It was Mark Twain’s famous story, “The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County”, that convinced my husband that a trip to California’s
gold country would be a good plan for Spring Break. We decided to head up north for a week, and
our temporary home would be Angel’s Camp, the town where the frog once
lived. The foothills of the Sierras are
beautiful this time of year—everything is green, the trees are regaining their
leaves, and California poppies adorn the hillsides. There are charming mining towns up and down
Highway 49, and we had fun exploring a few of them. People are really friendly when you have a
baby, so we met a lot of nice shopkeepers and restaurant owners.
The town of Murphy’s became our eating out destination. It has some neat shops, and some day I would
love to return to rent a vacation cottage or to stay at the local B & B, an
old Victorian. There are dozens of
wineries in the area, and the town features many tasting rooms.
It was on one of our drives on a windy road that we turned
to check out Mark Twain’s cabin on Jackass Hill. Apparently he spent 5 months living in a
small cabin, while he tried his hand at mining.
They built a replica of the cabin on top of this hill, named for the donkeys
that pack trains kept there. It was here
that Samuel Clemens—Twain’s real name—scrawled down the notes that eventually
became his frog chronicle, the story that made him famous. He had heard the story in the local tavern at
Angel’s Camp.
What was Twain doing as a miner? It turns out that Twain did a variety of
things, in addition to writing fiction like Huckleberry
Finn, a book I remember reading in high school. He was a newspaper writer for a number of
different towns, from Nevada City, to San Francisco, to Buffalo. He started his twenties as a steamboat pilot
along the Mississippi. After the fame of
his jumping frog tale, he was hired as a travel writer for the Sacramento Union.
My heart is a flutter at dreaming of the possibilities that
lie ahead. My day job does not define
me, even though I absolutely love it. I
can still be a Mark Twain or Lawrence of Arabia. May Samuel Clemens inspire you to go out and
turn over that rock—you never know what could be waiting for you to discover.
Credits: The Mark
Twain House and Museum web site, http://www.marktwainhouse.org/
, for more background on Twain’s life & Rick McDonough for the photography.
