The Fairest Picture

In September 1861, twenty-five-year-old Samuel L. Clemens and John Kinney walked from Carson City to Lake Tahoe, then known as Lake Bigler, to stake a timber claim on the lake's north shore. Clemens, later famous as Mark Twain, was surprised and deeply moved by his first sight of the lake and later recalled it in Roughing It as "the fairest picture the whole earth affords." The two men spent the next five days on the North Shore working on their claim and enjoying the lake from sandy beaches, trying to fish, drifting by boat above submerged boulder fields, and building a ramshackle brush hut to meet legal requirements for a land claim. Clemens then accidentally started a spectacular wildfire with an innocent campfire, abruptly ending the first of his many trips to Lake Tahoe. He later tried prospecting, mining stock speculation, and mill labor, then became a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in late September 1862. By February 1863 he was using the pseudonym Mark Twain, and after leaving Virginia City the following spring to avoid prosecution over a threatened illegal duel with a rival journalist, he spent the next two and a half years based in California as a correspondent, traveler, author, and lecturer before leaving the West in 1866 as a now-famous author, lecturer, and humorist.

Incline Village, Nevada · United States