Nature as Travel Guide: Mark Twain and Hawaii in Writing the American Frontier

Abstract:This article traces the evolution of Mark Twain’s early travel writing by comparing intersections between recorded travel and nature writing in Twain’s 1866 letters for the Sacramento Union and his 1872 full-length book about the America West, Roughing It. In his twenty-five published letters, Twain critiques past travel guides and histories that distract visitors—and by extension readers—from what is in front of them, forcing their attention away from the reality of the people and places they encounter. In Twain’s first full-length travel account, 1869’s The Innocents Abroad, this critique is more fully realized, as Twain articulates an even stronger lament against tour guides and books that script a travelers’ experiences with new spaces. When Twain returns to writing about the American frontier in Roughing It, he condenses the narration of his Pacific travel for his second full-length account, employing nature as a narrative structure that enables him to direct a reader’s attention to travel experiences as they unfold. Here nature serves as a witness that preserves stories and a phenomenon that punctuates Twain’s experiences uncovering these stories, thus working to frame human action in the text, drawing the attention of both travelers and readers to what is immediately in front of them. This article argues that, in employing this model, Roughing It insists on the importance of natural descriptions in travel writing, and that Twain’s work ultimately illustrates the essential role that nature plays in shaping the human experience of travel on the unscripted frontiers of the Pacific and American West, for travelers and readers alike.