[begin page 262]

(This headnote is repeated in numbers 117–119.)

In 1896 Clemens' close friend Joseph Hopkins Twichell said that the “celebrated ‘Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ . . . was a story (it had some basis of fact) with which [Clemens] had long been wont on occasion to entertain private circles. When at some one's urgency he at length wrote it out, it appeared to him so poor and flat that he pigeonholed it in contempt, and it required further urgency to persuade him to let it be printed.”1 This statement is almost certainly based on a conversation with Clemens, and as a capsule history of the jumping frog story it seems about right, for it is corroborated by other collateral accounts and by the three sketches grouped together here. “The Only Reliable Account” (no. 117) and “Angel's Camp Constable” (no. 118) are taken from two of the author's holographs preserved by his sister, Pamela, and now in the Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers at Vassar. They have not been published before. The third is taken from the New York Saturday Press of [begin page 263] 18 November 1865, where Clemens first published his most famous tale. The evidence of the manuscripts—paper, ink color, style of handwriting, and content—is that Clemens wrote both late in 1865, probably soon before he wrote “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” Both manuscripts were abandoned: they are complete, but obviously unfinished, since their last pages remain only partly filled. We conjecture that they were among the “poor and flat” versions that Clemens reportedly pigeonholed in contempt, and that they were written in September or during the first two weeks of October 1865. And we further conjecture that “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (no. 119) was composed rapidly, between October 16 and 18, although it was not published in New York until a month later.

Clemens had left San Francisco in early December 1864 to visit Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker at Jackass Hill, California. The purpose of this retreat from the pressures of the city to the calm of backwoods mining towns is not certainly known, but Clemens appears to have been in a somber mood. While at Jackass Hill and nearby Angel's Camp he and his companions were confined indoors by the continuous winter rain, and so they listened to the miners and residents tell a variety of anecdotes from the local collection of folklore. Clemens recorded a number of stories in his notebooks. “New Years night—dream of Jim Townsend—'I could take this x x x book & x x x every x x x in California, from San Francisco to the mountains,'” he wrote. On about January 25 he added, “Met Ben Coon, Ill river pilot here.” And then on about February 6 he wrote, “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C's frog full of shot & he couldn't jump—the stranger's frog won.”2

Writing to Jim Gillis five years later, Clemens said in part:

And in 1894 Clemens again recalled the occasion, this time in somewhat greater detail:

Clemens did not here specify who the “chap” was who told this story. But the anecdote itself had been current in oral and written folklore for years, and one version, probably written by James W. E. Townsend (the same Townsend whose dream Clemens recorded on New Year's night), had appeared in the Sonora Herald in 1853.5

On 26 February 1865 Clemens returned from his three-and-one-half-month stay in the mining camps. “Home again,” he recorded in his notebook for that day, “home again at the Occidental Hotel, San Francisco—find letters from ‘Artemus Ward’ asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory travels which is soon to come out. Too late—ought to have got the letters 3 months ago. They are dated early in November.”6 Presumably Clemens wrote as much to Ward on or about March 1, also mentioning some of his recent experiences in Angel's [begin page 265] Camp—perhaps including the jumping frog story. In a letter (now lost) that could not have reached Clemens before the first of May, Ward apparently said, “Write it. . . . There is still time to get it into my volume of sketches. Send it to Carleton, my publisher in New York.” Albert Bigelow Paine, who recorded this phrase as Clemens remembered it, said that the author “promised to do this, but delayed fulfillment somewhat.”7

Indeed, it seems likely that Clemens did delay for several months. On March 18, however, he published his first experiment with the narrator Coon—almost certainly based on the Illinois river pilot he had met, Ben Coon—in “An Unbiased Criticism” (no. 100). On June 17 he introduced the narrator Simon Wheeler, who was clearly derived from Coon, and to whom Clemens now attributed “He Done His Level Best” (“Answers to Correspondents,” no. 107). For most of June he was kept busy writing a weekly column of answers to correspondents for Bret Harte's Californian, but it must have been about this time that he was accustomed “to entertain private circles” with the frog story. Bret Harte recalled hearing it shortly after Clemens returned from “the mining districts.”

While in London in March 1897, Clemens gave the following further account of the story's genesis to James Ross Clemens:

It seems unlikely that Clemens' frog “Daniel Webster” was ever called “Henry Clay,” but the confusion of orators (if not of politics) is understandable and may be due to James Ross Clemens' faulty memory. The other facts ring true: the suggestion that Jim Townsend's story about a domestic fox preceded the frog story as the subject of Wheeler's monologue, the indication that the final story “only very slowly took shape,” the attribution of the original narration to Ben Coon, and the statement that Artemus Ward had written “several more” letters urging Clemens to send a contribution. Twichell had said in 1896, less than a year earlier, that Clemens first pigeonholed his manuscript and returned to it only after “further urgency” had been applied. These later letters from Ward could hardly have reached Clemens much before the beginning of September 1865.

The two manuscripts published here, as well as the earlier experiments with Ben Coon and Simon Wheeler published in the Californian, suggest that Clemens saw the humorous possibilities of his narrator more clearly than he saw how to bring that narrator and his frog story into conjunction. At least two closely related problems seem to have been troubling him: precisely what stance to adopt toward his vernacular narrator (how much or how little condescension), and how to simulate the effect he could achieve so easily in oral narration when, as Harte remarked, he “half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator.” In “The Only Reliable Account” Clemens addressed Ar- [begin page 267] temus Ward much as he would in the third version, offering him the sketch for “the history of your travels,” and characterizing Wheeler as a “venerable rural historian” living in “unostentatious privacy,” from whom he had obtained a “just and true account” of the jumping frog. But Clemens then spent almost as many words as the finished tale would require simply sketching the “decaying city of Boomerang.” He never got around to letting Wheeler speak at all, much less tell the frog story.

“Angel's Camp Constable,” on the other hand, seems to be an effort to correct this tendency to overemphasize the frame story. It begins: “I was told that if I would mention any of the venerable Simon Wheeler's pet heroes casually, he would be sure to tell me all about them, but that I must not laugh during the recital, as he would think I was making fun of them, and it would give him mortal offense.” After this we are plunged almost immediately into Wheeler's monologue. The introductory sentences suggest, however, that Constable Bilgewater—a name Clemens had also recorded in his notebook at Angel's Camp10—was only the first of Wheeler's “pet heroes” to be treated in the story. These sentences also warn us rather too directly that his “recital” is supposed to be humorous, and they cast the author as clearly condescending toward “the old gentleman [who] oozed gratified vanity at every pore.” Like the first version, however, this one never gets around to telling the story of the jumping frog: the manuscript is another false start, and Clemens did not mention his grandiose constable again until sometime in August 1878.11

These technical difficulties were tied up with Clemens' conception of himself, particularly his doubts about pursuing the “low” calling of a humorist. Partly because of when they were written, and partly because Simon Wheeler's monologues are a kind of literary free association, we find a number of circumstances in these stories that mirror the conflict between ambition and self-doubt that Clemens appears to have experienced. In the lingering description of the backwater community of Boomerang, for instance, Clemens conveys something of the nostalgia he would feel for the Quarles Farm. But the nostalgia is complicated here by the fact that Boomerang sits unwittingly on immense mineral [begin page 268] wealth—wealth that has been quietly bought up by a “New York company” from the residents, who fail to recognize the value of what they own. Passive retirement is no solution. On the other hand, Constable Bilgewater has foolishly resigned his post in Angel's Camp because “they'd heard of him in New York, I reckon, and I s'pose they wanted him there, and so he went. And he was right. There warn't business enough here for a man of his talents, though what there was he made the most of.” Bilgewater's view of his own vocation, like Simon Wheeler's respect for him, are comic precisely because both are so contrary to the facts. But even here it is not quite clear how Mark Twain judges Bilgewater, “who attained to considerable eminence, and whom I have frequently heard of in various parts of the world.”

Clemens, too, had begun to be heard of in New York. His Californian sketches were being reprinted there, as Webb had noted in January and February 1865. And probably on October 17, the day before he finished the manuscript of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” Clemens saw an article in the New York Round Table that placed him among the “foremost” of the “merry gentlemen of the California press.” On October 19 he confided to Orion that he would now pursue his fame as a humorist, “unworthy & evanescent though it must of necessity be,” despite the fact that his talent had been deprived of the “steam of education.” He explained that it was “only now, when editors of standard literary papers in the distant east give me high praise . . . that I really begin to believe there must be something in it.”12 Clemens' self-doubts, particularly about his education, also appear in the third, published version of the tale. As Henry Nash Smith pointed out in 1962, the “elegiac theme of mute inglorious Miltons” applies to all of Simon Wheeler's “pet [begin page 269] heroes,” including Daniel Webster: “Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most anything—and I believe him.”13 Both the fear of being forgotten and unjustly obscure, like Boomerang, and the fear of being ridiculed for his presumption, like Bilgewater, appear indirectly in the basic fantasies of these three stories. “I wonder what they think of him in New York,” says Wheeler about his hero. It is a comic question precisely because of its childlike assumption that fame cannot have failed to attend Bilgewater “in New York.”

An abundance of evidence suggested in 1967 that Clemens wrote the third version of his sketch in the week of 16 to 23 October 1865.14 It now seems likely, although not certain, that Clemens actually composed it between 16 and 18 October, presumably having reached the point of near despair he described for James Ross Clemens. He probably did not send his manuscript to New York by overland mail, which took about one month and remained an uncertain means at best. Because he doubtless knew Ward's book was nearing publication, and because transit time by Pacific Mail Steamship could be as brief as twenty-one days between San Francisco and New York,15 it seems likely that Clemens chose this method instead. The only steamer to leave San Francisco in the week of 16 to 23 October was the Golden City, which departed at 11:20 a.m. “with 72 packages United States mails” on October 18; its cargo was transferred by rail across the Isthmus of Panama to the Ocean Queen, which arrived in New York on November 10. (The next steamer to leave San Francisco was the Colorado on October 30, and its cargo did not arrive in New York until December 4.)16 If Clemens did as we suppose, then one week must have elapsed between the arrival of the mails in New York on November 10 and publication in the Saturday Press on [begin page 270] November 18. On November 11 George W. Carleton advertised Artemus Ward: His Travels as ready “this morning” in the New York Tribune, although the book was probably published even earlier than that (piracies appeared in England by November 18 at the latest). In any case, Carleton would have been unable to include Clemens' sketch in Ward's book and could easily have turned the manuscript over to the editor of the Press, Henry Clapp, saying, as Clemens recalled in 1897, “Here, Clapp, here's something you can use!”17 Clemens himself noted in January 1866 that his sketch was “a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, & then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.” And one year later he said, while preparing the sketch for his Jumping Frog book, that it was “originally written, by request, for Artemus Ward's last book, but arrived in New York after that work had gone to press.”18

In mid-September the Californian had noted a general revival in periodical literature in the East, following the end of the war. It particularly mentioned “the smart Saturday Press,”

This may explain why Clemens thought, as he said years later, that the Press was close to collapse. Certainly its editor was quite genuinely happy to publish “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and to promise—accurately, but on what authority is not known—future contributions from the same pen.

Within three weeks of publication the sketch had, like its less distinguished predecessors, been widely reprinted. The New York correspondent of the San Francisco Alta California, Richard Ogden (“Podgers”), wrote on December 10 to say that it had “set all New York in a roar. . . . 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.” He added a question that may have touched Bret Harte on a tender place: “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.”21 Even before this report arrived, however, Bret Harte had acknowledged the value of Clemens' latest work by reprinting it, on December 16, in the Californian—incorporating a few changes that Clemens himself may have authorized. But the full nature and extent of the eastern storm of praise did not reach California until Podgers' letter was published on 10 January 1866. Three days later Charles Henry Webb said in his column “Inigoings” in the Californian: “I should have expressed my pleasure at the hit which ‘Podgers’ says Mark Twain has made at the East in ‘Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog.’ But he deserves it all. For he's a good fellow, and his sketch ‘is good’ . . . better than any of their funny fellows can do.”22

Clemens' own reaction to this success was mixed. The day after Podgers' remarks were published he told the local reporter of the San Francisco Examiner about an old ambition, recently revived. The Examiner said, in part, “That rare humorist, ‘Mark Twain,’ whose fame is rapidly extending all over the country, informs us that he has commenced the work of writing a book.”23 To his family on January 20 he confided that [begin page 272] he was actually thinking of three books, and he enclosed a clipping of Podgers' comments in the Alta, adding a note of self-deprecation: “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 & His Jumping Frog.’ ” This low opinion of his sketch would soon change. In June 1866 he proudly reported the approval of Anson Burlingame and his son; in April 1867 he said that James Russell Lowell had pronounced “the Jumping Frog . . . the finest piece of humorous writing ever produced in America”; and in December 1869 he endorsed this view in a letter to Olivia Langdon, saying he thought it “the best humorous sketch America has produced, yet.”24 In 1867 Clemens gave the sketch pride of place in the Jumping Frog book, but even though he continued to reprint it, he seemed to convey his low opinion of it by planning to use it in the various cheap pamphlets that so obsessed him from 1870 until 1874. The original version is reprinted here. It was revised by both Clemens and his editor, Webb, for the 1867 Jumping Frog book, and revised again in 1872 and 1874.25 But whatever the author's later opinion of it, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was an impeccably shaped yarn that took extraordinary delight in someone's saying humorous things without being aware of it.26 And it both expressed and to some extent resolved the personal dilemma Clemens was feeling about his calling as a humorist.