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Here’s a beautiful video of Bodie, the ghost town in the Sierra Nevada a few miles from the Nevada border. We visited there on our Mark Twain trip. Click here, if you’d like to read more about it.
Thanks for the tip, Greg!
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Photo: Greg MacDonald
When we last left Mark Twain he was slaughtering passers-by in the pages of the Territorial Enterprise. He wrote a similar story in the fall of 1863 meant to shame financiers for artificially inflating stock prices—yes, it happened back then too—and to embarrass San Francisco newspapers for their complicity.
Entitled “The Massacre at Empire City,” it told the story of a man who, in seeing no way out of a huge financial scandal (think 19th-century Enron), committed suicide after gruesomely murdering his wife and most of their nine children.
Twain intended it as satire but big-city papers reprinted the piece as fact, too caught up in the grisly details to catch the finer, cautionary tale. When he recanted the whole thing, cries for Mark Twain’s head could be heard up and down the west coast. Shocked, Twain offered to resign from the paper. “Nonsense,” his editor replied, “We can furnish the people with news, but we can’t supply them with sense.”
In making his first real mark on the West, Twain had, to his amazement, discovered the power of the media.
At our camp in the Bodie Hills, Greg had discovered the power of a wonky stomach. Marinated chicken and my lack of ice-chest due diligence had been the culprits. Back at Desert Creek I had grilled chicken. Natalie warned that it might not have survived the thaw. It had tasted fine but I spit it out anyway. Greg passed too, after swallowing a bite. That simple italics made all the difference. Now in the Bodie Hills he made excursions into the sagebrush with shovel in hand. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo: Nik Schulz
When Clemens arrived in Virginia City in 1862, it was a mere three years old. Its mines, however, had already produced over $400 million dollars in silver, enough to bankroll the building of San Francisco and eventually help the Union win the Civil War. The booming town was lined with businesses, restaurants, saloons, and populated with well-paid miners and dancing girls. After his own hard-scrabble mining stint, Sam Clemens, newly shaved and puffing on his ever-present cigar, must have surveyed the bustling, cosmopolitan scene and thought, “Now this is more like it.”
Here he began to thrive writing stories for the Territorial Enterprise. When the news wasn’t interesting enough for him, which it rarely was, he stretched the facts like taffy, folding and molding them until he had produced a confection that bore little resemblance to the reality from which it was derived. To these colorfully fabricated accounts, he added his colorful new pen name: Mark Twain.
I found one wagon that was going to California, and made some judicious inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his short and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on and would not be in the city the next day to make trouble… I took down his list of names and added his party to the killed and wounded. Having more scope here, I put this wagon through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.
My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the morning I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last… I felt I could take my pen and murder all the emigrants on the plains if need be, and the interests of the paper demanded it.
Mark Twain, Roughing It, Chapter 42
Our legitimate occupation involved getting to the former town of Masonic in the Bodie Hills. First though we had to follow the trail south from our Desert Creek campsite to Jackass Creek and over the Sweetwater Mountains. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the last post about our trip to Idaho in early October.
Pausing by the shores of the Payette River
By the time we left Burgdorf Hot Springs we were pretty impressed with Idaho. The place is beautiful. And as we headed into our last couple of nights, it got even better.
We were traveling south again, down from McCall and then making our way east on Highway 21 towards the town of Stanley and on to Redfish Lake Lodge in the Sawtooth Mountains. I had booked online and squeaked us in to one of their last cabins, in the last week of their season. We drove through the Boise National Forest, gaining in elevation. The scenery was standard stuff until I saw the bear. “Where!!?” piped Natalie, keen for the lookout. It was just a little guy hanging out by the side of the road. I stepped on the brakes, backed up, and it ran up the hill and hid behind a tree. Maybe that was all standard stuff too but it was pretty cute. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a continuation of posts about our Idaho trip in early October 2010.
Burgdorf Hot Springs
Most of the cabins are not falling down. Some, however, are.
After Silver City and a night in Boise, we drove up to the town of McCall near Payette National Forest. Before heading up to the hot spring Natalie suggested a little side trip to the local fish hatchery. She, already a fan, initiated me to the wonders of the fish life cycle. What we learned was pretty amazing. (Salmon swim to Idaho from the ocean! It takes them three months! A female can lay 4000 eggs! Only 200 make it back out to sea! Of those only 10 will reach adulthood! Of those 10, only two will return to spawn!)
We took the self-guided tour, saw salmon in their various stages of development, and learned that Idaho restocks fish at about 600 lakes every year by horseback, helicopter and backpack. Can you imagine hiking for hours with a backpack full of trout leaning over your shoulder asking, “Are we there yet” every five minutes? That’s dedication. Read the rest of this entry »
Silver City, Idaho in its heyday in 1892
We hadn’t planned on going to Silver City. Heading to Boise up Hwy. 95, the easy way, was what we had in mind. But there we were in tiny, little Jordan Valley, Oregon, having lunch at a diner three miles from the Idaho border, when I spotted the above photo on the wall. I had a feeling this was going to be good. “Do you know how long it takes to get to Silver City?” I asked our waitress to no avail. She hadn’t heard me.
“At least an hour,” answered the woman at the counter. “How are you planning on getting there?” I pointed out the window at Butch (my Mitsubishi Montero), with his Hi-Lift jack and bull-bar front bumper. “With that.”
“That should work,” she said. I wouldn’t take a normal car though.”
“But don’t go in the rain,” our waitress then chimed in. “The road gets real greasy.”
I looked at Natalie. She was feeling a little under nourished from her iceberg salad—southeastern Oregon hadn’t provided many options for my favorite vegetarian—and was eager to get to Boise. Despite a craving for Thai food, she said she was game and soon we were on a dirt road headed out of town. Read the rest of this entry »
My artist’s rendering of our night siting.
It was around 4am, mid-September at the South Yuba Campground northeast of Nevada City. Natalie and I were sleeping happily. Then nature called (both of us—I guess it was a conference call). As we headed out into the chilly night air to take care of business, I said, “Hey, look, there’s Jupiter.” Fairly low on the horizon, east-southeast of us floated a bright white light. “Wow, it’s really twinkling.”
“It looks green,” observed Natalie. “Yeah, I does look like it’s twinkling green,” I said, struck by the brightness of it. I can’t remember exactly how it went from here. I think Natalie said, “It looks like it’s moving.” I looked again. “Oh my God, it does. It’s totally moving.” And we watched through the trees as this blinking, twinkling thing hovered and moved, paused and moved again. Read the rest of this entry »