Mark Twain

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (Annotated) Mark Twain

The narrator visits Simon Wheeler in a tavern in Angel's Camp, Calaveras County, California, a gold rush mining town. He calls on Wheeler at the request of his friend from back East to ask after the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. He finds Simon Wheeler dozing by the stove and describes him as old, fat, simple, and gentle. As Wheeler backs the narrator into a corner and launches into a series of tall tales about a completely different man named Jim Smiley, the narrator suspects that his friend made up Leonidas as a pretext to entrap him into listening to Wheeler's "long and tedious" stories. Wheeler's story within the story commences, all about a gambler named Jim Smiley. Jim Smiley would bet on anything. He was a lucky man who almost always won. He bet on dog fights, horse races, and even the ill health of the parson's wife. Smiley trained animals to win bets for him. Both his horse, the "fifteen-minute nag," and his dog, "Andrew Jackson," didn't seem like much, but would surprisingly win in the end. Andrew Jackson had a trick during a fight of catching the other dog's back legs in his mouth tenaciously.