On that journey, recalling that Samuel Clemens had once worked at the Missouri Democrat, he turned up at those offices, in St. Louis, and offered his services. At the time he brought along several of the dispatches he had written during the war, and these, along with a mention of his friend Clemens, who had by then, writing under the name Mark Twain, become something of a legend to the Western newspaper community, helped the young Stanley procure a position as an attaché (or freelance stringer).
Leaving St. Louis for the frontier, he, without knowing it at the time, followed in the footsteps of Samuel Clemens, his travels taking him to St. Joseph, then by stagecoach across the Rocky Mountains and onward to San Francisco, California. Eventually, he based himself in Denver, but because his earnings as a journalist were not guaranteed, he found work as a part-time bookkeeper in Central City, a mining town where he entertained (like Clemens and many others before him) the notion of striking it rich by prospecting for gold. But as money to buy the needed supplies was scarce, he became an employee of the Daily Miners’ Register, not as a journalist but as an apprentice typesetter — as if Samuel Clemens’s own past had come to shadow him. Finding no gold in the hills around that city, he returned to his fledgling skills as a writer, keeping notebooks filled with observations and successfully selling many an article on the doings of the rugged cowboys and miners he encountered on his travels.
In those days, while on a trip down the Platte River to the Missouri, through hostile Indian Territory (this never bothered Stanley, for he was handy with a Colt revolver and loved to practice his aim, shooting birds out of the sky), he, with his own great ambitions, hatched a scheme to travel the world. Confident that he could recoup his expenses by writing an account of it, he arranged to set out with several companions by way of Omaha and St. Louis to New York, then to Boston, toward Asia Minor. Paying for his passage to Smyrna (modern Izmir), in western Turkey, as a hand aboard the ship, he planned his route during the fifty-one-day voyage: He would cross the expanses of Anatolia into Georgia, then go through Kashmir toward China and ultimately Tibet, where few foreigners had ever traveled.
Unfortunately, not some few days out from Smyrna, as this small party — a seventeen-year-old former shipmate of Stanley’s aboard the Minnesota named Louis Noe; a journalist whom Stanley had met during his Central City days, William Cook; and Stanley himself — was crossing the mountains east of that city they were waylaid and taken captive by a band of twelve Turkish brigands. They might have lingered in that place indefinitely or been killed were it not for the intercession of a Turkish banker sympathetic to their plight who secured their release and safe passage to Constantinople.
Some months afterward, in mid-February, Stanley, late of Constantinople, Athens, Marseille, Liverpool, and Denbigh, Wales, arrived at the offices of the Missouri Democrat in St. Louis. Received gladly by the editors, and put on a staff salary of fifteen dollars a week, he counted among his first duties, during his renewed tenure with the newspaper, an assignment to report upon some dreary legislative proceedings in Jefferson City. Later on in that early April of 1867, he was on hand at the Mercantile Library in St. Louis to cover a lecture by the latest literary sensation, Mark Twain — whom Stanley remembered, as he always would, as Samuel Clemens.
BY THEN, IN THAT CLIMATE of a recovering post — Civil War America whose public was hungry for amusement, Clemens had achieved much renown for his humorous, homespun writings and for his cheerful and rather theatrical public presentations of his works. The first gleanings of his fame came with the publication of a short story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” in the New-York Saturday Press in 1865. In much demand, his reputation preceding him, and wildly popular for his travel articles, Clemens, somewhat bemused by his ability to draw a crowd, had packed the auditorium. For several hours, Clemens, as Mark Twain, ever resplendent and dapper, held forth from the stage about his recent six-month stay in the Sandwich Islands — Hawaii. His written lecture and improvised asides filled the premises with laughter, and the fine quality and detail of his prose much impressed Stanley, who stood quietly in the back observing him. While dutifully recording in his notebooks the contents of Twain’s lecture, Stanley had somewhat jealously studied his friend’s techniques at stagecraft, for, upon his own initial return from Turkey some months before, Stanley himself had tried his hand at lecturing. He had rented a hall in Jefferson City, printed flyers and tickets, and advertised the subject as the adventures and perils encountered by the American traveler in Asia Minor. He had promised to recite aloud the Islamic call to prayer, which he had memorized in Constantinople and heard from every mosque, to sing Turkish songs, and to speak of other cultural eccentricities. (When that night arrived, Stanley — dressed in a Turkish naval officer’s uniform and with props and souvenirs to display, among them a scimitar and a Saracen coat of chain mail — mounted the stage to find that only four people had shown up. He later burned the box full of remaining tickets in a stove.) So while attending the St. Louis lecture, he had perhaps envied Clemens’s popularity with the audience — but he showed no signs of it. He sought out Clemens backstage.
Sipping a glass of warmed whiskey and smoking a cigar to relax before heading out to greet the crowd of well-wishers, Clemens, lounging in a chair, looked up and, through the swirls of smoke, saw a much-changed Stanley approaching. When he got up, Clemens said, “My God, Henry, is that you?” in apparent surprise over the very fact that Stanley was still alive. They briefly embraced, neither man prone to overt expressions of affection. Later, after Clemens had partaken of a salon reception and fulfilled his duties to the crowd, he and Stanley repaired to a hotel bar, where, with the abundant enthusiasm of youth — clocks were irrelevant then — they stayed up until three in the morning recounting the events of their recent pasts to one another, for they had been long out of touch.
In the years since they had parted in New Orleans, Stanley, never knowing of Clemens’s meandering whereabouts, had managed to send but two brief letters to him, in care of Clemens’s sister in St. Louis, but these, apparently because of the war, Clemens had never received. For his part, Clemens had never known Stanley’s transient addresses, though he had over the past several years occasionally read some of Stanley’s dispatches in the Missouri Democrat (often signed with a simple S) and admired them without knowing their authorship. Mainly, he was grateful that Stanley had not been killed in the Civil War, and to that sentiment they toasted.
That same evening, Stanley, in his cups, knowing that Clemens, as Mark Twain, was turning into something of a prolific memoirist, broached the subject of their journey to Cuba. “What was it but a disappointing journey for me? Can you, Samuel, knowing me as your friend, agree to forgo any mention of it in your prolific writings, simply because it is a friend’s request?”