Mark Twain

Before he was Mark Twain, he was a failed miner named Sam Clemens. He came to Nevada in 1861, gave up on prospecting, and in 1862 took a reporting job at Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise—then the most powerful newspaper in the West. There, in February of 1863, he first signed a story "Mark Twain," and a career was launched; his book Roughing It would mine these years for comedy. The Enterprise is gone, but the name he took here went around the world. A museum on C Street keeps his Comstock days.

What the plaque says

100 years ago, in 1864, Samuel Clemens left the Territorial Enterprise, moving on to California and world-wide fame. He was a reporter here in 1863 when he first used the name, Mark Twain. He later described his colorful adventures in Nevada in “Roughing It.” Nevada Centennial Marker No. 27 Placed by James Lenhoff, 1964 Editor and Publisher Territorial Enterprise. Mark Twain. Who greatly enriched the literature of the West, started his career as a writer in this building in 1862 on the editorial staff of the Territorial Enterprise Placed April 29, 1934 University of Nevada Press Club.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Virginia City — steps away
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 0.6 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Carson City — 12 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since
• Stewart Indian School — 14 mi
  The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices

More markers nearby

• African Americans and the Boston Saloon — steps away
• Piper’s Opera House — steps away
• The Great Fire of 1875 — steps away
• Mackay Mansion — 0.2 mi