Mark Twain first earned his reputation as a fiction writer with the publication of "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," originally entitled "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." Trained as a journalist, Twain lived in the West for most of the Civil War. In 1864 and 1865, he spent several months mining around Angel's Camp, California, where he supposedly heard a version of the story from a camp bartender. Like a true journalist, Twain noted the anecdote. He developed it into a fictional piece less than a year later, gaining nationwide recognition as a premier humorist and short-story writer from its publication.
Mining camps and the "forty-niners." In 1848, two weeks before Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceding California to the United States, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill. The discovery enticed 100,000 people to California within a year and induced 250,000 more people to emigrate within the next three years. By the summer of 1849, 40,000 gold-seekers, or "forty-niners," as they were called, headed west. By 1850, 80,000 gold-seekers reached the West Coast; these early fortune-hunters shaped the history and settlement patterns of early California.
