Lighting Out For the Territory by Roy Morris

Perhaps you thought you read this book before – there was a book called Roughing It by Mark Twain that covers the same time period, but that was only one version and as one of the buddies of Sam Clemens on the Virginia City newspaper liked to say – “Get the facts first, then you can distort them as much as you like.”  It was advice that Clemens took as he chose his new name – Mark Twain while writing at the paper.

We begin with Twain in Missouri and Iowa towns at the beginning of the war, his attachment to a futile little militia that road around looking busy, but staying out of conflict and then his journey west when his brother Orion took a job as secretary to the Governor of Nevada.  Carson City awaited, the war was behind him, and he was ready for new adventures.

Of course he loved the piloting of the steamboats, but the war made the Mississippi a war zone and when they tried to recruit him to take troops by steamboat up the Missouri, his desire to travel elsewhere took roots.

The book contains the humor that was Twain – even the humor that backfires and sorts out some of the imaginary characters he invented to make his tale more enjoyable for the reader.  Yes he distorted his own life. 

He tried mining, but did not like to work; he did a variety of odd jobs, moved around and finally got an offer to write in the booming Virginia City. “ Virginia City was a town of 10,000 people, mostly men, with 51 saloons, two opera houses and numerous brothels, where women Twain called ‘soiled doves’ worked. And, he said, ‘there was some talk of building a church.’”  Here he began to develop his humor and might have stayed, but some of his humor backfired and he chose to travel to San Francisco to avoid the conflicts.

Traveling to San Francisco he stayed with two miners who were also great story tellers and he heard the story that would start his career as an internationally famous author – The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County.

Boredom came quickly if there was not enough new stimulus and thus his trip west did not stop until Hawaii where he became a travel writer and correspondent. Always alert to the truth and knowing what a scam really is his comments were not just about the scenery.  He described "swarms of Christian missionaries" whose purpose, Twain wrote, seemed to be "to make the natives permanently miserable by telling them how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there." 

Twain spent a few months here and came back to be a lecturer, then he wrote his Frog Story and his writing career would never be the same.  He returned from the West and Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer would rise from his prolific pen to carry him to fame.