Samuel Clemens Mines For Gold & Instead Publishes Book

   At the start of the Civil War, Samuel Clemens lost his job as a steamboat pilot and travelled west to Nevada and California. He pieced together a ramshackle existence by prospecting for silver, mining for gold, and working as a local reporter and correspondent selling sketches and essays—by Mark Twain—to several newspapers and magazines.

   In 1865, the nearly destitute Clemens spent three months in the California mining camps of Jackass Hill and Angel’s Camp with Jim and William Gillis and their partner, Dick Stoker. It was at the bar inside the Angels Hotel (modern day home of Calaveras Coin & Pawn) that he first heard of the “jumping frog”—the story that launched his literary career.

   Upon his return to San Francisco from the camps, Clemens received an invitation from the popular American humorist, Artemus Ward, to contribute a sketch to his forthcoming travel book about the Nevada Territory. Mark Twain’s story arrived too late to be included in the volume, but Ward’s publisher, George W. Carleton, forwarded the submission to Henry Clapp, who first published it as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in theSaturday Press in New York on November 18, 1865. It was immediately reprinted in newspapers and periodicals across the country, including an unauthorized appearance in a Beadle’s Dime Book, the popular and inexpensive fiction series that anticipated today’s mass market paperback books.

   Just over a year later, Webb would collect and edit sketches from Clemens’s scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and publish them in Mark Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches.