Archives for posts with tag: Mark Twain

Overland in the Land of Twain, Part 5

October 28, 2011 //

Photo: Greg MacDonald

After Twain’s first, large-scale, Western ruckus, his audience began to grow, as did his reputation. By 1864 he was honing his craft by writing 4,000-word political dispatches five days a week from Carson City. So much for not liking work.

In 1865 his story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” submitted too late for inclusion in an anthology of Western writing, was instead published in New York’s Saturday Press. It exploded. Within in no time the tale of the jumping frog with the belly full of lead had appeared in newspapers across the U.S. and Europe.

He had stepped onto the world stage.

As we stepped out into the morning at Trumbull Lake, the sun cracked across 12,280 ft. Dunderberg Peak, a wall of loose rock, towering a good 3,000 ft. above our campsite. We’d completely missed seeing it in the dark the night before.

Prior to 1878 this pile of 100-million-year-old granite was known as Castle Peak. Here’s how Twain described it:

At the end of a week we adjourned to the Sierras on a fishing excursion, and spent several days in camp under snowy Castle Peak, and fished successfully for trout in a bright, miniature lake whose surface was between ten and eleven thousand feet above the level of the sea; cooling ourselves during the hot August noons by sitting on snow banks ten feet deep, under whose sheltering edges fine grass and dainty flowers flourished luxuriously; and at night entertaining ourselves by almost freezing to death.

Mark Twain, Roughing It, Chapter 39

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Categories - Pictures, - Trips: The Western US, - United States, FEATURES, MEDIA, PLACES, — California, — Trip: Overland, Land of Twain

Overland in the Land of Twain, Part 4

October 19, 2011 //

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 »

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Categories - Difficulty: 2 of 10, - Pictures, - Trips: The Western US, - United States, FEATURES, PLACES, — California, — Nevada, — Trip: Overland, Land of Twain

Overland in the Land of Twain, Part 3

October 8, 2011 //

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 »

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Categories - 4x4 / SUV, - Difficulty: 3 of 10, - Maps, - Pictures, - Trips: The Western US, - United States, - Videos, FEATURES, MEDIA, PLACES, TRAIL RATINGS, VEHICLES, — California, — Nevada, — Trip: Overland, Land of Twain

Overland in the Land of Twain, Part 2

September 28, 2011 //

Photo: Greg MacDonald

As I mentioned in the first “Twain Trip” post, Sam Clemens planned to work as an assistant to his brother, the newly appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory—a secretary to the Secretary as it were. This notion he abandoned, however, when he learned that his salary would be deducted straight from his brother’s paycheck. Surely seeking to maintain positive fraternal relations, he sought his fortune by other means, first as a timber baron, then as a mining tycoon.

Things did not work out as planned, however. Aside from nearly capsizing in Mono Lake and almost freezing to death near Carson City, a consequence of having spent the night lost in a snowstorm (a mere 50 feet from the nearest stagecoach station), he accidentally burned down a large swath of forest surrounding Lake Tahoe, a feat he bested only by forfeiting a mining claim worth millions of dollars. Not to say that he wasn’t keeping busy—he was. It was just no way to make a living.

Twain, used to doing things on a grand scale, made no exception in failure. He had failed spectacularly. Those weren’t the piddling millions of today’s currency, mind you—they were 1860s millions. And yet, at the end of his short mining career he didn’t have two cents to rub together. The dizzying flight from millionaire to pauper left him lost. A saving grace though arrived in the form of an offer to write for Virginia City’s local newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise for $25 a week. Normally he would have turned it down, work having been antithetical to his nature, but with his back firmly against a wall he accepted and, at 27, moved to Virginia City.

I do not like to work, even when another person does it.

— Mark Twain

For us, Virginia City lay still ahead. We awoke before dawn and watched a serene orange glow bleed into the dark until the sky flooded and pushed the stars out of sight. After breakfast and cups of tea to ward off the chill, we packed up and hit the trail. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories - Difficulty: 2 of 10, - Maps, - Pictures, - Trips: The Western US, - United States, - Videos, FEATURES, MEDIA, PLACES, TRAIL RATINGS, — Nevada, — Trip: Overland, Land of Twain

Overland in the Land of Twain, Part 1

September 22, 2011 //

Photo: Natalie Menacho

On August 14, 1861 an unknown, unemployed steamboat pilot, and his brother, got off a dusty stagecoach from St. Joesph, Missouri having made the 1550 mile trek west to the newly-minted town of Carson City, Nevada. On a bit of a lark, he had decided to go and assist his brother, the recently appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His own career had been a casualty of the Civil War, which had broken out earlier that year halting all traffic on the Mississippi. Their three week journey cost $400, the equivalent of over $9580 dollars today. Of course, this former steamboat pilot, willing to spend hard earned money on a lark to head west was none other than Samuel Clemens.

Almost exactly 150 years later my girlfriend Natalie, our friend Greg, and I, set out for the Eastern Sierras, also on a bit of a lark, to follow in Clemens’ footsteps. We had combed guides, books, and maps, and made our plan. In early September we headed out in two Mitsubishi Monteros. Greg’s Gen1 and my Gen2.

Loading up the trucks

Monteros at the ready

Photos: Greg MacDonald

And we’re off!

Photo: Natalie Menacho

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Categories - 4x4 / SUV, - Difficulty: 2 of 10, - Maps, - Pictures, - Trips: The Western US, - United States, - Videos, FEATURES, MEDIA, PLACES, TRAIL RATINGS, VEHICLES, — California, — Trip: Overland, Land of Twain