This autobiographical work covers Mark Twain's scuffling years, during which he beat a path from his home in Missouri across the American West and all the way to the South Atlantic Ocean. Twain traveled by overland stage to Nevada, where he took to silver mining and gained and lost a claim worth millions; worked as a reporter for a Virginia City newspaper; fell upon hard times in San Francisco; ventured off to the Sandwich Islands as newspaper correspondent; and ultimately returned in triumph to California on a lecture tour. His spirited narrative, amply laced with genial humor, presents a kaleidoscopic succession of personalities and locales: the stage-drivers and desperadoes of the Great Plains; Mormon society; the mines and miners of Nevada; the climate and characteristics of San Francisco; and the amusing and startling traits of Sandwich Island civilization.