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Mark Twain’s Tahoe Adventures: Part I
Mark Twain’s
TAHOE ADVENTURES, PART I
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STORY BY MARK M c LAUGHLIN
This summer commemorates the 160th anniversary of Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ 1861 arrival in the West. Considered one of America’s greatest writers, he was also a talented humorist, publisher, lecturer and ardent admirer of Lake Tahoe. Most know him by his pen name, Mark Twain, which he adopted while working as a journalist for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Nevada. He has been lauded as “the father of American literature” and his 1872 semiautobiographical book “Roughing It” depicts adventures he experienced in the Tahoe Sierra. e Truckee-Tahoe region can claim some of the most dramatic historical events in the American West – the opening of the California Trail, the Donner Party and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad over rugged Donner Pass by predominantly Chinese laborers. Another notable occurrence was the startling transformation of Samuel Clemens, a former printer’s apprentice, newspaper typesetter and riverboat pilot from Missouri, who on Nevada’s
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Comstock lode of all places, found his true calling as the irascible humorist and gifted raconteur, Mark Twain. After failing to nd riches in the primitive mining camps, Clemens found redemption in a rowdy Virginia City saloon where he discovered his muse as a witty newspaper writer and social commentator.
Fate and war delivered Clemens to Nevada on Aug. 14, 1861. He was 25 years old and traveling with his older brother, Orion, 10 years his senior. Orion had long struggled in the newspaper business; it was Sam’s money saved from his riverboat piloting that paid for the stage. e pair had journeyed nearly 2,000 miles ending in a grueling stretch of rough road, bad food and alkali dust. After what seemed like an eternity, the two men arrived in the frontier town of Carson City, capital of Nevada Territory. is huge land district had been carved out of the vast Utah Territory that was controlled by Brigham Young and the Mormons. Nevada Territory was o cially established by Congress and President James Buchanan on March 2, 1861, just two days before Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency.
Orion Clemens made the trip to assume his duties as the appointed secretary to Nevada’s rst territorial governor, General James Warren Nye. He would be the rst and only Secretary of Nevada Territory, which became a state in 1864. Its admittance to the Union during the Civil War earned it the nickname: e Battle Born State. in Carson City he wrote his mother back home: “It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No owers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. e birds that y over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us.” Clemens was not impressed with the high-desert landscape, but a short trip to beautiful Lake Tahoe changed his mind about western terrain.
At the time, timber was desperately needed to support tunneling in the Comstock mines as was cordwood to fuel the boilers that powered mining-shaft elevators and air pumps. Anticipating that the demand for wood would lead to logging
Orion formerly worked as an apprentice at a local newspaper and later purchased one in Hannibal, Mo. He traveled to St. Louis to study law under attorney Edward Bates. Bates would later serve as U.S. Attorney General after President Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, and it was Bates’ association with Lincoln that led to
Orion’s lucrative commission. O cially, Sam accompanied his brother as an assistant and secretary, but his real motivation was the lure of adventure and to avoid ghting in the bloody American Civil War. Shortly after their arrival in Carson City, Sam heard the bad news that there was no provision in the Territorial budget to pay a clerk for Orion; he would have to wait at least six weeks until the rst Territorial Legislature convened.
On that hot August afternoon, the Clemens’ brothers lurched sti y out of the cramped Overland Stage and squinted into the unrelenting desert sun. Exhausted and thirsty, they slapped the alkali powder from their clothes and strolled toward the nearest saloon. Born and raised in verdant Missouri river-bottom country, Sam was shocked by the barrenness of the Great Basin. Shortly after his arrival
Mark Twain, circa 1872. | Courtesy Nevada Historical Society
the Tahoe Basin, Governor Nye and other wealthy businessmen laid out a large timber claim on the Carson Range along the shores of east Lake Tahoe. Clemens heard about the majestic pine forest surrounding the mountain lake from his acquaintances living at the dormitory-style boarding house where he was staying. Some of these men had also established a timber claim on the northeast slopes of Tahoe; Sam called this group “ e Brigade.” Sam and John Kinney, a young man from Ohio, decided to stake their own claim up at the lake, as well. ey packed their supplies over the Carson Range and down into the Tahoe Basin, likely ending up near the Tunnel Creek area of today’s Incline Village.
Sam found the lake overwhelmingly beautiful. In what has become a famous quote, he described Lake Tahoe as “a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the seas and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft a full three thousand feet higher still! It is a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole world a ords.”
Exactly where Clemens and Kinney camped — and started a forest re — has been a matter of controversy with California and Nevada researchers split on whether it was located on Tahoe’s northeast shore in Nevada or farther west near Tahoe Vista in California. In 2013, this ongoing factual dispute delayed approval by the U.S. Forest Service and Nevada Board of Geographic Names to designate a small beach on Nevada’s East Shore Clemens’ Cove. Despite Twain’s professed reverence of Lake Tahoe, o cials at the Forest Service did not think Clemens had played a meaningful role in the lake’s history — well, not enough to have a landmark named after him. e agency stated that there were others more deserving. e controversy was rendered moot in May 2014 when representatives from the Washoe Indian Tribe protested naming any geographic feature in the Tahoe Basin after Sam Clemens or Mark Twain. e board permanently tabled the request for a Clemens’ Cove.
Stay tuned for Part II in the next edition and at eTahoeWeekly.com.
Read more local history at TheTahoeWeekly.com
Tahoe historian Mark McLaughlin is a nationally published author and professional speaker. His award-winning books are available at local stores or at thestormking.com. You may reach him at mark@thestormking.com.
