Known as “Tom” (presumably his middle name), Moore had clerked on the John J. Roe for two years, beginning in 1856 or 1857. His whereabouts at the time of this letter are not known. By 1866 he had risen to the rank of captain, for he was in command of the Ida Handy when it burned at St. Louis on 2 June of that year. In 1867 he retired from the river, eventually becoming the owner of several large sugar plantations near New Orleans, as well as the father of seven children (index of steamboat officers, MoShi; Way 1983, 220). He and Clemens had been acquainted since at least August and September 1857, when Clemens was cub pilot on the Roe. Twenty-five years later, on his final visit to New Orleans, Clemens went out of his way to find and visit his old friend: “I hunted up Tom Moore, who used to be mud clerk on the John J Roe when I was cub. He is short, & unwieldy with flesh, is a rich & respected burgher, & looks it. Good fellow is Tom; am going to his house to see his wife & six children, tomorrow” (4 May 82 to Olivia Clemensclick to open link, CU-MARK, in N&J2 , 465 n. 116). Moore died near New Orleans in May 1909.

The authenticity of this letter remains in doubt: the manuscript has not been found, and the text therefore derives from what Opie P. Read, editor of the Arkansaw Traveler (Little Rock), published on 14 July 1883, with this introduction: “The following letter, written by Samuel Clemens—‘Mark Twain’—has never heretofore been published. It was addressed to an old river man, once of New Orleans but now of Little Rock.” Three weeks later, however, Read said his Mark Twain letter was a hoax, a “very rough imitation . . . purporting to have been written in Memphis in 1859” (Read 1883, 4; Burns, 90–92). Yet the hoax may be Read’s retraction, not the letter itself. Clemens was furious when, also in July 1883, another of his letters, to Joseph Twichell, was published in Hartford (see N&J3, 28 n. 47). Since Read’s publication “was immediately reproduced by many of the leading papers in the country,” it is likely that Clemens knew of it, and may even have asked for the retraction. “Our motive in publishing this exposure of the fraud,” wrote Read, “is to exculpate the author of ‘Innocents A broad’ from any odium that might fall upon him in consequence of the letter.” But whether or not Clemens called for a retraction, the available circumstantial evidence supports the letter’s authenticity: Moore clearly fits Read’s description of “an old river man, once of New Orleans,” even though he was not “now of Little Rock”; Paine, who apparently received a copy of the letter from Stephen E. Gillis in 1907, identified Clemens’s correspondent as “John T. Moore, a young clerk on the John J. Roe,” information he could scarcely have learned from anyone but Clemens himself (MTB , 1:156; Davis 1956, 2). Existing evidence suggests that Clemens was in Memphis on the date Read gave for the letter. It is now thought that between 25 June and 28 July 1859 he made two St. Louis–New Orleans round trips as pilot of the J. C. Swon, captained by Isaac H. Jones. On the first of these trips the Swon left St. Louis on 25 June, arrived at New Orleans on 1 July, and started back upriver two days later. Noted for its fast upriver passages, the Swon definitely reached Memphis by 7 July and in fact may well have arrived there by midnight of the sixth. In any case, the likelihood is small that any hoaxer writing in 1883 would be able to approximate the facts of Clemens’s whereabouts in 1859 so closely. The letter writer’s elaborate pretense of laziness, his interest in “what a fool old Adam was,” and the joking about his love life (including a young lady he saw “the other day” in Vicksburg, before reaching Memphis) all strongly suggest Clemens’s manner, while the tone greatly resembles the tone of a letter he is known to have written as “Soleather” and deliberately published just two weeks later, in the 21 July New Orleans Crescent (SLC 1859, 4).