There are several elements in "Texan Steer" that do give me pause and think that the sketch has a Twain whiff about it. 1) Twain did write a number of reports when he was living in and contributing to California newspapers about animals (dogs) running in the street and a being a menace to the public. 2) The final reference to improving the undertaking business if the steer was not captured -- Twain had a particular aversion to that business enterprise. (See "Mark Twain's Quarrel with Undertakers" online at twainquotes.com). 3) One curious angle that I found when I looked at _Mark Twain's Lexicon_ for the word "corned" in quotation marks -- The documented usage according to the _Lexicon_ was in the 1910 edition of _Mark Twain's Speeches_ in a speech titled "The Union Right or Wrong? Reminiscences of Nevada." That 1910 version of the speech contains a passage: "We found him standing on a table in a saloon with an old tin lantern in one had and the school report in the other, haranguing a gang of "corned" miners ..." (_Speeches_, 1910, p. 272 -- available in the Oxford Edition, 1996). Searching for that identical phrase turns up an edited version that was used in _Roughing It_, Chapter 43. However, the passage had been edited to read: "haranguing a gang of intoxicated Cornish miners..." (_Roughing It_ University of California Works edition, 1993, p. 280). There is no textual commentary regarding this change or how it appeared in the original manuscript, if it exists. I think a good argument can be made that Twain did use the phrase "corned" at least once in his notes and that it was later edited and/or refined in such a way to implicate Cornish miners -- who may not have even been Cornish. Barb