narratives

In 1861, Mark Twain traveled by stagecoach from St. Joseph, Missouri to the Nevada Territory. He was twenty-five years old. The trip west took him out of the Civil War, and to a place as fast, amoral, and weird as the Mississippi River scene in which he had just run. A few years later, he turned his travel stories into stand-up routines. A decade later, he wrote Roughing It – a slightly more tasteful print version.

Twain was not the first writer to take the stagecoach cross-country. In 1859, Horace Greeley made the same trip, sending back informative articles about the prospects of gold mining, farming, and the Kansas-Missouri border wars. This was service journalism for the mid-19th century. Greeley compiled his dispatches into a book called Overland Journey.

Richard Burton, the great Victorian explorer, went west by stagecoach a year later. Always one to foreground exotic local customs, he took the Mormons of Salt Lake City (the City of Saints, to him) as his lede.

Twain was not ignorant of his heavyweight predecessors. In Roughing It, a running joke about Greeley culminates when a desert wanderer dies in Twain’s arms rather than tell the same boring Greeley anecdote yet again. As a one-time western newspaperman, Twain knew how to take down his rival journalists.

I particularly love the Alkali Desert passage in Roughing It. Twain recounts the thirst, boredom, and desolation of a slow passage across the western Utah desert. He writes that he had always dreamed of visiting an American Sahara, but the cruel reality of the transit beat the dreams out of him. Yet reading this passage, I marvel that such a place could exist – one that can knock the humor even out of Mark Twain.

Reading Greeley and Burton, one searches for their descriptions of this desert. They describe scenic rocks to the east, they describe an army base, but no Alkali Desert. Twain makes his story out of something which Greeley and Burton did not consider news – a sixty mile passage without much water. In writing what some scholars have called the first great piece of nature writing on an American desert, Twain also builds a story in a place which Greeley and Burton did not bother to describe.

In 2011, 150 years after Twain’s trip, I drove down Simpson Springs Road in a sparsely populated part of Utah. This dirt road pretty closely follows Twain’s route. The Alkali Desert is more scrub brush than sand. In a moist summer, the landscape holds a bit of dull dark green. Further to the west, the road can get muddy. Just to the north is Dugway Proving Ground, where the military has tested chemical and biological weapons. A series of helpful articles by Jaromy Jessop in the Tooele Transcript Bulletin explain how to find markers of the old stage stations. In the 1930s, the government commissioned stone and concrete monuments for each, and there are newer welded steel stakes, which sometimes mark a slightly different spot.

It is pleasant out in the Alkali Desert. Calm, quiet. It’s a place far away from words.

 

 

Photo and text © Dan Torop