Florida Gold Rush
Charles O. Edder
Keiser University
Abstract
The following is a literary analysis about The Case of George fisher written by Mark Twain. This piece of literature is a non fictional account of a series of lawsuits involving the heirs of the deceased George Fisher vs the US government. Twain highlights years of frivolous yet successful rulings for the Fishers as they kept returning repeatedly milking uncle Sam for whatever the could. This story is composed based on information from US senate documents that he cites late in the story. Florida Gold Rush
Twain immediately sets a somewhat angry tone in his story. It is as if he feels personally cheated or ripped off by a group of hacks. He uses powerful words in the beginning…show more content… On this day, George Fisher’s corn fields are destroyed either by Indians or the US troops pursuing them. A key factor of this story is that the US government will only pay for damages caused by US troops, NOT the indians. George fisher himself assumes the damage was caused by the indians and leaves it at that. It is only after George Fisher dies and his widowed wife remarries that the claims against the government begin. This is where the story only begins to become rather absurd. One thing that immediately sticks out for me is the fact that George Fisher’s widow that has remarried can still make a claim twenty years after the fact. The claim was denied at first but the heirs of Fisher will prove relentless as time goes on. In fact, they go on and on, refiling their claim for years and years from 1848 (26 years after the raid on Georges corn fields) to well into post civil…show more content… Many times he refers to the heirs of George Fisher as “suffering” and “victims”. He even refers to them as “children of many sorrows”. Twain's sarcastic tone is what illustrates the absurdness of this story. Throughout the story, Twain insinuates how fraudulent the heirs of Fisher are without directly accusing them of any illegal or fraudulent. Again he merely lets the reader make the conclusion with his blatant and sarcastic account of the events. In fact It's almost as if the many fields of corn, livestock and countless other goods seem to have been grossly exaggerated. We go from the original owner basically shrugging off what was assumably a small loss of property to the hands of the indians to the children of the new husband receiving $133,323.00 in damages and interest caused by the troops pursuing the indians.
Mark Twain does in fact refer to some actual events in his story, such as the “creek war” also known as the red stick war. Richard D Blackmon points out in his pamphlet titled “The Creek War” that “ The Creek War was a complicated affair. It was both a civil war between two factions within the Creek Nation and an international struggle in which the United States, Spain, Britain, and other Indian tribes played a part.”1 So we know that The Creek War was a real event that took place to help validate Twain's