When Clemens set the Sierra alight

Samuel Clemens left Missouri for Nevada Territory in the summer of 1861. He went west partly to avoid service in the Civil War, which was more problematic for Missourians than for residents of many other states, in that the state government remained loyal to the Union but much of the population sympathized with the Confederacy. Clemens in fact played at soldiering with a pro-Confederate militia during the first months after Fort Sumter. The experience didn’t suit him, and when his brother Orion, newly appointed as secretary to the territorial government of Nevada, offered him a job as secretary to the secretary, Sam Clemens accepted at once.

The journey from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Carson City, Nevada, formed the basis for Clemens’s later book, Roughing It, written under the nom de plume he acquired in Nevada, Mark Twain. In the book Clemens recounted an excursion he and a friend, Johnny, took to Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada west of Carson City. They wanted to claim a tract of timberland, and to this end they cut trees for a fence and built a rudimentary house. The work took longer than expected. They relocated to a new camp site.

“By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old camp and laid in a new supply,” Clemens wrote. “We were gone all day, and reached home again about nightfall, pretty tired and hungry. While Johnny was carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our ‘house’ for future use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to get the frying-pan. While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny, and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises!

“Johnny was on the other side of it. He had to run through the flames to get to the lake-shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the devastation.

“The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pineneedles, and the fire touched them off as if they were gunpowder. It was wonderful to see with what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled! My coffeepot was gone, and everything with it. In a minute and a half the fire seized upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chaparral six or eight feet high, and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific. We were driven to the boat by the intense heat, and there we remained, spellbound.

“Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! It went surging up adjacent ridges, surmounted them and disappeared in the cañons beyond, burst into view upon higher and farther ridges, presently shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again, flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the mountainside, threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there and sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountainfronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava streams. Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare, and the firmament above was a reflected hell!

“Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it with the stronger fascination.

“We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours. We never thought of supper and never felt fatigue. But at eleven o'clock the conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and then darkness stole down upon the landscape again.

“Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. The provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see. We were homeless wanderers again, without any property. Our fence was gone, our house burned down; no insurance. Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away. Our blankets were on our usual sand-bed”–the beach of the lake–“however, and so we lay down and went to sleep.”

Clemens didn’t say how far the fire burned. He hadn’t bothered to investigate. Likely it didn’t match the huge Sierra fires of our recent times. He would have noticed that. Our fires burn hotter on account of human suppression of fires, which allows combustibles to accumulate.

And the forests then went on forever. A hundred acres, a hundred thousand acres, hardly dented the canopy. A fire was a spectacle, but nothing to lose sleep over.