The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

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"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is a short story by Mark Twain. It was also published as "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog". In it, Twain retells a story he heard from a bartender at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the hopeless gambler Jim Smiley. Twain describes him: "If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to--to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road."

[edit] Notes on the story

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Jim Smiley (the main character) was a constant gambler/con artist and would pretty much bet on anything

Jim Bet on Parson Walker's (filler character) wife dying

Bet on his bulldog pup fighting other dogs (eventually dies fighting a dog with no hind legs)

At the end Jim's frog goes against another frog for 40 dollars and loses (gets cheated). "Then he got the frog (Dan'l Webster) out and pried his mouth open. He took a Teaspoon and filled the frog full of quail shot." The implication is that the frog was heavy so Jim got conned out of 40 bucks.

The frog of the title, named Daniel Webster, is a California red-legged frog (Rana aurora).

Upon discovering a copy of this story translated into French, Twain translated it, word-for-word, back into English, keeping the French grammar structure, ending it with a note "thus is my story, to the distorted French eye." ^{[citation needed]}

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Trivia

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone allude to The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County with the title of episode 19, The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka.

Works of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Fiction: Advice for Little Girls • The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County • General Washington's Negro Body-Servant • My Late Senatorial Secretaryship • Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance • The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer • 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors • The Prince and the Pauper • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court • The American Claimant • Tom Sawyer Abroad • Pudd'nhead Wilson • Tom Sawyer, Detective • Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc • The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg • A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany • A Dog's Tale • King Leopold's Soliloquy • The War Prayer • The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • A Horse's Tale • Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Letters from the Earth • The Mysterious Stranger • No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
Non Fiction: The Innocents Abroad • Memoranda (monthly column) • Roughing It • Old Times on the Mississippi • A Tramp Abroad • Life on the Mississippi • How to Tell a Story and other Essays • Following the Equator • What Is Man? • Christian Science • Is Shakespeare Dead? • Queen Victoria's Jubilee • Mark Twain's Autobiography • Mark Twain's Notebook • Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War • The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood
Short Story Books: Sketches New and Old • A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime • Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches • Merry Tales • The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories