Reality of a dream (roughing i
Reality of a dream (roughing iReality of a Dream
In the book Roughing It by Mark Twain, Twain gives his account of the West he encountered on his journey across the U.S. Twain depicts many aspects of the west such as outlaws, Indians, Mormons, and miners. All of the mentioned were and still are stereotyped by people not possessing the entire truth. Because of this many of the people are misinformed on the truth of these different sections of the western culture. Twain writes about the miners in Nevada and California. All of the miners were looking for the quick dollar but, most found themselves deeper in the hole. Twain's Roughing It as well as Vardis Fisher and Opal Holmes's Gold Rushes and Mining Camps Of The Early American West both show how miner's in the west were searching for the dream of making it rich and instead finding the harsh reality of chance.
To start the section on mining Twain writes of how he first hears of the fortunes being found. He tells of hearing the story the widow Brewster by saying, "The widow Brewster had struck it rich in the Golden Fleece and sold ten feet for $18,000 - she hadn't money enough to buy a crape bonnet before."(109). To this he replied, " And so on - day in and day out the talk pelted our ears and the excitement waxed hotter around us."(109). What the people were not realizing was the fact that these people finding prosperity were just a fraction of the miners who were not finding anything as Twain would later find out.
The problem of listening to these stories was further enhanced by the prospectors lack of knowledge of what they were about to do and that was mining itself. Twain himself showed his lack of reality when he said, " I confess without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground."(115). He further showed his lack of knowledge when he brought back to camp a bag of what he thought to be gold. He was so proud of himself until the man he showed it to and asked what he thought of it replied, "I think nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre."(117). Twain was showing how miners in general went out looking for the quick money but did not know exactly what that quick money was.
Not only does Twain show the lack of knowledge of the miners, Twain also depicts the miners looking for the fortune and working the land as if they know for sure their fortune is right where they are digging. Twain expressed this fact when he said, "I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand feet in underdeveloped silver...
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