by Ben Tarnoff
Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot & he couldn’t jump—the stranger’s frog won.
The story involved a contest between two frogs. One man wagered his frog could jump higher. Another man accepted, and then secretly stuffed a handful of quail shot into the other frog’s mouth to make him too heavy to jump. As with Jim Gillis, the storyteller delivered these particulars with unsmiling sternness, as if he were relating “austere facts.” Neither he nor his listeners laughed. He “was not telling it to his hearers as a thing new to them,” Twain noted, “but as a thing which they had witnessed and would remember.”
Quite possibly they did remember it, since the story was a popular one. Its basic plot had been around for decades, in oral and written forms. Twain himself may have recognized it from the versions printed in California newspapers. He may have heard it in Missouri or along the Mississippi, told by black or white voices. In the oral literature of the frontier there was no original, only variations. Tall tales mutated constantly, molded by new regions and narrators. By the time the jumping frog landed at the tavern at Angel’s Camp, it had traveled a considerable distance through the streams of western folklore.
Twain adored the story. Later, he remembered it as the “one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain & mud.” He and Jim Gillis often “quoted from the yarn & laughed over it.” When he returned to San Francisco a few weeks later on February 26, 1865, he shared the tale with Harte. The US Mint’s offices on Commercial Street, where Harte received him, represented a radically different California than the one on display at Jackass Hill and Angel’s Camp. Harte himself had little love for miners. He despised their vulgar materialism, their propensity for unpleasant place-names like Poker Flat and Murderer’s Bar—“offences against public decency,” he called them in the Californian. Even so, Harte was fascinated by Twain’s sojourn in the Sierras. “He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and ‘swop lies,’” Harte recalled. When Twain recounted one of those lies, he “half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator.” “It was as graphic as it was delicious,” Harte observed admiringly.
Twain mimicked the timbre of Angel’s Camp brilliantly. To reach a wider audience, however, he would need to render that voice in writing. This meant translating a piece of music with its own special rhythms into the silent, linear script of the printed page—a daunting task. The undertaking became more urgent when he discovered a batch of letters from Artemus Ward waiting for him at the Occidental Hotel, postmarked more than three months earlier. The comedian wanted Twain to submit a sketch for an upcoming book on Ward’s trip to Nevada in late 1863, when the two had first met. Twain dashed off a reply, suggesting the story of the jumping frog. “Write it,” came the response from New York. “There is still time to get it into my volume of sketches.”
Even with the deadline looming, Twain dragged his feet. He didn’t usually suffer from writer’s block, but this particular bit of prose would pass from his pen about as easily as a kidney stone. In the meantime, he had to make a living. The financial strain of surviving on a freelancer’s salary in San Francisco hadn’t gotten any easier while he was away—and he presumably still owed $500 from forfeiting the bond when Steve Gillis jumped bail back in December 1864. Luckily, Twain had a large appetite for work, and a pathological fear of the poorhouse. After almost three months away, he flung himself back into the literary life of the city.
He wasn’t the same writer as before. The change could be felt in his first piece for the Californian after his return to the city, “An Unbiased Criticism,” published in March 1865. Ostensibly a review of a new art gallery on Montgomery Street, it swiftly unspooled into a long digression about life in Angel’s Camp. He wove his memories of the miners into an affectionate burlesque of the world he had left behind. He parroted how they spoke: rambling from one subject to the next, getting lost in dense thickets of extraneous detail.
He was experimenting. The jumping frog kept rattling around his head while he procrastinated with other journalistic pursuits, like parody and social satire. In June 1865, he began writing a letter for his old editor at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. As a reporter for the Morning Call, Twain had gotten a firsthand look at the corrupt machinery of criminal justice. Now, in his Enterprise pieces, he laid into the city’s cops with new zeal. He hammered them for being shiftless, cruel, inept—for clubbing a man and throwing him in jail and letting him die of a head wound, for never arresting the racist Irish rowdies who threw stones at the Chinese. The city’s police chief retaliated with a libel suit against the Enterprise, and his men even jailed Twain overnight for public drunkenness. These efforts at intimidation didn’t work: as late as February 1866, he hadn’t let up. “Mark Twain is still on the war-path,” noted the San Francisco Examiner. “He is after the San Francisco Policemen with a sharp stick.”
Twain had always hated hypocrites, snobs, blowhards, and bullies. But the longer he spent in San Francisco, the shrewder his analysis became. He criticized not just people but institutions; not just isolated cases of bad behavior but broader patterns of injustice. By 1865, he had earned a new nickname: the Moralist of the Main. His morality wasn’t of the priggish, temperance-society sort. It was the conscience of the individual against the crowd, the same morality that later made Huckleberry Finn refuse to betray his friend Jim. Society taught him that runaway slaves should be returned to their owner. His heart told him different. If that meant eternal damnation, so be it: “All right, then,” Huck says, “I’ll go to hell.”
As a prankster and a social critic, a parodist and a folk philosopher, Twain had never been better. In 1864, he had come close to abandoning writing and resuming his piloting career on the Mississippi. By 1865, he was cranking out large quantities of prose on any topic he liked. Under the influence of Harte and the Californian, his style evolved. He no longer dropped bombs like the miscegenation hoax of May 1864—his firepower had found a narrower bore, and more deserving targets. His mischief hadn’t become any milder, only more discerning. Nevada’s Gold Hill News, which had blasted Twain during the miscegenation uproar, now praised his work for the Californian.
He also earned accolades from the Atlantic coast. On September 9, 1865, the New York Round Table singled him out as the “foremost” writer “among the merry gentlemen of the California press”—significant praise from a prestigious literary paper. Eastern editors had been reprinting his Californian pieces for months; now the critics had started to take notice. Charles Henry Webb took it as an omen. “To my thinking Shakspeare [sic] had no more idea that he was writing for posterity than Mark Twain has at the present time,” he wrote, “and it sometimes amuses me to think how future Mark Twain scholars will puzzle over that gentleman’s present hieroglyphics and occasionally eccentric expressions.”
Webb was joking, but someday he would seem oddly prescient. In late 1865, Twain finally finished the story from Angel’s Camp and sent it east. The manuscript held nothing less than the Fort Sumter of American letters, exploding in the annihilating blaze of a jumping frog.
II
BONANZA AND BUST
Gold miners in Tuolumne County in the 1860s, around the time that Twain visited Jackass Hill.
FOUR
The American frontier was a magical place. Daniel Boone wrestled bears in Kentucky and Davy Crockett battled a twelve-foot catfish in Tennessee. In Utah, grasshoppers grew so big they were barbecued like steaks, and in Arkansas, the corn grew so fast that a seed planted under a sleeping sow sprouted a stalk that speared the poor creature before sunrise. The frontier marked the outer limit of the ordinary. It was a “borderland of fable,” the historian Bernard DeVoto once wrote, an alternate reality where fact merged with fiction and a young, practical nation indulged its yearn
ing for myth.
The frontier always lived vividly in people’s minds. On the map, it was harder to place. In theory, it represented the line between wilderness and civilization. In practice, it was a porous, imprecise boundary between two different Americas: the populous East and the populating West—not one continuous front of white settlement but a patchwork of conquest and compromise spanning a vastly diverse region. The frontier improvised a society from many competing strands. Indians, northerners, southerners, blacks, Europeans, Chinese, and Mexicans overlapped and collided. Certain rules were suspended, others rewritten entirely. In these communities, America outgrew the colonial legacy of the Atlantic coast and created something new.
This evolution could be heard in the stories people told. In taverns and trading posts, stagecoaches and steamboats, they traded funny, fantastic yarns that reflected the new realities of western life. Tall talk was a kind of realism: a magnified portrait of actual speech, characters, and settings. It was also uncompromisingly coarse, the product of a male-dominated frontier. It broke all the rules of respectability, embracing vulgarity, violence, drunkenness, depravity, even ugliness. The heroes were hideous, and often hideously cruel. The language was exuberantly ungrammatical, composed in regional dialects that stretched and scrambled proper English into gorgeously expressive new forms.
These forms found their way into print via the nation’s journalists. Reprinted from one newspaper to the next, popularized by periodicals in eastern cities, frontier humor became a national phenomenon, forming a “low” vernacular alternative to the high-cultural effusions of New England. Those “semi-barbarous citizens” described by Jefferson hadn’t waited for their raw societies to become civilized before creating their own culture. They went ahead and did it anyway, using the materials at hand. The result wasn’t just quirky spellings and quaint anecdotes. It was America’s first folk art, a mortal threat to the literary dominion of the Atlantic coast. The revolt had been brewing for a while. On November 18, 1865, Mark Twain fired the first shot by publishing “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in the New York Saturday Press.
The path to publication had been anything but easy. Ever since returning to San Francisco from the Sierra foothills in February 1865, Twain had struggled to write the story he had heard at Angel’s Camp about a jumping frog. He produced at least two incomplete drafts, trying to find the right tone, but he couldn’t get this slice of frontier storytelling done to his satisfaction. He still hoped to send the piece to Artemus Ward in time for it to appear in his upcoming book. But time was running short: with each passing month, that opportunity receded.
What made the jumping frog such a difficult birth wasn’t just style or structure. The real problem involved a crisis of faith. Despite a prolific output and rising recognition, Twain had grave doubts about his future. Even as he developed a supremely confident writing voice, pummeling the San Francisco Police Department and other crooks and charlatans, he suffered serious misgivings about his chosen profession. As 1865 came to a close, the insecurities that he had long concealed under a swaggering exterior came painfully to the surface.
Money always made Twain crazy, even in those moments when he had enough of it. His father, John Marshall Clemens, had been a man of honesty, ambition, and appallingly bad business sense. He had started out as a lawyer, but it was his disastrous career as a speculator and entrepreneur that kept his family poor. The constant flutter of financial panic that Twain felt came partly from a fear of repeating his father’s failures. Wealth meant more than just fancy things—it promised a bulwark against chaos and uncertainty. Poverty, by contrast, represented something far worse than material scarcity: it brought shame and self-loathing. Throughout 1865, money problems kept Twain’s anxiety keyed to a constant pitch. He began sending daily letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in October, earning $100 a month. He made another $40 writing for the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle. He still contributed to the Californian—although after the summer, his pace dropped to about once a month—and placed a couple of parodies in the San Francisco Youths’ Companion. In all, he earned the same income as he did as a reporter for the Morning Call, doing work he hated. But his wages couldn’t keep pace with his debts.
In Roughing It, his later narrative of these years, he would describe this as his “slinking” period. “I slunk from back street to back street to back street,” he wrote. “I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar.” It took a terrible emotional toll. “I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the worms,” he recalled. His former colleagues at the Call poked fun at his distress. “There is now, and has been for a long time past, camping about through town, a melancholy-looking Arab, known as Marque Twein,” the paper joked in October. This nomad wore ratty clothes, drank heavily, and changed lodgings whenever he reached “the end of his credit.” “Having become familiarly but painfully known to all the widows in town who let out rooms, he finds it expedient to move again.” A darker view was provided by Twain himself four decades later: driven to despair, he almost committed suicide. “I put the pistol to my head but wasn’t man enough to pull the trigger,” he confessed. “Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed, but I was never ashamed of having tried.”
Unhappiness forced him inward. In November he would turn thirty. He was poor, unmarried, unsure of himself and his prospects. He grew reflective, philosophical. On October 19 and 20, 1865, he wrote a letter to his brother Orion and his sister-in-law Mollie:
I never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, & the other a preacher of the gospel. I accomplished the one & failed in the other, because I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade—i.e. religion. I have given it up forever. I never had a “call” in that direction, anyhow, & my aspirations were the very ecstasy of presumption. But I have had a “call” to literature, of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says that to do right you must multiply the one or the two or the three talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping, I would long ago have ceased to meddle with things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures. Poor, pitiful business! Though the Almighty did His part by me—for the talent is a mighty engine when supplied with the steam of education—which I have not got, & so its pistons & cylinders & shafts move feebly & for a holiday show & are useless for any good purpose.
This epiphany marked a turning point. It was the moment when he decided to “drop all trifling, & sighing after vain impossibilities” and consecrate himself to the writer’s life. It was the moment when he accepted his inheritance as a child of the frontier: as a “low” humorist “scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures.” Instead of trying to become someone he wasn’t, he would make peace with the person he already was.
His new self-knowledge didn’t solve anything in the short term. “I am utterly miserable,” he revealed at the end of the letter. “If I do not get out of debt in 3 months,—pistols or poison for one—exit me.” Yet he also felt a pinprick of hope: the New York Round Table had praised him for his Californian pieces, and the acclaim made waves when it reached San Francisco. “It is only now, when editors of standard literary papers in the distant east give me high praise, & who do not know me & cannot of course be blinded by the glamour of partiality, that I really begin to believe there must be something in it,” he wrote.
Out of this crisis came the courage to face the jumping frog. Eight months after he heard the tale at Angel’s Camp and promised to write it for Artemus Ward, it remained unfinished. Now he wrestled the manuscript into its final form and sent it to New York. By the time Twain’s contribution arrived, however, it was too late: Ward’s book had already gone to press. The publisher, George W. Carleton, passed the item along to Henry Clapp Jr.—a New York Bohemian
who had once held court at Pfaff’s with Walt Whitman—and on November 18, 1865, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” appeared in Clapp’s Saturday Press. This wasn’t another sarcastic squib of the Bohemian school: it was a fable of the frontier, drawing laughter deep from the country’s diaphragm, changing the course of American literature forever.
• • •
HUMOR IS HARD TO DEFINE. It thrives on context, and suffers in translation. What makes people laugh in one time and place often doesn’t make sense in another. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” still reads brilliantly, but it’s not as funny now as it was when it first appeared. Americans loved the story because it offered something at once familiar and strange: frontier humor, drawn with an unusual degree of detail. Twain took a world usually depicted in broad, buffoonish strokes and gave it sharp focus. The comedy came less from what he said than how he said it: how he rendered the lazy drawl and matter-of-fact tone that Bret Harte, listening to Twain’s tale in his office at the US Mint, had found so irresistible.
Twain modeled the story on the Southwestern humor sketches that filled the newspapers of his Missouri youth. That genre’s key feature was the “frame,” which involved using a refined, socially superior narrator to introduce and interpret the tall-talking backwoodsmen for the reader. It kept the frontier at a safe distance. It acted as an enclosure, the literary equivalent of those split-rail fences that marked the first signs of white settlement in the West.
At first, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” appears to use the standard Southwestern frame. The narrator is educated, well-spoken. He arrives at a mining camp looking for a reverend named Leonidas W. Smiley. He asks an old man at the tavern named Simon Wheeler, who says he doesn’t know Reverend Smiley—but he does know a gambler named Jim Smiley. This starts Wheeler on a long, rambling digression that culminates with a tale of a jumping contest between two frogs—the kernel of the original entry in Twain’s notebook from Angel’s Camp.
