Roughing It

By Mark Twain, Edgar Marquess Branch, Lin Salamo and Robert Browning

Mark Twain's humorous account of his six years in Nevada, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the "vigorous new vernacular" of the West. Selling seventy five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, Roughing It was greeted as a work of "wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration" whose satiric humor made "pretension and false dignity ridiculous." Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, the text is the first to adhere to the author's wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation, and includes all of the 304 first-edition illustrations. With its comprehensive and illuminating notes and supplementary materials, which include detailed maps tracing Mark Twain's western travels, this Mark Twain Library Roughing It must be considered the standard edition for readers and students of Mark Twain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9780520948068

Mark Twain

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was an American humorist, novelist, and lecturer. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, a setting which would serve as inspiration for some of his most famous works. After an apprenticeship at a local printer’s shop, he worked as a typesetter and contributor for a newspaper run by his brother Orion. Before embarking on a career as a professional writer, Twain spent time as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi and as a miner in Nevada. In 1865, inspired by a story he heard at Angels Camp, California, he published “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” earning him international acclaim for his abundant wit and mastery of American English. He spent the next decade publishing works of travel literature, satirical stories and essays, and his first novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). In 1876, he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel about a mischievous young boy growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River. In 1884 he released a direct sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which follows one of Tom’s friends on an epic adventure through the heart of the American South. Addressing themes of race, class, history, and politics, Twain captures the joys and sorrows of boyhood while exposing and condemning American racism. Despite his immense success as a writer and popular lecturer, Twain struggled with debt and bankruptcy toward the end of his life, but managed to repay his creditors in full by the time of his passing at age 74. Curiously, Twain’s birth and death coincided with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, a fitting tribute to a visionary writer whose steady sense of morality survived some of the darkest periods of American history.

Book preview

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MARK TWAIN

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ROUGHING

IT

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THE MARK TWAIN LIBRARY

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The Library offers for the first time popular editions of Mark Twain’s best works just as he wanted them to be read. These moderately priced volumes, faithfully reproduced from the California scholarly editions and printed on acid-free paper, are expertly annotated and include all the original illustrations that Mark Twain commissioned and enjoyed.

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"Huck waited for no particulars. He sprang away

and sped down the hill as fast as his

legs could carry him."

—THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

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Contributing Editors for This Volume

Richard Bucci

Victor Fischer

Michael B. Frank

Kenneth M. Sanderson

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Samuel L. Clemens in 1863 (above) and 1872.

Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library (CU-MARK).

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The Miner’s Dream.

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MARK TWAIN

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ROUGHING

IT

ILLUSTRATED BY TRUE WILLIAMS,

EDWARD F. MULLEN, AND OTHERS

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Editors

Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch

Associate Editors

Lin Salamo and Robert Pack Browning

A publication of the

Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library

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The text of this Mark Twain Library edition of Roughing It is identical with the text of the scholarly edition of Roughing It, edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch (University of California Press, 1993). It was established in accord with the standards of the Center for Scholarly Editions (CSE). Editorial work was supported by a generous grant from the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation and by matching funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

The edited text of Roughing It, notes, and maps are © 1993 by The Regents of the University of California. Editorial foreword and note on the text are © 1995 by The Regents of the University of California.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

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Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Twain, Mark, 1835–1910.

Roughing it / Mark Twain ; illustrated by True Williams, Edward F. Mullen, and others ; editors, Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch ; associate editors, Lin Salamo and Robert Pack Browning.

p.      cm.—(The Mark Twain library)

A publication of the Mark Twain Project of the Bancroft Library.

Includes bibliographical references (p.    ). ISBN 978-0-520-26817-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Journeys—West (U.S.) 2. Authors, American—19th century—Journeys—West (U.S.) 3. West (U.S.)—Description and travel. I. Smith, Harriet Elinor. II. Branch, Edgar Marquess, 1913–. III. Bancroft Library. IV. Title. V. Series: Twain, Mark, 1835–1910. Mark Twain Library.

PS1318.A1     1996     818′.403     95-30007

[B]

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

The Mark Twain Library is designed by Steve Renick.

The text of this Mark Twain Library edition of

Roughing It

is drawn from the Mark Twain Project’s complete edition of

The Works and Papers of Mark Twain.

Editorial work for this volume has been supported by a grant to

The Friends of The Bancroft Library from the

L. J. SKAGGS AND MARY C. SKAGGS FOUNDATION

and by matching funds from the

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES,

an independent federal agency.

Without such generous support, these editions could

not have been produced.

CONTENTS

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ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

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ROUGHING IT

Prefatory

1. My Brother Appointed Secretary of Nevada—I Envy His Prospective Adventures—Am Appointed Private Secretary under Him—My Contentment Complete—Packed in One Hour—Dreams and Visions—On the Missouri River—A Bully Boat

2. Arrive at St. Joseph—Only Twenty-five Pounds Baggage Allowed—Farewell to Kid Gloves and Dress Coats—Armed to the Teeth—The Allen—A Cheerful Weapon—Persuaded to Buy a Mule—Schedule of Luxuries—We Leave the States—Our Coach—Mails for the Indians—Between a Wink and an Earthquake—A Modern Sphynx and How She Entertained Us—A Sociable Heifer

3. The Thoroughbrace Is Broke—Mails Delivered Properly—Sleeping under Difficulties—A Jackass Rabbit Meditating, and on Business—A Modern Gulliver—Sage-brush—Overcoats as an Article of Diet—Sad Fate of a Camel—Warning to Experimenters

4. Making Our Bed—Assaults by the Unabridged—At a Station—Our Driver a Great and Shining Dignitary—Strange Place for a Front Yard—Accommodations—Double Portraits—An Heirloom—Our Worthy Landlord—Fixings and Things—An Exile—Slum-gullion—A Well Furnished Table—The Landlord Astonished—Table Etiquette—Wild Mexican Mules—Stage-coaching and Railroading

5. New Acquaintances—The Cayote—A Dog’s Experiences—A Disgusted Dog—The Relatives of the Cayote—Meals Taken Away from Home

6. The Division Superintendent—The Conductor—The Driver—One Hundred and Fifty Miles’ Drive without Sleep—Teaching a Subordinate—Our Old Friend Jack and a Pilgrim—Ben Holladay Compared to Moses

7. Overland City—Crossing the Platte—Bemis’s Buffalo Hunt—Assault by a Buffalo—Bemis’s Horse Goes Crazy—An Impromptu Circus—A New Departure—Bemis Finds Refuge in a Tree—Escapes Finally by a Wonderful Method

8. The Pony Express—Fifty Miles without Stopping—Here He Comes!—Alkali Water—Riding an Avalanche—Indian Massacre

9. Among the Indians—An Unfair Advantage—Lying on Our Arms—A Midnight Murder—Wrath of Outlaws—A Dangerous, Yet Valuable Citizen

10. History of Slade—A Proposed Fist-Fight—Encounter with Jules—Paradise of Outlaws—Slade as Superintendent—As Executioner—A Doomed Whisky Seller—A Prisoner—A Wife’s Bravery—An Ancient Enemy Captured—Enjoying a Luxury—Hob-nobbing with Slade—Too Polite—A Happy Escape

11. Slade in Montana—On a Spree—In Court—Attack on a Judge—Arrest by the Vigilantes—Turn-out of the Miners—Execution of Slade—Lamentations of His Wife—Was Slade a Coward?

12. A Mormon Emigrant Train—The Heart of the Rocky Mountains—Pure Saleratus—A Natural Ice-House—An Entire Inhabitant—In Sight of Eternal Snow—The South Pass—The Parting Streams—An Unreliable Letter Carrier—Meeting of Old Friends—A Spoiled Watermelon—Down the Mountain—A Scene of Desolation—Lost in the Dark—Unnecessary Advice—U. S. Troops and Indians—Sublime Spectacle—Another Delusion Dispelled—Among the Angels

13. Mormons and Gentiles—Exhilarating Drink, and Its Effect on Bemis—Salt Lake City—A Great Contrast—A Mormon Vagrant—Talk with a Saint—A Visit to the King—A Happy Simile

14. Mormon Contractors—How Mr. Street Astonished Them—The Case before Brigham Young, and How He Disposed of It—Polygamy Viewed from a New Position

15. A Gentile Den—Polygamy Discussed—Favorite Wife and D 4—Hennery for Retired Wives—Children Need Marking—Cost of a Gift to No. 6—A Penny-Whistle Gift and Its Effects—Fathering the Foundlings—It Resembled Him—The Family Bedstead

16. The Mormon Bible—Proofs of Its Divinity—Plagiarism of Its Authors—Story of Nephi—Wonderful Battle—Kilkenny Cats Outdone

17. Three Sides to All Questions—Everything a Quarter—Shriveled Up—Emigrants and White Shirts at a Discount—Forty-Niners—Above Par—Real Happiness

18. Alkali Desert—Romance of Crossing Dispelled—Alkali Dust—Effect on the Mules—Universal Thanksgiving

19. The Digger Indians Compared with the Bushmen of Africa—Food, Life and Characteristics—Cowardly Attack on a Stagecoach—A Brave Driver—The Noble Red Man

20. The Great American Desert—Forty Miles on Bones—Lakes without Outlets—Greeley’s Remarkable Ride—Hank Monk, the Renowned Driver—Fatal Effects of Corking a Story—Bald-Headed Anecdote

21. Alkali Dust—Desolation and Contemplation—Carson City—Our Journey Ended—We Are Introduced to Several Citizens—A Strange Rebuke—A Washoe Zephyr at Play—Its Office Hours—Governor’s Palace—Government Offices—Our French Landlady Bridget O’Flannigan—Shadow Secrets—Cause for a Disturbance at Once—The Irish Brigade—Mrs. O’Flannigan’s Boarders—The Surveying Expedition—Escape of the Tarantulas

22. The Son of a Nabob—Start for Lake Tahoe—Splendor of the Views—Trip on the Lake—Camping Out—Reinvigorating Climate—Clearing a Tract of Land—Securing a Title—Out-house and Fences

23. A Happy Life—Lake Tahoe and Its Moods—Transparency of the Waters—A Catastrophe—Fire! Fire!—A Magnificent Spectacle—Homeless Again—We Take to the Lake—A Storm—Return to Carson

24. Resolve to Buy a Horse—Horsemanship in Carson—A Temptation—Advice Given Me Freely—I Buy the Mexican Plug—My First Ride—A Good Bucker—I Loan the Plug—Experience of Borrowers—Attempts to Sell—Expense of the Experiment—A Stranger Taken In

25. The Mormons in Nevada—How to Persuade a Loan from Them—Early History of the Territory—Silver Mines Discovered—The New Territorial Government—A Foreign One and a Poor One—Its Funny Struggles for Existence—No Credit, No Cash—Old Abe Curry Sustains It and Its Officers—Instructions and Vouchers—An Indian’s Endorsement—Toll-Roads

26. The Silver Fever—State of the Market—Silver Bricks—Tales Told—Off for the Humboldt Mines

27. Our Manner of Going—Incidents of the Trip—A Warm but Too Familiar a Bedfellow—Mr. Ballou Objects—Sunshine amid Clouds—Safely Arrived

28. Arrive at the Mountains—Building Our Cabin—My First Prospecting Tour—My First Gold Mine—Pockets Filled with Treasures—Filtering the News to My Companions—The Bubble Pricked—All Not Gold That Glitters

29. Out Prospecting—A Silver Mine at Last—Making a Fortune with Sledge and Drill—A Hard Road to Travel—We Own in Claims—A Rocky Country

30. Disinterested Friends—How Feet Were Sold—We Quit Tunneling—A Trip to Esmeralda—My Companions—An Indian Prophecy—A Flood—Our Quarters during It

31. The Guests at Honey Lake Smith’s—Bully Old Arkansas—Our Landlord—Determined to Fight—The Landlord’s Wife—The Bully Conquered by Her—Another Start—Crossing the Carson—A Narrow Escape—Following Our Own Track—A New Guide—Lost in the Snow

32. Desperate Situation—Attempts to Make a Fire—Our Horses Leave Us—We Find Matches—One, Two, Three and the Last—No Fire—Death Seems Inevitable—We Mourn over Our Evil Lives—Discarded Vices—We Forgive Each Other—An Affectionate Farewell—The Sleep of Oblivion

33. Return of Consciousness—Ridiculous Developments—A Station-House—Bitter Feelings—Fruits of Repentance—Resurrected Vices

34. About Carson—Gen. Buncombe—Hyde vs. Morgan—How Hyde Lost His Ranch—The Great Land-Slide Case—The Trial—Gen. Buncombe in Court—A Wonderful Decision—A Serious Afterthought

35. A New Traveling Companion—All Full and No Accommodations—How Capt. Nye Found Room—And Caused Our Leaving to be Lamented—The Uses of Tunneling—A Notable Example—We Go into the Claim Business and Fail—At the Bottom

36. A Quartz Mill—Amalgamation—Screening Tailings—First Quartz Mill in Nevada—Fire Assay—A Smart Assayer—I Stake for an Advance

37. The Whiteman Cement Mine—Story of Its Discovery—A Secret Expedition—A Nocturnal Adventure—A Distressing Position—A Failure and a Week’s Holiday

38. Mono Lake—Shampooing Made Easy—Thoughtless Act of Our Dog and the Results—Lye Water—Curiosities of the Lake—Free Hotel—Some Funny Incidents a Little Overdrawn

39. Visit to the Islands in Mono Lake—Ashes and Desolation—Life amid Death—Our Boat Adrift—A Jump for Life—A Storm on the Lake—A Mass of Soap Suds—Geological Curiosities—A Week on the Sierras—A Narrow Escape from a Funny Explosion—Stove Heap Gone

40. The Wide West Mine—It Is Interviewed by Higbie—A Blind Lead—Worth a Million—We Are Rich at Last—Plans for the Future

41. A Rheumatic Patient—Day Dreams—An Unfortunate Stumble—I Leave Suddenly—Another Patient—Higbie in the Cabin—Our Balloon Burst—Worth Nothing—Regrets and Explanations—Our Third Partner

42. What to Do Next?—Obstacles I Had Met With—Jack of All Trades—Mining Again—Target Shooting—I Turn City Editor—I Succeed Finely

43. My Friend Boggs—The School Report—Boggs Pays Me an Old Debt—Virginia City

44. Flush Times—Plenty of Stock—Editorial Puffing—Stocks Given Me—Salting Mines—A Tragedian in a New Role

45. Flush Times Continue—Sanitary Commission Fund—Wild Enthusiasm of the People—Would Not Wait to Contribute—The Sanitary Flour Sack—It Is Carried to Gold Hill and Dayton—Final Reception in Virginia—Results of the Sale—A Grand Total

46. The Nabobs of Those Days—John Smith as a Traveler—Sudden Wealth—A Sixty-Thousand-Dollar Horse—A Smart Telegraph Operator—A Nabob in New York City—Charters an Omnibus—Walk Right in, It’s All Free—You Can’t Pay a Cent—Hold on, Driver, I Weaken—Sociability of New Yorkers

47. Buck Fanshaw’s Death—The Cause Thereof—Preparations for His Burial—Scotty Briggs the Committeeman—He Visits the Minister—Scotty Can’t Play His Hand—The Minister Gets Mixed—Both Begin to See—All Down but Nine—Buck Fanshaw as a Citizen—How to Shake Your Mother—The Funeral—Scotty Briggs as a Sunday School Teacher

48. The First Twenty-six Graves in Nevada—The Prominent Men of the County—The Man Who Had Killed His Dozen—Trial by Jury—Specimen Jurors—A Private Graveyard—The Desperadoes—Whom They Killed—Satisfaction without Fighting

49. Fatal Shooting Affray—Robbery and Desperate Affray—A Specimen City Official—A Marked Man—A Street Fight—Punishment of Crime

50. Capt. Ned Blakely—Bill Noakes Receives Desired Information—Killing of Blakely’s Mate—A Walking Battery—Blakely Secures Noakes—Hang First and Be Tried Afterward—Capt. Blakely as a Chaplain—The First Chapter of Genesis Read at a Hanging—Noakes Hung—Blakely’s Regrets

51. The Weekly Occidental—A Ready Editor—A Novel—A Concentration of Talent—The Heroes and the Heroines—The Dissolute Author Engaged—Extraordinary Havoc with the Novel—A Highly Romantic Chapter—The Lovers Separated—Jonah Outdone—A Lost Poem—The Aged Pilot Man—Storm on the Erie Canal—Dollinger the Pilot Man—Terrific Gale—Danger Increases—A Crisis Arrived—Saved as if by a Miracle

52. Freights to California—Silver Bricks—Underground Mines—Timber Supports—A Visit to the Mines—The Caved Mines—Total of Shipments in 1863

53. Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Ram—Filkins’s Mistake—Old Miss Wagner and Her Glass Eye—Jacops, the Coffin Dealer—Waiting for a Customer—His Bargain with Old Robbins—Robbins Sues for Damage and Collects—A New Use for Missionaries—The Effect—His Uncle Lem and the Use Providence Made of Him—Sad Fate of Wheeler—Devotion of His Wife—A Model Monument—What about the Ram?

54. Chinese in Virginia City—Washing Bills—Habit of Imitation—Chinese Immigration—A Visit to Chinatown—Messrs. Ah Sing, Hong Wo, See Yup, etc.

55. Tired of Virginia City—An Old Schoolmate—A Two Years’ Loan—Acting as an Editor—Almost Receive an Offer—An Accident—Three Drunken Anecdotes—Last Look at Mount Davidson—A Beautiful Incident

56. Off for San Francisco—Western and Eastern Landscapes—The Hottest Place on Earth—Summer and Winter

57. California—Novelty of Seeing a Woman—Well, if It Ain’t a Child!—One Hundred and Fifty Dollars for a Kiss—Waiting for a Turn

58. Life in San Francisco—Worthless Stocks—My First Earthquake—Reportorial Instincts—Effects of the Shocks—Incidents and Curiosities—Sabbath Breakers—The Lodger and the Chambermaid—A Sensible Fashion to Follow—Effects of the Earthquake on the Ministers

59. Poor Again—Slinking as a Business—A Model Collector—Misery Loves Company—Comparing Notes for Comfort—A Streak of Luck—Finding a Dime—Wealthy by Comparison—Two Sumptuous Dinners

60. An Old Friend—An Educated Miner—Pocket-Mining—Freaks of Fortune

61. Dick Baker and His Cat—Tom Quartz’s Peculiarities—On an Excursion—Appearance on His Return—A Prejudiced Cat—Empty Pockets and a Roving Life

62. Bound for the Sandwich Islands—The Three Captains—The Old Admiral—His Daily Habits—His Well Fought Fields—An Unexpected Opponent—The Admiral Overpowered—The Victor Declared a Hero

63. Arrival at the Islands—Honolulu—What I Saw There—Dress and Habits of the Inhabitants—The Animal Kingdom—Fruits and Delightful Effects

64. An Excursion—Capt. Phillips and His Turn-out—A Horseback Ride—A Vicious Animal—Nature and Art—Interesting Ruins—All Praise to the Missionaries

65. Interesting Mementoes and Relics—An Old Legend of a Frightful Leap—An Appreciative Horse—Horse-Jockeys and Their Brothers—A New Trick—A Hay Merchant—Good Country for Horse Lovers

66. A Saturday Afternoon—Sandwich Island Girls on a Frolic—The Poi Merchant—Grand Gala Day—A Native Dance—Church Membership—Cats and Officials—An Overwhelming Discovery

67. The Legislature of the Island—What Its President Has Seen—Praying for an Enemy—Women’s Rights—Romantic Fashions—Worship of the Shark—Desire for Dress—Full Dress—Not Paris Style—Playing Empire—Officials and Foreign Ambassadors—Overwhelming Magnificence

68. A Royal Funeral—Order of Procession—Pomp and Ceremony—A Striking Contrast—A Sick Monarch—Human Sacrifices at His Death—Burial Orgies

69. Once More upon the Waters—A Noisy Passenger—Several Silent Ones—A Moonlight Scene—Fruits and Plantations

70. A Droll Character—Mrs. Beazeley and Her Son—Meditations on Turnips—A Letter from Horace Greeley—An Indignant Rejoinder—The Letter Translated but Too Late

71. Kealakekua Bay—Death of Capt. Cook—His Monument—Its Construction—On Board the Schooner

72. Young Kanakas in New England—A Temple Built by Ghosts—Female Bathers—I Stood Guard—Women and Whisky—A Fight for Religion—Arrival of Missionaries

73. Native Canoes—Surf-Bathing—A Sanctuary—How Built—The Queen’s Rock—Curiosities—Petrified Lava

74. Visit to the Volcano—The Crater—Pillar of Fire—Magnificent Spectacle—A Lake of Fire

75. The North Lake—Fountains of Fire—Streams of Burning Lava—Tidal Waves

76. A Reminiscence—Another Horse Story—My Ride with the Retired Milk Horse—A Pic-nicking Excursion—Dead Volcano of Haleakala—Comparison with Vesuvius—An Inside View

77. A Curious Character—A Series of Stories—Sad Fate of a Liar—Evidence of Insanity

78. Return to San Francisco—Ship Amusements—Preparing for Lecturing—Valuable Assistance Secured—My First Attempt—The Audience Carried—All’s Well That Ends Well

79. Highwaymen—A Predicament—A Huge Joke—Farewell to California—At Home Again—Great Changes. Moral

APPENDIX

A.—Brief Sketch of Mormon History

B.—The Mountain Meadows Massacre

C.—Concerning a Frightful Assassination That Was Never Consummated

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EXPLANATORY NOTES

SUPPLEMENTS

REFERENCES

NOTE ON THE TEXT

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The Miner’s Dream (Full Page).

Envious Contemplations

Innocent Dreams

Light Traveling Order

The Allen

Inducements to Purchase

The Facetious Driver

Pleasing News

The Sphynx

Meditation

On Business

Author as Gulliver

A Tough Statement

Third Trip of the Unabridged

A Powerful Glass

An Heirloom

Our Landlord

Dignified Exile

Drinking Slumgullion

A Joke without Cream

Pullman Car Dining-Saloon

Our Morning Ride

Prairie Dogs

A Cayote

Showing Respect to Relatives

The Conductor

The Superintendent as a Teacher

Jack and the Elderly Pilgrim

Crossing the Platte

An Inhuman Spectacle

A New Departure

Suspended Operations

A Wonderful Lie

Tail-Piece

Here he comes!

Changing Horses

Riding the Avalanche

Indian Country

A Proposed Fist-Fight

From behind the Door

Slade as Executioner

An Unpleasant View

Unappreciated Politeness

Tail-Piece

Slade in Court

A Wife’s Lamentation

The Concentrated Inhabitant

The South Pass (Full Page)

The Parted Stream

It Spoiled the Melon

Given Over to the Cayote and the Raven

Don’t come here!

Think I’m a dam fool?

The Destroying Angel

Effects of Valley Tan

One Crest

The Other

The Vagrant

Portrait of Heber Kimball

Portrait of Brigham Young

The Contractors before the King

I Was Touched

The Endowment—Tail-Piece

Favorite Wife and D 4

Needed Marking

A Remarkable Resemblance

The Family Bedstead

The Miraculous Compass

Three Sides to a Question

Result of High Freights

A Shriveled Quarter

An Object of Pity

Tail-Piece

Tail-Piece

Goshoot Indians Hanging around Stations

The Drive for Life

Greeley’s Ride

Bottling an Anecdote

Tail-Piece

Contemplation

The Washoe Zephyr

The Governor’s House

Dark Disclosures

The Irish Brigade

Recreation

The Tarantula

Light Thrown on the Subject

I Steered

The Invalid

The Restored

Our House

At Business

Fire at Lake Tahoe (Full Page)

You might think he was an American horse.

Unexpected Elevation

Universally Unsettled

Riding the Plug

Wanted Exercise

Borrowing Made Easy

Free Rides

Satisfactory Voucher

Needs Praying For

Map of Toll-Roads

Unloading Silver Bricks

View in Humboldt Mountains

Going to Humboldt

Ballou’s Bedfellow

Pleasures of Camping Out

The Secret Search

"Cast your eye on that!"

We’ve got it!

Incipient Millionaires

Rocks—Tail-Piece

Do you see it?

Farewell Sweet River

The Rescue

Mr. Arkansas

An Armed Ally

Crossing the Flood

Advance in a Circle

The Songster

The Foxes Have Holes—Tail-Piece

A Flat Failure

The Last Match

Discarded Vices

Flames—Tail-Piece

Camping in the Snow (Full Page)

It Was Thus We Met

Taking Possession

A Great Effort

Reärranging and Shifting

We Left Lamented

Picture of Townsend’s Tunnel

Quartz Mill in Nevada

Another Process of Amalgamation

First Quartz Mill in Nevada

A Slice of Rich Ore

The Saved Brother

On a Secret Expedition

Mono Lake (Full Page)

Rather Soapy

A Bark under Full Sail

A Model Boarding House

Life amid Death

A Jump for Life

Stove heap gone!

Tail-Piece

Interviewing the Wide West

Worth a Million

Millionaires Laying Plans

Dangerously Sick

Worth Nothing

Enforcing a Compromise

One of My Failures

Target Shooting

As City Editor

The Entire Market

A Friend Indeed

Union—Tail-Piece

An Educational Report

No Particular Hurry

Bird’s Eye View of Virginia and Mount Davidson

A New Mine

Take a few?

Portrait of Mr. Stewart

Selling a Mine

Couldn’t Wait

The Great Flour Sack Procession (Full Page)

Tail-Piece

A Nabob

Magnificence and Misery

A Friendly Driver

Astonishes the Natives

Col. Jack Weakens

Committeeman and Minister

Scotty Regulating Matters

Never Shook His Mother

Scotty as a Sunday School Teacher

The Man Who Had Killed a Dozen

The Unprejudiced Jury

A Desperado Giving Reference

Satisfying a Foe

Tail-Piece

Imparting Information

A Walking Battery

Overhauling His Manifest

Ship—Tail-Piece

The Heroes and Heroines of the Story

Dissolute Author

Unlooked-for Appearance of the Lawyer

The Storm Increased

Jonah Outdone

Dollinger

Low bridge!

Shortening Sail

Lightening Ship

The Marvelous Rescue

Silver Bricks

Timber Supports

From Gallery to Gallery

Jim Blaine

Hurrah for Nixon

Miss Wagner

Waiting for a Customer

Was to Be There

The Monument

Where Is the Ram?—Tail-Piece

Chinese Wash Bill

Imitation

Chinese Lottery

Chinese Merchant at Home—Tail-Piece

An Old Friend

Farewell and Accident

Gimme a cigar!

The Herald of Glad News

Flag—Tail-Piece

An Eastern Landscape

A Variable Climate

Sacramento and Three Hours Away

Fetch her out!

Well, if it ain’t a child!

A Genuine Live Woman

The Grace of a Kangaroo

Dreams Dissipated

The One-Horse Shay Outdone

Hard on the Innocents

Dry Bones Shaken

"Oh, what shall I do!"

Get out your towel my dear!

We will omit the benediction!

Slinking

A Prize

A Look in at the Window

Do it, stranger.

The Old Collegiate

Striking a Pocket

Tom Quartz

An Advantage Taken

After an Excursion

The Three Captains

The Old Admiral

Deserted Field

Williams

Scene on the Islands

Fashionable Attire

A Bite

Reconnoitering

Eating Tamarinds

Looking for Mischief

A Family Likeness

Sat Down to Listen

My brother all same—we twins!

Extraordinary Capers

A Load of Hay

Marching through Georgia—Tail-Piece

Sandwich Island Girls

Original Ham Sandwich

I Kissed Him for His Mother

An Outsider—Tail-Piece

An Enemy’s Prayer

Visiting the Missionaries

Full Church Dress

Playing Empire

Royalty and Its Satellites

A High Private—Tail-Piece

A Modern Funeral

Former Funeral Orgies

A Passenger

Moonlight on the Water

Going into the Mountains (Full Page)

Evening—Tail-Piece

The Demented

Discussing Turnips

Greeley’s Letter

Kealakekua Bay and Cook’s Monument

The Ghostly Builders

On Guard

The Tabu Broken

Tail-Piece

Surf-Bathing—Success

Surf-Bathing—Failure

The City of Refuge

The Queen’s Rock

Tail-Piece

The Pillar of Fire

The Crater

Breaking Through

Fire Fountains

Lava Stream

A Tidal Wave

Trip on the Milky Way

A View in the Iao Valley (Full Page)

Magnificent Sport

Eleven Miles to See

Chased by a Storm

Leaving Work

Tail-Piece

Our Amusements

Severe Case of Stage-Fright

My Three Parquette Allies

Sawyer in the Circle

A Predicament

Best Part of the Joke

The End

FOREWORD

Like most of Mark Twain’s best work, Roughing It is largely autobiographical, as its preface explains: This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing. . . . Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person. Roughing It recreates a six-year period from Clemens’s early life, beginning in the summer of 1861, when the Civil War had interrupted (and, as it turned out, terminated) Clemens’s career as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot. His brother, Orion, had just been appointed secretary of Nevada Territory, where a mining boom had infected nearly everyone with silver fever. Clemens eagerly accepted the chance to accompany him to Nevada, using his own savings to pay both stagecoach fares for the trip across the continent. The opening chapters of the book describe this arduous but exhilarating journey, and these are followed by anecdotal but essentially accurate accounts of Clemens’s adventures as a prospector and miner, then as a journalist in Nevada, California, and the Sandwich Islands, and finally as a lecturer in 1866. But Roughing It is also partly fiction—what has been aptly called an imaginative interpretation of Clemens’s experience in the West. His personal narrative ingeniously combines reminiscence and factual reporting with anecdotes and tall tales, many told in the vigorous new vernacular of the West. Several of these are so successful that they are often reprinted as separate sketches: the Great Land-Slide Case (chapter 34); Buck Fanshaw’s funeral (chapter 47); the Genuine Mexican Plug (chapter 24); Bemis and the buffalo (chapter 7); and Dick Baker’s sagacious cat, Tom Quartz (chapter 61).

It was in the West that Clemens found and eventually accepted his vocation as a humorist. The experiences described in Roughing It illuminate how the freedom and spontaneity of the frontier helped him to develop as a writer, encouraging him to experiment and cultivate a distinctive style. Although he considered writing a book about the West as early as 1864, he did not in fact begin on it until after he had published the immensely successful Innocents Abroad (1869). In July 1870 he signed a contract to provide his subscription publisher with a 600-page book—and although the topic was not specified, he soon confided to his brother that he proposed to do up Nevada & Cal., beginning with the trip across the country in the stage. Have you a memorandum of the route we took—or the names of any of the Stations we stopped at? Do you remember any of the scenes, names, incidents or adventures of the coach trip? Orion did indeed have such a memorandum, and Clemens found it (and other similar notes) an essential stimulant for his imagination: Incidents are better, any time, than dry history, he explained.

Although Clemens began to make use of Orion’s memorandum in late August and early September 1870, a series of personal crises, combined with a mysterious lapse of facility in writing, effectively postponed any significant progress on the book until the following March. The episodic nature of his narrative enabled Clemens to explore virtually any subject that occurred to him, and to add (or delete) chapters without much affecting the continuity of his story. It also permitted him to incorporate revised versions of sketches he had previously published in newspapers—for example, a series of western reminiscences that had appeared originally in the Buffalo Express. Having fallen behind schedule, he began submitting chapters to his publisher long before he had completed his book—something he had not done before, and refrained from doing with any later book. As a consequence, he found himself radically altering the early chapters even after they had been set in type. And more than once he was obliged to add chapters, after he thought his book was complete, in order to make it as long as the announced 600 pages. It was not until July 1871, for instance, that he decided to add "4 or 5 chapters" about the Sandwich Islands, but under the necessity of making the book longer he eventually devoted fifteen chapters to describing his 1866 experiences there, eleven of them based on letters he had first published in the Sacramento Union. And the appendixes were probably not added until the book was nearly ready to print, with the result that the final one bears only a dubious relationship to his subject. Some of the late additions were by no means so perfunctory, however. While putting the final touches on his manuscript he added a splendid chapter to the middle of the book—probably Jim Blaine’s rambling story of his grandfather’s old ram (chapter 53).

The publication of Roughing It was formally announced on 29 February 1872. It was the first of Mark Twain’s books to be published simultaneously in England, a strategy designed to ensure a valid British copyright in the absence of international copyright protection. The book was not widely reviewed, a result of Clemens’s own policy: fearing the book would be considered pretty poor stuff, he declined to send complimentary copies to the newspapers. But his fear was not realized: on the whole it was well received, and sold more than 75,000 copies within a year of publication. William Dean Howells praised the grotesque exaggeration and broad irony of Clemens’s account of western life, calling them conjecturably the truest colors that could have been used, for all existence there must have looked like an extravagant joke, the humor of which was only deepened by its nether-side of tragedy. And Charles Dudley Warner noted, Behind the mask of the story-teller is the satirist, whose head is always clear, who is not imposed on by shams, who hates all pretension, and who uses his humor, which is often extravagant, to make pretension and false dignity ridiculous. Warner also defended Clemens’s controversial use of slang, calling it the "argot that was current in the mining regions, and asserting that the description of the life there would be entirely imperfect if it had been left out." The vernacular style of Roughing It often seems surprisingly fresh to modern readers, an effect of Clemens’s remarkable prescience about his native tongue: many of the words objected to as slang in 1872 have outlived their detractors and become part of our everyday language.

Although readers have long been entertained by Roughing It, it has gradually become part of all serious study of American culture. Students of history have come to rely on it for accurate information about the period, and it has played a major role in shaping the myth of the wild West, especially as perpetuated in countless novels, films, and television programs. No examination of American popular culture would be complete without Mark Twain’s imaginative reminiscence of what it was like to be on the ground in person.

Harriet Elinor Smith

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MARK TWAIN

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ROUGHING

IT

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TO

CALVIN H. HIGBIE,

Of California,

An Honest Man, a Genial Comrade, and a Steadfast Friend,

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

By the Author,

In Memory of the Curious Time

When We Two

WERE MILLIONAIRES FOR TEN DAYS.

PREFATORY

THIS book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada—a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind, that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it.

Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I caulk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.

THE AUTHOR.

CHAPTER 1

MY brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory—an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting Governor in the Governor’s absence. A salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year and the title of Mr. Secretary, gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word travel had a seductive charm for me. 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, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero. And he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pail-fuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. And by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean, and the Isthmus as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face. What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe. And so, when he offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him, it appeared to me that the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was rolled together as a scroll! I had nothing more to desire. My contentment was complete. At the end of an hour or two I was ready for the journey. Not much packing up was necessary, because we were going in the overland stage from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and passengers were only allowed a small quantity of baggage apiece. There was no Pacific railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve years ago—not a single rail of it.

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ENVIOUS CONTEMPLATIONS.

I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months—I had no thought of staying longer than that. I meant to see all I could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business. I little thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years!

I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a steamboat bound up the Missouri river.

We were six days going from St. Louis to St. Joe—a trip that was so dull, and sleepy, and eventless that it has left no more impression on my memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many days. No record is left in my mind, now, concerning it, but a confused jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other; and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then retired from and climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our crutches and sparred over. In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Joe by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow—climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. The captain said she was a bully boat, and all she wanted was more shear and a bigger wheel. I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the deep sagacity not to say so.

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INNOCENT DREAMS.

CHAPTER 2

THE first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at St. Joseph was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and fifty dollars apiece for tickets per overland coach to Carson City, Nevada.

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LIGHT TRAVELING ORDER.

The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and hurried to the starting-place. Then an inconvenience presented itself which we had not properly appreciated before, namely, that one cannot make a heavy traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage—because it weighs a good deal more. But that was all we could take—twenty-five pounds each. So we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a selection in a good deal of a hurry. We put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece all in one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis again. It was a sad parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats and white kid gloves to wear at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and no stovepipe hats nor patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and peaceful. We were reduced to a war-footing. Each of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and stogy boots included; and into the valise we crowded a few white shirts, some underclothing and such things. My brother, the Secretary, took along about four pounds of U. S. statutes and six pounds of Unabridged Dictionary; for we did not know—poor innocents—that such things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received in Carson City the next. I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson’s seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It only had one fault—you could not hit anything with it. One of our conductors practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief. The Secretary had a small-sized Colt’s revolver strapped around him for protection against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it uncapped. Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our fellow-traveler. We had never seen him before. He wore in his belt an old original Allen revolver, such as irreverent people called a pepper-box. Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an Allen in the world. But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, If she didn’t get what she went after, she would fetch something else. And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon—the Allen. Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it.

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THE ALLEN.

We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were modest—we took none along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. We had two large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the way of breakfasts and dinners.

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INDUCEMENTS TO PURCHASE.

By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of the river. We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left the States behind us. It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine. There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the great Plains. Just here the land was rolling—a grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach—like the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm. And everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this limitless expanse of grassy land. But presently this sea upon dry ground was to lose its rolling character and stretch away for seven hundred miles as level as a floor!

Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description—an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the conductor, the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We three were the only passengers, this trip. We sat on the back seat, inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail-bags—for we had three days’ delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver said—a little for Brigham, and Carson, and ’Frisco, but the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome ’thout they get plenty of truck to read. But as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and leave it to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it.

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THE FACETIOUS DRIVER.

We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the hard, level road. We jumped out and stretched our legs every time the coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued.

After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and conductor. Apparently she was not a talkative woman. She would sit there in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with tranquil satisfaction—for she never missed her mosquito; she was a dead shot at short range. She never removed a carcase, but left them there for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill thirty or forty mosquitoes—watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said:

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PLEASING NEWS.

The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.

You bet!

What did I understand you to say, madam?

You BET!

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THE SPHYNX.

Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:

Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. I did, b’ gosh. Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a bust’n muskeeters and wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin’, and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn’t think of nothing to say. Wher’d ye come from?

The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation!

How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after hour, till I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start. She never did stop again until she got to her journey’s end toward daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we were nodding, by that time), and said:

"Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o’ days, and I’ll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good by edgin’ in a word now and then, I’m right thar. Folks ‘ll tell you’t I’ve always ben kind o’ offish and partic’lar for a gal that’s raised in the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my equals, I reckon I’m a pretty sociable heifer after all."

We resolved not to lay by at Cottonwood.

CHAPTER 3

ABOUT an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly over the road—so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle, lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our consciousness—when something gave away under us! We were dimly aware of it, but indifferent to it. The coach stopped. We heard the driver and conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a lantern, and swearing because they could not find it—but we had no interest in whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with the curtains drawn. But presently, by the sounds, there seemed to be an examination going on, and then the driver’s voice said:

By George, the thoroughbrace is broke!

This startled me broad awake—as an undefined sense of calamity is always apt to do. I said to myself: Now, a thoroughbrace is probably part of a horse; and doubtless a vital part, too, from the dismay in the driver’s voice. Leg, maybe—and yet how could he break his leg waltzing along such a road as this? No, it can’t be his leg. That is impossible, unless he was reaching for the driver. Now, what can be the thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder? Well, whatever comes, I shall not air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway.

Just then the conductor’s face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter. He said:

Gents, you’ll have to turn out a spell. Thoroughbrace is broke.

We climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and dreary. When I found that the thing they called a thoroughbrace was the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself in, I said to the driver:

I never saw a thoroughbrace used up like that, before, that I can remember. How did it happen?

Why, it happened by trying to make one coach carry three days’ mail—that’s how it happened, said he. And right here is the very direction which is wrote on all the newspaper-bags which was to be put out for the Injuns for to keep ’em quiet. It’s most uncommon lucky, becuz it’s so nation dark I should ‘a’ gone by unbeknowns if that air thoroughbrace hadn’t broke.

I knew that he was in labor with another of those winks of his, though I could not see his face, because he was bent down at work; and wishing him a safe delivery, I turned to and helped the rest get out the mail-sacks. It made a great pyramid by the roadside when it was all out. When they had mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots again, but put no mail on top, and only half as much inside as there was before. The conductor bent all the seat-backs down, and then filled the coach just half full of mail-bags from end to end. We objected loudly to this, for it left us no seats. But the conductor was wiser than we, and said a bed was better than seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his thoroughbraces. We never wanted any seats after that. The lazy bed was infinitely preferable. I had many an exciting day, subsequently, lying on it reading the statutes and the Dictionary, and wondering how the characters would turn out.

The conductor said he would send back a guard from the next station to take charge of the abandoned mail-bags, and we drove on.

It was now just dawn; and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to where there was an expectant look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses’ hoofs, the cracking of the driver’s whip, and his Hi-yi! g’lang! were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us with interest, or envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it.

After breakfast, at some station whose name I have forgotten, we three climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let the conductor have our bed for a nap. And by and by, when the sun made me drowsy, I lay down on my face on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron railing, and slept for an hour or more. That will give one an appreciable idea of those matchless roads. Instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast hold of the railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways, no grip is necessary. Overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their places and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time, on good roads, while spinning along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. I saw them do it, often. There was no danger about it; a sleeping man will seize the irons in time when the coach jolts. These men were hard worked, and it was not possible for them to stay awake all the time.

By and by we passed through Marysville, and over the Big Blue and Little Sandy; thence about a mile, and entered Nebraska. About a mile further on, we came to the Big Sandy—one hundred and eighty miles from St. Joseph.

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MEDITATION.

As the sun was going down, we saw the first specimen of an animal known familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain and desert—from Kansas clear to the Pacific Ocean—as the jackass rabbit. He is well named. He is just like any other rabbit, except that he is from one-third to twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size, and has the most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature but a jackass. When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins, or is absent-minded or unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project above him conspicuously; but the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to death, and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home. All you can see, then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out straight and streaking it through the low sage-brush, head erect, eyes right, and ears just canted a little to the rear, but showing you where the animal is, all the time, the same as if he carried a jib. Now and then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs, high over the stunted sagebrush, and scores a leap that would make a horse envious. Presently he comes down to a long, graceful lope, and shortly he mysteriously disappears. He has crouched behind a sage-bush, and will sit there and listen and tremble until you get within six feet of him, when he will get under way again. But one must shoot at this creature once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels, and do the best he knows how. He is frightened clear through, now, and he lays his long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yard-stick every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy indifference that is enchanting.

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ON BUSINESS.

Our party made this specimen hump himself, as the conductor said. The Secretary started him with a shot from the Colt; I commenced spitting at him with my weapon; and all in the same instant the old Allen’s whole broadside let go with a rattling crash, and it is not putting it too strong to say that the rabbit was frantic! He dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish! Long after he was out of sight we could hear him whiz.

I do not remember where we first came across sage-brush, but as I have been speaking of it I may as well describe it. This is easily done, for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and venerable live oak tree reduced to a little shrub two feet high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture the sagebrush exactly. Often, on lazy afternoons in the mountains, I have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-bush, and entertained myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were lilliputian birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its base were lilliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from Brobdingnag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him.

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AUTHOR AS GULLIVER.

It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the sage-brush. Its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that tint to desert and mountain. It smells like our domestic sage, and sage-tea made from it tastes like the sage-tea which all boys are so well acquainted with. The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except bunch-grass.* The sage-bushes grow from three to six or seven feet apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the Far West, clear to the borders of California. There is not a tree of any kind in the deserts, for hundreds of miles—there is no vegetation at all in a regular desert, except the sage-brush and its cousin the grease-wood, which is so much like the sage-brush that the difference amounts to little. Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sage-brush. Its trunk is as large as a boy’s wrist (and from that up to a man’s arm), and its crooked branches are half as large as its trunk—all good, sound, hard wood, very like oak.

When a party camps, the first thing to be done is to cut sagebrush; and in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it ready for use. A hole a foot wide, two feet deep, and two feet long, is dug, and sage-brush chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with glowing coals. Then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and consequently no swearing. Such a fire will keep all night, with very little replenishing; and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly entertaining.

Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner. Mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that anything will relieve temporarily, but nothing satisfy. In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet. He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life. Then he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve. Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat. The tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople. And then my newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that—manuscript letters written for the home papers. But he was treading on dangerous ground, now. He began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach; and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth; it was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter’s work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony. I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public.

f0016-01

I was about to say, when diverted from my subject, that occasionally one finds sage-bushes five or six feet high, and with a spread of branch and foliage in proportion, but two or two and a half feet is the usual height.

*Bunch-grass grows on the bleak mountain sides of Nevada and neighboring Territories, and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the dead of winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it; notwithstanding its unpromising home, bunch-grass is a better and more nutritious diet for cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass that is known—so stock-men say.

CHAPTER 4

As the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation for bed. We stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks, and the knotty canvas bags of printed matter (knotty and uneven because of projecting ends and corners of magazines, boxes and books). We stirred them up and redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible. And we did improve it, too, though after all our work it had an upheaved and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea. Next we hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail-bags where they had settled, and put them on. Then we got down our coats, vests, pantaloons and heavy woolen shirts, from the arm-loops where they had been swinging all day, and clothed ourselves in them—for, there being no ladies

Reviews for Roughing It

[laugal-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed his descriptions of Hawaii of 1866. Very colorful tales of his trip and Hawaiian history.Some very funny lines that only Twain could write!

[ireadby · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Would rate 3.5 stars if I could, but went with three because the novel tends to go off on tangents and gets bogged down with tedious details at times.

However, it was an entertaining history lesson from Twain's opinionated and unapologetic perspective. If written today, it would take the form of a highly popular social networking site and easily make YouTube's top ten most watched videos.

Part autobiography and part travelogue, this novel is really a collection of short stories separated by chapters (79 in all). It encompasses time period from Mark Twain's teen to young adulthood years. The book is catalogued as non-fiction, but I wonder what the criteria is that separates fact from fiction? I estimate that about 50-60% of the author's recollections are true but interwoven with anecdotal hyperbole. Twain does stop at times to address the reader and admit these exaggerations or at least gives you a choice of how much of a particular story to believe. And it works!

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had high hopes for this one, but I found that most of it lacked Twain’s incomparable wit. Much of it is a straight forward description of Twain’s travels out west in his youth during the mid-1800s. He travelled all over the west, even out to Hawaii. He describes gold and silver mining and the wild west in detail and has some incredibly strong feelings of dislike for Mormons. There were bits in the second half that I enjoyed more that the first half. Apparently the first half is based on this brother’s journals of the trip (I didn’t find that out until I’d finished the book) and that would explain why it comes across and a bit dull. If you can make it through those bits it picks up and fans will recognize Twain’s clever style. I loved his description of attempting to work as an editor. He has the job for only seven days before quitting. He decided it was much too hard to come up with something new to write about each day. Twain’s anecdotes about his travels are wonderful. I particularly loved a story about planning his first public lecture. He was so nervous he took every possible precaution to ensure he would receive some laughs. BOTTOM LINE: I would recommend only if you are a huge Mark Twain fan or if you love reading about the development of the west. Otherwise I would highly recommend most of Twain’s other work, including Huck Finn, Tow Sawyer, Prince and the Pauper, etc.  

[edgeworth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I bought this when I was travelling in Beijing a few years ago and the only English-language bookstore I could find was something churning out endless public domain texts, presumably for students. Mark Twain is by far the most readable of any 19th century author, so I picked this up, but didn’t get around to reading it until recently.Roughing It is an account of Twain’s journeys across America’s western frontier when he was a young man in his twenties; it was apparently written in 1872, but the actual journey took place in the 1860s, while the Civil War (rarely mentioned in this book) was raging in the east. His brother Orion had been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory, and Twain (or Clemens, at the time) went along with him as an assistant. He remained with his brother in Nevada for some time before, as youth are wont to do, he went gallivanting off on his own adventures. What was supposed to be a three-month journey ultimately ended up being seven years.Roughing It takes place, as I said, before the events of Twain’s more famous travelogue The Innocents Abroad, but it was written after the success of that volume, collated from various old diary entries, correspondence pieces and Twain’s imperfect memory. Apparently the first third of the book, detailing their journey to Nevada, is heavily based on Orion’s journals. This may be why I found it dull, dry and difficult going, since it lacked Twain’s personal spark.The book picks up a bit more as Twain begins his own travelling, and branches out into other work – prospecting, mining, real estate speculation, and eventually journalism, in the confusingly-named town of Virginia, which is where he first adopted his famous pen-name. (A recent theory suggests this didn’t come from riverboat slang, as originally thought, but was perhaps something Twain would cry out at the bar in Virginia when putting new drinks on his tab.) Towards the end it also details his time in San Francisco, and a trip to Hawaii – which would have seemed a bit tacked-on to the book in 1872, but now slots in with the theme of America’s West quite well.I mentioned earlier that Twain is the most readable of any 19th century writer, but that is of course a relative measure – his style is long, verbose and drawn-out, and to a 21st century reader it can often become tedious, especially when he’s taking you through the finer points of gold mining or relating a somewhat amusing 12-page-long shaggy dog story. But there are also moments which, even 150 years later, are quite amusing. My favourite anecdote comes when he and two friends become lost in a blizzard, their horses bolting into the blinding snowstorm. As they huddle together in the cold and await their certain death they pray to God to deliver them, swear off all their sins, apologise to each other for past grievances, and slowly come to accept their demise. In the morning, clinging to life, they wake to find the snowstorm has cleared – to reveal the inn from which they had departed a mere fifteen feet from where they sat.For two hours we sat in the station and ruminated in disgust. The mystery was gone, now, and it was plain enough why the horses had deserted us. Without a doubt they were under that shed a quarter of a minute after they had left us, and they must have overheard and enjoyed all our confessions and lamentations.It’s interesting to see the trace of humour, and Twain’s use of sarcasm and deadpan – he’s clearly not a man to let the truth stand in the way of a good yarn – mixed with overwrought 19th century prose. I always wonder whether people actually spoke like that in the 19th century (think the movies True Grit, or Lincoln), or whether they just wrote like that, and modern filmmakers interpret it as a speech pattern as well, based on reading letters and journals. (Westerns from the 1950s and ‘60s were pretty plain-talking, weren’t they?) And, if people did actually speak like that, when in the course of history they stopped.In any case, Twain’s non-fiction – as always – can be difficult and sometimes tedious for the modern reader to follow. The jokes and amusement sprinkled throughout the book are not a reward for effort, but rather a sweetener for a reader who wants an insight into the real Old West – not cowboys, Indians and train robberies, but rather mining, prospecting and the sheer majesty of an untouched wilderness. Roughing It is an excellent first-hand account of life around Nevada and California in the mid-19th century, but be warned that it can be difficult going.

[joeydag · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I remember this book more from where I bought it than for the writing. I bought it from a free standing used book store on the road to my brother's home in Sterling, Massachusetts. The store was built along Route 12 in a rural setting and you could see it, "USED BOOKS", from the highway, big letters, 5 feet high on the walls. This was back in the 70's and even then the book looked old. After purchasing it, the only purchase I ever made at that store, I had occasion to notice that one edition of this book was considered rare, but I never tried to verify if that was the case with this dusty thing.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A memoir, with the author's caution, that "When young,i could remember it whether it happened or not.". It covers the period 1862 to 70, as he rattled around the West, trying his hand at mining and several other risky occupations, including dining with Jack Slade, a notorious gun-man. Well worth the read, but not an exacting history. He wrote the book in 1872.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The works of Mark Twain are all published as classics, literature that finds new readers each generation. However, Roughing it is much thicker and detailed than many of Twain's popular, shorter works. Then, too, to the patient and attentive reader Roughing it will prove to be a highly entertaining and dazzling novel.During the 1860s, the United States of America was still largely unformed, and pioneers had shown to path to the West. Their trail was followed by fortune hunters, and a colourful, adventurous and lawless medley of immigrants, who settled in the new territories, and tried to carve out a livelihood. Samuel Clemens and his brother Orion Clemens were among them, and Roughing it is a semi-autobiographical novel based on their adventures, under the sole authorship of Mark Twain.Roughing it is the story of travelling and short-term jobs of a young man in the "Wild West". It is a kaleidoscopic work of fiction, which consists of numerous anecdotes, stories, true, perhaps, and fictional, experiences and descriptions of all youngman Clemens saw and experienced at that time. All is described with a remarkable degree of detail, which forces the reader to slow down in order to be able to take it all in.In the early 1870s, Mark Twain looked back on this period of his life, just five to ten years earlier, and realized he could remember hardly anything about it. With trhe help of his brother's diaries, and invention, he was able to recover the spirit of the times, and Twain's superior penmanship shines through on every page. Besides that, Twain was an excellent story teller, a quality that accounted for much of his early success, as much of the income of novelists in the Nineteenth century came from public readings. In some parts of the story, the reader can imagine the impact of "telling" the story to an audience, carefully timing jokes. Some stories are funnier than other stories, and probably drew laughter from different kinds of people. Some are difficult to appreciate by modern audiences, either because modern readers are out of tune with what would provoke laughter at the time, or because the written consumption of the book leads to less hilarity. The narrative of Roughing it is enlivened with a number of "nuggets" short episodes embedded in the story that capture the audience more intensely and create memorable vignettes of heightened observation. One of these stories is for example the story of surveyors spending the night in a barrack in pitch dark, when one of them upset and breaks the glass terrarium that contains 16 tarantulas. The fear of sixteen large, black, hairy spiders at large in a bedroom in the black of the night creates a tension that is at once horrifying and humourous:The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish. If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a fight in a minute. Starchy?—proud? Indeed, they would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress. There was as usual a furious "zephyr" blowing the first night of the brigade's return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch. There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisle between the bedrows. In the midst of the turmoil, Bob H——sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with his head. Instantly he shouted:"Turn out, boys—the tarantulas is loose!"No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried, any longer, to leave the room, lest he might step on a tarantula. Every man groped for a trunk or a bed, and jumped on it. Then followed the strangest silence—a silence of grisly suspense it was, too—waiting, expectancy, fear. It was as dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a thing could be seen. (...) Presently you would hear a gasping voice say:"Su—su—something's crawling up the back of my neck!"(...)Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There were ten or twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success.The story is littered with several such gems, each entirely pleasing when read and many memorable. There are stories about outlaws, Indians, bandits and bravados, told in a jumble as Twain saw it, in the real or in his inner eye.The second part of the book, describing the narrator's travels to the Sandwich Islands, now better known as Hawaii, is a bit different in tone than the first part of the book. It is more descriptive, and less jocular, perhaps reflecting the more mature traveller.It is very likely that upon completing the reading of Roughing it the reader will feel exactly the same way as the writer felt when he embarked on the adventure of writing it, namely the inability to recall and remember all of it, or maybe even any of, or at most those sparkingly intense mini stories. If so, the reading would mirror the real life experience: living through a dazzlingly rich experience, and looking back with wonder.

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The funniest book ever written. I howl each time I've read it. Side-splitting, all-out fun.

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mark Twain's memoirs of his youthful travels straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction. Regardless of how accurate these stories are, they are fun to read.

[wkspence · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is, without a doubt, one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read. Like most other boys, I had read "Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in grammar school and loved them. They were, of course, written for young boys seeking adventure. However, I hadn't read any of Twains' work in many years but the accident of pickinig up "Roughing It" and reading a few pages had me laughing and thoroughly enjoying Twains' presentation style and self-effacing humor. His descriptions of the events, adventures, and places are priceless. Exaggerations all, of course, but told in a style that is distinctly his own. Humor doesn't get any better than this story. His version is humorous, but in reality, many of his stories are simply amplified versions of real events written in his own style. This book prompted me to read his other books. He was a talented author which we may not see again. For me, he was to American English, what Shakespeare was to Englands' English. His creativity is highlighted in "A Yankee iin King Arthur's Court." The "Prince and the Pauper" is another tal well told.

[crmass_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Similar in style to Innocents Abroad, but a bit more disjointed. I think that occurs because of the length of time this book covers. There's a lot about gold/silver mining and interesting characters from the West, as well as commentary on a trip to Hawaii, and some interesting takes on various peoples, including early Mormons (there's an interview with Brigham Young and additional appendixes about the Mormons).

[amerynth · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I know this is supposed to be one of the all-time classics in adventure literature... but I quit reading halfway through because I just couldn't take anymore of Twain's style, which I found stilted and painfully slow. The anecdotes were just so long and tedious that I was happy by the time even the interesting ones were over. I've never particularly enjoyed Mark Twain's work... making this book a poor fit for me.... but it disliked it more than his works of fiction.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another book I chose to read while on our California trip. Roughing It is an account of Twain’s life in the West. Twain travels with his brother to California and Nevada during the time of the Gold Rush. Twain looks for silver, has run-ins with bad guys, and observes the West in its early days with humor and cleverness. Lots of politically incorrectness that probably struck the readers of the day as hilariously funny.

[natejordon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first American road novel is not only an entertaining read but a detailed account of an era long past. All American writers can (or should) point to Twain as a major influence; the following passages contain hints of what would later become Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson:"I never had been away from home, and that word 'travel' had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon we 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, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero.""We jumped into the stage[coach], the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left 'the States' behind us. It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine. There was freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away."

[whiskey3pa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Funny stories and good insight into day to day life in Nevada and Hawaii circa 1861-70.

[mrslee_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very enjoyable look at the Old West through the eyes of one who lived there. A great picure of a greenhorn, yet through the eyes of an old hand, and they are one and the same man. He has an extraordinary talent for exploring serious subjects, yet in looking back at them, because of the distance, he is able to find humor in them. It is not a humor that is in jest or makes light of the problem, but the humor of experience and time. I have never wanted to visit Hawaii before, yet after reading this, I would like to. I might be hard-pressed to find the places he talks about though.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Roughing It is semi-non-fiction travel literature about Mark Twains six-years "out west" from 1861-1867 in his late 20s and early 30s prospecting for gold and finding his way in life to become a writer. It was influential in the mythical creation of the Old West.It is a mixed bag of stories and anecdotes, but most importantly it is one of the most influential books of early American travel literature genre and captured the imagination of the "Old West". Much of it seems cliche now, but it was in part Twain who helped invent and popularize it. It is an authentic primary source that captures the feel and flavor of its time, including a few tall tales. Having traveled out west myself on a number of exploratory mis-adventures I could really visualize and understand Twains sense of awe and wonderment, in fact its part of the American psyche, a part of me, and this book was a key in that mythical creation.Gutenberg has a HTML version online which includes scans of the lithograph pictures from the original which is recommended since many books omit the pictures, which are otherwise numerous and good. It was originally released on a subscription-basis. Twain had difficulties completing it with deaths in the family and writers block (it was his 3rd book and by far his longest at 600 pages). It didn't sell well at first, his earlier book Innocents Abroad did much better, which takes place after the Roughing period, but was written before, and is also a travel narrative, about a trip to Europe and Asia Minor.