Mark Twain invented himself in Nevada over about three years, during which he failed at silver mining, faked a corpse, faked a massacre, insulted a ladies' charity, got challenged to a duel, and had to leave the territory. He went out there in 1861 because his older brother Orion had been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, a job Abraham Lincoln personally signed off on, and could not afford to get there. Sam Clemens paid for the trip in exchange for being made Orion's private secretary. Nineteen days by stagecoach from St. Joseph, Missouri to Carson City. He quit the government work almost immediately to go look for silver in the Humboldt and Esmeralda districts. He was bad at it. By the time he got there the amateur window had closed and the good ground was taken. He lost a promising claim in 1862, an episode he later inflated considerably when he wrote about it. Broke, he started mailing humorous letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise under the name Josh. In the fall of 1862 the editor, Joe Goodman, hired him as city editor at twenty five dollars a week. His first real hoax ran on October 4, 1862. He wrote a completely deadpan news item about a petrified man discovered in the hills, a century old, fused into the rock, with a coroner's jury convened over the body that decided it would be irreverent to blast him out. And then, in flat reportorial prose, he described the corpse's hands. The right thumb resting against the side of the nose, fingers spread. The left thumb propping up the chin, with one finger holding an eyelid open. He had written a dead man thumbing his nose and winking at the reader, and he genuinely believed nobody could possibly miss it. Newspapers across the country reprinted it as a real scientific discovery. So did papers in England. It made it into the London Lancet, a medical journal. Twain then spent about eleven months mailing clippings to the pompous local judge the whole thing had been aimed at. On February 3, 1863, he signed a piece "Mark Twain" for the first time. The piece was a complaint about a party. His second hoax, in October 1863, went badly wrong. He wrote a graphic fake story about a man near Empire City slaughtering his own family, intended as a shot at San Francisco companies falsifying their dividend reports. It was reprinted as real news across the region. When he ran the retraction admitting he had made it up, readers were not amused. Subscriptions were cancelled. Rival papers demanded he be fired. Goodman kept him on. Then came May 1864, which is the part he left almost entirely out of his own memoir. He published an unsigned item implying that money raised by the women of Carson City at a charity ball for the Sanitary Fund, which was the Civil War's version of the Red Cross, was going to be handed over to a "miscegenation society." In Nevada in 1864 that was a calculated and genuinely ugly insult, and the word was being deployed nationally as a smear against Lincoln. At the same moment he was in an escalating newspaper war with James Laird, editor of the rival Virginia City Union, and it got as far as formal challenges. Twain challenged Laird to a duel on May 21. Then the husbands of the Carson City women started challenging Twain. Dueling was a crime in Nevada, and there was talk of a grand jury. On May 29, 1864, Samuel Clemens got on a stage out of the territory with his friend Steve Gillis and went to San Francisco. No duel was ever fought. A year later he published a short story about a jumping frog and became the most famous writer in America. He arrived in Nevada as his brother's unpaid secretary with no money and no prospects, and he left it three years later one step ahead of a grand jury. He went in as Sam Clemens. He came out as Mark Twain.