Mark has a brief encounter with a Pony Express rider. He discovers alkali water which somehow elevates him above the folks back home, experiencing the unusual. This he equates with site seers in the Alps venturing onto heights where they should not be.
Mark's traveling companion, Bemis, has an amazing escape from a buffalo. Believe it or not.
We hear of how the stagecoach business is run, its hierarchy of personnel and how discipline is maintained. We are also treated to an anecdote from Mark's journey in the Holy Land.
This chapter is remarkable to me as it is the first display of Mark's bigotry against Native Americans. One often hears charges of racism and the use of a particular offensive word when thinking of Mark Twain but little is ever said of his disdain for Indians.
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SLClemens, an avatar in Second Life, has begun a tour of speaking venues on the Second Life grid. He is opening at The Deck, http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Koi%20Cove/38/205/23 March 3 at 1pm PST, or SLT if you wish, reading from Mark Twain's book Roughing It. Sam Clemens left for Nevada, with his brother Orion, in 1861. This book, Roughing It, is an extraordinary look at America just a few years before the railroads connected the American East to the West. He was about 26 years of age and yet to make his mark on the world (I don't know if the pun was intended or not).
