They tried their fortune at Angel’s Camp, a place well known to readers of Bret Harte.  But it rained pretty steadily, and they put in most of their time huddled around the single stove of the dingy hotel of Angel’s, telling yarns.  Among the stories was one told by a dreary narrator named Ben Coon.  It was about a frog that had been trained to jump, but failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded him with shot.  The story had been circulated among the camps, but Mark Twain had never heard it until then.  The tale and the tiresome fashion of its telling amused him.  He made notes to remember it.

Their stay in Angel’s Camp came presently to an end.  One day, when the mining partners were following the specks of gold that led to a pocket somewhere up the hill, a chill, dreary rain set in.  Jim, as usual was washing, and Clemens was carrying water.  The “color” became better and better as they ascended, and Gillis, possessed with the mining passion, would have gone on, regardless of the rain.  Clemens, however, protested, and declared that each pail of water was his last.  Finally he said, in his deliberate drawl: 

“Jim, I won’t carry any more water.  This work is too disagreeable.  Let’s go to the house and wait till it clears up.”

Gillis had just taken out a pan of earth.  “Bring one more pail, Sam,” he pleaded.

“I won’t do it, Jim!  Not a drop!  Not if I knew there was a million dollars in that pan!”

They left the pan standing there and went back to Angel’s Camp.  The rain continued and they returned to jackass Hill without visiting their claim again.  Meantime the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth left standing on the slope above Angel’s, and exposed a handful of nuggets-pure gold.  Two strangers came along and, observing it, had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim-notice posted by Jim Gillis should expire.  They did not mind the rain—­not with that gold in sight —­and the minute the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans further, and took out-some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars.  It was a good pocket.  Mark Twain missed it by one pail of water.  Still, it is just as well, perhaps, when one remembers The Jumping Frog.

Matters having quieted down in San Francisco, he returned and took up his work again.  Artemus Ward, whom he had met in Virginia City, wrote him for something to use in his (Ward’s) new book.  Clemens sent the frog story, but he had been dilatory in preparing it, and when it reached New York, Carleton, the publisher, had Ward’s book about ready for the press.  It did not seem worth while to Carleton to include the frog story, and handed it over to Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press—­a perishing sheet-saying: 

“Here, Clapp, here’s something you can use.”

The story appeared in the Saturday Press of November 18, 1865.  According to the accounts of that time it set all New York in a roar, which annoyed, rather than gratified, its author.  He had thought very little of it, indeed, yet had been wondering why some of his more highly regarded work had not found fuller recognition.