Interestingly, I don't necessarily think it was Twain's
experience of life on the Mississippi river that gave him the inspiration for this excellent
story of humour and farce so much as his time spent prospecting for gold in Nevada. Twain, during
the Civil War, spent a little while serving as a solder in a company of Confederate irregulars,
but he quickly found that military life was not to his taste and therefore he started his new
life looking for gold. We are told that he found little gold there, but what this stage of his
life did do for him was that he uncovered rich seams of storytelling within himself. This story
is one that he had heard from his time mining from other miners, and Twain transforms it into a
classic of American humour.
Thus whilst this tale owes a lot to
Twain's own experiences in life, it is not his experiences on the Mississippi river that
contributed to the creation of this story, but rather his time spent as a gold miner in
Nevada.
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