• Twain went to Nevada in 1861 -- during the years of the Civil War, which had terminated his career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot.
• His brother Orion just been made secretary of the Nevada Territory, where a mining boom had caused 'silver fever.'
• The text is a convergence of the autobiographical and the fictional:
• Follows his adventures as a prospector and miner and as a journalist in Nevada, California, and the Hawaiian Islands, to his success as a public lecturer in 1866: from the pursuit of one form of success that fails to another that succeeds, i.e., from prospecting to writing.

Romance / Realism
Life / Death
Innocence / Experience
Fact / Fiction
Landscape / Society, i.e., non-human / human
First-hand experience / Literature
Anticipated / Actual
Sublime / Ordinary
Aesthetic / Commercial
East / West

Possible to structure the text by seeing it as divided into two equal parts:

"Roughing It is one of the first truly literary treatments of the desert in English, a carefully made comic narrative told in the voice of an innocent abroad in a western wonderland of his own imagining, a wonderland in which the romantic possibilities of the desert figure prominently." (Teague, p.55).

"I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word 'travel' had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us about it, and be a hero. And he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. And by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean, and 'the isthmus' as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face. What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe."  (Mark Twain, Roughing It  [1872; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985], Chapter 1, pp. 49-50.

Twain's narrator takes on "the stance of a strident, outraged child" (Limerick, Desert Passages, 63).

"now we had no swallow-tail coasts and white kid gloves ... no stove-pipe hats nor patent-peather boots,  nor anything else necessary to make life calm and peaceful. We were reduced to a war footing. Each of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and 'stogy' boots included." (Chapter 2, p. 52).

The narrator discovers "that western life shoves up against the limits of language itself, as if the region had an uncanny power to expose the discursive conventions structuring those very descriptions it elicits."  (Mitchell, p. 68).

"[T]he point of this book lies precisely in its deferral of expectations, especially of expectations for a West that exists as a place, not an angle of vision. The 'territory' of Roughing It emerges less as a region than a perspective, one evident only in juxtaposition to conventional norms and assumptions. Unlike prior accounts that had stressed the West's unique physical grandeur, Twain draws our attention instead to the unparalleled idiosyncrasies of its language. For the book's radical premise is that the West exists as a direction of thought far more than it does as geographical place or historical episode. Only by 'roughing it' epistemologically can we begin to appreciate the fact that the West we discover is always and only our own creation. Only by abandoning criteria for appropriate discourse and conventional narrative logic can we recognize the extent to which the myth of the West is indeed quite simply a myth. Curiously, however, the territory through which we are guided comes to seem vividly real, the result of Twain having adopted a regional idiom instead of accepting eastern usage." (Mitchell, p. 69).

"The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains if her great deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation!" (Roughing It, Chapter 2, p. 56)

"Clemens rescued himself from the monotony of desert reality by emphasizing and accelerating his activity as a writer, containing desert-inspired fears with barricades of words. [...] Using his words to distance himself, Clemens made a mockery of the actual suffering undergone by Americans in desert crossings. For the overland travelers of the 1840s and 1850s, the desert meant an exhausting struggle against death. For the stage passenger of 1861, the desert was a comparatively brief interlude of dust and annoyance. For the reminiscent writer of 1871, the desert was material for jokes. It could be presented as a foolish act of nature -- the product of nature in a clown's mood, making a joke of landscape." (Limerick, Desert Passages, p. 73).

"AT 4.20 P.M., SUNDAY, we rolled out of the station at Omaha, and started westward on our long jaunt. A couple of hours out, dinner was announced -- an 'event' to those of us who had yet to experience what it is to eat in one of Pullman's hotels on wheels; so, stepping into the car next forward of our sleeping palace, we found ourselves in the dining-car. It was a revelation to us, that first dinner on Sunday. And though we continued to dine for four days, and had as many breakfasts and suppers, our whole party never ceased to admire the perfection of the arrangements, and the marvelous results achieved. Upon tables covered with snowy linen, and garnished with services of solid silver, Ethiop waiters, flitting about in spotless white, placed as by magic a repast at which Delmonico himself could have no occasion to blush; and, indeed, in some respects it would be hard for that distinguished chef to match our menu; for, in addition to all that ordinarily makes up a first-chop dinner, had we not our antelope steak (the gormand who has not experienced this -- bah! what does he know of the feast of fat things?) our delicious mountain-brook trout, and choice fruits and berries, and (sauce piquant and unpurchasable!) our sweet-scented, appetite-compelling air of the prairies? You may depend upon it, we all did justice to the good things, and we washed them down with bumpers of sparkling Krug whilst we sped along at thirty miles and hour, agreed it was the fastest living we had ever experienced. [...]" (Roughing It,  Chapter 4, pp. 73-74).

"[A]n imperializing discourse drains imaginative possibilities from language in the process of making sense of the West. It conquers the region by recreating it in its own tired verbal image." (Mitchell, p. 78).

"Presently the driver exclaims:
'Here he comes!'
Every neck is stretched further,and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves.Well, I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling -- sweeping towards us nearer and nearer -- growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined -- nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear -- another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go swinging away like a belated fragment of a storm." (Chapter 8, pp.95-96).