Jim Smiley follows us around Jackass Hill like a slippery bandito about to pickpocket a gold prospector.
I can’t shake the feeling that Smiley and his California red-legged long jumper Dan’l Webster lurk among the canyon live oak and ponderosa pines, ready for another rip-roaring Gold Country escapade.
Call me a crackpot with an outsized imagination. But I swear on the New York tombstone of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, this is the feeling I get as soft sunlight glances off a facsimile of a one-room miner’s cabin.
We’ve reached the intersection of Fact and Fiction on the well-trodden path of Mark Twain’s California.
I’ve been on the hunt for the past five years. But only now has it evolved into a serious pursuit to understand what the Golden State meant to a writer mainly associated with Hannibal, Missouri, and the Mighty Mississippi.
From 1861 to 1866, Twain rambled around Lake Tahoe, San Francisco and ever-so-briefly, this Sierra foothills hideaway, all the while collecting a mother lode of literary nuggets for his timeless observations.
Twain spent 88 days on Jackass Hill in the winter of 1864-65 with three pocket miners and a cat named Tom Quartz. According to Twain, ringleader Jim Gillis regaled the household with campfire stories in a colloquial tongue spoken by the hardscrabble miners.
The homespun tales were scattered in Twain’s work throughout a long career as America’s great humorist and storyteller. “Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn,” which first appeared in 1880 in “A Tramp Abroad,” came from Gilles, biographers report.
Twain’s first published story emanated out of the Gold Rush town of Angels Camp, a short distance from Jackass Hill across the Stanislaus River. According to biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain and Gillis heard the frog story at the bar in the Angels Hotel. There’s a mural of Twain on the southern facade, but the building serves as a financial office now.
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, which featured Smiley and Dan’l Webster, became the parable that catapulted Twain to literary fame. It also has pumped dollars into the needy veins of Angels Camp, a touristy town along the rolling Gold Chain Highway 49.
Angels Camp has grabbed onto Twain like a lifeline, despite a short stay in the area that included visits to mining encampments in Murphys and Vallecito, as well. Personable papier-mache frogs that cost $2,500 each, according to an Angels Camp Museum historian, are fixtures along a 3-mile stretch of the slow-moving town.
Main Street is lined with brass plaques of the winners of the Jumping Frog Jubilee held in May nearly every year since 1928 at the Calaveras County Fairgrounds (AKA Frogtown). The exceptions: 1933 during the Great Depression and this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The winners are memorialized on the “Hop of Fame,” starting with an ode to the origin story — Smiley has a plaque in front of the former Angels Hotel.
Without Twain’s little tale, the Calaveras County fair might not have attracted worldwide attention, as well as an episode in the new Netflix series, “We Are the Champions,” which showcases odd competitions, from cheese rolling to fantasy hairstyling. And frog jumping.
Without Twain, “it would be just like Modoc,” Laurie Giannini, the fairground’s chief executive officer, said of the remote county tucked in the state’s northeastern corner.
Frog jockeys — yes, that is what competitors call themselves — coax bullfrogs to perform Bob Beamon-like feats at the county fair. Alas, Dan’l Webster would not be eligible, because California red-legged frogs are a protected species.
Angels Camp natives Jon and Laura Kitchell are part of the fabric that has kept Twain’s story steaming by competing in the Jubilee for four decades. The town’s Mark Twain Elementary graduates do not recite “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Instead, they offer morsels of the writer’s exploits, like almost all the townsfolk we meet.
Quite often, these anecdotes don’t have a frog’s leg to stand on. They veer from established research. Who cares? In the famed author’s inimitable style, embellishment is the mother’s milk of storytelling.
Twain would embrace the Kitchells, town celebrities who have piled up frog-jumping trophies; two titles each for Laura and son Riley Kitchell and another for Riley’s wife, Morgan.
Jon Kitchell, however, has a 38-year winless streak — and counting. Twain, methinks, would have turned the good-natured man’s misfortune into a rustic fable. It has not stopped Kitchell, 59, from immersing himself in the town’s history.
“It all goes back to Mark Twain,” he says on a recent day in Utica Park, near a white-painted aluminum statue of the author.
It goes back to Jackass Hill and Jim Gillis. Twain arrived here on Dec. 4, 1864, to dodge San Francisco authorities.
We hear the story from Barbara Thienes, whose husband was the great-grandson of Steve Gillis, Jim Gillis’ brother. Thienes, 81, is one of three Gillis family descendants still living on the Hill above New Melones Lake.
Twain and Steve Gillis worked at the Territorial Express in Virginia City. As the story goes, they fled the Nevada hinterlands for San Francisco in 1863 because one of Twain’s scathing satires led to a duel.
A year later, trouble found Steve in a San Francisco bar brawl that landed him in jail. Twain posted bail for his roommate, Thienes tells us.
She pauses at the doorway of the home she shares with an affable Westie, three cats and nine peacocks. Thienes wants us to know the story she is sharing has been passed down the family line like heirlooms.
Twain did not have the money to pay off the bond when Steve Gillis skipped town. At this point, Thienes’ retelling of how Twain landed in the once-thriving mining camp on Jackass Hill pivots from scholarly work. According to biographical sketches, Steve Gillis returned to Virginia City, not Tuolumne County as Thienes suggests. Instead, Jim Gillis brought Twain to the foothills. Steve Gillis would settle with Jim on the Hill later, according to historical records.
The original one-room cabin where Twain stayed used to rest on Thienes’ parcel. She said family members moved it to its current spot, where sightseers take pilgrimages up the rutted one-lane road seeking Twain’s mysticism.
The roadside attraction is not a replica. The cabin has been reimagined for tourists.
Thienes, who has lived alone on the eight-acre property since her husband died in 2009, leads us to her neighbor’s home to visit hidden cabins where the Gilles clan once lived.
Twain described the area as a verdant hillside populated by five other cabins. He recounted how during the height of the Gold Rush, it had been a flourishing city. “When the mines gave out,” Twain wrote, “the town fell into decay and in a few years, wholly disappeared — streets, dwellings, shops, everything — and left no sign.”
Living in an eroding miners’ camp is not where this Western adventure began.
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A writer once called Virginia City “San Francisco’s ‘mining suburb.’ ”
I visited the dusty town last year, only to find a Disneyesque C Street of curio shops and costumed actors playing the role of Comstock Lode ruffians. The office of the Territorial Express captured my interest as Nevada’s first newspaper, which heralded the start of Twain’s abbreviated journalism career.
Clemens took the pseudonym Mark Twain, a nautical term from his riverboat piloting days, while writing biting commentary as Nevada debated statehood.
Twain had followed his brother Orion to Nevada from Missouri in 1861 just as the Civil War started. The proximity to the majestic Eastern Sierra and Lake Tahoe led to mountain excursions that would influence his writing.
We must turn to “Roughing It” as our guide, knowing full well that this nonfiction rambling is overcooked with, shall we say, literary license.
The lake’s transcendent beauty moved Twain to write, “As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”
I tramped up the Flume Trail from the Tunnel Creek Cafe to find where Nevada State Parks built a bench with an interpretative panel to commemorate the approximate spot Twain first saw the lake. Peering past the pine-covered mountains and into the sun-sparkled water leaves little doubt how the vista moved the author.
Twain also visited the otherworldly Mono Lake east of Yosemite. In “Roughing It,” he wrote: “This solemn, silent, sailless sea — this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth — is little graced with the picturesque.”
But boy, did Twain embrace city life: “After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me,” he wrote.
Twain loved the ribald port, cavorting with Barbary Coast denizens, including a barkeep by the name of Tom Sawyer.
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Swear to Aunt Polly, this is the truth. Turns out, America’s best-known rapscallion is named after a larger-than-life San Franciscan. Leave it to Twain’s wicked humor to borrow his friend’s name and weave it into a literary goldmine.
Sawyer served the once-popular Pisco Punch at the Bank Exchange Saloon, a literary watering hole where the Transamerica Pyramid now rises 48 glorious stories into the city skyline. A bronze plaque in the lobby says the old Montgomery Block had been headquarters for the artistic and legal community.
According to the Smithsonian Magazine, Sawyer told stories of his travels while soaking in the Turkish baths with Twain at the plush Occidental Hotel, now a bank building at Montgomery and Bush streets.
Sawyer was the city’s customs inspector and also served in San Francisco’s first volunteer fire company, according to the Smithsonian Magazine.
It seems stories are all I can find when tracing Twain’s footsteps in San Francisco, a place that helped frame prose that is as American as a drive-in burger joint. He lived in the city on and off for three years, working as a frustrated journalist and meeting future fictional characters.
Joshua Abraham Norton, the self-appointed Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, is one such San Francisco eccentric to find his way into Twain’s work. The con artist king in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is based on Norton, according to Twain scholars.
Twain’s haunts mostly were confined to a seven-block radius from Montgomery near Union Square to the Jackson Historical District.
In the lobby of the Hunter-Dulin Building on the corner of Montgomery and Sutter streets is a small tribute to the Lick House, a luxury hotel destroyed in the fire after the 1906 earthquake. Twain stayed here upon arriving in the city.
The building later became the fictional office for Sam Spade’s detective agency in “The Maltese Falcon.” Twain’s residency goes unmentioned in the historical display in a hallway.
Twain’s newspaper offices near the Pyramid have met the same fate. The Daily Morning Call at 617 Commercial St. neighbored the first U.S. Mint branch, now the Pacific Heritage Museum. The mint has a historical signpost. The Call and Twain do not. Same with the Genella Building, where the literary journal, the Golden Era, once was located.
The University of California, Berkeley opened two years after Twain left the Bay Area for good. The school’s Bancroft Library houses the Mark Twain Papers, an important repository of the author’s notebooks, letters and other documents. It’s doubtful the humorist set foot on the campus.
So where are the San Francisco breadcrumbs to help guide us on this journey through the past?
I walk around the Transamerica monolith to encounter a deserted alleyway. The street sign says “Mark Twain.”
The little plaza is empty, other than a small art gallery and Alex Gourmet Burrito. At the end of Mark Twain Plaza is a fence with a plaque for Transamerica Redwood Park, an open space for tenants of the building. The park has a pond that includes a handful of amphibians in mid-flight. The apparition of Smiley and Dan’l Webster return just as this expedition comes to an end.
Best to let leaping frogs lie.
