THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY

'"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"' is an 1865 short story by Mark Twain. It was also published as '"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"' and '"Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog."' In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the hopeless gambler Jim Smiley told by Simon Wheeler, a fat and bald-headed man. Twain describes him: "If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to--to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road."

Contents

Notes on the story

References

See also

External links

Notes on the story

★ Jim Smiley (the main character) was a constant gambler/con artist and would pretty much bet on anything

★ Jim bet on Parson Walker's (filler character) wife dying

★ Bet on his bulldog pup fighting other dogs (eventually dies fighting a dog with no hind legs)

★ At the end Jim's frog goes against another frog for 40 dollars and loses (gets cheated). "Then he got the frog (Dan'l Webster) out and prized his mouth open. He took a Teaspoon and filled the frog full of quail shot." The implication is that the frog was heavy so Jim got conned out of 40 bucks.

★ The frog of the title, named Daniel Webster, is a California red-legged frog (''Rana aurora'').

★ Upon discovering a copy of this story translated into French, Twain translated it, word-for-word, back into English, keeping the French grammar structure, ending it with a note "thus is my story, the distorted French eye." ^[1]

References

1. ''The Jumping Frog''

See also

★ Frog jumping

External links

★ Online text at the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library

★ Stephen Railton's Mark Twain in His Times project

★ Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum