The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Characters

If you want to be fancy about it, you might say Jim Smiley is a man addicted to gambling. Or maybe he just likes to compete. Either way, he’ll bet on just about anything, including the long s...

Though we know very little about the stranger, we do know that he isn’t impressed by Dan’l Webster and keeps insisting that he looks like an ordinary frog to him. We also know that he r...

Though Simon Wheeler is bald and lazy, and seems simple, he may be cleverer than he looks. He’s certainly very aggressive in getting the narrator to listen to him. He uses tactics that sound...

The narrator is an educated man from the East who is traveling west. Along the way, he does a friend a favor by going to Angel’s mining camp to ask about the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. Instead...

Dan’l Webster is the frog that Smiley educates to jump higher, faster, and farther than any other frog. He beats all the competition until the day that the stranger fills him with quail shot,...

Andrew Jackson was the name of the dog that Jim Smiley had. To anyone but Smiley, it looked like Andrew wasn’t worth much. However, it turned out he always won dog fights. Andrew Jackson won...