Sometime in the first two weeks of June 1853, Samuel L. Clemens (aged seventeen) left his home and family in Hannibal, Missouri, for the first time, stopping initially in St. Louis and then going on to New York City, supporting himself as a journeyman printer in both places. Precisely when Clemens boarded the regular evening packet for St. Louis is not known: in his autobiography he said simply that he “disappeared one night and fled to St. Louis” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:287). On 26 October 1853, however, he mentioned that he had first departed Hannibal “more than four months ago” (26–?28 Oct 53 to OC and HCclick to open link). Since it would have been exactly four months on that day if he had left Hannibal on 26 June, Clemens himself seems to place his departure in the early weeks of that month.

Having sworn to his mother that he would not “throw a card or drink a drop of liquor” during his absence from home, Clemens was somewhat less than candid with her about his real plans, which, as Albert Bigelow Paine reported, were even then “to go farther than St. Louis” ( MTB , 1:93). Three years later, in fact, when Clemens decided to conceal his true plans for traveling to Brazil from his older brother, Orion, she slyly acknowledged his earlier deceit: “Ma knows my determination,” he wrote his younger brother, Henry, “but even she counsels me to keep it from Orion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St. Louis and went to New York—I can start to New York and go to South America.!” (5 Aug 56 to HCclick to open link).

Clemens’s incentive for leaving home had been building for more than two years. In January 1851 he had cheerfully joined with Henry in going to work for Orion, who had just begun his efforts to publish the Hannibal Western Union and, a few months later, to revive the moribund Hannibal Journal. In part, Clemens’s willingness simply derived from the relief he felt at ending his apprenticeship under Joseph P. Ament of the Hannibal Missouri Courier. But as Orion later admitted, his brother’s hopes for an easier and more independent berth were to be disappointed. “I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam,” Orion recalled somewhat lugubriously in 1880.

When Clemens ventured to enliven the Hannibal Journal by writing controversial satire for it (as he did in 1852 and 1853, while left briefly in charge), Orion’s response was not unequivocally encouraging ( ET&S1 , 6–7, 102). Only when matters seemed near a crisis did Orion think to gratify his brother’s literary impulse by instituting a feature he called, pointedly, “Our Assistant’s Column.” Clemens contributed this column only three times (on 23, 25, and 26 May 1853), and by the time of its second appearance, Orion was already looking for a replacement for his brother: “WANTED! An Apprentice to the Printing Business! Apply Soon” first ran on 25 May and continued daily through 10 June, evidently without success, for on the tenth Orion was obliged to suspend publication for a month—a clear sign that his brother had left him without adequate help (Wecter, 263).

In St. Louis Clemens was free to please himself. He probably stayed with his older sister, Pamela Ann, who in 1851 had married William A. Moffett (1816–65), later described by Clemens as “a merchant, a Virginian—a fine man in every way” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, in MTA , 2:289). Formerly in business in Hannibal, Moffett was now a partner in Moffett, Stillwell and Company, St. Louis commission merchants. The Moffetts’ first child, Annie, had been born on 1 July 1852, but they were still not keeping house: they rented their home on Pine Street and boarded nearby, with an aunt (see 5 Dec 53 to PAM, n. 3click to open link).

Clemens’s principal job was as a typesetter for the St. Louis Evening News, but he also worked on several other weekly journals published in the city. He may have tried to publish some sketches with the St. Louis Missouri Republican at this time, but his first months as a professional typesetter probably left him little time for literature ( ET&S1 , 8–9). A fellow printer recalled that “while the rest of us were drawing our $12 a week, it was all Sam Clemens could do to make $8 or $9. He always had so many errors marked in his proofs that it took most of his time correcting them. He could not have set up an advertisement in acceptable form to save his life” (Anthony Kennedy, 560). This description is somewhat suspect, but Clemens probably did have a bit yet to learn about his craft.

His two-month stay in St. Louis ended on 19 August, when he “ran away . . . & visited the World’s Fair” in New York City (SLC 1899, 3). He arrived in New York on 24 August, the date of his first surviving letter, which Orion promptly published in the Journal.