Essay Questions

Who does Twain refer to America’s “dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum” and why?

Mark Twain was notable for tempering his sense of outrage at a number of social ills with humor. Take away the ironic tweak that can be found throughout much of Twain’s writing and intensify the low-key understatement to a high-volume rage and what Twain’s body of work reveals is one of the angriest writers in American literature. Rarely, however, does Twain put down the detachment afforded comic distancing and come right out with an attack against a foe on a literal level minus the irony that softens the blow. Such a rarity comes at the end of the chapter profiling the Chinese immigrants working in Virginia City. Unlike some foreign cultures, the Chinese have something about them that seems to really inspire a sense of admiration in the author and his outrage at the shameless way they are treated seems genuine. That it is really is genuine comes at the very end of the chapter when he finally does unsheathe that sword of anger and rips it without benefit of comic effect right through all the oppressors, saving the final precise slice for those pimps and scums of America: policemen and politicians.

Twain’s stories about the frontier contributed to the rise of the myth of the wild west. List some familiar western movie stereotypes which can be found in the pages of Roughing It.

Despite the derogatory connotation of the term, not all stereotypes are bad. On the other hand, the Indian who says “Dam stove heap gone” is a character who gave birth to a thousand offensive portrayals of “Indians” in movies and television. The young innocent who unwisely buys a horse without knowing what to look for would become a far less offensive stereotypical character in western films: the tenderfoot. And speaking of ill-mannered equines, the inexperienced horseman getting tossed from the bucking bronco is always good for a laugh and can find its provenance in text. In fact, one could extract from the various stories and tales told in the book an entire plot of a western: the low-down, double-crossing snake, the grizzled old-timer packed with wisdom he is always ready to share, a caravan of riders set in silhouette against a blazing sun crossing over barren alkali flats. The only thing missing is a showdown at high noon between the sheriff and the bank robber who escaped from prison to get his revenge.

What is the symbolic significance of the abundant references to horses?

Nearly a dozen of chapter subtitles within the text contain a reference to horses: “A Sixty-Thousand-Dollar Horse,” “Good Country for Horse Lovers,” and, notably, “Another Horse Story.” Horses become major characters in some of chapters and are merely background players in others. When the horses go missing outside Carson City during a blizzard, the loss of the animals seems to mean certain death. “The Genuine Mexican Plug” is trouble enough to become a story unto itself. The blazing speed of the animals carrying riders of the Pony Express becomes almost a sport. Horses are the transport of choice for Twain during his travels whether the company are Mormons in Utah or pagans in the Pacific Islands. Over the course of the narrative it gradually begins to dawn on the attentive reader that Twain is subtly using horses as a motif that reflects the spirit of his entire adventures. Horses can be saviors or demons, they can be a thing of sublime beauty to be admired for aesthetic principles and they can be utilitarian necessities without the frontier could never possibly have been settled.