Explanatory Notes
Apparatus Notes
MTPDocEd
[begin page 262]
[three versions of the “jumping frog”]
§ 118. Angel's Camp Constable
1 September–16 October 1865

(This headnote is repeated in numbers 117–119.)

In 1896 Clemens' close friend Joseph Hopkins Twichell said that the “celebrated ‘Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ . . . was a story (it had some basis of fact) with which [Clemens] had long been wont on occasion to entertain private circles. When at some one's urgency he at length wrote it out, it appeared to him so poor and flat that he pigeonholed it in contempt, and it required further urgency to persuade him to let it be printed.”1 This statement is almost certainly based on a conversation with Clemens, and as a capsule history of the jumping frog story it seems about right, for it is corroborated by other collateral accounts and by the three sketches grouped together here. “The Only Reliable Account” (no. 117) and “Angel's Camp Constable” (no. 118) are taken from two of the author's holographs preserved by his sister, Pamela, and now in the Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers at Vassar. They have not been published before. The third is taken from the New York Saturday Press of [begin page 263] 18 November 1865, where Clemens first published his most famous tale. The evidence of the manuscripts—paper, ink color, style of handwriting, and content—is that Clemens wrote both late in 1865, probably soon before he wrote “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” Both manuscripts were abandoned: they are complete, but obviously unfinished, since their last pages remain only partly filled. We conjecture that they were among the “poor and flat” versions that Clemens reportedly pigeonholed in contempt, and that they were written in September or during the first two weeks of October 1865. And we further conjecture that “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (no. 119) was composed rapidly, between October 16 and 18, although it was not published in New York until a month later.

Clemens had left San Francisco in early December 1864 to visit Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker at Jackass Hill, California. The purpose of this retreat from the pressures of the city to the calm of backwoods mining towns is not certainly known, but Clemens appears to have been in a somber mood. While at Jackass Hill and nearby Angel's Camp he and his companions were confined indoors by the continuous winter rain, and so they listened to the miners and residents tell a variety of anecdotes from the local collection of folklore. Clemens recorded a number of stories in his notebooks. “New Years night—dream of Jim Townsend—'I could take this x x x book & x x x every x x x in California, from San Francisco to the mountains,'” he wrote. On about January 25 he added, “Met Ben Coon, Ill river pilot here.” And then on about February 6 he wrote, “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C's frog full of shot & he couldn't jump—the stranger's frog won.”2

Writing to Jim Gillis five years later, Clemens said in part:

You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal so-journ in the rain & mud of Angel's Camp—I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove & heard that chap tell about the frog & how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn & laughed over it, out there on the hillside while you & dear old Stoker panned & washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, & would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up.3

And in 1894 Clemens again recalled the occasion, this time in somewhat greater detail:

I heard the story told by a man who was not telling it to his hearers as a thing new to them, but as a thing which they had witnessed and would [begin page 264] remember. He was a dull person, and ignorant; he had no gift as a story-teller, and no invention; in his mouth this episode was merely history —history and statistics; and the gravest sort of history, too; he was entirely serious, for he was dealing with what to him were austere facts, and they interested him solely because they were facts; he was drawing on his memory, not his mind; he saw no humor in his tale, neither did his listeners; neither he nor they ever smiled or laughed; in my time I have not attended a more solemn conference. To him and to his fellow gold-miners there were just two things in the story that were worth considering. One was, the smartness of the stranger in taking in its hero, Jim Smiley, with a loaded frog; and the other was the stranger's deep knowledge of a frog's nature—for he knew (as the narrator asserted and the listeners conceded) that a frog likes shot and is always ready to eat it. Those men discussed those two points, and those only. They were hearty in their admiration of them, and none of the party was aware that a first rate story had been told, in a first rate way, and that it was brimful of a quality whose presence they never suspected—humor.4

Clemens did not here specify who the “chap” was who told this story. But the anecdote itself had been current in oral and written folklore for years, and one version, probably written by James W. E. Townsend (the same Townsend whose dream Clemens recorded on New Year's night), had appeared in the Sonora Herald in 1853.5

On 26 February 1865 Clemens returned from his three-and-one-half-month stay in the mining camps. “Home again,” he recorded in his notebook for that day, “home again at the Occidental Hotel, San Francisco—find letters from ‘Artemus Ward’ asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory travels which is soon to come out. Too late—ought to have got the letters 3 months ago. They are dated early in November.”6 Presumably Clemens wrote as much to Ward on or about March 1, also mentioning some of his recent experiences in Angel's [begin page 265] Camp—perhaps including the jumping frog story. In a letter (now lost) that could not have reached Clemens before the first of May, Ward apparently said, “Write it. . . . There is still time to get it into my volume of sketches. Send it to Carleton, my publisher in New York.” Albert Bigelow Paine, who recorded this phrase as Clemens remembered it, said that the author “promised to do this, but delayed fulfillment somewhat.”7

Indeed, it seems likely that Clemens did delay for several months. On March 18, however, he published his first experiment with the narrator Coon—almost certainly based on the Illinois river pilot he had met, Ben Coon—in “An Unbiased Criticism” (no. 100). On June 17 he introduced the narrator Simon Wheeler, who was clearly derived from Coon, and to whom Clemens now attributed “He Done His Level Best” (“Answers to Correspondents,” no. 107). For most of June he was kept busy writing a weekly column of answers to correspondents for Bret Harte's Californian, but it must have been about this time that he was accustomed “to entertain private circles” with the frog story. Bret Harte recalled hearing it shortly after Clemens returned from “the mining districts.”

In the course of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond anything in his previous experience. He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and “swop lies.” He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. . . . The story was “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.”8

While in London in March 1897, Clemens gave the following further account of the story's genesis to James Ross Clemens:

The idea of writing the Jumping Frog Story only very slowly took shape in my mind . . . and was discarded time and time again as being too far-fetched. In fact I had actually written out a delightful story which James Townsend, the prototype of Harte's “Truthful James,” had told one day in Lundie Diggings about a tame fox who used to sweep his master's cabin and dust off the furniture with his unusually bushy tail—but for some reason or other I simply couldn't get the thing just to my liking. [begin page 266] Each time I rewrote it, it seemed less humorous than when originally told by the inimitable Townsend.

Then one dismal afternoon as I lay on my hotel bed, completely nonplussed and about determined to inform Artemus that I had nothing appropriate for his collection, a still small voice began to make itself heard.

“Try me! Try me! Oh, please try me! Please do!”

It was the poor little jumping frog, “Henry Clay,” that old Ben Coon had described! Because of the insistence of its pleading and for want of a better subject, I immediately got up and wrote out the tale for my friend who had followed up his first letter with several more requests. But if it hadn't been for the little fellow's apparition in this strange fashion, I never would have written about him—at least not at that time.9

It seems unlikely that Clemens' frog “Daniel Webster” was ever called “Henry Clay,” but the confusion of orators (if not of politics) is understandable and may be due to James Ross Clemens' faulty memory. The other facts ring true: the suggestion that Jim Townsend's story about a domestic fox preceded the frog story as the subject of Wheeler's monologue, the indication that the final story “only very slowly took shape,” the attribution of the original narration to Ben Coon, and the statement that Artemus Ward had written “several more” letters urging Clemens to send a contribution. Twichell had said in 1896, less than a year earlier, that Clemens first pigeonholed his manuscript and returned to it only after “further urgency” had been applied. These later letters from Ward could hardly have reached Clemens much before the beginning of September 1865.

The two manuscripts published here, as well as the earlier experiments with Ben Coon and Simon Wheeler published in the Californian, suggest that Clemens saw the humorous possibilities of his narrator more clearly than he saw how to bring that narrator and his frog story into conjunction. At least two closely related problems seem to have been troubling him: precisely what stance to adopt toward his vernacular narrator (how much or how little condescension), and how to simulate the effect he could achieve so easily in oral narration when, as Harte remarked, he “half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator.” In “The Only Reliable Account” Clemens addressed Ar- [begin page 267] temus Ward much as he would in the third version, offering him the sketch for “the history of your travels,” and characterizing Wheeler as a “venerable rural historian” living in “unostentatious privacy,” from whom he had obtained a “just and true account” of the jumping frog. But Clemens then spent almost as many words as the finished tale would require simply sketching the “decaying city of Boomerang.” He never got around to letting Wheeler speak at all, much less tell the frog story.

“Angel's Camp Constable,” on the other hand, seems to be an effort to correct this tendency to overemphasize the frame story. It begins: “I was told that if I would mention any of the venerable Simon Wheeler's pet heroes casually, he would be sure to tell me all about them, but that I must not laugh during the recital, as he would think I was making fun of them, and it would give him mortal offense.” After this we are plunged almost immediately into Wheeler's monologue. The introductory sentences suggest, however, that Constable Bilgewater—a name Clemens had also recorded in his notebook at Angel's Camp10—was only the first of Wheeler's “pet heroes” to be treated in the story. These sentences also warn us rather too directly that his “recital” is supposed to be humorous, and they cast the author as clearly condescending toward “the old gentleman [who] oozed gratified vanity at every pore.” Like the first version, however, this one never gets around to telling the story of the jumping frog: the manuscript is another false start, and Clemens did not mention his grandiose constable again until sometime in August 1878.11

These technical difficulties were tied up with Clemens' conception of himself, particularly his doubts about pursuing the “low” calling of a humorist. Partly because of when they were written, and partly because Simon Wheeler's monologues are a kind of literary free association, we find a number of circumstances in these stories that mirror the conflict between ambition and self-doubt that Clemens appears to have experienced. In the lingering description of the backwater community of Boomerang, for instance, Clemens conveys something of the nostalgia he would feel for the Quarles Farm. But the nostalgia is complicated here by the fact that Boomerang sits unwittingly on immense mineral [begin page 268] wealth—wealth that has been quietly bought up by a “New York company” from the residents, who fail to recognize the value of what they own. Passive retirement is no solution. On the other hand, Constable Bilgewater has foolishly resigned his post in Angel's Camp because “they'd heard of him in New York, I reckon, and I s'pose they wanted him there, and so he went. And he was right. There warn't business enough here for a man of his talents, though what there was he made the most of.” Bilgewater's view of his own vocation, like Simon Wheeler's respect for him, are comic precisely because both are so contrary to the facts. But even here it is not quite clear how Mark Twain judges Bilgewater, “who attained to considerable eminence, and whom I have frequently heard of in various parts of the world.”

Clemens, too, had begun to be heard of in New York. His Californian sketches were being reprinted there, as Webb had noted in January and February 1865. And probably on October 17, the day before he finished the manuscript of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” Clemens saw an article in the New York Round Table that placed him among the “foremost” of the “merry gentlemen of the California press.” On October 19 he confided to Orion that he would now pursue his fame as a humorist, “unworthy & evanescent though it must of necessity be,” despite the fact that his talent had been deprived of the “steam of education.” He explained that it was “only now, when editors of standard literary papers in the distant east give me high praise . . . that I really begin to believe there must be something in it.”12 Clemens' self-doubts, particularly about his education, also appear in the third, published version of the tale. As Henry Nash Smith pointed out in 1962, the “elegiac theme of mute inglorious Miltons” applies to all of Simon Wheeler's “pet [begin page 269] heroes,” including Daniel Webster: “Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most anything—and I believe him.”13 Both the fear of being forgotten and unjustly obscure, like Boomerang, and the fear of being ridiculed for his presumption, like Bilgewater, appear indirectly in the basic fantasies of these three stories. “I wonder what they think of him in New York,” says Wheeler about his hero. It is a comic question precisely because of its childlike assumption that fame cannot have failed to attend Bilgewater “in New York.”

An abundance of evidence suggested in 1967 that Clemens wrote the third version of his sketch in the week of 16 to 23 October 1865.14 It now seems likely, although not certain, that Clemens actually composed it between 16 and 18 October, presumably having reached the point of near despair he described for James Ross Clemens. He probably did not send his manuscript to New York by overland mail, which took about one month and remained an uncertain means at best. Because he doubtless knew Ward's book was nearing publication, and because transit time by Pacific Mail Steamship could be as brief as twenty-one days between San Francisco and New York,15 it seems likely that Clemens chose this method instead. The only steamer to leave San Francisco in the week of 16 to 23 October was the Golden City, which departed at 11:20 a.m. “with 72 packages United States mails” on October 18; its cargo was transferred by rail across the Isthmus of Panama to the Ocean Queen, which arrived in New York on November 10. (The next steamer to leave San Francisco was the Colorado on October 30, and its cargo did not arrive in New York until December 4.)16 If Clemens did as we suppose, then one week must have elapsed between the arrival of the mails in New York on November 10 and publication in the Saturday Press on [begin page 270] November 18. On November 11 George W. Carleton advertised Artemus Ward: His Travels as ready “this morning” in the New York Tribune, although the book was probably published even earlier than that (piracies appeared in England by November 18 at the latest). In any case, Carleton would have been unable to include Clemens' sketch in Ward's book and could easily have turned the manuscript over to the editor of the Press, Henry Clapp, saying, as Clemens recalled in 1897, “Here, Clapp, here's something you can use!”17 Clemens himself noted in January 1866 that his sketch was “a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, & then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.” And one year later he said, while preparing the sketch for his Jumping Frog book, that it was “originally written, by request, for Artemus Ward's last book, but arrived in New York after that work had gone to press.”18

In mid-September the Californian had noted a general revival in periodical literature in the East, following the end of the war. It particularly mentioned “the smart Saturday Press,”

whilom a “brief abstract and chronicle” of “Pfaff's,” snappy with absinthian wit, and dying of its own Bohemian excesses and dissipations, [which] has been revived under apparently more moral auspices, and in respectable quarto form. Let us hope that this corruption has put on incorruption. Artemus Ward is a contributor to its first number in a not over-bright theatrical criticism.19

This may explain why Clemens thought, as he said years later, that the Press was close to collapse. Certainly its editor was quite genuinely happy to publish “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and to promise—accurately, but on what authority is not known—future contributions from the same pen.

We give up the principal portion of our editorial space, to-day, to an exquisitely humorous sketch—“Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog”—by Mark Twain, who will shortly become a regular contributor to our columns. Mark Twain is the assumed name of a writer in California who has long been a favorite contributor to the San Francisco press, from [begin page 271] which his articles have been so extensively copied as to make him nearly as well known as Artemus Ward.20

Within three weeks of publication the sketch had, like its less distinguished predecessors, been widely reprinted. The New York correspondent of the San Francisco Alta California, Richard Ogden (“Podgers”), wrote on December 10 to say that it had “set all New York in a roar. . . . I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. It is voted the best thing of the day.” He added a question that may have touched Bret Harte on a tender place: “Cannot the Californian afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the California press.”21 Even before this report arrived, however, Bret Harte had acknowledged the value of Clemens' latest work by reprinting it, on December 16, in the Californian—incorporating a few changes that Clemens himself may have authorized. But the full nature and extent of the eastern storm of praise did not reach California until Podgers' letter was published on 10 January 1866. Three days later Charles Henry Webb said in his column “Inigoings” in the Californian: “I should have expressed my pleasure at the hit which ‘Podgers’ says Mark Twain has made at the East in ‘Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog.’ But he deserves it all. For he's a good fellow, and his sketch ‘is good’ . . . better than any of their funny fellows can do.”22

Clemens' own reaction to this success was mixed. The day after Podgers' remarks were published he told the local reporter of the San Francisco Examiner about an old ambition, recently revived. The Examiner said, in part, “That rare humorist, ‘Mark Twain,’ whose fame is rapidly extending all over the country, informs us that he has commenced the work of writing a book.”23 To his family on January 20 he confided that [begin page 272] he was actually thinking of three books, and he enclosed a clipping of Podgers' comments in the Alta, adding a note of self-deprecation: “To think that after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!—‘Jim Smiley & His Jumping Frog.’ ” This low opinion of his sketch would soon change. In June 1866 he proudly reported the approval of Anson Burlingame and his son; in April 1867 he said that James Russell Lowell had pronounced “the Jumping Frog . . . the finest piece of humorous writing ever produced in America”; and in December 1869 he endorsed this view in a letter to Olivia Langdon, saying he thought it “the best humorous sketch America has produced, yet.”24 In 1867 Clemens gave the sketch pride of place in the Jumping Frog book, but even though he continued to reprint it, he seemed to convey his low opinion of it by planning to use it in the various cheap pamphlets that so obsessed him from 1870 until 1874. The original version is reprinted here. It was revised by both Clemens and his editor, Webb, for the 1867 Jumping Frog book, and revised again in 1872 and 1874.25 But whatever the author's later opinion of it, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was an impeccably shaped yarn that took extraordinary delight in someone's saying humorous things without being aware of it.26 And it both expressed and to some extent resolved the personal dilemma Clemens was feeling about his calling as a humorist.

Editorial Notes
1 

“Mark Twain,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 92 (May 1896): 818.

2 

N&J1 , pp. 69, 75, 80. The reference to Townsend is explained below.

3 

Clemens to James N. Gillis, 26 January 1870, CL1 , letter 154.

4 

“Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” (no. 365), first published in the North American Review 158 (April 1894): 446–453. Clemens corrected this version when he reprinted the story in the “authorized Uniform Edition” of How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1899). That correction is adopted here.

5 

Oscar Lewis, The Origin of the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1931); N&J1 , p. 69. Clemens' use of the words “Only Reliable Account” and “Celebrated” in his title indicates that he claimed no originality for the story itself, even though it was doubtless he who created Smiley's many “pet heroes.” As late as September 1867, however, critics in California were carping at his assimilation of folklore. The San Francisco Times said on September 6: “We must confess to experiencing some doubt as to his originality when we are told that his famous story ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras,’ was really written by Sam Seabough, now of the Sacramento Union, and by ‘Mark’ appropriated for his own” (“Not Exactly the Correct Thing,” quoted in “A Literary Piracy,” Californian 7 [7 September 1867]: 8).

6 

N&J1 , p. 82.

7 

MTB , 1:277. The quotation from Artemus Ward was not from a letter, but “in accordance with Mr. Clemens's recollection of the matter.” Since Paine knew that Ward was not on the Pacific Coast at this time it seemed likely “that the telling of the frog story and his approval of it were accomplished by exchange of letters.”

8 

Twichell, “Mark Twain,” p. 818; T. Edgar Pemberton, The Life of Bret Harte (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903), p. 74. See also “ ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras’ by Mark Twain with an Introductory and Explanatory Note by J. G. H.,” Overland Monthly 40 (September 1902): 287–288.

9 

Quoted in YSC , pp. 216–217. Cyril Clemens introduced the document in the following words: “Back in the bustling city again, at the Occidental Hotel, he found among a batch of mail a letter from Artemus Ward begging a contribution for a new anthology of humor. At first he did not know what to send, and he gave the author's father, James Ross Clemens, a very interesting account (now for the first time published) of how he solved the problem.” The nature of this account is not known, but it was probably a transcription of a conversation, not a holograph by the author.

10 

About January 30, just a few days before hearing the frog story, he wrote: “W Bilgewater, says she, Good God what a name” ( N&J1 , p. 76). For a list of other occurrences of the name in Clemens' work, see the explanatory note on it for “Answers to Correspondents” (no. 109).

11 

In his notebook for that time he wrote: “The Angel's Camp constable who always saw everything largely. Two men walking tandem was a procession; &2 3 men fighting was a riot; 5 &a riot; 15 an insurrection, & &25 15 a revolution” ( N&J2 , p. 136). It is not known whether Clemens in fact wrote anything further about the constable.

12 

“American Humor and Humorists,” New York Round Table, 9 September 1865, p. 2; Clemens to Orion and Mollie Clemens, 19–20 October 1865, CL1 , letter 95. Clemens wrote Orion the day after this extract from the Round Table had appeared in “Recognized,” San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 18 October 1865, p. 3. Since Clemens was contributing to the Chronicle on a casual basis (see the headnote to “Enthusiastic Eloquence,” no. 111) and had just joined the paper's staff on a slightly more formal basis ( CL1 , letter 95), it seems likely that he saw the Round Table article before the Chronicle quoted from it. He certainly saw it before the Californian quoted from it on Saturday, October 23 (p. 5). It should be noted that Bret Harte was well aware of the significance of such recognition and what it implied about the local audience. On 11 November 1865 he criticized California's taste and said in part: “A California humorist, whose crude, but original sketches have been a feature of our local press, is handsomely recognised by a critical Eastern authority, and the criticism read here by a class who never before heard of the humorist” (“Home Culture,” Californian 3 [11 November 1865]: 8).

13 

MTDW , p. 11.

14 

Edgar M. Branch, “ ‘My Voice Is Still for Setchell’: A Background Study of ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’ ” PMLA 82 (December 1967): 591–601.

15 

The steamship Colorado arrived in San Francisco on October 24, for instance, “bringing the passengers and mails that left New York October 2d, and making the trip in the very quick time of 21 days” (“Arrival of the Steamship ‘Colorado,’ ” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 24 October 1865, p. 3). The Bulletin of November 24, however, could publish New York news only to October 26—a typical time lag for overland mail.

16 

“Arrival of the Steamship ‘Golden City,’ ” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 24 November 1865, p. 3; “Shipping Intelligence . . . Arrived,” New York Tribune, 11 November 1865, p. 7; “Arrival of the Steamship ‘Colorado,’ ” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 4 December 1865, p. 5; “Shipping Intelligence . . . Arrived,” New York Tribune, 5 December 1865, p. 7. Clemens might have made use of other steamers from the opposition lines, but none left within the period during which he completed his sketch.

17 

New York Tribune, 11 November 1865, p. 2; “Literary Items,” New York Tribune, 18 November 1865, p. 9; quoted in YSC , p. 217. Paine gave the line as “Here, Clapp, here's something you can use in your paper” ( MTB , 1:277–278).

18 

Clemens to Jane Clemens and Pamela Moffett, 20 January 1866, CL1 , letter 97; page 23A of the Yale Scrapbook, reproduced in photofacsimile on p. 528 of the textual introduction in volume 1. The latter inscription must have been written in mid-January or February 1867.

19 

“Revival in the Eastern Literary Press,” Californian 3 (16 September 1865): 8.

20 

Saturday Press, 18 November 1865, p. 248. Clemens said in 1906 that “Clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary journal, The Saturday Press” (AD, 21 May 1906, MTE , p. 144). And in an entry made at an unknown time, commenting on his original notebook entry for the frog story, he wrote: “Wrote this story for Artemus—his idiot publisher, Carleton gave it to Clapp's Saturday Press” ( N&J1 , p. 80).

21 

“Letter from New York,” written 10 December 1865, published in the Alta California, 10 January 1866, p. 1.

22 

“Inigoings,” Californian 4 (13 January 1866): 1. For the details of Clemens' possible alteration of the text for the Californian and his subsequent revisions of the text, see the textual commentary.

23 

“ ‘Mark Twain’ Is Writing a Book,” San Francisco Examiner, 12 January 1866, p. 3. Clemens included a reprinting of this item, probably taken from the steamer edition of the Alta California, in his 20 January 1866 letter to this family ( CL1 , letter 97).

24 

Clemens to Jane Clemens and Pamela Moffett, 20 January 1866, CL1 , letter 97; Clemens to Jane Clemens and Pamela Moffett, 21 June 1866, CL1 , letter 105; Clemens to Jane Clemens et al., 19 April 1867, CL1 , letter 125; Clemens to Olivia Langdon, 14 December 1869, CL2 , letter 129.

25 

See the textual introduction in volume 1, pp. 527–535, 557, 613.

26 

For an excellent analysis of the way this tale exemplifies Clemens' theory of humor, see Paul Baender, “The ‘Jumping Frog’ as a Comedian's First Virtue,” Modern Philology 60 (February 1963): 192–200.

Textual Commentary

The manuscript of this sketch, probably written in September or early October 1865 but never published, survives in the Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar. It is copy-text. The piece is written in brown or black ink on five leaves numbered consecutively by Mark Twain. All five leaves are cream-colored wove paper with thirty-two horizontal rules, measuring 11⅝ by 7” inches, with an embossment of a crown in the upper left corner. The same paper is used in “The Only Reliable Account” (no. 117) and in the fragment reproduced in Appendix C2, volume 2, as well as in “Sarrozay Letter from ‘the Unreliable’ ” (no. 86), written in 1864. Mark Twain wrote the title on the back of the first leaf. There are no textual notes.

[begin page 279]
Angel's Camp Constable

I was told that if I would mention any of the venerable Simon Wheeler's pet heroes casually, he would be sure to tell me all about them, but that I must notalteration in the MS laughalteration in the MS during the recital, as he would think I was making fun of them, and it would give him mortal offense. I was fortifiedalteration in the MS with the names of some of these admired personages.

So, after some little unimportant conversation, I said:

“There was formerlyalteration in the MS a constable here by the name of Bilgewater, who attained to considerable eminence, and whom I have frequently heard of in various parts of the world—did you know him?”

The old gentleman oozed gratified vanity at every pore, but its expression took no more enthusiastic form. Nothing could seduce him from his unsmiling mien or force any enthusiasmemendation into the smoothalteration in the MS monotony of his voice.alteration in the MS

“Yes, I knew that feller,” said he; “I knew him as well as I know my own wife. Him and me was always friends, and very particular friends, too, as I may say. He was constable here for as much as three years, and I think he could have been constable yet, but they'd heard of him in New York, I reckon, and I s'pose they wanted him there, and so he went. And he was right. There warn't business enough here for a man of his talents, though what there was he made the most of. He always liked to have people pay him a good deal of respect, and he liked to have them call things [begin page 280] belonging to his line by big names, and there he was right again—because to be a constable, and the only constable in the deestrict besides, is a position that most any man would be proud of, there'semendation no getting around that. So he made the most of what business there was. He would come down in the morning and knock around here all day long for a week, laying for a riot, or an insurrection—because that was what he called it when fellers would get to fighting—emendationhe never called fights rows, or fracases, or such names. There warn't anything small about him—names nor anything. Well, may be about the end of the week a couple of the boys would get at it, and he'd wade in and break it up—he always broke it up rough. And always when any thing like that happened, he'd swear his boots was new and that he wore 'em out on that occasion.

“Iemendation see him one day with his eye on a nigger and an Irishman that was quarreling, though he didn't appear to be noticingalteration in the MS of 'em. By-and-bye they got at it and Bilgewater sung out angry-like, ‘Hell, here's another riot,’alteration in the MS run out and says, ‘In the name of the constable of this deestrict, I command the peace’emendation—and he give the Irishman a terrible kick with his right foot and the nigger another with his left and then knocked 'em endways with his fist as they fell. That was the end of that business, you know.

“Then Bilgewater looked at his boots and they was ripped open, and he says “Nother pair of boots busted; dang my cats if I ever put down an insurrection but what I've got to lose a pair of boots by it.'emendation And so he took them two fellersalteration in the MS before the Squire and charged them with being engagedalteration in the MS in a riot, and made a speech and showed his boots to the court and got them fined forty dollars apiece.

“Well, when he'd got through with one of them cases, he'd come down to the horse-trough here inalteration in the MS front of the hotel to wash his face, and everybody'd crowd around, and onealteration in the MS would dip out some water for him and another'd hold the towel, and a dozen would ask him what was up. Bilgewater would look sour and seem to be disgusted, and sayalteration in the MS, ‘O damn such a place as this—keeps a man on the go, all the time—and what thanks does he get for it, I'd like to know? Riots—hell, there ain't a day that there ain't a riot. What have I been doing now? What do you s'pose I'vealteration in the MS [begin page 281] been doing but putting down another d—d insurrection? But I reckonalteration in the MS it ain't no work to do that?—Oh, no—certainly not—an insurrection ain't anything to put down—Oh, I'm surprised at myself for thinking so, for a minute—humph! why bless you, it's play—certainly, that's what it is, it's play. Wellalteration in the MS, it may be play for some, but as for me, play or no play, if this rioting is going to go on this way much longer, I'm not going to be constable, that's all.’ But you see, he always talked that way because I s'pose he knowedalteration in the MS he was the quickest and the handiest man about bustingalteration in the MS up a riot that had ever been in the camp. I wonder what they think of him in New York. There's one thing certain—if they see him snatch a riot once they'll conclude pretty quick that he's no slouch.”emendation

Editorial Emendations Angel's Camp Constable
  enthusiasm (I-C)  ●  unthusiasm
  there's (I-C)  ●  there
  fighting— (I-C)  ●  fighting.—
  “I (I-C)  ●  ‸I
  ‘Hell . . . riot,’ . . . ‘In . . . peace’ (I-C)  ●  “Hell . . . riot,” . . . “In . . . peace”
  “Then . . .' ‘Nother . . . it.’ (I-C)  ●  ‸Then . . .” 'Nother . . . it.”
  “Well . . . ‘O . . . all.’ . . . slouch.” (I-C)  ●  ‸Well . . . “O . . . all.” . . . slouch.‸
Alterations in the Manuscript Angel's Camp Constable
 not] interlined with a caret.
 laugh] followed by a canceled comma and canceled ‘while he was’.
 fortified] interlined without a caret above canceled ‘provided’.
 formerly] ‘f’ written over ‘a’.
 the smooth] follows canceled ‘his monotonous’.
 voice.] follows canceled ‘manner of speaking’ and a period left standing.
 noticing] ‘c’ written over ‘n’.
 sung . . . riot,'] interlined with a caret above canceled ‘says’.
 fellers] ‘er’ written over wiped-out ‘ow’.
 engaged] ‘en’ written over wiped-out ‘ou’.
 in] written over wiped-out ‘to’.
 one] written over wiped-out ‘the’.
 say] ‘y’ possibly written over ‘i’.
 do you s'pose I've] interlined with a caret above canceled ‘have I’.
 reckon] interlined without a caret above canceled ‘suppose’.
 Well] follows a canceled dash.
 knowed] interlined without a caret above canceled ‘knew’.
 busting] follows canceled ‘putting’.