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From the discouragement of his mining failures, Mark Twain began digging his way to regional fame as a newspaper reporter and humorist. The instant riches of a mining strike would not be his in the reporting trade, but for making money, his pen would prove mightier than his pickax. In the spring of 1864, less than two years after joining the Territorial Enterprise, he boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco, then and now a hotbed of hopeful young writers.
自從他因淘金失敗而感到心灰意冷之后，馬克吐溫便開始努力博取作為一名報社記者和幽默作家的地區性聲望。從事新聞報道工作當然不能使他像淘金成功者一樣立成巨富，但在掙錢方面他的筆桿卻比他的鋤鎬要有效得多。1864年春季，在他加盟《領土開發報》還不足兩年之時，他又乘驛站馬車前往舊金山，那兒在當時和現在都是有前途的年輕作家成長的搖籃。
Mark Twain honed and experimented with his new writing muscles, but he had to leave the city for a while because of some scathing columns he wrote. Attacks on the city government, concerning such issues as mistreatment of Chinese, so angered officials that he fled to the goldfields in the Sacramento Valley. His descriptions of the rough-country settlers there ring familiarly in modern world accustomed to trend setting on the West Coast. "It was a splendid population-for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained slothsstayed at home... It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day-and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says 'Well, that is California all over.
馬克吐溫磨煉并試驗了他的新筆力，但他卻因寫了一些尖銳的評論文章而被迫暫時離開這座城市。他圍繞著虐待華人等一類問題對市政府提出的尖銳批評惹得一些官員大為惱火，因之他只好逃到薩克拉門托山谷的金礦區暫避風頭。他對那兒的拓荒者們的描寫使西海岸地區富有創新精神的現代人倍感親切。"這兒的人們真是了不起--因為那些笨手笨腳、無精打彩、呆頭呆腦的懶漢都呆在家里……正是那些人們為加利福尼亞贏得了這樣的聲譽：當他們著手進行一項宏偉的事業時，他們會不計代價或風險而以一種豪邁的氣概和闖勁勇往直前，一千到底。加利福尼亞人至今仍保持著這樣的聲譽，因而，每當他們發起一項新的驚天動地的壯舉時，那些素來穩重的人便會像往常一樣微笑著說：'看吧，這完全是加利福尼亞的風格'。"
In the dreary winter of 1864-65 in Angels Camp, he kept a notebook.
1864年與1865年之交的那個冬天，馬克吐溫是在安吉爾斯礦區度過的。在這段沉悶的日子里，他記了一本筆記。
