looks back nearly ten years to an earlier self. A few years earlier, he had taken a quick look backward, when in November 1868 he had written to Olivia, “I have been through the world’s ‘mill’—I have traversed its ramifications from end to end—I have searched it, & probed it, & put it under the microscope & know it, through & through, & from back to back—its follies, its frauds, & its vanities—all by personal experience & not through dainty theories culled from nice moral books in luxurious parlors where temptation never comes.” Despite his candidacy for gentility, the author presents himself in Roughing It as a man of experience. He reminds the reader repeatedly in the early chapters that he has traveled to Europe and to the Holy Land; he suggests that those experiences, as well as the ones he is telling about, made him what he is now. As a result, the reader is encouraged to feel that he is hearing the voice of the authentic Mark Twain, who is providing his autobiography. Here the writer provides answers to some implied questions. How did there come to be this humorist, this skeptical, sometimes cynical character? Who is this frank, confidential, vulnerable, justice-seeking comic writer, whose graceful but firm prose seems to fit him like a glove? The writer’s Western experience provides explanations. Chapter 1 begins with the writer mocking his youthful self—the “before” to be contrasted with the present “after.” He makes the ex-journeyman printer and experienced ex-pilot of twenty-six sound ten years younger as he describes the jealousy of a younger brother contemplating the older.
[Brother] was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word “travel” had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us about it, and be a hero…. What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe.
This naive youth will go west and there through initiation lose his innocence. Roughing It is a retelling of an old familiar story, but in Mark Twain’s words it is a fresh and original one. As an exploration of the values that come into existence when the restraints of an ordered life are relaxed, the book is a celebration of freedom. The loss of that innocence, and later that freedom, is recalled with considerable nostalgia, at the same time that Mark Twain implies that the civilization of the East is marked by pretense and vanity.
All the romantic features of the West are here: wild Indians, barren deserts, the buffalo hunt, prospecting, the bucking bronco, the Pony Express rider, the desperado, the tall tale. Early in the book two incidents suggest the ways of the West. Chapter 5 describes the coyote: “not a pretty creature or respectable either,” especially to “a dog that has a good opinion of himself.” The coyote attracts his attention, leads the dog on, misleading him into thinking that the varmint can be caught, and the dog becomes “more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger.” At length this coyote “turns and smiles blandly upon him once more,” then runs off with a speed that makes the dog’s “head swim.” Once so taken in, once so humiliated, the dog is unlikely to be victimized again soon. Such lessons were ones that the newcomer had to learn, as in chapter 24, when the narrator is persuaded to buy “a Genuine Mexican Plug” that proves to be unridable. After several painful attempts to master the beast, he meets an “elderly-looking comforter,” who informs him, “Stranger, you’ve been taken in.” To emphasize the point he has been making, Mark Twain ends his chapter with this moral: “Now whoever has had the luck to ride a real Mexican plug will recognize the animal depicted in this chapter, and hardly consider him exaggerated—but the uninitiated will feel justified in regarding his portrait as a fancy sketch, perhaps.”
Many other stories have a similar point. When in chapter 32 Mark Twain and two companions are lost in a snowstorm, then lose their horses and decide that they cannot survive, each ceremoniously prepares for the end by giving up his dearest vice: the first his bottle of whiskey, the second his playing cards, the third his pipe, each in a spirit of sincere reformation. Then “oblivion comes.” But in the morning (in the next chapter), the three wake to discover that they are “not fifteen steps from … a stage station.” Their situation is “painfully ridiculous and humiliating,” and each soon ashamedly gathers up what he has thrown away and vows never to say more about reformation.
Others are taken in, too, in Mark Twain’s collection of somewhat imaginative recollections, such as one he had told before of how General Buncombe was humbugged by a practical joke played on him in the landslide case and failed for two months to recognize how he had been victimized. One of the earliest stories in Roughing It shows a victim coping with his situation. In chapter 7, the writer’s touring party experiences “disaster and disgrace” in a buffalo hunt. One of their number, Bemis, is thrown from his horse and chased up a tree by a wounded buffalo. He manages to avoid humiliation by resourcefully telling a fanciful tale, full of circumstance. He climbed “the only solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent,” only to find the buffalo climbing after him. So he lassoed him, fired his revolver at the beast, and “shinned down the tree and shot for home,” leaving the buffalo “dangling in the air, twenty feet from the ground.” Bemis’s fantastic tale restores him to comradeship with those who heard it.
Roughing It is dedicated to a friend of Clemens’s Western days, Calvin H. Higbie, “In Memory of the Curious Times When We Two WERE MILLIONAIRES FOR TEN DAYS.” The story of how such riches were obtained, though far from true, is central to Mark Twain’s account of a land where great wealth was won and lost overnight. Only a few pages are devoted to Mark Twain’s Enterprise journalism, with Clement T. Rice, the Unreliable, here being referred to as Boggs. There are memorable and hilarious stories of Scotty Briggs’s efforts to communicate with a minister who cannot understand his vernacular, of Ned Blakely (modeled on Captain Wakeman), of Jim Blaine’s grandfather’s ram and Dick Baker’s cat. For the subscription book buyer, there is abundant factual information about that very curious subject, Mormon polygamy; a beautiful description of Lake Tahoe, about which the author had pleasant memories; and a sympathetic analysis of the situation of the Chinese in California. Samuel Clemens’s adventures are a good part of the story, but Mark Twain never neglected the maxim “Don’t spoil a good story for the truth.” Readers who do not have access to an edition with the original illustrations miss a great deal of what both author and publisher intended. Although some of the illustrations had appeared in earlier books, most were drawn for this new one. The chief artist was True W. Williams, who had provided illustrations for The Innocents Abroad; his illustrations of Tom Sawyer would prove to be a complementary part of that book. Increasingly, the author was to grasp the importance of illustrations; in December 1872, he wrote to the artist Thomas Nast that he recognized the need for “good pictures. They’ve got to improve on ‘Roughing It.’”59
In Roughing It, victimization and humiliation are constant themes, but the victim is seldom hurt for long, and the tone is good-natured, compassionate, seldom hostile or sadistic. Instead, the book emphasizes the solidarity and community enjoyed by those who have achieved status by being initiated into the fellowship of toughened Western skeptics. As in The Innocents Abroad, the narrator is frequently disillusioned, but now he responds with greater cheerfulness. The theme of initiation is lost in the Sandwich Island portion, even though the writer seems to have intended to use it. For those readers who appreciate the accomplishments of the first four-fifths of the book, these last chapters may be left unread, though there is a falling-off even earlier, after the protagonist forsakes the pursuit of wealth for the life of a newspaperman.
Clemens’s years in the West had not been financially rewarding. Only two-fifths of the way through the book, in chapter 28, the narrator recognizes that his hopes are never to be realized. “So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.” The writing of Roughing It brought home to its author, once and for all, the inescapable truth that the West had not rendered him the rewards he had expected