Roughing it Lecture, version 1

The Chicago Tribune 20 December 1871 [Transcribed text of MT lecture, given 18 December 1871.] "MARK TWAIN." Sketch of the Great American Humorist's Lecture, Delivered in the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church — An Original Introduction — Mark's Experience with a "Genuine Mexican Plug" — Reportorial Experience at Virginia City — Remarkable Exploits as a Duellist.

The Chicago Tribune 24 December 1871 "MARK TWAIN." A Few More Passages from the Great Humorist's Lecture at the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church — Lake Tahoe and Camp Life in Its Vicinity — Remarkable Recovery of an Invalid — Hunting Rocky Mountain Sheep — Mark's Great Sand Shifter — Duelling at Virginia City.

[introduction]

[section]

LAKE TAHOE.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP.

SHOVELLING SAND.

THE CODE DUELLO.

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SHOVELLING SAND.

"I had to go to work in a quartz mill at $10 a week. A nice place, truly, for the proprietor of a hundred silver mines! But I was glad to get that berth. But I could not keep it. They did not want me. I did'nt know why. I was the most careful workman they had ever had. They said so. I took more pains with my work. I was shovelling sand. The technical term is "tailing." The silver rock is ground over once or twice and they clean it up and work it over again. Whenever I had a lot of that sand to shovel I was so particular that I would sit down for an hour and a half and think about the best way to shovel that sand. And if I could not cipher it out in my mind just so, I would not go shovelling it around heedless. I would leave it alone until next day. Many a time when I would be carrying a bucket full of sand from one pile to another, thirty or forty feet off, right in the middle, suddenly, a new idea would strike me, and I would carry that sand back, and sit down and think about it, and like enough get so wrought up, and absorbed in it, that I would go to sleep. Why, I always knew there must be some tip-top, first-rate way to move that sand. At last I discovered it. I went to the boss, and told him that I had got just the thing, the very best and quickest way to get that sand from one pile to the other. And he says, 'I am awful glad to hear it.' You never saw a man so uplifted as he was. It appeared to take a load off his breast — a load of sand, I suppose. And I said — 'What you want now is a cast iron pipe about 13 or 14 feet in diameter, and, say, 42 feet long. And you want to prop one end of that pipe up, about 35 or 40 feet off the ground. And then you want a revolving belt — just work it with the waste steam from the engine — a revolving belt with a revolving chair to it. I am to sit in that chair, and have a Chinaman down there to till up the bucket with sand, and pass it up as I come around, [illustrates with gestures] and I am just to soar up there and tilt it into that pipe, and there you are. It is as easy as rolling off a log.

"You never saw a man so overcome with admiration — so overwhelmed. Before he knew what he was about he discharged me."

University of Virginia Library

SHOVELLING SAND.