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Mark Twain In California

Back in the 1860s, a rascally young reporter, aged 26, visited the western edges of the United States for a variety of backcountry and city adventures. This young writer, Samuel Clemens’, California experiences became the source for legendary stories we can enjoy reading today. Gentle readers (as he often called his audience) know Mr. Clemens as the great American author, Mark Twain.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are two of the most beloved ‘American’ novels in English literature, both penned under the pseudonym of Mark Twain by Samuel Clemens. But before those long-famous stories of boyhood on the Mississippi were published (Tom in 1876, Huck in 1884), Mark Twain traveled the world and reported back to his ‘gentle readers’ on his daring, sometimes foolish, and nearly always adventurous exploits.

During his seven years in the West – which were launched when he joined his brother Orion Clemens who had been appointed Secretary to the Nevada Territory – Mark Twain lived in frontier towns, hiked into remote canyons and forests, camped by beautiful pure lakes, paraded about San Francisco in his finery, escaped critics by hiding out in mining camps in the Sierras, visited Yosemite, Mono Lake and Lake Tahoe, and even sailed to Hawaii.

On heading West he wrote : "I envied my brother. . . . Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time."

On living in San Francisco he recalled : For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of existence--a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it. However, I suppose I was not greatly worse than the most of my countrymen in that. I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself--and the kangaroo.”

These adventures in the rugged West, far from the polished lives of his eastern American readers in St. Louis, Boston, and New York, became the subjects of two famous works: Roughing It, and, The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County. During his time living in the West, Clemens earned a living writing for publications that were newspapers, weekly reviews, and journals describing life in the West. He wrote for the Union in Sacramento (1862-65), the Morning Call (San Francisco 1863), The Golden Era (San Francisco 1863), the Californian (1864), and Alta California (San Francisco 186667). His works were not only read by Californians, they were also printed by papers in the east and he began to draw a national following.

By 1866, Clemens had developed a national reputation as a Western humorist, well versed in making fun of people, showing the unfavorable sides of places, and generally satirizing the world around him. He wrote from personal experiences, incorporated stories he was told by some colorful characters, and he elaborated on these experiences in a way unique to his own storytelling style. Along with insulting people and places at times, Twain the writer also captured the spirit of a time and place, and shares with us the essential nature of many California people he met.

From his emergence as a nationally recognized humorist during his years in California, he was then contracted to tour the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) by the Sacramento Union (1866), and Europe by the San Francisco Alta California (1867). But it wasn’t until 1872 – six years after last living in the West – that Twain published “Roughing It”, his recollections of his time and experiences in Nevada, California, and Hawaii. After his many efforts to ‘strike it rich’ in mining and other risky pursuits, Twain really did strike it rich with the success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, and has since become an American hero of gigantic proportions. Let’s look now at The Adventures of Mark Twain in California.