5 Chapter 4 The Celebrated Jumping Frog

Chapter 4 The Celebrated Jumping Frog "The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." —Mark Twain After less than a year at the Enterprise, Sam wrote to his mother, "Everybody knows me, & I fare like a prince wherever I go."

Sam was growing famous as Mark Twain. His columns were reprinted in California papers and even sometimes in newspapers back East. Soon more people were calling him Mark instead of Sam. (His family and boyhood friends would always call him Sam; others called him Twain or Clemens. The man himself often signed his name "Samuel L. Clemens Mark Twain.") Mark Twain became known not only for his wit and wisecracks, but also for exposing injustice and fraud. In one column, Mark wrote about an undertaker who was charging sky-high prices for his funerals. The undertaker, Mark said, was taking advantage of families who were too sad to argue about money. Through his pen, Mark tried to correct the evils in society.

Mark wrote freely at the Enterprise until a rival newspaperman he'd poked fun at in the news challenged him to a duel—a formal fight with weapons. Rather than risk his life, Mark skipped town for San Francisco. The beginning of 1865 found Mark Twain prospecting for gold in the hills outside the city. One night around the camp stove, he heard a story that would change his life. It was a tale of a gambler who had made a bet with a stranger. The gambler said his frog could out-jump the stranger's frog. The stranger had no frog; while the gambler went to find a frog for him, the stranger filled the gambler's frog with gunpowder.

You'll have to read the story to find out what happens! Mark wrote down his own version of the simple story, adding comic touches. Then he sent it to an editor in New York City. New York was the nation's literary capital—the big league. "Make your mark in New York," Mark wrote, "and you are a made man." Before year's end, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" appeared in the New York Saturday Press. One critic said the story was the finest piece of humor ever written in the United States. The "Jumping Frog" was picked up by papers across the country. Within two years, the story became part of Mark Twain's first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. Mark's success landed him a plum assignment: traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento Union. At that time, Hawaii was not part of the United States. It was called the Sandwich Islands, and it was ruled by kings and queens. Mark told his readers about the islands' sugarcane plantations, native peoples, and bubbling crater of the volcano Kilauea.

When Mark returned to San Francisco, some friends suggested that his experiences on the trip would be perfect for the lecture circuit. In those days, before radio, television, and movies, people attended lectures to be informed and entertained. A lecturer was a one-man (or one-woman) show. Mark was terrified, but there was good money and prestige in lecturing, so he decided to give it a try. He rented a hall and printed posters to advertise the event:

The trouble did begin at eight, when Mark found himself "quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away. The house was full, aisles and all!" After two minutes on the platform, Mark's stage fright melted. He began speaking in his Southern drawl, pausing at just the right points in his stories to make the crowd laugh. All the while, he acted as if nothing he said was funny.