Roughing It

Note: The contents of Chapter 2 correspond to Chapters 19-41 in print editions of the book.

The travelers are on the 16th day of their journey when Twain comes across some people from the Goshoot tribe (now known as the Goshute, a tribe of Western Shoshone Indigenous people whose homelands are in what is now Utah and Eastern Nevada). He spends a good deal of time enumerating what he perceives to be their limitations. Since they live in a very inhospitable area of Nevada, he concludes by saying, “If we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in God’s name let us at least not throw mud at them” (149).

As the coach travels through an area that Twain calls “the Great American Desert,” now known as the Forty Mile Desert in Nevada, the stage picks up an additional passenger who regales the travelers with an anecdote about the newspaper publisher Horace Greeley journeying over the same route on his way to give a lecture and the overzealous driver who intended to get him there on time. While the story is initially amusing, Twain is subjected to this same yarn from every fellow traveler he encounters in the territory.