On the Mark Twain trail
Fact and fiction intertwine and thrive
Jim Smiley follows us around Jackass Hill like a slippery bandito about to pickpocket a gold prospector. I can’t shake the feeling that Smiley and his California red-legged long jumper Dan’l Webster lurk among the canyon live oak and ponderosa pines, ready for another rip-roaring Gold Country escapade. Call me a crackpot with an outsized imagination. But I swear on the New York tombstone of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, this is the feeling I get as soft sunlight glances off a facsimile of a one-room miner’s cabin.
We’ve reached the intersection of Fact and Fiction on the well-trodden path of Mark Twain’s California.
I’ve been on the hunt for the past five years. But only now has it evolved into a serious pursuit to understand what the Golden State meant to a writer mainly associated with Hannibal, Missouri, and the Mighty Mississippi.
From 1861 to 1866, Twain rambled around Lake Tahoe, San Francisco and ever-so-briefly, this Sierra foothills hideaway, all the while collecting a mother lode of literary nuggets for his timeless observations.
Twain spent 88 days on Jackass Hill in the winter of 1864-65 with three pocket miners and a cat named
Right: Bronze frog sculptures by Richard Clopton, frozen in midjump at a pond at Redwood Park in San Francisco, were inspired by Mark Twain, who lived near the site in the early 1860s.
Tom Quartz. According to Twain, ringleader Jim Gillis regaled the household with campfire stories in a colloquial tongue spoken by the hardscrabble miners.
The homespun tales were scattered in Twain’s work throughout a long career as America’s great humorist and storyteller. “Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn,” which first appeared in 1880 in “A Tramp Abroad,” came from Gillis, biographers report.
Twain’s first published story emanated out of the Gold Rush town of Angels Camp, a short distance from Jackass Hill across the Stanislaus River. According to biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain and Gillis heard the frog story at the bar in the Angels Hotel. There’s a mural of Twain on the southern facade, but the building serves as a financial office now.
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, which featured Smiley and Dan’l Webster, became the parable that catapulted Twain to literary fame. It also has pumped dollars into the needy veins of Angels Camp, a touristy town along the rolling Gold Chain Highway 49.
Angels Camp has grabbed onto Twain like a lifeline, despite a short stay in the area that included visits to mining encampments in Murphys and Vallecito, as well. Personable papier mache frogs that cost $2,500 each, according to an Angels Camp Museum historian, are fixtures along a 3-mile stretch of the slow-moving town.
Main Street is lined with brass plaques of the winners of the Jumping Frog Jubilee held in May nearly every year since 1928 at the Calaveras County Fairgrounds (AKA Frogtown). The exceptions: 1933 during the Great Depression and this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The winners are memorialized on the “Hop of