Abstract
ABSTRACT Comparing episodes in the travel narrative Roughing It, in which Mark Twain critiques the materialism of the Nevada Silver Rush, with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” illustrates the ways the short story is another instance in which Twain creates rhetorical spaces to debunk an imaginary West and the storytellers like Simon Wheeler who perpetuate it. In the process he also reveals the materialism, greed, and inhumanity that propelled a nation into spending themselves and the natural world in a frenzied compulsion to “win” at all costs. In many ways “Jumping Frog” mirrors the speculation on future fortunes and the addiction to gambling that were endemic to the mining West, Jim Smiley and the Stranger standing in for the miners and speculators that Twain parodies in the travel volume.
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