Twain's Travels Through Tahoe

Sept. 28, 2010 - PRLog -- A great American writer and 'American Saint' according to Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain to my mind has somehow made his own dents and shaped the American Landscape. It is in any case hard to think of that golden ideal of chiming 'America', without picturing Huckleberry Finn floating down the Mississippi river. Somehow America, as an idea at least, has been coloured by Twain, reborn under his pen strokes.

The relationship between words and the land were clearly something considered by the author, if we take the Lake Tahoe for instance, we can read Twain's criticism of the name he found so repulsive. Complaining of it's dissonant syllables and aural puniness, he was clearly passionately against the name, as if it were some raging slur on  the water. Writing on its perceived unfortunate moniker Twain wrote this the Territorial Enterprise Newspaper in 1862:

“Bigler is the legitimate name of the Lake, and it will be retained until some name less flat, insipid and spooney than "Tahoe" is invented for it. I am sorry, myself, that it was not called in the first place by some cognomen that could be persuaded to rhyme with something, because, you see, every sentimental cuss who goes up there and becomes pregnant with a poem invariably miscarries because of the unfortunate difficulty I have just mentioned. I speak of the matter lightly, but it is not a frivolous one, for all that. A very beautiful thing was once written by a distinguished English poet about our royal river at home, but the loveliness was all mashed out of it by the stress of weather to which he was obliged to succumb in order to gouge a rhyme out of its name. He had called it 'Mississippi'!”

In a sense perhaps Twain was considered with the metre of the land and the namer's inability to do the poetry of the environment justice due to the sloppy selection of names. So this makes me wonder what Twain would make of the recent decision to name a Tahoe cove after him. Would Twain approve of Clemens cove (Samuel Clemens being the author's birth name)? Well that will remain to be seen.

The decision to name an area of the cove after Twain is due to a historical obscurity in which he accidentally started a forest fire in the peripheries of the river. While the location of the exact fire remains highly up to speculation it is known that the writer did inadvertently scorch a good part of the area.

He wrote of the spectacle in his book Roughing It, “While Johnny was carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our "house" for future use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot, ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to get the frying-pan. While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny, and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises!”

This was the humble beginnings of the fire, but Twain of course could not help but note the beauty as it reflected over the water “Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it with the stronger fascination.”

But it turns out that this tail may only be the tip of the iceberg Twain concludes mentioning many subsequent trip to the lake, but none that will be recorded in any history.

Today Tahoe retains a bewildering beauty, maintaining that fascination of large waters, as they reflect the world's distortions and ripples. It is easy to see why it is such a popular destination for tourists and Lake Tahoe vacation rentals are so popular.



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