The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: Historical Context: California During and After the Gold Rush Years

The major historical events of the mid-19th century provide the historical backdrop for “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and lend further meaning to the work. In 1847, at the conclusion of the Mexican-American war, the United States acquired from Mexico the land that is now California, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and western Colorado. American settlers had been migrating west to seek their fortunes since the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and this new land acquisition only increased the trend. When gold was discovered in the hills of California in 1848, it precipitated the California Gold Rush and the mass migration of American settlers to California. Between the summers of 1848 and 1855, California’s population exploded. More than 300,000 people migrated to the area, nearly doubling its pre-1848 population of 160,000, and in 1850 California became a state. Hundreds of mining camps popped up all over California, including Angel’s Camp in Calaveras County, the setting for Twain’s story.

Angel’s Camp was booming in 1849–1850 when, according to Simon Wheeler, Jim Smiley arrived at camp. Such mining camps were so hastily established, with thousands of people arriving in only a short time, that there were few rules and laws, if any. Such a setting is the perfect place for a huckster and conman like Jim Smiley to thrive, and it provides the context for Simon Wheeler’s mythologization of the man. However, the surface gold that individual prospectors like Jim Smiley sought to mine dried up by 1852 and turned many of California’s small mining towns into ghost towns. Though Angel’s Camp survived and endured, it would have seen a hasty establishment, a rapid population boom, and swift decline, all within a few years. It is this strange history that leads the narrator to describe the town as “ancient.” Though the narrator’s description is tongue-in-cheek, it contains a kernel of truth in that Angel’s Camp’s rapid rise and fall constituted an entire history packed into a few short years. In addition, the narrator is writing in 1867, just two years after the American Civil War, which fundamentally and forever altered the United States in almost every conceivable way. Thus, so much history had happened in Angel’s Camp between 1848 and 1867, that the narrator’s “ancient” descriptor for the town seems apt.

Given the establishment, growth, and decline of Angel’s Camp in such a short time period, Simon Wheeler’s tall tales about Jim Smiley serve an important cultural purpose. The influx of a huge number of an entirely new kind of people into an area gives birth to a new society. As the society develops, it begins to develop a culture all its own, and Wheeler’s folktales seek to describe this new culture and to mythologize its heroes. Yet, to attribute a “culture” to the hastily established mining town and the mythologization of a conman like Jim Smiley seem utterly ridiculous and even hilarious. Mark Twain saw the humor in this and wrote the story, which, in the words of the story’s own narrator, is nothing short of “exquisitely absurd.”

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