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 [log in to unmask]