Although Mark Twain lived in many stately homes, and counted the world’s social elite, including kings, queens, and American presidents, as his friends, he began his career as a writer in a dirt-floor cabin living with miners and prospectors on the western frontier. While many have visited the homes where he wrote his most famous works, few have traveled to Aurora, Nevada, the place where he got his start as a writer. This once prosperous mining town had a population of over 5,000 at the height of the Civil War. By 1865 the town’s fortunes plummeted when the mines ran out of gold ore. Today it is deserted and its buildings are gone. The cabins where 26 year-old Sam Clemens wrote newspaper stories during the summer of 1862 that led to his first writing job have not only completely disappeared, their locations in Aurora have been lost and forgotten.