Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [43]
The trout in Tahoe lived in water famous for clarity and purity and were fresh as any fish could be; they probably tasted especially delicious considering that a lot of frontier food was awful. Twain later enjoyed the beer, cheese, and mustard of Virginia City, whose ten thousand tents, dugouts, cabins, and frame houses (he described them as “‘papered’ inside with flour-sacks sewed together” and decorated with engravings from Harper’s) were serviced by fifteen restaurants and fifty-one saloons. He at least respected the spartan cooking of the prospectors, whom he described as “young men who made their own bacon and beans.” He’d relished a ham-and-egg breakfast on board a stagecoach. But these were exceptions.
Most food on the trails west was dried, burned, or borderline rotten; butter could take nearly a year to reach Washoe or California. It was also monotonous; 1870s Dakota settler Annie Tallent remembered trail menus of “for breakfast, hot biscuit, fried bacon, and black coffee; for dinner, cold biscuit, cold baked beans, and black coffee; for supper, black coffee, hot biscuit, and baked beans warmed over.” Sometimes canned goods were an option (the two big early booms in the canning industry came with the Gold Rush and the Civil War), or even a necessity—Twain might as well have crossed an ocean to reach Washoe from Missouri, jolting for over a month across prairie and uncertain desert. But useful as they could be on long journeys, the cans usually held gray meat or limp, pale vegetables. Too often the contents had spoiled; until 1895, canners believed that it was the lack of air that sterilized the cans, and sometimes they failed to boil them long enough to kill off bacteria.
Twain did get used to trail food, once describing fried bacon, bread, molasses, and black coffee as part of “earthly luxury.” But most meals he remembered were those that provided a break from what were basically shipboard provisions—long-lasting, easily carried stuff. Put fried lake trout—wonderful in its own right—beside that spread of dried, rotten, or indifferently packed food and it’s easy to see why Twain would remember it decades later. And though the taste of perfectly fresh fish had a lot to do with Twain’s love for it, I think it also had a lot to do with the place and the heady memory of those roving, exploratory days when he was on the verge of discovering his voice—discovering, in a real sense, just who he’d be for the rest of his life.
Twain did make one rare aesthetic misstep at the lake; he preferred the name “Lake Bigler” to Tahoe, which was a corruption of the Washoe Indian word for “water in a high place.”5 In the September 4, 1862, Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (he often wrote for the paper under the wince-inducing, double-entendre pen name “Josh”) Twain wrote that though “of course Indian names are more fitting than any others for our beautiful lakes and rivers, which knew their race ages ago, perhaps, in the morning of creation,” he wanted nothing “so repulsive to the ear as ‘Tahoe’ for the beautiful relic of fairy-land forgotten and left asleep in the snowy Sierras when the little elves fled from their ancient haunts and quitted the earth.”
Why “Bigler” should beat out “Tahoe” as the name of a beautiful relic of forgotten fairyland is, to put it gently, unclear. The only upside to “Bigler” is that, unlike “Tahoe,” it can’t easily be slapped on a Chevy (though admittedly that’s a pretty serious upside). But whatever he called it, Twain’s love for the lake was pure and absolute. I imagine him cresting that last, “three thousand mile high” mountain, gasping and exhausted, the blue