Mark Twain
intended to stay there but a short time. He says, "I little thought that I
would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or
seven uncommonly long years."
The account of his experiences in our far West is given in the volume
called _Roughing It_ (1871). This book should be read as a chapter in the
early history of that section. The trip from St. Joseph to Nevada by stage,
the outlaws, murders, sagebrush, jackass rabbits, coyotes, mining
camps,--all the varied life of the time--is thrown distinctly on the screen
in the pages of _Roughing It_. While in the West, he caught the mining
fever, but he soon became a newspaper reporter and editor, and in this
capacity he discovered the gold mine of his genius as a writer. The
experience of these years was only second in importance to his remarkable
life in the Mississippi Valley. No other American writer has received such
a variety of training in the university of human nature.
LATER LIFE.--In 1867, he supplemented his purely American training with a
trip to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. The story of his journey is given
in _The Innocents Abroad_ (1869), the work which first made him known in
every part of the United States.
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