Roughing It

As he passes through the vast and varied landscapes of the American West, Twain crosses paths with an ethnically diverse cast of characters, all of whom have been affected in widely varying ways by the economic volatility of the frontier—an ambiguous, constantly shifting zone of colonization, resistance, and migration in which fortunes are lost as fast as they are made.

Twain’s encounters with Indigenous tribes provide stark evidence of this economic volatility, as Western land is rapidly becoming a valuable commodity, to the detriment of the Indigenous peoples who have lived on that land for millennia. Twain’s disparaging description of the “Goshoot Indians” of Utah begins by comparing them unfavorably to a global litany of other Indigenous peoples, all of whom he also disparages. The people he terms “Goshoots” are now known as the Goshute people (in their own language, Kutsipiuti, meaning “people of the dry earth” or “people of the desert”), a tribe who had lived in what is now Utah and eastern Nevada for centuries before their first encounters with Mormon settlers. By the time of Twain’s arrival in the early 1860s, the tribe had endured roughly two decades of conflict in which white settlers, with the help of the US Army, had steadily pushed them off all the most favorable parts of the already challenging land in which they lived. When Twain disparages the Goshute people as “lean, small, ‘scrawny’” (146), he is unwittingly describing the results of a very recent, engineered famine arising from displacement and land theft.

In the mining boom town of Virginia City, Nevada, Twain finds a city of more than 15,000 people sprung up out the desert as if overnight, fueled by the short-lived economic largesse of the Comstock Lode, a large deposit of silver in the ground underneath the city: “Money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen” (305). He details the long list of businesses and civic institutions that have grown up around the mine, drawing people and industry to an arid and inhospitable mountainside in the Nevada desert. As a reporter for the local paper, Twain soon becomes theoretically rich in mine stock, given to him by prospectors eager to have their finds written up in the paper. Later, when the mines run dry, this speculative wealth evaporates along with much of the wealth of the town.

Twain devotes a chapter to the community of Chinese immigrants in Virginia City, drawn there by the abundance of work. He remarks that such communities exist in “every town and city on the Pacific Coast” (391)—the constantly shifting economies of the West are driving mass movements of people across geographical space, and with that movement comes both cultural transformation and racist conflict. Twain’s portrayal of Chinese Americans is often patronizing, deploying stereotypes of industriousness and docility, but he is sharply critical of the legal system that affords them none of the protections offered to their white neighbors: “Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man” (391).

Twain’s miners are emblematic of the West as a place of promise and danger—one that draws young people looking for opportunities not available elsewhere and willing to bear the attendant risks. They tend to be young adventurers who left the East to seek their fortunes in the highly speculative pursuit of mining for gold or silver. It should be stressed that this subgroup is entirely male and generally youthful. They take foolish risks that more often lead to disaster than glory, but Twain admirers them nonetheless when he says, “It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men […] No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans,—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants” (415). Even as he writes Roughing It, Twain knows that this strange band is passing into history and that he is singing its requiem.