Twain on Tahoe

Jill's Journal: It was in 1861 a not-yet-famous-25-year-old Mark Twain, then Samuel Clemens, was trying his hand at silver mining in Virginia City, Nevada. He later turned his six years in the Wild West into a semi-autobiographical book called Roughing It. Here’s what he had to say about Lake Tahoe:

“…At last the Lake burst upon us -- a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”

“Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be? -- it is the same the angels breathe.”