Mark Twain's humorous account of his six years in Nevada, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the "vigorous new vernacular" of the West. Greeted as a work of "wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration" whose satiric humor made "pretension and false dignity ridiculous," Roughing It sold 75,000 copies within a year. The book still evokes a vivid portrait of frontier life and character, in part because of its distinctively western humor: the mock trial known as the Great Landslide Case; Buck Fanshaw's funeral; Mark Twain's adventures with the Genuine Mexican Plug; Jim Blaine's rambling story of his grandfather's old rain; Bemis's account of hunting the buffalo; and Dick Baker's story about his sagacious cat, Tom Quartz.