Renaming Nevada cove after Mark Twain stirs controversy
By MyMotherLode.com
Before he became Mark Twain, a dirt poor Samuel Clemens chased a dream of being a timber baron from the shores of Lake Tahoe. But his hopes went up in smoke when he accidentally started a wildfire while preparing to cook dinner over a campfire.
Nearly 150 years later, Nevada historians are embracing new research they say pinpoints the location of his camp near Incline Village on the lake’s northeast shore with the help of a huge, table-like granite boulder that Twain used for meals and card games.
The Nevada State Board on Geographic Names is considering a request to name the site Sam Clemens Cove after the man who later assumed his pen name as a newspaper reporter in nearby Virginia City and created literary characters Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
Nevada state Archivist Jeff Kintop, a board member, said the recognition is fitting because Twain penned perhaps the most eloquent and immortal descriptions of the lake and there is no geographic feature in the state named for him.
