Mark Twain's Frog

In eighteen sixty-four, a young journalist named Samuel Clemens came through Angels Camp while working in the gold fields nearby. He spent time in the saloons. He listened to stories. He was building up a backlog of material that would eventually make him the most famous American writer of the nineteenth century.

In November eighteen sixty-five, writing under the name Mark Twain, he published a short story in the New York Saturday Press under the title 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,' later reprinted and renamed 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.' He claimed to have heard it from a miner named Ben Coon in a saloon in Angels Camp. The story was an instant sensation. It launched his national career.

What the historical record leaves somewhat open is how original the story actually was. A nearly identical tale had appeared in the Sonora Herald in eighteen fifty-three, twelve years before Twain published his version. And the basic plot device, a frog weighted down to lose a jumping contest, may have roots in ancient Greek folklore that neither Twain nor the Sonora Herald had any direct knowledge of. Whether Twain heard the story in Angels Camp, adapted it from something he had read, or simply absorbed it from the general air of Gold Rush California is a question that scholarship has not fully resolved.

What is unresolved does not diminish what is certain: this story, from this place, made Mark Twain's name. The Calaveras Jumping Frog Jubilee has been running here in Angels Camp every year since nineteen twenty-eight. The frog competition is real and serious and draws entrants from across the country. The story behind the story is still, after a hundred and sixty years, a matter of reasonable dispute.