(Not Really) Roughing it on the Mark Twain Trail
From Hannibal, Missouri, to San Francisco, California
Categories: Renegade Roads
By: Johnny D. Boggs 11/01/2007
In Old San Francisco
Check out the California Historical Society, Wells Fargo Museum and the museum Twain would have loved—Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum.
It was in San Francisco where Twain wrote his short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which The Saturday Press of New York published in 1865. Newspapers across the country reprinted the humorous bit, and Twain was on his way to becoming a landmark writer and a national treasure.
In 1866, Twain left San Francisco, landing a gig with The Sacramento Union to cross the Pacific and write about the Sandwich Islands. I’ve tried to get this rag to let me continue chronicling the Mark Twain trail, to send me to Hawaii, to let me follow the Equator or to be a tramp abroad in England, France and the Mediterranean. But my editors won’t splurge for it.
“You’re not Mark Twain,” they tell me.
Johnny D. Boggs’ favorite Mark Twain novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.
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