Building upon the last sections of his first book, Violence over the Land, in this presentation Ned Blackhawk reevaluates the American West’s most famous if often under-recognized author, Samuel Clemens, whose more famous pseudonym, Mark Twain, was first deployed in 1863 in Virginia City, Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise. This presentation considers the place of indigenous peoples—specifically Goshute Shoshones and Native Hawaiians—in Clemens’ early writings and identifies longstanding uncertainties about the place of non-Anglophone and indigenous peoples in Twain’s authorship.