Roughing It. Mark Twain.

Roughing It
Mark Twain
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1984 (1872)

Why read it? Twain records a journey in the 1800s from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and Life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. Twain describes pioneering in the West: riding a stage coach; the Pony Express; the Mormon Bible (“chloroform in print”); the “scholarly” Indians in The Last of the Mohicans; characters’ use of language; a landslide; a character who knows everyone he meets or a relative; the colorful idiomatic language of the West; lawyers—“First and last aim…was to defeat justice"; the belief that everything that happens is good if we wait long enough to find out—“Prov’dence don’t fire no blank ca’tridges, boy”; the missionaries who converted the natives of Hawaii to Christianity and made them permanently miserable; and Brigham Young and polygamy.

Some sample ideas from the book: “Pretty soon he [Twain’s brother] would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the far west, and would 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 all about it, and be a hero.” “Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description—an imposing cradle on wheels.” “…dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation….” “…camp fire…around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly entertaining.” “Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the unabridged dictionary would come too, and every time it came it damaged somebody.”

“Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings.” “It did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude.” “…kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look.” “There were about eighty pony-riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering processions from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year.”

“In a small way we were the same sort of simpletons as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of Mount Blanc and the Matterhorn and derive no pleasure from it except the reflection that it isn’t a common experience.” “Whenever he [Joseph smith writing the Mormon Bible] found his speech growing too modern…he ladled in a few such scriptural phrases as ‘exceeding sore,’ ‘and it came to pass,’ etc. and made things satisfactory again.” “Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.” “Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe…a ‘downgrade,’ a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness...what all the ages have struggled for.” “…the scholarly savages in The Last of the Mohicans who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part…an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer.”

Quote: “I had quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and was full of anxiety to learn more.”

Quote: “The reader cannot know what a land-slide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain’s front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory.”