Larry,

Thanks for offering to check the U.of.Cal. edition for me.  The incident
occurs in the beginning of chapter 32, in the snowstorm, shortly before
the travelers repent in extremity:

        "All agreed that a campfire was what would come nearest to saving
us now, and so we set about building it.  We could find no matches, and so
we tried to make shift with the pistols.  Not a man in the party had ever
tried to do such a thing before, but not a man in the party doubted that
it _could_ be done, and without any trouble--because every man in the
party had read about it in books many a time and had naturally come to
believe it, with trusting simplicity, just as he had long ago accepted and
believed _that other_ common book fraud about Indians and lost hunters
making a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together."

I ask because I recently found an example of this in an 1843 book -- T. S.
Arthur's _Bell Martin_ :

        "We must kindle a fire as quickly as possible," whispered Handy,
in a hoarse voice, and following the word by the action, poured a little
powder into his pistol and pressed in loosely some paper.  Then he drew a
whole newspaper from his pocket and fired the pistol into it.  In a moment
or two it was in a blaze.  Leaves, small twigs, and pieces of dry wood
were added to this, and soon a bright fire was lighting up the dark and
gloomy forest . . . " (T. S. Arthur, _Bell Martin: An American Story of
Real Life_ [Philly: J. W. Bradley, 1855], pp.125-126.  first published
1843.)

Arthur was prolific and best-selling throughout from the early 1840s
through _Ten Nights in a Bar-Room_ (1854) and on into the 1870s (see
Hart's _Popular Book_ p. 109).  Gregg Camfield points out that Arthur is
the hero of Mamie Grant, the protagonist in Twain's burlesque of
sentimental Christian tracts, "Mamie Grant, Child Missionary" (1868), in
his _Sentimental Twain_, p. 76.

Despite his popularity, sales, and the evidence in "Mamie Grant"  that
Arthur meant something to Twain, I'm not so confident the western
travelers of _Roughing It_ would have all so certainly read him.  But
Twain's hyperbolic insistence they had all read it in the books means it
must have been going on somewhere.  And rather than comb everything ever
popular in the 1860s for the answer to a trivia question, I thought I'd
ask the forum.

Jon Miller
University of Iowa
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