This tale was first published in the journal Galaxy, the forerunner of Atlantic Monthly, in 1870.
Mark lived the high life of a social butterfly for a short time, then the silver mine stocks collapsed. This is followed by the San Francisco Earthquake of October 1865. We are treated to some strangely humorous descriptions of the havoc caused.
We get a description of the gold rush population and an anecdote about one missing part of that population, the arrival of a woman. We are also treated to an anecdote about the meeting of a miner and a small child in the streets of San Francisco.
Mark enters California but it compare unfavorably for him to New England. It's okay from a distance but he thinks it monotonous close up.
Mark is tired of the Nevada Territory and decides to go to California. His last look at Mt Davidson reminds him of the day that the Union forces defeat the Confederate forces at Gettysburg. The flag on the top of Mt Davidson seems to signal this event but no one knows because of a journalistic monopoly that dictates all news of the East must first be printed in California papers.
Life on the Mississippi is the ninth book in The Oxford Mark Twain collection but the content brackets his early childhood aspirations with his eventual success as a writer, "...a scribbler of books". This particular "book", a drupal method for organizing content, contains those chapters dealing with Mark's training to be a pilot. The readings are all done by my Second Life avatar SLClemens in sessions conducted at the sim Fate Gardens in May and June of 2011.
