Traveling with Twain

Carson City, named after frontiersman Kit Carson, grew from a stagecoach stop in 1851 to capital of Nevada in 1864. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) arrived there with his brother Orion, secretary of the new Nevada territorial government, on August 14, 1861. As a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise Twain later covered legislative sessions, the constitutional convention and other Carson City events. He signed his January 31, 1863, report Mark Twain for the first time, later explaining the pseudonym as “the non de plume of one Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune.” Twain biographer Ron Powers writes, “There is no evidence that Sellers ever signed a dispatch that way.”

December 5