No letters are known to survive for the next fourteen and a half months. Probably Clemens remained in St. Louis, working as a typesetter, until mid-June 1855 before moving to Keokuk, Iowa. Keokuk was a bustling frontier town, population about sixty-five hundred, some two hundred miles above St. Louis on the Mississippi River. Orion Clemens had married Mary Eleanor (Mollie) Stotts, a Keokuk native, on 19 December 1854. On 9 June 1855, after Orion sold his share in the Muscatine Journal to James W. Logan earlier that week, the couple moved to Keokuk. There, on 11 June, Orion became the new owner of the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office (MEC, 3; Lorch 1929, 418; “Sold Out,” Keokuk Morning Glory, 6 June 55, 2; OC and Wilson, 2; OC 1855, 2). Naturally restless and wary of being trapped by what he considered a job without a future, Clemens may well have seen his older brother’s new enterprise as an opportunity. By mid-June he seems to have left St. Louis for Keokuk, for his name appeared in a 16 June “List of Letters” unclaimed at the St. Louis post office (Missouri Republican, 16 June 55, 3). It evidently was Clemens whom the Keokuk Dispatch of 29 June described as follows:
We know a man in this city who would make a prime editor, and we believe that if he has any “genus” at all, it runs in that direction, “’cos” he says there is not a single paper published in town worth reading—and he says that not one of them has any news—and if he published a paper, he says he would make news, and lots of it, and spirited news, too.
We propose to have all the papers in the city to club together and secure the services of this chap, and have spirited news; it will pay—we bet on it. What do you all say about hiring this editorial genius? He will save the expense of a telegraph. Everybody in the morning will be up at four to get the new spirited news, and everybody will take the paper. Our private opinion is that the thing must be “did,” for he is the only population in the country. (Untitled notice, Keokuk Weekly Dispatch, 5 July 55, 1, reprinting the Keokuk Dispatch of 29 June 55)
If this local “genus” was indeed Clemens, then it is clear that he made his mid-July visits to Hannibal and the nearby villages of Paris and Florida on a downriver trip after he settled in Keokuk and not while en route from St. Louis, as previously thought (see N&J1 , 14, 18–38; MTBus , 20–28; and Ralph Gregory: 1963, 9; 1971, 3). In the three small towns Clemens arranged for the care and disposition of family property before continuing downriver to St. Louis. There he attended to several errands, among them an effort to become a Mississippi River cub pilot. He had with him a letter from Orion introducing him to wealthy James Clemens, Jr. (1791–1878), a distant cousin, who he hoped would help him realize that ambition. James Clemens later told Orion that only illness prevented him from interceding with a friend “who is Pilot of one of the large boats,” despite a conviction that “your brother should stick to his present trade or art” (letter of 6 Aug 55, CU-MARK; see N&J1 , 36 n. 40).
Following his trip to St. Louis, Clemens returned to Keokuk and Orion’s print shop. There is persuasive evidence that briefly toward the end of 1855, and perhaps into 1856, he left Orion’s employ to set type on a newspaper published across the Mississippi in Warsaw, Illinois (Branch 1983–84, 201–5). But by 17 January 1856 at the latest, when he spoke at the Keokuk printers’ celebration of Franklin’s birth, Clemens was back in Orion’s shop, working alongside their brother Henry and earning, according to Paine, “five dollars a week and board” ( MTB , 1:104).