The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain

An errand, a name, a question. That's all it takes.

Sent east to west on a friend's behalf, a traveler walks into a decayed mining camp in Calaveras County and asks one polite question of one agreeable old man. He is then backed into a corner, blockaded there with a chair, and told at enormous length about Jim Smiley, a gambler who would bet on a horse race, a dog fight, a camp meeting, or two birds on a fence, and who once spent three solid months in his back yard teaching a frog to jump.

The frog's name was Dan'l Webster. He was, by every account, the finest jumper in the county.

Then a stranger came through camp.

Mark Twain published this in the fall of 1865 and woke up famous. Sixty years of American humor start here, on a barroom floor, with forty dollars on the line.

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Missouri in 1835. Printer's devil, riverboat pilot, and, briefly and disastrously, a silver prospector. He went west in 1861 chasing a fortune he never found, and came back with something better, which was a way of hearing how Americans actually talked.

He heard this story in a tavern in Angels Camp in the winter of 1865, wrote it down, and watched it run in a New York paper that November. It was reprinted everywhere, pirated almost as fast, and read aloud in parlors and barrooms coast to coast. He was thirty and unknown that fall. By spring he was Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer was still eleven years away.

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