A Sarcastic Message to his Friend

In "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Twain writes about what he have heard from a man whom a friend of his have requested for Twain to get information about Leonidas W. Smiley. I believe Twain was pretty angry, or at least annoyed by his friend's request for he have written that he has:

"A lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that [his] friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that if [he] asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore [him] to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to [him]" (Bohner and Grant 272).

He even adds to it that, "If that was the design, it succeeded" (Bohner and Grant 272). "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first written as a letter to the friend from the East, or at least written in letter format, although it is now displayed as a short story. Mark Twain was living in a time when the East was considered civilized, cultured and advanced; and the West was considered less-educated for the fact that Americans have settled in the East far before they started to move out to the West. Frogs, "Smiley" says, can do almost anything, if they received the education (Bohner and Grant 274). This signifies the people deprived in education; that they could do almost anything, or just like the educated people, as long as they were educated. Twain's thoughts also proceed during the bet of frogs. The other man cheats by filling the frog up with "quail shots," which Smiley does not notice until he was gone (Bohner and Grant 275). He shows how education can also be meaningless at times: cheating, would be an example for that. Mark Twain wanted to send a message to his friend that, if the process of getting the information of Leonidas W. Smiley was just for him to go through the boring and meaningless process, it had succeeded and wanted to show the irritation he had experienced during it by stating indirectly that education, which his friend could have practiced excessively, can be useless at times.