Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [52]
—SUSANNAH CARTER, The Frugal Housewife, 1803
Tahoe’s peace touched Twain. But it wasn’t like him to stay calm and quiet for long; his Tahoe idyll ended when he set the mountain on fire. He’d set a blaze to burn down into coals for supper, heading down to the skiff for a frying pan. But a shout from Kinney interrupted him—when he looked back, the fire “was galloping all over the premises.”
The forests around Tahoe needed fire almost as much as the great prairies did. Fifteen years before Twain came to Tahoe, a member of the Mormon Battalion descending along the Carson River said that “the mountains seem to be all on fire and the valley full of smoke. . . . At night we could see as it were a hundred fires in the California mountains made no doubt by Indians.” Washoe Indians would often set fires intentionally, helping to clear out undergrowth and encourage the growth of mule’s ears, a sort of sunflower the Native Americans harvested for seeds. They burned most often during spring’s first thaws, when the remaining snows created natural firebreaks. “By this means,” the admiring traveler and poet Joaquin Miller wrote in 1887, “the Indians always kept their forest open, pure and fruitful, and conflagrations were unknown.” Other fires could have been set by lightning (Forest Service land in California can receive seventeen hundred strikes per year).
Whether people or lightning had caused the earlier blazes, Twain’s fire wasn’t nearly as intense as it would be today, when a policy of stopping all burns as quickly as possible has left behind a century’s worth of dry, tangled growth. Still, the burn was spectacular and terrifying. Now the fishing boat became a means of escape, as the young men pulled offshore and away from the blaze. In Roughing It, Twain recalled that
Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! It went surging up the adjacent ridges—surmounted them and disappeared in the cañons beyond—burst into view upon higher and farther ridges, presently—shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again—flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the mountain side—threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled net-work of red lava streams.6 Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare, and the firmament above was a reflected hell!
But the lake was there—always the lake. Even when watching a mountain inferno, Twain couldn’t draw his eyes from the water for more than a few moments:
Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it with the stronger fascination.
They watched for four hours. By that time they looked like “lava men, covered as we were with ashes, and begrimed with smoke.” With the fire miles away, “hunger asserted itself,” Twain remembered, “but there was nothing to eat. The provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see.”
There are a few theories about the location of Twain’s timber claim, but one convincing idea places it near Stateline Point, on Tahoe’s northern edge. That would mean a south-facing slope, vulnerable to burns as it dried and warmed during the sun’s long passage. What’s more, south faces in Tahoe are favored by ponderosa pines, which leave the ground “deeply carpeted with dry pine needles” just as Twain later remembered. Add in the fact that any slope will increase the speed and intensity of a blaze and you have a recipe for a genuinely impressive, if not particularly dangerous, burn.
In a letter to his mother a week after returning to Carson City, Twain described the “standard-bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped