The wildfire raging up near Lake Tahoe reminded us of our dear old cousin Mark. Mark Twain, that is, and what we remembered was his own brush with accidental arson up Tahoe way.

It's a little-known fact, if "fact" be something that can safely ascribed to Twain's baroquely embellished reminiscences of his years out West, that he was solely responsible for a horrendous forest fire on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

It was 1861, and the young not-yet-famous-writer was taking a break from the imaginary job of assisting his brother, the Secretary to the Governor of the Nevada Territory. There wasn't much government to speak of in the Territory, nor any real work at all -- but he'd heard tales of a gorgeous mountain lake paradise to the north, so one day he and a friend set out to find the spot. All was idyllic for the first two weeks of the camping trip, but then... well, perhaps we should let him tell the story in his own words -- here's Mark Twain in an excerpt from Roughing It:

By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old camp and laid in a new supply. We were gone all day, and reached home again about night-fall, pretty tired and hungry. While Johnny was carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our "house" for future use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot, ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to get the frying-pan. While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny, and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises! Johnny was on the other side of it. He had to run through the flames to get to the lake shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the devastation.

Who knew that one of the five islands in San Francisco Bay was privately owned? Even stranger, "Red Rock Island" is now up for sale, for a paltry $10 million.

The last time we remember one of our islands changing hands was way back in 1847, when Captain John C Fremont bought Alcatraz for $5000.

Fremont was in town, as you no doubt remember, as the head of a surveying expedition. A man of action, he wasn't satisfied with merely naming the "Golden Gate", but soon precipitated the Bear Flag Revolt against Mexico, and capped off his year by becoming Military Governor of California!

Alcatraz, then known as "Alcatraces" or "Pelican Island", was privately owned at the time of the Mexican War. As both surveyor and military man, Fremont quickly sized up the island as a strategically valuable piece of real estate. He bought the Rock in the name of the United States Government.

San Francisco was once pretty much a giant sand dune. We've even heard it said that the very name derives from the once common epithet "sands-can-drift-so", but we're pretty sure that this tale is apocryphal. Okay, we're positive, but a sunny weekend of wandering through Golden Gate Park prompted us to drift back to those early, sandier days.

Golden Gate Park was established in 1868, and a local newspaper described it as a "dreary waste of shifting sandhills where a blade of grass cannot be raised without four posts to keep it from blowing away."

And so it was. It was up to the first Park Superintendent William Hammond Hall to figure out a way to turn those rolling dunes into parkland, and he wracked his brain over the problem. Every exotic plant in the nursery was planted out in the dunes, but the strong ocean winds made short work of every one.

In fact, we might still be picnicking on sand today if it wasn't for one hungry horse.