I was inspired, while reediting Chapter 32 of Roughing It, wherein Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) believes he and his partners, Ollendorf and Ballou, are going to freeze to death in a winter storm in the Carson desert, to record a version of Jack London's To Build a Fire. This is a tale of a man without the proper respect for nature and as London remarks, without imagination. While hiking toward his mining claim on Henderson Creek he breaks through an ice layer and steps into a spring wetting his legs near to his knees. The temperature is 75 degrees below zero.

One of those great lines from Groucho Marx, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member", appears to have roots in Mark Twain. "I wouldn't have a girl that (I thought) I was worthy of. She wouldn't do. She wouldn't be respectable enough."

I had thought I'd pretty much worked out all the narration I wanted for my Mark Twain tour through the Great Basin province of Nevada, from Utah to Carson City. It just needed a few photographs to break up the hour long Google Earth Tour. But from the few comments Twain made in his chapters on this region as well as the histories of the stations along the way I came to realize how large an effect the so call Paiute War played in what Sam Clemens experienced. The white man, or “American” had arrived and had disrupted the ecosystem, which included the Northern Paiute people.

Back in Chapter 9 Mark Twain's narrative of his journey west had entered into Wyoming, approaching the Rocky Mountains. He then spent two chapters devoted to the notorious Jack Slade, division superintendent and vigilante. He begins chapter 12 by describing a Mormon wagon train he passed en route. He reaches the top of the Rocky Mountains at South Pass and then descends the west side eventually arriving in Salt Lake City. I had intended to display an animated map of this journey, as I did with the previous chapters, But I didn't find a suitable base map to use.

I have started mapping significant Mark Twain locations from his book Roughing It. The first chapter is merely a dismal riverboat ride from St. Louis to St. Joseph Missouri. I made my first attempt at animated mapping in the video for that chapter. But Chapter 2 has Sam traveling the Overland Stagecoach line out of St. Joseph, across Kansas.  He does not mention any stations by name but does say they stop every ten miles or so. My Googling around for information on these stations led to listings of the Pony Express Stations.