By Mark Twain, 1872 (I own this book)
Hilarious account, especially in the beginning, about Mark Twain’s trip out West in the 1860’s.
The stage coach trip took 20 days from St. Joseph, MO, to Carsono City, NV. It’s mostly hilarious!
He talks about the Mormons and includes a history in the appendix – they’d only been around 40 years at that time.
He also tells the story about the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Appendix B where some Mormons disguised as Indians attacked and killed a wagon train of emigrants. They couldn’t vanquish the emigrants as Indians so they disbanded, came back as settlers, cooked up a story that they would protect the emigrants, and had the emigrants march in front of them as part of the ploy. Then they slaughtered them – 120 people; men, women, children, Sept. 10, 1857. “Thus, on the 10th day of September, 1857, was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and bloody murders known in our history.”
He talks about Nevada – Silver mining, dust, wind, “Washoe” wind, Lake Tahoe – BEAUTIFUL – “Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor…The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be? – it is the same the angels breathe.”
“So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! … So empty and airy did all spaces seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions “balloon-voyages.”
“We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week. We could see trout by the thousand winging about in the emptiness under us, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not bite – they could see the line too plainly, perhaps.”…
“I resolved to have a horse to ride…He bought a ‘Genuine Mexican Plug’ at an auction for $27. Ended up to be a bucking horse; hilarious stories about him. “Everybody I loaned him to always walked back.
He and his friend Higbie, really Higbie, discover a blind lead and claim it. They only have to work it within 10 days for it to be their’s. But Twain gets called to the sick bed of Capt. John Nye and leaves that 1st day. Higbie also left, to find the secret cement mine So they lost their claim on the blind lead.
He goes to Virginia City and works for the newspaper. Then to San Francisco. Here is a beautiful passage:
“…The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and sombre California, when that man has seen New England’s meadow-expanses and her maples, oaks, and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests, comes very near being funny – would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic. No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces – and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.”
In San Francisco, he experiences “the Great Earthquake” in October of 186?.
He became broke, hungry, and homeless in S.F. He tried pocket mining, then back to S.F. to write for the Enterprise. Then he got to go to the Sandwich Islands and write letters for the Sacramento Union! Hawaii in the 1860’s!!! First Oahu “(pronounced O-waw-hee)” – lots of information on the Hawaiians – Kanakas – and their ways. All whites are either preachers, whalers, or gov’t workers. Hilarious episodes.
Then he goes to the island of Hawaii, 150 miles distant, on the schooner, Boomerang.
…”Mauna Loa is said to be 16,000 feet high. The rays of glittering snow and ice, that clasped its summit like a claw, looked refreshing when viewed from the blistering climate we were in. One could stand on that mountain (wrapped in blankets and furs to keep warm), and while he nibbled a snowball or an icicle to quench his thirst he could look down the long sweep of hits sides and see spots where plants are growing that grow only where the bitter cold of Winter prevails; lower down he could see sections devoted to productions that thrive in the temperate zone alone; and at the bottom of the mountain he could see the home of the tufted cocoa-palms and other species of vegetation that grow only in the sultry atmosphere of eternal Summer. He could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of four or five miles as the bird flies!” (Written in 1872!!)
“By and by we took boat and went ashore at Kailua, designing to ride horseback through the pleasant orange and coffee region of Kona, and rejoin the vessel at a point some leagues distant. This journey is well worth taking. the trail passes along on high ground – say 1000 feet above sea level – and usually about a mile distant from the ocean, which is always in sight, save that occasionally you find yourself buried in the forest in the midst of a rank tropical vegetation and a dense growth of trees, whose great bows overarch the road and shut out sun and sea and everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers. It was pleasant to ride occasionally in the warm sun, and feast the eye upon the ever-changing panorama of the forest (beyond and below us), with its many tints, its softened lights and shadows, its billowy undulations sweeping gently down from the mountain to the sea. It was pleasant also, at intervals, to leave the sultry sun and pass into the cool, green depths of this forest and indulge in sentimental reflections under the inspiration of its brooding twilight and its whispering foliage.”
“Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to every school-boy in the wide world – Kealekekua Bay – the place where Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives, nearly a hundred years ago. [1778] The setting sun was flaming upon it, a summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent rainbows. Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor. Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery the Rainbow Islands? These charming spectacles are present to you at every turn, they are common in all the islands; they are visible every day, and frequently at night also – not the silvery bow we see once in an age in the states, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful colors, like the children of the sun and rain. I saw one of them a few nights ago. What the sailors call “rain dogs” – little patches of rainbow – are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like stained cathedral windows.”
…”Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook’s assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment…”
He talks about seeing the natives surfing – he calls it “surf-bathing. “Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell!”
He went to Honaunau – City of Refuge – in a hired canoe.
He explored thoroughly the volcano, Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah). Got to see it at night, right above it – very impressed.
“The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!…” He describes it in detail over a whole chapter. Nearly the last sentence: “The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.”
“We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii (the crooked road making the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the journey very much. We were more than a week making the trip, because our Kanaka horses would not go by a house or a hut without stopping – whip and spur could not alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it economized time to let them have their way. Upon inquiry the mystery was explained: the natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never pass a house without stopping to swap news, and consequently their horses learn to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the whole duty of man, and his salvation not to be compassed without it.”
“In one place in the island of Hawaii, we saw a laced and ruffled cataract of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred feet high…” (Akaka Falls?)
Then he went to Maui – a picnic excursion to the Iao Valley, a lush valley in cliffs of green – beautiful.
Then he climbed Haleakala – saw the sun rise above the clouds – “A growing warmth suffused the horizon and soon the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor-palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blessings and combinations of rich coloring.
“It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory of it will remain with me always.”
He returns to S.F., no money, no job – decides to do public lectures! “Doors open at 7 1/2. The trouble will begin at 8.” “That line has done good service since.”
He was so anxious before that 1st public lecture, couldn’t sleep, sick to stomach, never spoke publicly before, coerced friends and strangers to buy a ticket – waited in horror in the theatre – lo and behold – he had a full house and the lecture was a rousing success!
“All the papers were kind in the morning: my appetite returned; I had abundance of money. All’s well that ends well!”
Last paragraph: “MORAL.”
“If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are “no account,” go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them – if the people you go among suffer by the operation.”
Cats in Hawaii: “…I saw cats – Tom-cats, Mary Ann cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy, and sound asleep.”
Roughing It:
“To
CALVIN H. HIGBIE,
of California,
An Honest Man, a Genial Comrade,
and a Steadfast Friend,
This book is Inscribed,
By the Author,
In Memory of the Curious Time
When We Two
Were Millionaires for Ten Days.”