Mississippi.

After deserting the Missouri State Guard militia of the Confederacy (to which he was a member for just two weeks in 1861 during the Civil War), Clemens accompanied his older brother (who had been appointed as secretary of the Nevada Territorial Governor) out West in 1861. He moved to San Francisco in 1864, having just adopted the pen name of Mark Twain the year before.

Among the stories of his San Francisco sojourn in 1864 was one that indicated his early views of the Chinese weren’t all that different from most of his contemporaries. As a 28 year old down-and-out reporter, he shared a series of lodgings with a friend and fellow reporter, Steven Gillis. The story goes on to say,

“Their most satisfactory residence was on a bluff on California Street. Their windows looked down on a lot of Chinese houses —‘tin-can houses,’ they were called — small wooden shanties covered with beaten-out cans. Steve and Mark would look down on these houses, waiting until all the Chinamen were inside; then one of them would grab an empty beer-bottle, throw it down on those tin can roofs, and dodge behind the blinds. The Chinamen would swarm out and look up at the row of houses on the edge of the bluff, shake their fists, and pour out Chinese vituperation. By and by, when they had retired and everything was quiet again, their tormentors would throw another bottle. This was their Sunday amusement.”

Yet by the summer of 1864, Clemens views began to change upon incidents he witness while he worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Call. In May of 1870, he would write about one of these incidents as a note at the end of his article “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy” for Galaxy Magazine.

The main article satirizing the arrest of a boy for assaulting Chinese in San Francisco while dressed in his Sunday best clothes. Twain took on the role of an outraged citizen, sarcastically lamenting the fact that anyone could see it as wrong for such a model white boy to stone Chinese:

In San Francisco, the other day, “a well-dressed boy, on his way to Sunday school, was arrested and thrown into the city prison for stoning Chinamen.”

Everything conspired to teach him that it was a high and holy thing to stone a Chinaman, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty than he is punished for it--he, poor chap, who has been aware all his life that one of the principal recreations of the police, out toward the Gold Refinery, was to look on with tranquil enjoyment while the butchers of Brannan street set their dogs on unoffending Chinamen, and make them flee for their lives.

The editorial postscript from this article stated:

I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at present of one particular one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their dogs on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the hilarity of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman's teeth down his throat with half a brick. This incident sticks in my memory with a more malevolent tenacity, perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to publish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the paper.

He later expanded on a similar incident from this time period in his 1906 autobiographical dictation:

I saw some hoodlums chasing and stoning a Chinaman who was heavily laden with the weekly wash of his Christian customers, and I noticed that a policeman was observing this performance with an amused interest — nothing more. He did not interfere.

Clemens wrote another article as a satire against San Francisco police corruption in general, citing several outrageous examples that included one passage about the Chinese. The content was so inflammatory that it was not published by the San Francisco Call newspaper but by his former employer, the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada as "What Have the Police Been Doing?” The article reads,

“What have the police been doing? Ain't they virtuous? Don't they take good care of the city? Is not their constant vigilance and efficiency shown in the fact that roughs and rowdies here are awed into good conduct?... isn't it shown in the fact that although many offenders of importance go unpunished, they infallibly snaffle every Chinese chicken thief that attempts to drive his trade, and are duly glorified by name in the papers for it?”

Such material didn't make Mark Twain a popular figure among San Francisco city officials as the article spread back into California and across the West.

His semi-autobiographical book Roughing It (published in 1872), detailed his early travels in the Western states, starting in 1861. One chapter reflected his continued evolving views of the Chinese. Notice that his famous story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which presents a black man as a fellow human being equal of worth to whites, doesn’t appear until 1884. Much of the chapter was openly sympathetic towards the Chinese, a remarkable fact for a white man of any prominence in the Western states to express at the time against popular prejudice and racial hate. 1871 had been the year of the Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles, where a mob had lynched somewhere between 17 and 20 Chinese.

Clemens praised the Chinese for their industriousness, their respect for their dead, and their use of the abacus to calculate sums, “as fast as a musical professor's fingers travel over the keys of a piano.” He also strongly denounced white Americans for their prejudices and violence against the Chinese stating:

They are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody even to the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders. Any white man can swear a Chinaman's life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is the “land of the free" nobody denies that nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.] As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.

They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well-treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.

Clemens' comment about white men being able to swear the life of a Chinaman away in courts was a reference to the notorious 1854 case of People v. Hall. Hall, a white miner, had murdered a Chinese miner. The only witnesses to the case were three Chinese miners. The California Supreme Court ruled that the provision in the state constitution prohibiting Black and indigenous people from testifying against whites in court was actually a generic prohibition against any non-white race testifying against whites in California. It was a free license to murder Chinese at will that many white people took advantage of, not only in California, but in other Western states.

The violence led directly to the creation of ethnic enclaves across the West where the Chinese could gather and protect each other, the first distinct Chinatowns in the United States.

The atmosphere of violence and intimidation against the Chinese that Samuel Clemens encountered in California would change his views about race and of the treatment of racial minorities in America.