[In the following excerpt, Lynn argues that in Twain's telling of the jumping frog story, the author stands the tradition of the conventional Southwestern folktale on its head. Lynn then goes on to discuss Twain's narrative technique and use of political humor.]

In search of new forms to express a new idea of himself, Twain experimented in his Western period with a variety of humorous devices. Caricatures, puns, burlesques, hoaxes, and editorial bandinage were the stock-in-trade of Washoe journalism at the time, and Mark Twain of the Enterprise tried them all. In one of his most significant experiments, he produced a sort of literary ventriloquist's act, wherein the writer debated various questions with an uninhibited alter ego named "The Unreliable." By putting words in the mouth of this stooge, Twain was able to float out newly-thought-up opinions like so many trial balloons, without being held responsible for them. The fascination of a lifetime with the literary possibilities of twins may be said to date from these early pieces. (A couple of years later, in a series of travel letters to the Alta California, "The Unreliable" reappeared as Mark Twain's fictitious traveling companion, the antisocial Mr. Brown. Although these letters, with their distasteful joking about the fragrance of Negroes, reveal that on some social questions the young Missourian still had a lot to learn, the name Brown seems a curiously apt one for a character whom one Twain critic has likened to Caliban. Mr. Brown would have been outraged to know it, but he nevertheless foreshadows Twain's later use of a Negro alter ego as a way of commenting upon white society.)

Twain's most interesting literary experiment was "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," written the year after the author left Nevada. Possibly a Negro tale to begin with—the slyness with which the defeat of the champion is managed would seem to be the distinguishing mark of the slave upon it—the frog story was taken over by the rough-and-tumble society of the mining camps and incorporated in its democratic myth. Various versions of the story had been published in Western newspapers before Mark Twain ever reached California. In appropriating the story for his own purposes, he made numerous changes. First and foremost, he embellished the anecdote with a "Frame," in which we are introduced to the narrator, "Mark Twain," who in turn tells us of his encounter with Simon Wheeler in the barroom at Angel's Camp. The narrator's casual reference to an Eastern friend, and his indulgently superior description of the "winning gentleness and simplicity" of Simon Wheeler's countenance, establish his affinity with the Self-controlled Gentleman of the Southwestern tradition . . . The similarities of structure and dramatic situation, however, are sufficient to make us expect the familiar puppet show. The story upsets all our calculations—and the narrator's as well. "Mark Twain," as things turn out, is not as clever as he thinks he is. Assuming himself to be more sophisticated than the man he meets, the encounter teaches him just the reverse—it is he, not Simon, who is simple. The innocence of Simon Wheeler's expression is in fact a mask, cunningly assumed to deceive the outsider by seeming to fulfill all his preconceived notions of Western simple-mindedness. Simon Wheeler's little joke, of course, is simply a California variation on the ancient con game of the trans-Allegheny frontiersman, but in literary terms the "Jumping Frog" marks a historic reversal. The narrator, it turns out, is telling a joke on himself, not on the Clown. In the "Jumping Frog," it is the vernacular, not the polite style, which "teaches the lesson." The Southwestern tradition, in other words, has been stood on its head.

The "Frame" is a drama of upset expectations, and so is the story proper. Simon launches his vernacular monologue about Jim Smiley (after having been asked for information concerning the Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley) with an anecdote about Jim Smiley's bulldog, who could whip any other dog by fastening his teeth on his opponent's hind leg and hanging on "till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year," but who was finally defeated by a dog "that didn't have no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off in a circular saw. . . ." Doubtless Twain's Whig upbringing had something to do with the fact that the name of Smiley's bulldog is Andrew Jackson, for in making a dog of that name look ridiculous Twain in effect ridiculed a politician who he never ceased to believe had been a disastrous President. Simon Wheeler's ironic praise of the dog—"a good pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him and he had genius—I know it, because he hadn't no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he, could under them circumstances if he hadn't no talent"—would certainly have appealed to the Whiggish sense of humor of the earlier Southwestern writers. When we learn, however, as we do very shortly, that Jim Smiley's frog is named Daniel Webster, in honor of Whiggery's arch-hero, we begin to realize that this story is not playing political favorites in the old way at all, but is in fact saying a plague on both houses of a tragic era. Simon Wheeler's tall tale does not take sides on past history, it rejects the past altogether, and turns toward the West and the future. It also endorses democracy by making fun of superior feelings, as the "frame" had done. Gazing at Daniel Webster, the stranger says, in one of the most famous remarks in the history of American humor, "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog." The subsequent triumph of the anonymous underfrog over the vaunted Daniel Webster comically vindicates the stranger's radical democracy. As the author of the "Jumping Frog" had lately discovered, it didn't pay to be too proud in the West.

Catching the upturn of the national mood at the close of the Civil War, the "Jumping Frog" was an instantaneous success, James Russell Lowell hailing it as "the finest piece of humorous literature yet produced in America." If the story had any flaws, they resided in the character of the narrator. It was not quite certain who "Mark Twain" was. He seemed a more colloquial figure than the Self-controlled Gentleman, yet he continued to play the Gentleman's role, vis-à-vis the Clown. In the period following the publication of the "Jumping Frog," Twain's major imaginative effort was devoted to solving the problem of his narrative persona.