Schoolmates of sixty yearsⒶapparatus note ago—Mary Miller, one of Mr. Clemens’s first sweethearts—Artimisia Briggs, another—Mary Lacy, another— JimmyⒶapparatus note McDaniel, to whom Mr. Clemens told his first humorous story— Mr. Richmond, Sunday-school teacher, afterwards owner of Tom Sawyer’s cave, which is now being ground into cement—Hickman, the showy young captain—Reuel GridleyⒶapparatus note and the sack of flour incident—The Levin Jew boys called Twenty-two—GeorgeⒶapparatus note Butler, nephew of Ben Butler—The incident of getting into bed with Will BowenⒶapparatus note to catch the measles, and the successful and nearly fatal case which resulted.
We will return to those school childrenⒶapparatus note of sixty years ago. I recall Mary Miller. She was not my first sweetheart, but I think she was the first one that furnished me a broken heart. I fell in love with her when she was eighteen and I was nine,Ⓐapparatus note but she scorned me, and I recognized that this was a cold world. I had not noticed that temperature before. I believe I was as miserable as evenⒶapparatus note a grown man could be. But I think that this sorrow did not remain with me longⒺexplanatory note. As I remember it, I soon transferred my worship to Artimisia Briggs, who was a year older than Mary Miller. When I revealed my passion to her she did not scoff at it. She did not make fun of it. She was very kind and gentle about it. But she was also firm, and said she did not want to be pestered by childrenⒺexplanatory note.
And there was Mary Lacy. She was a schoolmate. But she also was out of my class because of her advanced age. She was pretty wild and determined and independent. She was ungovernable, and was considered incorrigible. But that was all a mistake. SheⒶapparatus note married, and at once settled down and became in all ways a model matron and was as highly respected as any matron in the town. Four years ago she was still living, and had been married fifty yearsⒺexplanatory note.
JimmyⒶapparatus note McDaniel was another schoolmate. His age and mine about tallied. His father kept the candy shopⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note and he was the most envied little chap in the town—after Tom Blankenship (“Huck Finn”)—Ⓐapparatus notefor although we never saw him eating candy, we supposed that it was, nevertheless, his ordinary diet. He pretended that he never ate it, andⒶapparatus note didn’t care for it because there was nothing forbidden about it—there was plenty of it and he could have as much of it as he wanted. Still there was circumstantial evidence that suggested that he only scorned candy in [begin page 418] public to show off, for he had the worst teeth in town.Ⓐapparatus note He was the first human being to whom I ever told a humorous story, so far as I can remember. This was about Jim WolfⒶapparatus note and the catsⒺexplanatory note; and I gave him that tale the morning after that memorable episode. I thought he would laugh his remainingⒶapparatus note teeth out. I had never been so proud and happy before, and IⒶapparatus note have seldom been so proud and happy since. I saw him four years ago when I was out thereⒺexplanatory note. He was working in a cigar-making shop.Ⓐapparatus note He wore an apron that came down to his knees and a beard that came nearly half as far,Ⓐapparatus note and yet it was not difficult for me to recognize him. He had been married fifty-four years. He had many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and also even posterity, they all said—thousands—yet the boy to whom I had told the cat story when we were callow juvenilesⒶapparatus note was still present in that cheerful little old man.
Artimisia Briggs got married not long after refusing me. She married Richmond, the stone mason,Ⓐapparatus note who was my Methodist Sunday-school teacherⒺexplanatory note in the earliest days, and he had one distinction which I envied him: atⒶapparatus note some time or other he had hit his thumb with his hammer and the result was a thumb-nailⒶapparatus note which remained permanently twisted and distorted and curved and pointed,Ⓐapparatus note like a parrot’sⒶapparatus note beak. I should not consider it an ornament now, I suppose,Ⓐapparatus note but it had a fascination for me then, and a vast value, because it was the only one in the town. He was a very kindly and considerate Sunday-school teacher, and patient and compassionate, so he was the favorite teacher with us little chaps. In that school they had slender oblongⒶapparatus note pasteboard blue tickets, each with a verse from the Testament printed on it, and you could get a blue ticket by reciting two verses. By reciting five verses you could get three blue tickets, and you could trade these at the bookcase and borrow a book for a week. I was under Mr. Richmond’s spiritual care every now and then for two or three years, and he was never hard upon me. I always recited the same five verses every Sunday. He was always satisfied with the performance. He never seemed to notice that these were the same five foolish virginsⒺexplanatory note that he had been hearing about every Sunday for months. I always got my tickets and exchanged them for a book. They were pretty dreary books, for there was not a bad boy in the entire bookcase. They were all good boys and good girls and drearily uninteresting, but they were better society than none, and I was glad to have their company and disapprove of it.
Twenty years ago Mr. Richmond had become possessed of Tom Sawyer’s cave in the hills three miles from town,Ⓐapparatus note and had made a tourist-resortⒶapparatus note of itⒺexplanatory note. But that cave is a thing of the past now.Ⓐapparatus note In 1849 when the gold seekersⒶapparatus note were streaming through our little town of Hannibal, many of our grown men got the gold fever, and I think that all the boys had it. On the Saturday holidays in summertimeⒶapparatus note we used to borrow skiffs whose owners were not present and go down the river three miles to the cave hollow, (Missourian for “valley”),Ⓐapparatus note and there we staked out claims and pretended to dig gold, panning out half a dollar a day at first; two or three times as much, later, and by and by whole fortunes, as our imaginations became inured to the work. Stupid and unprophetic lads! We were doing this in play and never suspecting. Why,Ⓐapparatus note that cave hollow and all the adjacent hills were made of gold! ButⒶapparatus note we did not know it. We took it for dirt. We left its rich secret in its own peaceful possession and grew up in poverty and went wandering about the world struggling for bread—and this because we had not the gift of prophecy. That region was all dirt and rocks to us, yet all it needed was to be ground up and scientifically handled and it was gold. That is to say, the whole region was a cement mineⒶapparatus note—and they make [begin page 419] the finest kind of Portland cement there now, five thousand barrels a day, with a plant that cost two million dollars.Ⓐapparatus note
Several months ago a telegram came to me from there saying that Tom Sawyer’s cave was now being ground into cementⒺexplanatory note—would I like to say anything about it in public? But I had nothing to say. I was sorry we lost our cement mine but it was not worth while to talk about it at this late day, and, takeⒶapparatus note it all around, it was a painful subject anyway. There are seven miles of Tom Sawyer’s cave—that is to say the lofty ridge which conceals that cave stretches down the bank of the Mississippi seven miles to the town of Saverton.Ⓐapparatus note
For a little while Reuel Gridley attended that school of ours. He was an elderly pupil; he was perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Then came the Mexican warⒶapparatus note and he volunteeredⒺexplanatory note. A company of infantry was raised in our town and Mr. Hickman, a tall, straight, handsome athlete of twenty-five,Ⓐapparatus note was made captainⒶapparatus note of it and had a sword by his side and a broad yellow stripe down the leg of his grayⒶapparatus note pants. And when that companyⒶapparatus note marched back and forth through the streets in its smart uniform—which it did several times a day for drill—its evolutions were attended by all the boys whenever the school hours permitted. I can see that marching companyⒶapparatus note yet, and I can almost feel again the consuming desire that I had to join it. But they had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
I saw the splendid Hickman in his old age. He seemed about the oldest man I had ever seen—an amazing and melancholy contrast with the showy young captain I had seen preparing his warriors for carnage so many, many years before. Hickman is dead—it is the old storyⒺexplanatory note. As Susy said,Ⓐapparatus note “What is it all for?”Ⓔexplanatory note
Reuel Gridley went away to the wars and we heard of him no more for fifteen or sixteen years. Then one day in Carson City while I was having a difficulty with an editor on the sidewalk—an editor better built for war than I was—I heard a voice sayⒶapparatus note “Give him the best you’ve got, Sam, I’m at your back.” It was Reuel Gridley. He said he had not recognized me by my face but by my drawling style of speech.
He went down to the Reese River mines about that time and presently he lost an election bet in his mining camp, and by the terms of it he was obliged to buy a fifty-pound sack of self-risingⒶapparatus note flour and carry it through the town, preceded by music, and deliver it to the winner of the bet. Of course the whole camp was present and full of fluid and enthusiasm. The winner of the bet put up the sack at auction for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Fund, and sold it. The purchaser put it up for the Fund and sold it. The excitement grew and grew. The sack was sold over and over again for the benefit of the Fund. The news of it came to Virginia City by telegraph. It produced great enthusiasm, and Reuel Gridley was begged by telegraph to bring the sack and have an auction in Virginia City. He brought it. An open barouche was provided, also a brass band. The sack was sold over and over again at Gold Hill, then was brought up to Virginia City toward night and sold—and sold again, and again, and still again,Ⓐapparatus note netting twenty or thirty thousandⒶapparatus note dollars for the Sanitary Fund. Gridley carried it across California and soldⒶapparatus note it at various towns. He sold it for large sums in Sacramento and in San Francisco. He brought it East, sold it in New York and in various other cities, thenⒶapparatus note carried it out to a great Fair at St. Louis, andⒶapparatus note went on selling it; andⒶapparatus note finally made it up into small cakes [begin page 420] and sold those at aⒶapparatus note dollar apiece. First and last, the sack of flour which had originally cost tenⒶapparatus note dollars, perhaps, netted more than two hundred thousand dollars for the Sanitary Fund. Reuel Gridley has been dead these many, many years—it is the old storyⒺexplanatory note.
In that school were the first Jews I had ever seen. It took me a good while to get over the awe of it. To my fancy they were clothed invisibly in the damp and cobwebby mouldⒶapparatus note of antiquity. They carried me back to Egypt, and in imagination I moved among the Pharaohs and all the shadowy celebrities of that remote age. The name of the boys was Levin. We had a collective name for them which was the only really large and handsome witticism that was ever born in that Congressional district.Ⓐapparatus note We called them “Twenty-two”Ⓐapparatus note—and even when the joke was old and had been worn threadbare we always followed it with the explanation, to make sure that it would be understood, “Twice LevinⒶapparatus note—twenty-two.”Ⓔexplanatory note
There were other boys whose names remain with me. Irving Ayres—but no matter, he is deadⒺexplanatory note. Then there was GeorgeⒶapparatus note Butler, whom I remember as a child of seven wearing a blue leather belt with a brass buckle,Ⓐapparatus note and hated and envied by all the boys on account of it. He was a nephew of General Ben Butler and fought gallantly at Ball’s Bluff and in several other actions of the Civil WarⒶapparatus note. He is dead, long and long agoⒺexplanatory note.
Will BowenⒶapparatus note (dead long ago)Ⓔexplanatory note, Ed Stevens (dead long ago)Ⓔexplanatory note, and John Briggs were special mates of mine. John is still livingⒺexplanatory note.
In 1845, when I was ten years old, there was an epidemic of measles in the town and it made a most alarming slaughter among the little people. There was a funeral almost daily, and the mothers of the town were nearlyⒶapparatus note demented with fright. My mother was greatly troubled. She worried over Pamela and Henry and me,Ⓐapparatus note and took constant and extraordinary pains to keep us from coming into contact with the contagion.Ⓐapparatus note But upon reflection I believed that her judgment was at fault. It seemed to me that I could improve upon it if left to my own devices. I cannot remember now whether I was frightened about the measles or not, but I clearly remember that I grew very tired of the suspense I suffered on account of being continually under the threat of death. I remember that I got so weary of it and so anxious to have the matter settled one way or the other, and promptly, that this anxiety spoiled my days and my nights. I had no pleasure in them. I made up my mind to end this suspenseⒶapparatus note and be done with it. Will BowenⒶapparatus note was dangerously ill with the measles and I thought I would go down there and catch them. I entered the house by the front way and slipped along through rooms and halls,Ⓐapparatus note keeping sharp watch against discovery, and at last I reached Will’s bed-chamberⒶapparatus note in the rear of the house on the second floor and got into it uncaptured. But that was as far as my victory reached. His mother caught me there a moment later and snatched me out of the house and gave me a most competent scolding and drove me away. She was so scared that she could hardly get her words out, and her face was white. I saw that I must manage better next time, and I did. I hung about the lane at the rear of the house and watched through cracks in the fence until I was convinced that the conditions were favorable; thenⒶapparatus note I slipped through the back yard and up the back way and got into the room and into the bed with Will BowenⒶapparatus note without being observed. I don’t know how long I was in the bed. I only remember that Will Bowen,Ⓐapparatus note as society,Ⓐapparatus note had no value for me, for he was too sick to even notice that I was there. When I heard his mother coming I covered up my head, but that device was a failure. It was dead summertimeⒶapparatus note—the cover was nothing [begin page 421] more than a limp blanket or sheet, and anybody could see that there were two of us under it. It didn’t remain two very long. Mrs. BowenⒶapparatus note snatched me out of theⒶapparatus note bed and conducted me home herself, with a grip on my collar which she never loosened until she delivered me into my mother’s hands along with her opinion of that kind of a boy.
It was a good case of measles that resulted. It brought me within a shade of death’s door. It brought me to where I no longer tookⒶapparatus note any interest in anything, but, on the contrary, felt a total absence of interest—which was most placid and tranquil and sweet and delightful andⒶapparatus note enchanting. I have never enjoyed anything in my life any more than I enjoyed dying that time. I wasⒶapparatus note, in effect, dying. The word had been passed and the family notified to assemble around the bed and see me off. I knew them all. There was no doubtfulness in my vision. They were all crying, but that did not affect me. I took but the vaguest interest in it, and that merely because I was the centreⒶapparatus note of all this emotional attention and was gratified by it and vain of itⒺexplanatory note.Ⓐapparatus note
When Dr. CunninghamⒺexplanatory note had made up his mind that nothing more could be done for me he put bags of hot ashes all over me. He put them on my breast, on my wrists, on my anclesⒶapparatus note; and so, very much to his astonishment—and doubtless to my regret—he dragged me back into this world and set me going again.
I recall Mary Miller . . . this sorrow did not remain with me long] Clemens’s classmate Mary Miller (b. 1835?), who regularly competed with him for the spelling medal, was the eldest daughter of lumber merchant Thomas S. Miller (1807?–60) and Mary E. Miller (1812?–49). She was about the same age as Clemens, according to census records. She married Clemens’s friend and classmate John B. Briggs (Hannibal Courier: “Obituary,” 30 Aug 1849, unknown page; “Look Out for the Old Lumber Yard,” 4 Mar 1852, unknown page; Marion Census 1850, 307; Marion Census 1870, 447; “Good-Bye to Mark Twain,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 3 June 1902, 1).
I soon transferred my worship to Artimisia Briggs . . . pestered by children] Artemissa (also spelled Artimissa, Artimisia, Artemesia, and Artemissia) Briggs (1832–1910), the elder sister of Clemens’s friend and classmate John B. Briggs, was the second of eight children of Rhoda Briggs (b. 1811?) and William Briggs (b. 1799?) ( Marion Census 1850, 315–16; Marion Census 1860, 145; death certificate for Artemissia Briggs, Missouri Digital Heritage 2009a; Inds, 306–7).
Mary Lacy . . . was a schoolmate . . . Four years ago she was still living, and had been married fifty years] Most likely, Clemens was confusing Mary Lacy with another schoolmate, Mary Nash. Mary Elizabeth Lacy (b. 1838?) was the daughter of John L. Lacy (1808?–83), who in 1850 worked as a pork packer to support his large family. She married Leonard Mefford in Hannibal on 31 May 1854 and by 1860 had two children ( Marion Census 1850, 319; Marion Census 1860, 149; “Missouri Marriage Records, 1805–2002” 2009). In 1898 Clemens sketched a plan in his notebook to use her as a character in “Schoolhouse Hill,” the version of “The Mysterious Stranger” set in the fictional Hannibal, St. Petersburg. When Satan arrives on earth he finds that his son, little Satan, “has been rejected by Mary Lacy, who took him for crazy & who is now horribly sorry she didn’t jump at the chance, since she finds that the Holy Family of Hell are not disturbed by the fire, but only their guests. Satan is glad his boy didn’t marry beneath him—he is arranging with the shade of Pope Alexander VI to marry him to a descendant” (Notebook 40, TS pp. 51–52, CU-MARK). Mary Nash (b. 1832?) was the half-sister of Clemens’s friend Tom Nash. She married John Hubbard of Frytown in January 1851. In 1901, a year before Clemens’s Hannibal trip, he responded to an announcement of her fiftieth anniversary, “I remember the wedding very well, although it was 50 years ago; & I wish you & your husband joy of this anniversary of it” (13 Jan 1901 to Hubbard, MoHM). He planned to (but ultimately did not) use her as the model for two literary characters: in his working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” he named her Mary Benton and characterized her as “wild”; and in his working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” he called her Louisa Robbins and characterized her as “Mary Nash, bad.” He may have based the independent Rachel Hotchkiss, the title character in “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” on her as well ( Inds, 214–59, 287–88, 134–213, 337; HH&T, 383; MSM, 431).
Jimmy McDaniel was another schoolmate . . . His father kept the candy shop] James W. (Jimmy) McDaniel (1833–1911) was the son of William McDaniel (b. 1811?), who ran the confectionary and variety store in Hannibal, which advertised that the “Confectionary Department consists in all the finest varieties of Candy, Nuts, Raisins, Prunes, Dates, Figs, Currants, Citrons, fig Paste, Jellies, Preserves and many other articles too tedious to mention” (“Confectionary and Fancy Goods,” Hannibal Courier, 7 Oct 1852, unknown page). Jimmy worked as a bookseller at fifteen, a tobacconist before he was twenty, a salesman at his father’s store at thirty, and later a packer and manager of the Holmes-Dakin cigar company (Fotheringham 1859, 40; Honeyman 1866, 37; Hallock 1877, 100; Stone, Davidson, and McIntosh 1885, 118, 150; Marion Census 1850, 310; death certificate for James W. McDaniel, Missouri Digital Heritage 2009a).
Jim Wolf and the cats] See “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX.”
I saw him four years ago when I was out there] In 1902, the Hannibal newspaper reported that as Clemens
was driving up Main street he espied James W. McDaniel, the old confectioner and greeted him with “Hello Jim, I’m truly glad to see you. Let me see that scalp of yours; what’s become of your hair?” Mr. Clemens and Mr. McDaniel used to be old chums and . . . although they had not met before in nearly forty years they recognized each other on sight. (“Sees Points of Interest,” Hannibal Morning Journal, 30 May 1902, reprinted in the Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 4B, transcript in CU-MARK)
Artimisia Briggs . . . married Richmond . . . my Methodist Sunday-school teacher] In March 1853, at the age of twenty-one, Artemissa Briggs married the local bricklayer, William J. Marsh (b. 1815?), not Joshua Richmond (b. 1816?), the stone mason. Richmond married Angelina Matilda Cook (b. 1829?) in January 1849; he taught Clemens’s earliest Sunday school class at Hannibal’s Methodist Old Ship of Zion Church, on the public square ( Marion Census 1860, 145; Fotheringham 1859, 39; Ellsberry 1965b, 1:10; Wecter 1952, 183, 305 n. 15; Inds, 95, 344; “Married,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 18 Jan 1849, unknown page).
five foolish virgins] Matthew 25:1–13.
Twenty years ago Mr. Richmond had become possessed of Tom Sawyer’s cave . . . made a tourist-resort of it] The limestone cave that Clemens called “McDougal’s cave” in Tom Sawyer was during his childhood at first called Simms Cave for the brothers who discovered it, then Saltpetre Cave for the mineral found there (potassium nitrate, thought to be derived from bat guano), and finally McDowell’s Cave (see “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” note at 214.3–4; Sweets 1986b, 1–2). After the publication of Tom Sawyer in 1876, it began to be called Mark Twain Cave or Tom Sawyer’s Cave. Joshua Richmond was evidently one of several owners in or after 1886, when the cave formally opened to the public. Evan T. Cameron, guide to the cave since 1886 and later manager, established a “permanent tour route through the cave’s maze of passageways, built a small ticket building near the entrance, purchased lanterns that people could carry for lighting, hired cave guides, and advertised the attraction as Mark Twain Cave” (Weaver 2008, 15–16, 97). The current public entrance to the Mark Twain Cave “was blasted out of the hillside to make an easy, comfortable entrance” for the tourist, as the original “was a steep climb up the hill” (George Walley to John Lockwood, 21 Sept 2005, photocopy in CU-MARK).
they make the finest kind of Portland cement there now . . . being ground into cement] In August 1901 the Atlas Portland Cement Company began construction of the “largest Portland cement plant in the United States and the first cement plant west of the Mississippi,” in Cave Hollow, where many of the entrances to the cave were situated (Sweets 1986a, 3). The telegram Mark Twain received has not been found.
Reuel Gridley attended that school of ours . . . Then came the Mexican war and he volunteered] Reuel Colt Gridley (1829–70), who must have been about seventeen or eighteen years old when he attended Dawson’s school, enrolled in the Third Regiment Missouri Mounted Volunteers at the age of eighteen on 5 May 1847 in New London, Missouri, was mustered into service the following month, and was honorably discharged on 28 October 1848 (Missouri Digital Heritage 2009b, reel s912).
A company of infantry was raised . . . and Mr. Hickman . . . was made captain of it . . . Hickman is dead—it is the old story] Philander A. Hickman (b. 1824) was born in Virginia. Unlike Gridley, he did not join the Missouri Volunteers. He enrolled in the infantry as a first lieutenant on 5 March 1847, was mustered into the Fourteenth Regiment on 9 April, and became a captain on 22 October. He married Sarah M. Brittingham (1828–89) on 11 May 1848, and was honorably discharged from the infantry on 25 July ( Marion Census 1850, 309; Heitman 1903, 1:528; Robarts 1887, 30). After the discovery of gold in California, Hickman and two of his in-laws emigrated, but he returned to Hannibal in the 1850s and established a store which sold stoves and hardware. In the 1870s, he became a representative in the state legislature. Clemens had last seen him in Hannibal in 1882: “Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young han[d]somely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me—a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65, now, his graces all vanished” (17 May 1882 to OLC, CU-MARK, in MTL, 1:429). He was dead within three years (“The Emigration,” unidentified clipping in Meltzer 1960, 15; Fotheringham 1859, 30; Honeyman 1866, 26; Hallock 1877, 79, 178; Stone, Davidson, and McIntosh 1885, 115).
As Susy said, “What is it all for?”] See the Autobiographical Dictation of 2 February 1906.
Reuel Gridley went away to the wars . . . dead these many, many years—it is the old story] After he was discharged from the Volunteers in 1848, Gridley returned to Hannibal, where he worked as a carpenter and attempted but failed to learn piloting on the Mississippi River from steamboat captain Bart S. Bowen, who found him “so much given to larking, that he couldn’t learn” (“River News,” Cincinnati Commercial, 13 Feb 1865, 4). In September 1850 he married Susannah L. Snider (b. 1832?), and in 1852 left for California, where he operated an express mail service in Oroville; his wife joined him two years later. Before 1863, he moved to the Reese River area in Nevada and opened another store—Gridley, Hobart and Jacobs—in a mining camp that later became the town of Austin. Gridley, who described himself to Clemens as “Union to the backbone, but a Copperhead in sympathies,” made a bet on the Democratic candidate for mayor and lost to Dr. H. S. Herrick, who backed the Republican candidate. Gridley had agreed to give Herrick a fifty-pound sack of flour, “and carry it to him on his shoulder, a mile and a quarter, with a brass band at his heels playing ‘John Brown.’ ” If Gridley had won, Herrick was to have carried the flour “to the tune of ‘Dixie’ ” (17 May 1864 to JLC and PAM, L1, 282, 285–86 n. 11). After a year spent selling and reselling the flour sack around the country, in the summer of 1865 Gridley took the sack and his proceeds to the St. Louis Fair, which the Western Sanitary Commission held to raise funds for “the relief of sick and wounded Union soldiers” ( L1, 284 n. 3). He found it was illegal in Missouri to repeatedly resell the same item, but “it was suggested that the flour be baked into cakes which could be sold. That Gridley refused to do for he felt that the flour came from the west and that was where it belonged. Thus the tour ended on a sour note and he headed home” (Elizabeth H. Smith 1965, 16). The total amount raised by Gridley is uncertain. In 1872, Clemens estimated $150,000; other estimates range from $40,000 to $275,000. When Gridley returned home in July 1865, he was almost bankrupt and his health was “completely broken down” (Tinkham 1921, 66). After he died on 24 November 1870 in Paradise City, California, Clemens eulogized him in a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune (11 Dec 1870, L4, 270–71; see RI 1993, 294–98, 660–64; Marion Census 1850, 310; “Missouri Marriage Records, 1805–2002” 2009; Butte Census 1860, 574; Elizabeth H. Smith 1965, 11–13).
first Jews I had ever seen . . . “Twice Levin—twenty-two.”] The Levin family apparently lived in Hannibal for a short time during the 1840s. Something of the townspeople’s attitude toward the boys is revealed in Clemens’s 1897 notes for a planned novel, “New Huck Finn” (Notebook 41, TS pp. 59–60, CU-MARK; the boy who drowned was Clint Levering):
*The Lev’n boys—the first Jew family ever seen there—an awful impression among us—it realized Jews, they had been creatures of vanished ages, myths, unrealities—the shudder visited every boy in the town—under breath the boys discussed them &were afraid of them. “Shall we crucify them?”
It was believed that the drowning of Writer Levering was a judgment on him &his parents because his great-grandmother had given the 11 boys protection when they were being chased &stoned.
All this feeling against Jews had been bred by the German youth who got so many verses by heart, before the 11s appeared. The ground was all prepared, &yet the Jew was a surprise at last when he came—as explained* above. . . .
Instead of 11, call them 9 (Nein) &18.
Tom stands by them &has fights.
Irving Ayres—but no matter, he is dead] Ayres (b. 1837?), another of Clemens’s schoolmates, was the younger son of Thomas J. Ayres (b. 1816?), Hannibal postmaster and tavern keeper, who in 1836 established the Brady House, a downtown hotel in a double-log house with hogs beneath the floor, “crowded with boarders” and fleas that “hopped upstairs, downstairs, into the parlors, bed-rooms, beds, and indeed every nook and cranny” (Holcombe 1884, 202, 896). In his 1897 notebook, Clemens listed Irving and his elder brother Tubman (b. 1829?) as characters in notes for his planned “New Huck Finn” (Notebook 41, p. 61, CU-MARK).
George Butler . . . was a nephew of General Ben Butler . . . dead, long and long ago] Clemens’s schoolmate George H. Butler (1839?–86) was the son of Andrew Jackson Butler (1815–64) and nephew of Andrew’s brother, Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818–93), the controversial Civil War general and Massachusetts congressman and governor who was known both for his brutality during the war and for his progressive politics afterwards. After working as an engineer in California, George joined the Union army Tenth Infantry in May 1861 and served as a first lieutenant during the battle of Ball’s Bluff on 21 October 1861, in Loudoun County, Virginia. The catastrophic battle resulted in a Confederate victory when Union forces attempted to cross the Potomac to capture Leesburg, Virginia; caught in a Confederate counterattack, they were driven over a high bluff into the river and suffered heavy casualties. Butler served as regimental quartermaster from late 1862 until his resignation from the army in June 1863 ( Marion Census 1850, 313; NNDB 2009; American Civil War 2009a; Missouri Digital Heritage 2009b, box 13; Heitman 1903, 1:269; Sonoma Census 1860, 649).
Will Bowen (dead long ago)] Bowen died on 19 May 1893 of sudden heart failure while on a business trip to Waco, Texas (Hornberger 1941, 8). See the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 March 1906, 402.16–33 and note.
Ed Stevens (dead long ago)] Clemens’s classmate and friend Edmund C. Stevens (b. 1834?) by the age of sixteen had learned the trade of watchmaking from his father, Thomas B. Stevens (b. 1791?), the town jeweler. As a child he led a classroom “rebellion” against their stern teacher, Miss Newcomb, and was one of the gang who rolled a giant boulder down Holliday’s Hill. He was a corporal to Clemens’s second lieutenant in the Marion Rangers; Clemens described him in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”: “trim-built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat; bright, educated, but given over entirely to fun. There was nothing serious in life to him. As far as he was concerned, this military expedition of ours was simply a holiday” (SLC 1885b, 194). Clemens wrote Stevens’s brother in 1901: “We were great friends, warm friends, he & I. He was of a killingly entertaining spirit; he had the light heart, the care-free ways, the bright word, the easy laugh, the unquenchable genius of fun, he was a friendly light in a frowning world—he should not have died out of it” (28 Aug 1901 to Stevens, CU-MARK). Clemens recalled him in “Villagers of 1840–3” and planned to use him as Jimmy Steel in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as Ed Sanders, watchmaker, in “Schoolhouse Hill” ( Inds, 96, 134–213, 214–59, 349; HH&T, 383; MSM, 432).
John Briggs . . . is still living] In 1902 Clemens said of John B. Briggs (1837–1907), with whom he had shared many childhood scrapes, “We were like brothers once,” and in his notebook reminded himself to “draw a fine character of John Briggs. Good & true & brave, & robbed orchards tore down the stable stole the skiff” (“Friendship of Boyhood Pals Never Waned,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 5C; Notebook 45, TS p. 13, CU-MARK). Briggs joined the Cadets of Temperance with Clemens in 1850, and in 1860 served with Clemens in the Marion Rangers. “Briggs and I,” Clemens said in 1902, “were the best retreaters in the company” (Love 1902, 5). Briggs later worked in a tobacco factory and became a farmer. He was almost certainly one of three boys upon whom Clemens based the “composite” character of Tom Sawyer, and perhaps of Ben Rogers as well, in Tom Sawyer. In 1902 notes for “New Huck Finn,” Clemens contemplated using an incident from Briggs’s childhood, in which Briggs’s father sold a young slave boy down the river, evidently believing he had struck John, when in fact John had struck the boy, “something so shameful that he could never bring himself to confess” (SLC 1902b; SLC 1982, 270; Inds, 134–213, 307; HH&T, 383). See the notes at 417.19–23 and 417.24–27 above and the Autobiographical Dictation of 8 May 1908.
In 1845, when I was ten years old, there was an epidemic of measles . . . vain of it] The deadly epidemics of measles that occurred in the 1840s were called “black” or “virulent” measles. In the spring of 1844, when Clemens was nine years old, the measles broke out in Hannibal “with uncommon virulence. Nearly 40 citizens died. . . . There were seven deaths in one day, all from measles” (Holcombe 1884, 900). Paine wrote that “in later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required” (MTB, 1:29). In “The Turning Point of My Life,” Clemens said that it was the cause of his mother’s apprenticing him to a printer: “I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old” (SLC 1910, 118–19).
Dr. Cunningham] Unidentified.
Source documents.
TS1 Typescript, leaves numbered 486–98, made from Hobby’s notes and revised.TS2 Typescript, leaves numbered 628–40, made from the revised TS1 and further revised.
NAR 23pf (lost) Galley proofs of NAR 23, typeset from the revised TS2; now lost.
NAR 23 North American Review 186 (October 1907), 163–69: ‘We will . . . going again.’ (417.19–421.16).
Clemens considered this dictation for possible publication through Samuel McClure’s newspaper syndicate, writing ‘M C’ in ink on the first page of TS1. Hobby incorporated the revisions that Clemens made on TS1 into TS2. Paine reviewed TS2 for possible publication in the NAR, marking a passage about Tom Sawyer’s cave for possible omission. Clemens selected the entire dictation and revised TS2 to serve as printer’s copy for NAR 23. He canceled Paine’s marks in ink and retained the queried text, but deleted a sentence about Jimmy McDaniel’s teeth, noting in the margin that he was ‘still alive’ (see the entry for ‘Still . . . town’ at 417.38–418.1). In NAR 23 the dictation is combined with excerpts from the ADs of 9 March 1906, 26 July 1907, and 30 July 1907. Collation reveals no evidence of authorial revision on the lost NAR 23pf.
Marginal Notes on TS2 Concerning Publication in the NAR