Walk the Read Bookmarks
Bookmark these Literary Landmark trips!
Categories: Featured Travel Stories
By: Meghan Saar 03/01/2008
Bookmark Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s last home, a 17-room house in Ketchum, Idaho, was once open to the public only one day each year, on July 21, Hemingway’s birthday, but the Nature Conservancy is in the middle of renovations and has ceased this practice. You’ll see pictures of Hemingway and his family, the last letter he wrote before he committed suicide in this house on July 2, 1961, and a memorial to the Nobel Prize-winning author that overlooks Trail Creek. His body is buried in the Ketchum cemetery.
Joaquin Miller
Joaquin Miller’s cradle may have been a “covered wagon pointed west,” but even this established poet was not above criticism.
When you walk around Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland, California, a garden he called “The Hights” when he settled here in 1886, don’t think of his best-known poem, “Columbus,” but his most controversial one, “Kit Carson’s Ride.”
General Edward F. Beale, who accompanied Kit Carson during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, wrote a scathing review of this poem to poet Bayard Taylor. It “ought to be put in a moral glass bottle, labeled ‘Poison,’ put on a high shelf in the cupboard out of reach of children, and forgotten,” he wrote. He even went so far as to regret “that the scalp of Joaquin had not been counted among the ‘coups’ of that redoubted knight of the prairies and mountains.”
What was Beale so upset about? In Miller’s Songs of the Sierras, Carson saved himself while a prairie fire overtook his Indian bride, and even escaped on his lady love’s horse.
Miller heard the loud and clear complaints, and revised the poem when he released his complete works, admitting “the end was coarse and unworthy the brave spirit of Kit Carson.” The new ending showed the fire consumed only the lovers’ fellow companion and the horse.
• TWMAG.COM: Read the poems and the letters exchanged between Beale and Taylor
Walking Tom Sawyer in California
Mark Twain Plaza is located near the Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper and the site of the Turkish Baths where Twain met a volunteer fireman named Tom Sawyer, while the author was reporting for the Daily Morning Call. It’s likely this man did inspire the name of Twain’s novel, as a biographical sketch of the fireman, published in 1900, mentioned this; neither Twain nor the fireman challenged the claim.
What most don’t know about this building is that a California Gold Rush artifact lies exactly beneath it! Fortune seekers came here via the whaling vessel Niantic, which was converted into a hotel in 1849. Fires destroyed it a few years later, but you can view artifacts from the ship at the San Francisco Maritime Museum.
Walking Tom Sawyer in Missouri
Hannibal is home to Mark Twain’s Boyhood Home and Museum; the New Mark Twain Museum; Judge Clemens’ Law Office; Pilaster House where Judge Clemens died; Grant’s Drug Store, which was stocked with Aunt Polly’s medicines in Tom Sawyer; and a statue of Mark Twain’s likeness and one of Huck and Tom.
You can also visit Becky Thatcher’s house, where the model for the Tom Sawyer character, Laura Hawkins, lived during the 1840s.
The cave Twain called McDougal’s Cave came to be called after the author, thanks to the notoriety he brought it from Tom Sawyer. Guides will point out the places Twain mentioned in his writings.
In Stoutsville, the birthplace of Mark Twain, you’ll find the restored two-room cabin Samuel L. Clemens was raised in that was moved from the village of Florida to the museum at Mark Twain State Park in 1930. The museum also exhibits Twain’s inventions, family artifacts and furniture, and the author’s books, most notably an 1876 manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Bookmark Helen Hunt Jackson
When Ponca Chief Standing Bear told Helen the plight of his people, she resolved to raise awareness of injustices against Indians in the American West. Her two most important books on the topic was her first, A Century of Dishonor, and Ramona.
Visit the reconstructed home of this “woman with a cause,” featuring salvaged rooms moved from her residence at 228 E. Kiowa Street to the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum in Colorado. Her furnishings and possessions are on display.
In nearby Cheyenne Mountains, make a stop at her grave at Helen Hunt Falls.
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