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About five hours north of Yosemite is Virginia City, Nev., where Samuel Clemens adopted his nom de plume. The conventional wisdom is that "Mark Twain" comes from the riverman's term for water two fathoms deep. Joe Curtis, owner of Mark Twain's Bookstore, offers an alternative theory. Clemens used to order his whiskey two shots at a time in Virginia City, telling the bartender to put it on his tab: "Mark me for twain [two]." Twain wrote for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in the early 1860s, chronicling the town's gold- and silver-fueled rise. His recollections of that time also appear in his autobiographical Roughing It. The population has dwindled from 28,000 to 800, but the town remains lively. Families can stay at one of several 19th century hotels and tour the museums commemorating Twain and the strike-it-rich era. Children will particularly enjoy going underground to visit the Chollar Mine. If you can, time your visit to coincide with the Bonanza Days Gunfighter Championships, June 18-20, or the Storey County Jumping Frog Jubilee, July 16-18.
"One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives," Twain once wrote. Great yarn spinners are few and far between these days, but one place to find a passel of them is Nevada City, Calif., about 115 miles west of Virginia City. Each summer the old gold-mining town is host to the Sierra Storytelling Festival. "You can put a six-year-old and a 90-year-old together," says founder Steve Sanfield, "and with the right story, they will both feel a deep connection." Tickets for this year's festival (July 16-18) will probably sell out, so reserve in advance. For those who miss out on the yarns, Nevada City has other charms--the little theater where Mark Twain used to lecture, horse-drawn-carriage tours of the town's winding streets, visits to the old mines and, locals claim, the best swimming holes in the state. But that may be just another tall tale.
--Reported by Elaine I. Marshall