Roughing It

"The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton," Twain writes, "a living, breathing allegory of Want," and from that sentence on the whole American West belongs to him. A young Missourian rides a stagecoach across the plains with his brother, bound for the Nevada silver country and certain of getting rich. What follows is the greatest comic account of failure ever written: a claim on a blind lead that makes him a millionaire for ten days, a campfire at Lake Tahoe that sets the mountainside ablaze, a stint as a Virginia City reporter who found facts confining. The Pony Express rider flashes past and is gone in a puff of dust, and a miner sets out to tell the story of his grandfather's old ram and never gets there. Under the tall tales runs something tender, a young man discovering that the frontier's riches were mostly rumour and that the rumour was his gold. This is the book where a broke prospector turns into Mark Twain, and finds the West was worth more told than dug.