Twain was born Samuel Longhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri.  He was a printers apprentice, a journalist, a steamboat pilot, a miner and a gambler before becoming the iconic author we know today.  His birth and death both came with the passing of Halleys comet.  He gained and lost a fortune.  His travels abroad and his friendship with Standard Oil Executive Henry Rogers, who took over his finances, helped him to get out of debt and fully payoff his creditors.   Twain is best know for his two novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  Huckleberry Finn is one of the most banned and debated books even today.  Twains name comes from a riverboat term regarding the waters depth.

"Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts." - Mark Twain

His travels abroad led to the writing of A Tramp Abroad and within this story our creative cache appears.  Twain was an artist of the spoken word his story about Bakers Bluejay Yarn not only leaves you laughing but guessing the next time you hear a bluejay squawking in your backyard.  The following is an excerpt from that story -

"They called in more jays; then more and more, till pretty soon this whole region `peared to have a blue flush about it. There must have been five thousand of them; and such another jawing and disputing and ripping and cussing, you never heard. Every jay in the whole lot put his eye to the hole and delivered a more chuckle-headed opinion about the mystery than the jay that went there before him. They examined the house all over, too. The door was standing half open, and at last one old jay happened to go and light on it and look in. Of course, that knocked the mystery galley-west in a second. There lay the acorns, scattered all over the floor.. He flopped his wings and raised a whoop. `Come here!` he says, `Come here, everybody; hang`d if this fool hasn`t been trying to fill up a house with acorns!` They all came a-swooping down like a blue cloud, and as each fellow lit on the door and took a glance, the whole absurdity of the contract that that first jay had tackled hit him home and he fell over backward suffocating with laughter, and the next jay took his place and done the same.

"Well, sir, they roosted around here on the housetop and the trees for an hour, and guffawed over that thing like human beings. It ain`t any use to tell me a bluejay hasn`t got a sense of humor, because I know better. And memory, too. They brought jays here from all over the United States to look down that hole, every summer for three years. Other birds, too. And they could all see the point except an owl that come from Nova Scotia to visit the Yo Semite, and he took this thing in on his way back. He said he couldn`t see anything funny in it. But then he was a good deal disappointed about Yo Semite, too."

The above text was excerpted from the following site: http://www.classicauthors.net/twain/trampabroad/trampabroad2.html

  If you would like to learn more about Mark Twain you can check out his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri which can lead to some great caching opportunities and it is near the upcoming Mega Event MOGA 2010

MOGA 2010

Thank you and Happy Geo Hunting!

Placed By A Proud Nebraskache Member