Pride In Mark Twain's The Notorious Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County

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The Wild West brought many great stories to foreign places, with the help of regionalism it made foreign places alive to people who didn’t know of them. In Mark Twain’s “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, is based out of California during the gold rush, a man named Jim smiley is a great gambler who bets on anything and everything. He will always win the bets, until an unknown man comes along and cheats out Jim smiley out of his money. He cheated Jim out by stuffing his famous jumping frog with a teaspoon of a quill shot (Twain 665). The other story by Bret Harte “The Outcast of Poker Flat”, a gambler, a thief and other outcast are thrown out of their town. John Oakhurst who is a great gambler is one of the few among the outcast thrown out of town. With Oakhurst and the others thrown out of town, they travel to another town but have to survive the elements. All was going well until a huge winter storm came and nearly killed all of them. John Oakhurst beats death by shooting himself before the storm could kill him. Before he died he left behind the deuce of clubs. Therefore showing that his luck has run out (Harte 674-684). With all the similarities within the stories the …show more content…

Harte’s story takes place during November of 1850 (Harte 674) and Twains story was somewhere between the winter of 1840 and 1850 (Twain 663). Both towns were mining towns during the California gold rush. They were small towns in which would look somewhat like the Wild West. People would come from all over in the hopes of finding gold and getting rich quick. One small difference between the stories is in Twains story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is that it is in a “decayed mining camp” (Twain 662), but in Harte’s story it is referred to as “a town of all improper persons”. With all the similarities of the setting many differences can be found throughout all parts of the