For those interested in this rather brief period of Mark Twain’s life, I have condensed my material on his journey from St. Joseph to Carson City, found in the section of Twain’s Geography titled “Sam Clemens Goes West”. As most, if not all of you know, he and his brother Orion took the Overland Stage. Railroads were not quite ready to cross the continent yet. He was the third of three authors to write about this journey and ironically was the least informative, the other two being Horace Greeley and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (not yet knighted). Greeley followed part of the route taken by Twain, from Fort Laramie to Ruby Valley but then followed the earlier Humboldt River route. Burton and Twain followed the same route until near the end of the journey where Burton continued to Fort Churchill and Carson City but Twain took the "Stillwater Dogleg" through the area Twain called “The Great American Desert”. The Great American Desert has had many definitions through the years, some encompassing vastly larger regions than just Lake Lahontan. Anyway, I have prepared a PDF of about 100 pages that I will email to anyone interested. It consists for the most part of selections from the three books, Greeley’s “An Journey, Overland From New York To San Francisco, In The Summer Of 1859”; Burton’s “The City of the Saints”; and of course, “Roughing It”. It also includes notes on all the stagecoach and Pony Express stations on the route noted in the National Park Service’s web site. The PDF does not include reference citations. If you want them they can be found in Twain’s Geography. Again, if interested send a message to me rather than just Twain-L with an email address that can accept a document of this size. -- /*Unaffiliated Geographer and Twain aficionado*/ Visit B. Scott Holmes <https://bscottholmes.com> Twain's Geography <https://twainsgeography.com>