Mark Twain's Roughing It

In a blog titled The Salted Mine, it seems only right to begin with Mark Twain’s 1872 ode to the American West, Roughing It. Twain's extensive travels during the 1860s had taken him clear across the country to Nevada, California, and ultimately as far as the Hawaiian islands. Roughing It is a loose chronicle of that period, intermixed with anecdotes, newspaper clippings, hearsay, and, if we know Twain at all, a fair bit of exaggeration.

Roughing It is an amusing, if somewhat too long, bit of travel fiction, featuring a Twain not at his strongest, nor at his funniest, but worth reading to anyone with an interest in the history of the American West or an overabundance of interest in early Twain. My interests lie in neither of these directions. For me, Roughing It is worth reading primarily for its references to the promise and the perils of speculation on the American Frontier. Twain's charmingly naive narrator engages in a whole host of speculative activities, demonstrating (as Twain did in his own lifetime) a singular incapacity for business. After accidentally burning down his logging project, he allows his ownership of a million dollar mine to lapse while he is spending his projected capital, and then sleeps through the departure of the ship scheduled to take him to a fortune-making meeting.

If he manages to avoid becoming a victim of one of the most popular hoaxes of the time, the salted mine, it is more by luck than skill. A salted mine is, of course, a mining claim that has been planted with a small amount of gold, silver, or in some cases a small number of gemstones, in order to make it appear more rich than it is in fact. One of the truly classic confidence tricks, the salted mine plays on the greed and haste of the mark who, in his hurry to claim near instantaneous wealth, fails to ascertain the true value of the land in question before laying out his money. The glittering appearance of the salted mine was designed to make the seller rich and the speculator appallingly poor.


The trick worked because the truth is that most of the mining fortunes made after the initial surge of the gold rush were not made by individual miners driving their picks into veins of solid gold or panning goose-eggs out of the local stream. Actual mining was expensive, back-breaking work best conducted on a large scale by cheap labor. The real money was in speculation. Mines were established with minimal labor, their value assessed (often unreliably) by a small sample of rock submitted to an appraiser, and then they were sold by the foot to other miners, who often had no more intention of actually working the mine than the original owner did. Feet of mine traded hands in exchange for whiskey and pork and haircuts, much like paper money does now (and did in the Eastern States at the time).

As with the salted mine, the apparent exchange value of these feet often far exceeded what the mine would yield in reality. This contrast between appearance and reality is one to which Twain repeatedly returns throughout the narrative; in this charmingly self-deprecating scene the narrator believes he has struck it rich during a casual stroll through wilderness and presents his findings to his more experienced friends:

"Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything--I haven't been around, you know, and of course don't know anything--but all I ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and I tossed my treasure before them.
There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light. Then old Ballou said:
"Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!"
So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn. Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold."
Mr Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once and for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

I like very much Twain's moralizing here, for it is to these "men of mica" that this blog is dedicated. My own commonplace human nature cannot abide honest or earnest men (I leave Whitman and Emerson to other folk), and pledge this blog to those men (and occasionally women) whose appearance continually belies their reality, to the cheats, quacks, frauds, fakes, humbugs, charlatans, swindlers, and counterfeits of the remarkable nineteenth century.