Submitted by scott on Mon, 07/15/2013 - 16:08

The final two chapters in Roughing It that concern the stagecoach ride from St. Joseph, Missouri to Carson City, the capitol of the Nevada Territory, are not specific about any of the stations. Chapter 19 is a racist diatribe against the Goshoot Indians, which he extends to all American Indians. Chapter 20 is devoted to a fictional encounter between Horace Greeley and the stagecoach driver Hank Monk. I am inserting this chapter as a means to include a map of the Overland/Pony Express Stations between Fish Springs Station and Carson City Station.  

I have actually gone beyond a mere map of the approximate station locations and produced a Google Earth Tour of the route through the Basin Range Province of Nevada. I've included narration by SLClemens regarding tales from the Pony Express/Overland Mail Company stations as well as some information on the so-called Paiute or Pyramid Lake War. Twain was not particularly sympathetic to the "Goshoots" but I'd like to think that if he'd been aware of the true situation between the white settlers and the Indians his opinion would not have been so harsh. The video runs about 52 minutes. I was unable to finish it with using OpenShot as it frequently crashed. I was able to produce the video with Kdenlive.

I've also included some wonderful banjo music from the Heftone Banjo Orchestra (http://www.heftone.com/orchestra). This music has been made available under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License.

Twain Chapter Comments

The narration on the video reports that Uncle Nick had stopped at the Spring Valley Station for a meal and ended up getting killed by a flint arrow head in his own head. According to an excerpt from "The Pony Express Goes Through" by Howard R. Driggs, printed in the BLM pamphlet "The Pony Express in Nevada", Uncle Nick or Elijah Nichols Wilson recovered but did suffer terrible headaches at different times for the rest of his life.

While preparing the Google Earth tour for the video I noticed that some of the locations initially plotted on the accompanying Google Map (which is different from Google Earth) have changed. I don't know when or even if I will update them.

1 Clemens had probably reached chapter 20 in the Roughing It proofs. In that chapter he repeated the famous anecdote about the hair-raising ride that Hank Monk gave Greeley in the stagecoach between Carson City, Nevada, and Placerville, California. In a footnote at the end of the chapter Clemens reported that the incident “never occurred” (RI 1993, 131–32, 136n, 866).

2 In 1869 Joseph Goodman had delivered to Greeley in New York a request from Monk for a railroad pass east “in memory of their celebrated mountain ride,” only to have Greeley exclaim: “‘Damn him! that fellow has done me more harm than any man in America! . . . there was not a damned word of truth in the whole story!’” (Joseph T. Goodman 1872; RI 1993, 611). Goodman had probably told this story to Clemens when he read chapter 20 in manuscript (18 Apr 71 to OC, n. 2; RI 1993, 866).

3 No reply from Greeley is known to survive.

SLC to Horace Greeley, 17 Aug 1871, Hartford, Conn. (UCCL 00645), n. 1. <>