Princess Carolyn

The frame narrative

Mark Twain inserted the Tom Quartz yarn into chapter sixty-one of Roughing It, his 591-page semi-autobiographical account of his 1861-1866 travels in Nevada, California, Utah and Hawaii. The American Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut issued the book in February 1872 by subscription in a green cloth binding with cover stamping by Carrie Burnham. The yarn is told by the prospector Dick Baker of the Calaveras County goldfields, a character Twain modelled on his cabin-mate Jim Gillis, with whom he had wintered at Jackass Hill in late 1864 and early 1865.

Plot of the yarn

Baker describes Tom Quartz as a grey cat who had attached himself to the placer-mining camp and had developed an opinion on every form of gold recovery practised there. The cat could distinguish auriferous quartz from common gravel by smell, and grew increasingly hostile after the miners switched their operation from placer panning to drift mining with blasting powder. A loosely tamped charge sent Tom Quartz a mile and a half straight up; he returned to the cabin singed, mud-caked and permanently set against quartz mining. Twain's comic effect rests on the cat's humanlike convictions about underground geology.

Sources and Twain's own cats

Twain kept at least nineteen cats over his lifetime according to the records compiled by biographer Albert Bigelow Paine in 1912, including cats named Apollinaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskite, Buffalo Bill, Sour Mash, Soapy Sal and Sin. Letters between Twain and his daughter Susy describe a kitten named Bambino who escaped from his New York City house in 1905 and prompted a newspaper appeal. The 1872 yarn predates these cats; Twain's autobiographical dictation of 30 September 1908 confirms the Tom Quartz character was wholly fabricated from miners' tall tales and contained no real cat.

Theodore Roosevelt's White House borrowing

President Theodore Roosevelt named one of the White House cats Tom Quartz in 1902 after reading the Twain chapter. The grey kitten was a gift to the Roosevelt children from House Speaker Joseph Cannon. Edith Roosevelt's letter of 6 January 1903 to her son Kermit at Groton School describes the kitten pouncing on the Roosevelt terrier Jack and chasing him under a sofa, an episode the President retold in his 1913 Autobiography.