"Goshoots" and the B&O Railroad in Mark Twain's Roughing It

Presented at the Annual Conference of the American Literature Association
May 2000

Because of his ambivalent feelings about questions of race and the westward expansion of Euro-Americans, Mark Twain’s representations of Native Americans in Roughing It, -- particularly in the chapter he devotes to the Gosiute Indians -- express two apparently contradictory cultural critiques. In what emerges as the dominant voice of the narrative (at least in terms of its discussions of Native Americans), Twain deploys and manipulates a variety of pseudo anthropological sources and interpretations to depict the Gosiutes – and, by explicit association all American Indians--as a degraded and inferior race. However, within a few paragraphs of some of his most racially charged and biting language, Twain, in an equally conspicuous and ironic register, turns this incendiary rhetoric about the Gosiutes upon what he considers the epitome of Euro-American colonial rapaciousness: the B&W railroad. This interplay between colonial rhetoric and ironic social criticism exposes the tensions inherent in Twain's representations of Native Americans and in the expansionist ideology of the emigrants to the West.


Twain sets up his later discussion of the Gosiute Indians as early as Chapter Five of Roughing It in which he devotes several paragraphs to a discussion of the “blood kinship” between Indians and coyotes. Contextualizing the disparaging evaluation of the Indian that follows, Twain first describes the coyote as belonging to a ‘race’: “for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence” (30). A “living, breathing, allegory of want” the coyote quickly demonstrates the vices with which Twain will also charge the Indians later in the narrative. Dishonest [“what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is... (32)] and willing to eat anything -- most tellingly the refuse of the westward movement of white men -- the coyote “seems to subsist soley on the carcasses of oxen, mules, and horses that have dropped out of emigrant trains and died...and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men...”(33).

Chapter Five: Roughing It

Lest the reader miss the obvious inference, the narrative makes explicit the relationship between Indians and coyotes implied above: “He (the coyote) will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert frequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat anything they can bite” (33). Native Americans in Twain’s representation have biological links to wild canines, a connection rhetorically underscored by the animalistic character of the word “bite” and accentuated in Twain’s description of the competition for food between the Indians and the coyotes in which the coyote’s “relations, the Indians, are just as apt to be the first to detect a seductive scent on the desert breeze...”(33). The language Twain employs -- coyotes as a ‘race’ and Indians as biting animals who track food by scent -- collapses the animal/human distinction between Native Americans and desert scavengers such as coyotes, ravens, and buzzards.

Summarizing the narrative’s biological and social classification system, Twain links Native Americans and the wild animals of the desert in a partnership of misery and predation: “It is considered that the coyote, and the obscene bird, and the Indian of the desert, testify their blood kinship with each other in that they live together in the waste places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and friendship while hating all other creatures and yearning to assist at their funerals” (34). This sentence compresses most of the key components of what Twain identifies as the abject state of the Indians: a physical relationship to a desolate land, a subsistence existence depending upon scavenging from that land, and hatred toward other life forms. It naturalizes Twain’s vituperative characterization of the Indians as “treacherous, filthy, and repulsive” within a biological family that equates Indians with birds and coyotes on the food chain. This characterization bonds Native Americans to animals while it distances them from white men. Significantly, in a text which gives Native Americans voice only when it chooses to mock their limited range of expression and mastery of English, the narrator claims that the Indians, coyotes, and ravens “testify” to their “kinship,” thereby couching the colonizer’s grafting of tropes of degradation as scientifically demonstrated by evidence presented by the Indians themselves.

This linking of Native American and coyote in the early pages of Roughing It sets the stage for the chapter long discussion of the Gosiute Indians, whom Twain renames the “Goshoot Indians.” For Twain, the debased relationship between Native Americans and their environment functioned as both source and reflection of the degraded nature of Native Americans themselves.

Such as the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, “scrawny,” creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American Negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations according to the proprietor (127).

Described as parasitic, “hanging about stations,” the “Goshoots” have none of the noble bearing Twain decries in romanticized representations of Native Americans. Twain replaces the noble visaged, “bronzed” warriors and “dusky” maidens of romanticized frontier fiction such as Cooper’s with “dull black” skinned Goshoots who look like “the ordinary American Negro.” The imputation of the dirt’s accumulation to “generations” applies the slur to ancestors and, in a backhanded way, the entire race.

“The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Cooper and worshipper of the Red Man... It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fall away from him and left him treacherous, filthy, and repulsive -- and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings -- but Goshoots after all” (129).

Albert Deane Richardson: Beyond the Mississippi, 1869

The original of the "Gosuite" drawing in Roughing It is an exact replica of this drawing of Ute Indian prisoners in Albert Deane Richardson's Beyond the Mississippi.

Twain was not the first writer to note the discrepancy between Cooper’s representations of Naive Americans and “first hand” observations by Western emigrants. Albert Deane Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi (1869) seems to have influenced both the form and content of Twain’s descriptions of the West in general and Native Americans in particular. Indeed, A case could be made that Twain’s Roughing It is a comic revision of Richardson’s work (which Twain seems to have possessed and read carefully). Not only is the picture at the head of Twain’s chapter on the Gosiutes pirated shamelessly from Richardson’s book but much of the substance of Twain’s critique of romanticized notions of Cooper and other “lovers” of the Red Man echoes Richardson’s earlier comments. It is tempting to accuse Twain of a bit of plagiarism, but this frustration with romantic images of Indians and Cooper’s role in their propagation dates back to some of Twain’s earliest writing about Native Americans and the West. Its occurrence in the works of both Twain and Richardson suggests Cooper bashing may have had a broader cultural parlance, functioning as a trope of Yankee ignorance about the “realities” of the West.


Beyond the sarcasm of his complaints about the perfect English grammar of Cooper’s Native Americans, Twain also differs from Richardson’s representations of Gosiutes in his determination to universalize his observations and ground them in the putative physical degradation of the Native American. His preoccupation with the hunger of the Gosiutes offers an example of this distinction between his representations of Native Americans and Richardson’s:

...hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jackass rabbits, crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and coyotes (127).

Embezzlers who steal food taken from coyotes and birds, the Indians fall lower than hogs on the Twainian evolutionary ladder. The ultimate and most degraded of bestial scavengers, the Goshoots, “produce nothing at all” and have no organized social or communal structure, “no villages, and no gatherings together in strictly defined tribal communities” . Insatiable consumers, “hungry, always hungry,” the Indians Twain describes also scavenge from humans with a “prideless” begging that infuriates Twain; he morally characterizes this behavior with one of the more perverse paradoxes of the his rhetoric of denigration when he describes the Goshoots as “indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless” (127).

“Near a little road-side grocery…stood a Noble Red Man. Indifferent to his tattered clothing, which offered no protection from the sharp wintry nights…his whole soul was wrapped in a whisky bottle…Mr. Cooper died too early. I think one glimpse of this aboriginal would have saved his pen much labor, and early American literature many Indian Heroes."

Drawing and passage from Albert Deane Richardson's Beyond the Mississippi (512)

As David Spurr notes, this type of rhetorical leap from observation of physical and cultural behaviors to conclusions about moral character--a move rationalized as scientific observation and reasoning by Darwin’s discussion of the “low morality of savages” in Descent of Man--frequently appeared in literature and journalism influenced by social Darwinism. Spurr notes that “abjection of the savage has always served as a pretext for imperial conquest and domination. While this abjection had traditionally formed part of the mythic imagination, the nineteenth century elevated it to the level of scientific truth” (81). In his chapter on the Gosiutes, Twain specifically refers to Darwin. In so doing, he demonstrates his own willing to stretch an interpretation of a source for comic and critical ends while providing a prominent example of how Darwin’s ideas were distorted in the name of race theory. According to Twain, “…our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, whichever animal-Adam the Darwinians trace them to” (127). In as much as it suggests that white men and Native Americans (or any other race for that matter) have different descendants, Twain’s argument contradicts Darwin’s claims in the Descent of Man that the similarities between human races outweigh the differences and, therefore, ultimately suggest a shared ancestry. Such technicalities do not deter Twain, however, because his project is not to practice science but to proffer a rationale for colonial displacement of a race that stands in the way of Euro-American westward expansion. In this form of colonial discourse, physical abjection and moral abjection present themselves as a pair licensing otherwise difficult to justify displacements and genocides.

George Wood: The Uncivilized Races of Men, 1871

Comanche Indian in full war dress from George Wood's
Uncivilized Races of Men

For the same reasons he looks to Darwin for intellectual grounding, Twain also turns to the armchair anthropology of George Wood’s Uncivilized Races of Men for scientific legitimacy. Ranking the “Goshoot” Indians as the “wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen up to this writing,” Twain places the “Goshoots” among the “savage tribe(s)” described in Wood’s two volume, copiously illustrated, study of the races of the world. Although replete with generalizations, condescending attitudes, and degrading observations and illustrations typical of the genre, Wood's anthropological epic has a much more positive view of American Indians than Twain’s Roughing It. Wood admires “these remarkable tribes” and delights in extended detail about Native American customs, combat and hunting rituals, and religious beliefs (Uncivilized Races 670-684). The text documents Wood’s enthusiastic descriptions with pictures of noble looking appearances and costumes more closely resembling Cooper’s descriptions than Twain’s.


Because Wood focuses on the Plains Indians and makes no mention of the tribes Twain encounters in the American West (Gosiute, Digger, Paiute, Washoe), his condescending reverence for these cultures and tribes constitutes exactly the type of representation that Twain wishes to counter by presenting the “real Indians” of his experience as pathetic, debased shadows of the images constructed by Wood and others. For this reason, Twain opts to ignore Wood’s representations of Native Americans, choosing instead to rank the Gosiutes with the Bosjeman (or bushmen) of South Africa. This shift allows Twain to present the degradation of Native Americans as not only relative to white men but absolute in comparison to all human races.

"Bojeman woman with child from George Wood's
Uncivilized Races of Men

In his study of colonial rhetoric, The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr points to another level upon which this “rhetoric of debasement,” as he terms it, operates. Along with sanctioning territorial dispossession and violence against the colonized, the language of debasement reflects and directs the colonizing narrator’s and culture’s anxieties about themselves and their own social, moral, and economic status. Spurr usefully quotes Julie Kristeva’s analysis of the function that the abject plays for the individual or culture describing it: “The abject is neither the subject nor the object...It represents the crisis of the subject...insofar as it would not yet be, or would no longer be separated from the object. Its limits would no longer be established. It would be menaced by possible collapse into the object” (Kristeva 1983: 39; quoted in Spurr 78). Applying this notion to Roughing It suggests that the process of designating the other as object has less to do with the character of that other than it does the narrator’s own conception of a slippage in his or his culture’s identity. Spurr also summarizes Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse in a context that applies directly to Twain’s representations of Native Americans in Roughing It: “When notions such as “civilization” and “reason” are in danger of being called into question, their definition, as well as their identification with a particular people, is established by pointing to their supposed opposites, to what can be designated as “savagery” or “madness” (Spurr 77).

In the context of this deployment of Wood, Richardson, and Darwin, the sudden turn Twain makes at the end of his description of the Gosiutes debilerately complicates the race theories and colonial ideologicies he has worked to prop up. Having derided Indians as “treacherous, filthy, and repulsive," Twain finds that he cannot put down the rhetorical sword he has so aptly wielded and turns the entire system on its head with an hilarious application of all that he has posited about Indians to that nemesis of westward expansion and human decency: the Baltimore and Washington Railroad Company. In one blistering paragraph, designed to scorch the quintessential icon of nineteenth-century capitalism, the railroads, Twain mocks anthropology, Christian pity, and the rhetorical and moral system at work in Twain’s efforts to distance himself and his culture from the Native Americans whom these same railroads helped drive from their land.

The Turn

“There is an impression abroad that the Baltimore and Washington Railroad Company and many of its employees are Goshoots, but it is an error. There is only one plausible resemblance, which while it is apt to mislead the ignorant, cannot deceive parties who have contemplated both tribes. But seriously, it was not only poor wit, but very wrong to start the report referred to above; for however innocent the motive may have been, the necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class who have a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the Rocky Mountains, Heaven knows! If we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in God’s name, let us at least not throw mud at them.”

The last line of the chapter, with its plea for compassion and request, “in God’s name,” that we not throw mud at “these poor naked creatures” seems absurdly poignant given how much energy Twain and Roughing It devote to exactly that project. This reading assumes that the “poor naked creatures” Twain refers to are the “Goshoots” But what if this poor tribe toiling in the mountains is made up of the employees of the B&W? That deliberate blurring, that unanswered question, speaks volumes about the fragility of the binaries Twain himself has worked so diligently to construct. While logic and the tenor of Twain’s previous descriptions of the “Goshoots” suggest that “naked” must refer to the Indians, the structure of the sentences carefully leaves room for doubt. This interpretive challenge only further emphasizes the unsustainable tensions and arbitrary constructions undermining any attempt to create a stable and coherent representation of an “other” in Twain’s era or any other moment in history.

It would make for a tidy concluding thesis for this essay to argue that Twain’s ironic twist on his representation of the Gosiutes marked a never-looked-back-upon turning point in his writing about Native Americans. As my fellow panelists will probably document, such a reading would require stubbornly reductive readings of characters such as Injun Joe and texts such as Huck and Tom Among the Indians. The post Roughing It Twain was not immune to racist and cutting disparagements of Native Americans. His respect and empathy for Indians rarely rose above condescending representations of their relative innocence (such as that in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven”). But the sensitivity to colonial hypocricy and rapacity that first emerges in his ironic comparison of the railroad company and its employees to the Gosiutes has a sustained trajectory that reaches a paternalistic apogee in later pieces such as “To the People Living in Darkness” and “The United States of Lyncherdom.”

Although the limits of Twain’s understanding of and exposure to Native American culture (limits imposed by his own prejudices), prevented him from ever becoming an advocate for American Indians, these limits did not prevent Twain from becoming a forceful critic of those he considered the moral descendents of the employees of the B&W railroad: the proponents of late nineteenth-century American imperialism. The disjunction between Twain's passionate and sustained critique of American imperialism in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and his vituperative dismissal of American Indians and their claims to the American West troubles Twain aficionados because we cannot reconcile these two positions.

. In the same way that Hank Morgan lampoons the ignorance of Arthur's Camelot while never understanding his own naive relationship to the destructive power of American capitalism and technological power, Samuel Clemens could denounce

Delivered at the American Literature Association Annual Conference, May 2000

Page last updated: 23 February, 2004