Smiley’s gullibility in the climax of the yarn, he creates interest in the gambler, as well as in his animals, exaggerated to heroic proportions. The story moves from a catalog of Jim’s interests, including chicken fights and straddle-bug races, to a discussion of his horse’s surprising abilities and the distinct personality of his dog, the well-named Andrew Jackson. Now Wheeler is ready to tell about Smiley’s frog, Dan’l Webster. Wheeler comments, admiringly, “You never see a frog so modest and straightfor’ard as he was, for all he was so gifted.”
As the story moves to its climax, the narration moves to drama, and we hear conversations between Jim and the stranger, whose coolness more than matches Jim’s studied indifference. Jim thinks he has entrapped the stranger when the latter observes, “I don’t see no points about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” Jim’s search for a frog for the stranger, to compete with Dan’l, provides the stranger with time to fill what was to become known as the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County “pretty near up to his chin” with quail-shot. Thus the stranger’s frog is permitted to win, whereupon the winner repeats, again coolly, “I don’t see no points about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog,” and leaves.
It is Mark Twain’s control of point of view that makes the story so rich. We see the narrator’s view of Simon Wheeler, and Wheeler’s view of Jim Smiley; each is consistent, and subtle. The story gave the writer a new sense of his capabilities. Even before it was published, the New York Round Table in an article on “American Humor and Humorists” had called him “foremost” of the “merry gentlemen of the California press.” Clemens saw the article, for it was quoted in at least two San Francisco publications. In January, he sent his mother a clipping from the New York correspondent of the San Francisco Alta California: “Mark Twain’s story in the Saturday Press of November 18, called ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’ has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. It is voted the best thing of the day. Cannot the Californian afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the California Press.” The Californian of December 16 reprinted the piece.
Mark Twain’s Eastern reputation was spread through a series of eight pieces appearing in the New York Weekly Review in 1865 and 1866, the first being an account of the October 7 San Francisco earthquake. But there was no sudden change in the author’s fortunes. He continued to write for the Enterprise, many of his letters being reprinted in the Golden Era. In the letter to Orion about his call to humorous literature, he announced that he was beginning work as a reviewer for the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle. Although it was the earliest version of San Francisco’s current leading newspaper, it was a poor thing, a four-page advertising handout, in which Mark Twain’s work consisted of squibs and fillers in addition to reviews—all anonymous. Only one short sketch appeared there, “Earthquake Almanac.” The pages of the Chronicle mention Mark Twain frequently during his two months of employment, but usually he is identified as the Enterprise correspondent. He also contributed two pieces to the Examiner and one piece, ridiculing women’s fashions, to the Evening Bulletin.
Six new pieces appeared in the Californian in late 1865 and early 1866. One deserves mention. “The Christmas Fireside for Good Little Boys and Girls. By Grandfather Twain,” subtitled “The Story of the Bad Little Boy That Bore a Charmed Life,” appeared on December 23. The story takes all the conventions of the moralistic children’s fable and naughtily turns them upside down. This bad little boy has none of the appeal of Tom Sawyer; in fact, he is thoroughly wicked. “And he grew up, and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality, and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.” Here Mark Twain presents himself as the satirical outsider.
Such sketches required a fertile imagination; finding something to write about was a constant strain, and he was barely making a living. He was frustrated. In Roughing It, he explains that “my interest in my work was gone; for my [Enterprise] correspondence being a daily one, without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted another change” (chap. 62).15 Clemens still had in mind the idea of a book, which he mentioned in a letter to his mother and sister on January 20, 1866, but “nobody knows what it is going to be about but just myself.” His boredom is reflected in his surviving Enterprise letters. After complaining in his January letter that his life was uneventful and that he wished he had accepted an invitation to take a round trip on the Ajax to the Sandwich Islands (the Hawaiian Islands), he visited Sacramento, and there the Daily Union commissioned him to write twenty or thirty letters from Hawaii. He was to go on the next sailing. This experience was pivotal, for it gave him an opportunity for sustained writing. The experience and observations were a combination that would prove fruitful in his travel books and novels.
Clemens left San Francisco on March 7, 1866, and returned August 13. Concerning this visit he wrote one letter for the New York Saturday Press, one for the New York Weekly Review, and twenty-five letters to the Sacramento Union. He stayed much longer than he expected, as he explained to Will Bowen, an old friend from Hannibal days, in a May 7 letter from Maui.
I contracted with the Sacramento Union to go wherever they chose & correspond for a few months, & I had a sneaking notion they would start me east—but behold how fallible is human judgment!—they sent me to the Sandwich Islands. I look for a recall by the next mail, though, because I have written them that I cannot go all over the eight inhabited islands of the group in less than five months & do credit to myself & them, & I don’t want to spend so much time. I have been here two months, & yet have only “done” the island of Oahu & part of this island of Maui, & it is going to take me two more weeks to finish this one & at least a month to “do” the island of Hawaii & the great volcanoes—& by that time, surely, I can hear from them. But I have had a gorgeous time of it so far.
He visited only those three islands.
Later Clemens edited his Hawaiian letters into a book manuscript, but he was not able to find a publisher. (Subsequently, he revised them for inclusion as chapters 63–77 of Roughing It.) While readers of that book usually find the Hawaii chapters weaker than the earlier ones on Nevada and California, the explanation is simply that he was a rapidly maturing writer and that the earlier chapters were written after Clemens’s trip to Europe and Middle East and the publication of The Innocents Abroad.
Mark Twain’s growth from a writer of sketches and news stories, humorous and otherwise, created a change that would lead to severe tensions in his career. Hitherto, in Nevada and California, he had been a critic of the dominant culture. He had chided the clergy, the courts, and the police. He had ridiculed women’s fashions. He had even criticized children and romantic young women. He had presented himself as an associate of the disgusting “Unreliable.” He was an outsider, a bohemian. In the increasingly sophisticated San Francisco, he was identified as being from Washoe, and he constantly reminded his readers of his origins. He was lazy, a loafer. As a writer he was a hoaxer and a humorist, a man of limited education and uncertain ambition. All this was to change, at least on the surface.
In Hawaii, he discovered, he was a man of importance, on an assignment that gave him prestige. As a result he associated with people of a sort that he would not have known on the mainland. He visited the king; he met the American minister, and he was befriended by Anson Burlingame, who was on his way to an important position in China. When Burlingame asked to see his writings, Clemens provided, as he told his mother in June, “pretty much everything I ever wrote.” Soon Burlingame was helping him with a news story about a fire on board the clipper ship Hornet; his account was to spread his reputation. Because Clemens was in bed with aggravated boils, Burlingame arranged to have him taken to the hospital
