Excerpt: “I digress constantly,” declares the narrator of Roughing It (1872), Mark Twain’s semi-autobiographical account of “variegated vagabondizing” in the North American West (331, xxxi).1 With this aside, Twain calls attention to the way he depicts spaces where US settlement was far from an accomplished fact. Most of Roughing It is set in early-1860s Nevada—which had been a part of Mexico just more than a decade earlier—where Indigenous people contested US occupancy and where the new territorial government struggled to assert sovereignty. The narrator’s declaration casts the presentation of this milieu in Roughing It as “constantly” digressive.
