Relations with the Call ceased before the end of the year, though
not in the manner described in Roughing It. Mark Twain loved to
make fiction of his mishaps, and to show himself always in a bad
light. As a matter of fact, he left the Call with great
willingness, and began immediately contributing a daily letter to
the Enterprise, which brought him a satisfactory financial return.
In the biographical sketch with which this volume opens, and more
extendedly elsewhere, has been told the story of the trouble growing
out of the Enterprise letters, and of Mark Twain's sojourn with
James Gillis in the Tuolumne Hills. Also how, in the frowsy hotel
at Angel's Camp, he heard the frog anecdote that would become the
corner-stone of his fame. There are no letters of this period—only
some note-book entries. It is probable that he did not write home,
believing, no doubt, that he had very little to say.
For more than a year there is not a line that has survived. Yet it
had been an important year; the jumping frog story, published in New
York, had been reprinted East and West, and laughed over in at least
a million homes. Fame had not come to him, but it was on the way.
Yet his outlook seems not to have been a hopeful one.
To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 20, 1866.
MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,—I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.
To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.
But no matter. His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers.
This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco Alta:
(Clipping pasted in.)
“Mark Twain's story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, 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.”