The Fairest Picture

The Fairest Picture. . , The First Glimpse , In September of 1861, 25-year old Samuel L. Clemens and a fellow adventurer, John Kinney, walked from Carson City to Lake Tahoe, then known as Lake Bigler, seeking to stake a timber claim on the north shore of the lake. Clemens would later be known quite famously by his pen name, Mark Twain. As the two men trudged onward, they may have passed this spot, where Clemens was surprised and deeply moved by his first sighting of the lake. Some ten years later, as he was writing his second book, Roughing It, he recalled the moment: ,

"At last the Lake burst upon us a noble sheet of blue water...As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords."

, Timber and Fire , The pair spent the next five days on the North Shore working on their timber claim and enjoying the lake while camped on its sandy beaches. They tried fishing, caught but one trout, and spent a lazy morning on a "balloon voyage," drifting in their boat above the submerged boulder fields nearby. They used brush to build a ramshackle hut in order to satisfy the legal requirements for a land claim before Clemens' inattention to an innocent campfire started a spectacular wildfire that prematurely ended the first of many of his Mark Twain, decades after his trip to Lake Tahoe trips to Lake Tahoe., Becoming Twain , Clemens went on to try his hand at prospecting and mining stock speculation and even worked briefly as a mill laborer. He accepted the job of a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in late September, 1862. By February, 1863, he was using the pseudonym "Mark Twain" as a byline for his articles. Later that spring. Twain exited Virginia City in some haste to avoid prosecution for threatening to engage in an illegal duel with a rival journalist and spent the next two and a half years based in California working as a correspondent, international traveler, author, and lecturer, publishing his first acclaimed work The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. He left the West for a final time in 1866 to continue his career as a now-famous author, lecturer, and humorist.