Mark Twain and the Myth of the Wild West

Mark Twain did not invent the Myth of the Wild West, but he certainly exploited and advanced it. Roughing It, one of his earliest books (1872), described his Western sojourn beginning in 1861 during the Civil War. It was a time when it made sense to abandon his profession as a riverboat pilot. He had little interest in fighting and there was a real danger that Union forces would draft him to serve their needs on the Mississippi. And, young Clemens wanted adventure.

Samuel Clemens (b. 1835) traveled with his older brother Orion (b. 1825), a Lincoln-appointee to serve as secretary-treasurer of the newly-created Nevada Territory. Samuel wanted to avoid work, so he hoped to find a position with the government. There were none, so he tried his hand at lumbering and mining, but both those endeavors proved to involve too much labor. He then decided to try his hand at journalism, which was an easy profession provided that a reporter was not overly committed to the truth.

In September 1862, he found employment with Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise. There, he eventually took the pen name, "Mark Twain" - the adoption of which is itself shrouded in folklore: various accounts say that it was a riverboat term meaning that the depth of water was navigable but dangerously close to trouble; others maintain that Clemens found inspiration in a saloon keeper's calling out that he was marking two drinks by his name.

Twain's Virginia City as depicted in Roughing It (1872).

Falsehood, deliberately crafted and cultivated, followed Clemens wherever he went, and he was apparently inspired by the Western genre of the Tall Tale. Clemens had long enjoyed telling "stretchers" - accounts that diverged from the truth both for amusement and effect. In the West, he found a place that regularly stepped away from reality and he celebrated the journey! It would be hard to imagine Clemens becoming Mark Twain without the American West: Clemens may have been born in Missouri, but Twain was born in Virginia City, Nevada, a place where the writer could fuse his Southern style of storytelling with the West's playful departure from fact.

One of the best examples of Twain exploiting Western folklore involved the account of Horace Greeley's journey across the Sierra. Greeley - founder of the New York Tribune, which promoted the Republican political agenda - is credited with giving fame to the phrase "Go West young man!" In 1859, Greeley decided to travel West to see the region he was advocating.

Greeley (1811-1872) found himself at the eastern base of the Sierra, in urgent need to make it over the summit to give a presentation in Placerville, California. The stage company assigned Hank Monk (1826-1883), their best driver, who necessarily took the ascent of the range slowly because of the steep grade. Greeley apparently expressed his concern about arriving in time, but Monk was an expert and knew he could easily make the deadline, so he slowed his team to rankle this Eastern greenhorn. According to the story, Greeley protested frequently and a laconic Monk repeatedly answered that he would get his passenger there on time. Once they reached the summit, Monk snapped his team into action, and they raced down the steep slope, coming perilously close to cliff edges. Greeley cried out to slow the speed of the stage, but Monk kept repeating that the celebrated phrase, "Don't worry Horace, I'll get you there on time."

The story became a favorite of Western storytellers, in part because it pitted a Westerner with little education but a tremendous amount of know-how against an effete Eastern snob who didn't understand the way of the West. Ample evidence indicates that the story was extremely popular, and when famed comedian Artemus Ward visited the West, he recorded the yarn, writing it up in his book, aptly named "His Travels" (a sequel to his first collection of comic anecdotes entitled "His Book"). Ward did little to change the story, which was read on the floor of the US House of Representatives as a way to ridicule Greeley who had challenged President U. S. Grant during the 1872 election.

Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne; 1834-1867) was reputed to be President Lincoln's "favorite comic writer." He gave a presentation in Virginia City during Christmas 1863, at which time he met Mark Twain.

In the early years of his career as a writer and a lecturer, Twain was frustrated by constantly being compared to Ward - who had played a role in getting his first national publication, the short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865). Twain adapted the Greeley-Monk story in a different direction, a clear display of his genius. Rather than recount the story as Ward had done, Twain used it on stage and in "Roughing It", emphasizing the dreary nature of an over-used anecdote. For Twain, the story was so often repeated, that when they encountered a man who was about to die of thirst - and they rescued him - he asked if he could repay them by telling them a most amusing story. Twain recounts how he refused to allow the man to tell the story because they had heard it too often, but the poor man was not able to bottle up the story within himself without ill effect and he died on the spot as a result.

Twain's use of the Greeley-Monk story displays his talent. He dipped into the well of oral tradition, but he was not satisfied with a simple recounting. Instead, he framed it in a way that placed the narration in the realm of literature. Folklore may have been the story's origin, but its ultimate manifestation in "Roughing It" proved the literary genius of Twain, America's renown man of letters.

Volumes could be written on Twain's interaction with oral tradition; I have addressed the Monky-Greeley narrative in an article that recently appeared in Western Folklore: “Monk, Greeley, Ward, and Twain: The Folkloresque of a Western Legend,” Western Folklore, 76:3 (Summer 2017).