16 January 1851
“A Gallant Fireman” is “the first known venture of Sam Clemens into print.”1 It is a brief anecdote that appeared in his brother Orion Clemens' Hannibal Western Union not long after Clemens had joined its staff subsequent to his apprenticeship on Joseph P. Ament's Hannibal Missouri Courier. The “fireman” of the brief sketch is Jim Wolf (or Wolfe), an apprentice printer in Orion's shop. For a while Jim roomed and boarded at the Clemens home, where he became a favorite target for the practical jokes of Clemens and his brother Henry. He is also the subject of Clemens' 1867 sketch “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats” (no. 212).
In the early morning of 9 January 1851 a fire broke out in A. C. Parker's family grocery store next door to Orion's printing office. Discovered “by the hands of this office, while returning home from their ‘nightly labor,’ ”2 the fire was quickly extinguished, but not before Jim had removed some utensils from the endangered print shop. More than half a century later Clemens described the then lost sketch to Albert Bigelow Paine, remembering that “Jim in his excitement had carried the office broom half a mile and had then come back after the wash-pan”3—a surprisingly accurate recollection of the “precious burden” Jim had rescued from the shop.
At the fire, on Thursday morning, we were apprehensive of our own safety, (being only one door from the building on fire) and commenced arranging our material in order to remove themⒶtextual note in case of necessity. Our gallant devil, seeing us somewhat excited, concluded he would perform a noble deed, and immediately gathered the broom, an old mallet, the wash-pan and a dirty towel, and in a fit of patriotic excitement, rushed out of the office and deposited his precious burden some ten squares off, out of danger. Being of a snailish disposition, even in his quickest moments, the fire had been extinguished during his absence. He returned in the course of an hour, nearly out of breath, and thinking he had immortalized himself, threw his giant frame in a tragic attitude, and exclaimed, with an eloquent expression: “If that thar fire hadn'tⒶemendation bin put out, thar'd a' bin the greatest confirmation of the age!”
The first printing appeared in the Hannibal Western Union for 16 January 1851 (p. 3). The original newspaper is not available, so a PH of it in MoHi is copy-text. Clemens may have typeset and proofread the sketch, since he was on the paper's staff.