Continental Divide, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1940. Photograph by Arthur Rothstein. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
This summer, Lapham’s Quarterly is marking the season with readings on the subject or set during its reign. Check in every Friday until Labor Day to read the latest.
Roughing It did not sell well, or perhaps just not well enough, according to its author, Mark Twain. He blamed the publisher: “I believe I have learned now that if one doesn’t secure publicity and notoriety for a book the instant it is issued, no amount of hard work and faithful advertising can accomplish it later on.” Yet before publication he had worried that he had produced “pretty poor stuff” that was nonetheless “pretty readable”—which might be a “tolerable success” or “no success”—and tried to prevent reviewers from getting advance copies.
The book, released in 1872, was a somewhat autobiographical retelling of the decade Twain had spent traveling through the West with his brother Orion Clemens, who needed to get to the Nevada Territory for his new job as secretary to the territory’s governor, a reward for Orion’s efforts campaigning for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. (Twain kept traveling after they arrived in Nevada in 1861, eventually making his way to San Francisco and Hawaii.) Roughing It wove together Twain’s humorous newspaper writings; an assortment of other sources, including his brother’s recollections of the trip; and a useful fudging of the details for dramatic effect. William Dean Howells considered it unproductive to dwell on the veracity of the book in his Atlantic Monthly review: “The grotesque exaggeration and broad irony with which the life is described are conjecturably the truest colors that could have been used, for all existence there must have looked like an extravagant joke, the humor of which was only deepened by its nether side of tragedy.”
“So long as anyone may be interested in our past there will be readers for the books in which Mark embodied his plentiful share of it,” Bernard De Voto wrote in 1946.
These are chiefly Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, and the Autobiography. But he is so persistently an autobiographer that the same lens repeatedly refracts something deeply American and casual contexts suddenly rise to the level of his better books. It may be a lynching in Marion County, a reminiscence of General Grant, a pocket miner’s tomcat, Harriet Beecher Stowe in her dotage fetching a war whoop behind someone’s ear—but it is more likely to be a page or two of dialogue which make a society transparent and register a true perception forever.
Roughing It eventually became a best seller; Jorge Luis Borges said that it was one of the first books he ever finished. In it Twain relates the experience of crossing the Continental Divide in Wyoming in August.
In the night we sailed by a most notable curiosity, and one we had been hearing a good deal about for a day or two and were suffering to see. This was what might be called a natural icehouse. It was August now, and sweltering weather in the daytime, yet at one of the stations the men could scrape the soil on the hillside under the lee of a range of boulders and at a depth of six inches cut out pure blocks of ice—hard, compactly frozen, and clear as crystal!
Toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised curtains enjoying our early-morning smoke and contemplating the first splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as if the invisible Creator reviewed his gray veterans and they saluted with a smile, we hove in sight of South Pass City. The hotelkeeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal, and the principal citizen and property holder all came out and greeted us cheerily, and we gave him good day. He gave us a little Indian news, and a little Rocky Mountain news, and we gave him some Plains information in return. He then retired to his lonely grandeur, and we climbed on up among the bristling peaks and the ragged clouds. South Pass City consisted of four log cabins, one of which was unfinished, and the gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the ten citizens of the place. Think of hotelkeeper, postmaster, blacksmith, mayor, constable, city marshal, and principal citizen all condensed into one person and crammed into one skin. He said that if he were to die as postmaster, or as blacksmith, or as postmaster and blacksmith both, the people might stand it; but if he were to die all over, it would be a frightful loss to the community.
Two miles beyond South Pass City we saw for the first time that mysterious marvel which all Western untraveled boys have heard of and fully believe in but are sure to be astounded at when they see it with their own eyes nevertheless—banks of snow in dead summertime. We were now far up toward the sky, and knew all the time that we must presently encounter lofty summits clad in the “eternal snow” which was so commonplace a matter of mention in books, and yet when I did see it glittering in the sun on stately domes in the distance and knew the month was August and that my coat was hanging up because it was too warm to wear it, I was full as much amazed as if I never had heard of snow in August before. Truly, “seeing is believing”—and many a man lives a long life through, thinking he believes certain universally received and well-established things, and yet never suspects that if he were confronted by those things once, he would discover that he did not really believe them before but only thought he believed them.
In a little while quite a number of peaks swung into view with long claws of glittering snow clasping them; and with here and there, in the shade, down the mountainside, a little solitary patch of snow looking no larger than a lady’s pocket handkerchief but being in reality as large as a “public square.”
And now, at last, we were fairly in the renowned South Pass, and whirling gaily along high above the common world. We were perched upon the extreme summit of the great range of the Rocky Mountains, toward which we had been climbing, patiently climbing, ceaselessly climbing, for days and nights together—and about us was gathered a convention of Nature’s kings that stood ten, twelve, and even thirteen thousand feet high—grand old fellows who would have to stoop to see Mount Washington in the twilight. We were in such an airy elevation above the creeping populations of the earth that now and then when the obstructing crags stood out of the way it seemed that we could look around and abroad and contemplate the whole great globe, with its dissolving views of mountains, seas, and continents stretching away through the mystery of the summer haze.
As a general thing the Pass was more suggestive of a valley than a suspension bridge in the clouds—but it strongly suggested the latter at one spot. At that place the upper third of one or two majestic purple domes projected above our level on either hand and gave us a sense of a hidden great deep of mountains and plains and valleys down about their bases which we fancied we might see if we could step to the edge and look over. These sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them; and catching presently on an intercepting peak, wrapped it about and brooded there—then shredded away again and left the purple peak, as they had left the purple domes, downy and white with new-laid snow. In passing, these monstrous rags of cloud hung low and swept along right over the spectator’s head, swinging their tatters so nearly in his face that his impulse was to shrink when they came closest. In the one place I speak of, one could look below him upon a world of diminishing crags and canyons leading down, down, and away to a vague plain with a thread in it which was a road, and bunches of feathers in it which were trees—a pretty picture sleeping in the sunlight—but with a darkness stealing over it and glooming its features deeper and deeper under the frown of a coming storm; and then, while no film or shadow marred the noon brightness of his high perch, he could watch the tempest break forth down there and see the lightning leap from crag to crag and the sheeted rain drive along the canyon sides, and hear the thunders peal and crash and roar. We had this spectacle—a familiar one to many, but to us a novelty.
We bowled along cheerily, and presently, at the very summit (though it had been all summit to us, and all equally level, for half an hour or more), we came to a spring which spent its water through two outlets and sent it in opposite directions. The conductor said that one of those streams which we were looking at was just starting on a journey westward to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean, through hundreds and even thousands of miles of desert solitudes. He said that the other was just leaving its home among the snow peaks on a similar journey eastward—and we knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet it would still be plodding its patient way down the mountainsides, and canyon beds, and between the banks of the Yellowstone; and by and by would join the broad Missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sandbars; and enter the Mississippi, touch the wharves of St. Louis, and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody islands, then the chained bends again, bordered with wide levels of shining sugarcane in place of the somber forests; then by New Orleans and still other chains of bends—and finally, after two long months of daily and nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure, and awful peril of parched throats, pumps, and evaporation, pass the Gulf and enter into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its snow peaks again or regret them.
I freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home and dropped it in the stream. But I put no stamp on it, and it was held for postage somewhere.
Read the other entries in this series: Charles Dudley Warner, I.A.R. Wylie, Jennie Carter, Virginia Woolf, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Willa Cather, Thomas Jefferson, Fridtjof Nansen, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Izumi Shikibu, Hilda Worthington Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William James.