Mark Twain Sets Tahoe on Fire

In the summer of eighteen sixty-one, a young man named Samuel Clemens came to Lake Tahoe. He was nominally serving as his brother's private secretary in Nevada Territory. He was also, like everyone else who arrived in that era, looking for something to do that might make him money. He and a companion camped on the north shore and staked an unauthorized timber claim, cutting trees they did not own on land they had no right to.

One evening they let their campfire get away from them.

In Roughing It, the book Clemens published in eighteen seventy-two under the name Mark Twain, he describes what happened next. The fire took the trees, the camp, the whole shoreline. He and his companion watched from a rowboat. The way he tells it, the fire was magnificent. He uses that word. The destruction was enormous and beautiful and entirely his fault, and he watched it with something between genuine guilt and genuine awe.

This is the same chapter, the same chapter, where he calls Lake Tahoe the fairest picture the whole earth affords. He wrote both of those things about the same day. The beauty and the burning were simultaneous.

He was two years away from adopting the name Mark Twain. The timber harvest that would strip the entire Tahoe basin was one year away from starting in earnest. Clemens got a preview of what the Sierra Nevada's forests were about to go through. He watched it happen. He wrote about how beautiful it was. Then he left.