Tracking Mark Twain by the marks he left
Who flies to Reno on a spring evening, rents a car and heads into the mountains with no skis, no mountain bike and a backpack full of books? Me.
Why? Because in 1861 a 25year-old Missouri riverboat pilot named Sam Clemens boarded a stagecoach bound for the same territory.
He was going to dodge the Civil War for a few months, work for the government, do some writing, maybe dig for silver. Instead he stayed west for almost seven years, emerged as Mark Twain, gave us “Huckleberry Finn” and won global fame as that sardonic old man with the white hair and droopy mustache.
I wanted to see some of what he saw in those early travels — a dusty Nevada silver-mining town, the shores of Lake Tahoe, the hills of California Gold Country. And I wondered: After so much history, myth and marketing, how much Twain remains?
A desk in Virginia City
The route from Reno to Virginia City, Nev., starts with broad, smooth Interstate 580, but before long, you’re climbing Nevada Highway 341, a narrow, curvy road that creeps near the summit of rocky Mount Davidson.
Virginia City (population 855), carved into the steep slopes and raked by winds, is part-ghost town and parttourist concoction plopped atop a netherworld of old mining tunnels.
The silver boom and the Wild West are the prevailing themes here, and there are no regularly scheduled Twain tours. But there is a 24-hour Mark Twain Saloon Casino, and his face and name adorn several storefronts.
By the time I arrived at the Silver Queen Hotel (built in 1876), night had fallen and the old building was creaking. Beneath my upstairs window, snowflakes fell on the empty boardwalk of C Street, the main drag.
It wasn’t so quiet when Clemens showed up in 1862. In those days, silver prospectors were arriving by the hundreds every week. The town, he wrote in “Roughing It,” was a jumble of “fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy’ houses, wide-open gambling palaces ... a dozen breweries and half a dozen jails ... and some talk of building a church.”
When silver mining didn’t work out, Clemens took to reporting for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. By early 1863 he had come up with the pen name Mark Twain.
Crime, culture, mining, politics — he covered them all with more verve than scruples, inventing hoaxes and waging feuds.
The dim, dusty Mark Twain Museum at the Territorial Enterprise (admission $5) is furnished with old posters, taxidermy, a vintage printing press and type cases, a portrait of the author, an aged wooden toilet that says “Mark Twain sat here” and, in prime location, a weathered desk.
Of course, you have to ask whether the desk was used by the author.
Sandie Buie, who manages the privately owned Twain museum, tells visitors that its owners have a letter from the expo committee authenticating it as being used by Twain.
But Buie likes to tread lightly when it comes to historical claims. The Territorial Enterprise changed offices twice. In 1875 a fire burned down most of the city. And Twain himself was never a particularly reliable narrator.
“People will come in for tours, and they’ll believe every word in ‘Roughing It,’” Buie said.
A trail above Tahoe
After a drive of less than 50 miles from Virginia City I reached the Tunnel Creek Cafe in Incline Village, Nev., and shook hands with David Antonucci, a retired civil and environmental engineer. Then we started climbing up the Flume Trail, one of the most popular hiking and mountain biking paths in the region.
Within minutes, we were surrounded by pines, a vast indigo lake sprawling below us. When Twain and a buddy arrived here in 1861 (before his time in Virginia City), it was known as Lake Bigler. Now we call it Tahoe.
Antonucci knows the territory particularly well. I arranged to join him because he’s written “Fairest Picture — Mark Twain at Lake Tahoe,” a book that seeks to pinpoint the author’s adventures at the lake. About 1.3 miles up the Flume Trail from the Tunnel Creek Cafe, Antonucci has concluded, Twain caught his first sight of the lake.
If you hike the Flume Trail on your own, don’t worry: There’s an interpretive panel marking the spot.
Twain stayed for a few weeks. We invested most of a day, beginning with a quick drive down Highway 28 and Harbor Avenue to Speedboat Beach, a half-hidden but popular spot a few hundred yards west of the California-Nevada state line where boulders are sprinkled along the shore.
One boulder has a flat top at the right height to serve as a card table — just as Twain described in “Roughing It.” Antonucci believes it’s a perfect match.
I should point out that there are similar rocks nearby on that 20-yard-wide stretch of beach, so we’ll never be certain. But even if no history happened there, it’s a great spot. Next time I’ll bring a deck of cards.
A hill in Gold Country
By early the next afternoon, I’d steered my way farther west on Interstate 80, then veered south on California 49 through the oak-shaded hills of Gold Country. The meadows were green, the rivers swollen. All seemed right with the world.
But things were grim when Twain arrived in Calaveras and Tuolumne counties in late 1864. He had been forced to leave San Francisco after posting a bond he couldn’t afford for a friend who had nearly killed a man in a fight.
So Twain repaired with another friend, Jim Gillis, to a small, rustic cabin on Tuolumne County’s Jackass Hill, where people used to park their pack animals. It was a cold, wet winter.
And then the author’s luck changed. That’s the focus of “Mark’s Twain’s 88 Days in the Mother Lode,” a book written by Angels Camp resident Jim Fletcher.
Fletcher now gives occasional Twain talks at Camps restaurant in Angels Camp. I met him there, and he told me the story of how Twain had wandered into the Angels Hotel and caught the bartender telling an outlandish story about a frog-jumping contest. Twain heard something in it.
By the end of 1865, after many rewrites, Twain’s version of the Calaveras County frog tale had appeared in the New York Saturday Press, been widely reprinted and won national attention. Like a frog in flight, Twain was launched.
After our lunch, I took a spin around the mining equipment and stagecoaches at the three-acre Angels Camp Museum, walked the sleepy main drag and paused at Main Street and Bird Way, where the updated Angels Hotel building now houses offices, apartments and a Twain mural.
If it were late May, I would have attended the Calaveras County Fair, where the frog jumps continue.