[begin page 299]

[begin page 300] Armstrong, Jesse M. (b. 1827?), was a clerk in a Hannibal store as a young man. In the late 1850s he opened a dry-goods firm with his brother-in-law George A. Hawes, a distant relative of Clemens’s, and in 1870 he became a director and assistant cashier of the newly formed Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank. In “Villagers” (95), Clemens apparently confused Armstrong with Amos J. Stillwell (1828–88), who worked in a Hannibal mill from 1848 to 1851, ran a St. Louis commission business from 1851 to 1855 with Clemens’s brother-in-law, William Anderson Moffett, then returned to Hannibal and became a prosperous pork-packer and bank president. It was Stillwell, not Armstrong, who was murdered in 1888 in the manner described in “Villagers.” Both the New York Times and the New York Tribune for 31 December 1888 gave the event front-page coverage. In an account of the murder published in 1908 (a decade after Clemens wrote “Villagers”), Minnie T. Dawson reported that Stillwell’s second wife, Fannie, fell in love with Joseph Carter Hearne, a prominent surgeon about three years younger than herself and twenty-three years younger than her husband. Stillwell was murdered in his bed with an axe taken from his barn, but investigators failed to find an indictable suspect. The widow inherited a substantial estate, and she married the doctor a year later. When the couple left Hannibal, they were followed to the train station by a jeering crowd. In 1895 they were formally charged with the murder. After Hearne was acquitted, charges against his wife were dropped (Marion Census 1850, 310, 312; Fotheringham, 10, 29, 30; “The Farmers & Merchants Bank,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 22 Apr 1905, 1; Portrait, 198, 578–79; Holcombe, 604, 614–15, 953; Greene, 329; MTBus, 72; “Murdered by a Burglar,” New York Times, 31 Dec 88, 1; “Murdered in His Bed,” New York Tribune, 31 Dec 88, 1; Dawson, 12, 34, 40–42, 118, 152).

B. See Benjamin L. Clemens.

Barret, Richard F. (1804–60), called Dr. Ray in “Villagers” (103), was a former suitor of Jane Clemens’s whom she had hoped to marry. Clemens learned of this early romance in the spring of 1886—evidently from his sister, Pamela—a few months after his mother had revealed it to Orion Clemens. In a letter of 19 May 1886 to William Dean Howells, Clemens re-created his mother’s account:

After studying medicine at Transylvania University, Barret established a lucrative practice in Green County, Kentucky. In 1832 he married Maria Buckner, daughter [begin page 301] of a Kentucky lawyer and congressman. He moved to St. Louis in 1840 and assisted Dr. Joseph N. McDowell (father of John McDowell) and others in founding Missouri Medical College. A “pioneer in various important business enterprises,” he was regarded as “one of the most active men of his generation . . . in developing the resources of the States of Illinois, Iowa and Missouri” (Conard, 1:160, 161). In his later years, Barret was described as “eminently noble and engaging,—a figure tall, graceful, and courtly, and a countenance of the Roman model,” and although “at times irascible, his disposition was usually gentle and amiable. . . . His pride of race and scholarly habits made him appear exclusive and aristocratic, but his impulses were ardent, and his manners polite and engaging” (Scharf, 1:677). Mark Twain’s list of potential characters for “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (S&B, 173) includes a Dr. Rayley, possibly to be based on Barret, but the character does not appear in the story (Conard, 1:160–62; Scharf, 1:676–77, 2:1544; Barret, 1).

Beebe family.

William B. Beebe was a forwarding and commission agent who kept a store near the Hannibal steamboat landing. He is mentioned in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (89) and in “Villagers” (104) as the man who bought Jenny, the Clemens family’s slave. He appears as Bat Bradish, the slave trader, in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (146–213 passim) and is alluded to as “the nigger-trader” in “Schoolhouse Hill” (215, 228). Between 1843 and 1847, John Marshall Clemens twice battled Beebe in court over financial disagreements (Henry Beebe to SLC, 14 Nov 1908, CU-MARK; Wecter 1952, 111–13).

Henry Beebe (b. 1836) was William’s son. In “Letter to William Bowen” (20, 21), Clemens recalled details about Henry that he later used in “Schoolhouse Hill,” where he portrayed him as the bully Henry Bascom (214–28 passim). A working note for that story refers to both father and son: “Henry Bascom (Beebe) the bully new rich man & slave trader” (MSM, 432). In 1908 Beebe asked Clemens whether he recalled him as a schoolmate “64 years ago,” adding “I have not visited Hannibal since 1852 and have lost track of all but you.” He said that he took “great pleasure” in reading Mark Twain’s books, “and oftimes thought I recognized the characters mentioned in them” (Beebe to SLC, 14 Nov 1908, CU-MARK).

Ben, “The Hanged Nigger,” mentioned in “Villagers” (101), was a young slave who belonged to Thomas Glascock of Shelby County. He was accused in October 1849 of killing a ten-year-old white boy, then raping the boy’s twelve-year-old sister and slitting her throat. The Palmyra jail had to be guarded to prevent his being lynched. Although he reportedly claimed the law would not hang him because he was worth a thousand dollars, he was convicted and, after a full confession, hanged on 11 January 1850. Clemens was then fourteen and a printer’s apprentice for the Missouri Courier, which reported the crime at length. The Courier office also published a twenty-five cent pamphlet giving Ben’s “detailed confession” of “the manner in which he did the atrocious deed and his villainous transactions and adventures through life” (“Confession of Ben,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 21 Feb 50). Clemens wrote in his 1897 [begin page 302] notebook: “Negro smuggled from Va in featherbed when lynchers were after him. In Mo he raped a girl of 13 & killed her & her brother in the woods & before being hanged confessed to many rapes of white married women who kept it quiet partly from fear of him & partly to escape the scandal” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 57). In 1901, contemplating a book on the history of lynching, Clemens wrote to his publisher, summarizing Ben’s crimes and requesting help in obtaining an account of his punishment to “be found in the St Louis Republican, no doubt—date, along about 1849” (SLC to Francis E. (Frank) Bliss, 26 Aug 1901, TxU, in Wecter 1952, 215; Holcombe, 298–99; Haines, 42–43; Missouri v. Ben; Hannibal Missouri Courier: “Atrocious Murder and Rape,” 8 Nov 49; “Trial at Palmyra,” 6 Dec 49; “Execution at Palmyra,” 17 Jan 50; “Confession of Ben,” 21 and 28 Feb 50).

Blankenship family. The father, Woodson (b. 1799?), a laborer from South Carolina, was one of Hannibal’s drunkards. The 1850 census lists him and his wife, Mahala (b. 1813?), with eight children, all born in Missouri: Benson, 21; Tom, 19; Martha, 18 or 19; Nancy, 16; Sarah, 14; Elizabeth, 12; Mary, 6; and Catherine, 3. In “Villagers” (96) and “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (131), Clemens recalls the unproven charge that the Blankenship girls were prostitutes (Marion Census 1850, 308, 309; AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:174).

Benson (Bence, or Ben) Blankenship (b. 1829?) is called “the boys’ friend & loafer” in Clemens’s 1897 notebook (NB 42, CU-MARK, TS p. 24). In 1847 he helped a runaway slave hiding on Sny Island (across the river from Hannibal, near the Illinois shore) by carrying provisions to him for several weeks, spurning a fifty-dollar reward for his capture—a source for an incident in chapters 8 through 11 of Huckleberry Finn (MTB, 1:63–64; Wecter 1952, 148). He is mentioned in “Villagers” (96).

Tom Blankenship (b. 1831?) was the model for Huckleberry Finn, who first appears in chapter 6 of Tom Sawyer. When Clemens’s sister, Pamela, heard that chapter read aloud, she exclaimed, “Why, that’s Tom Blankenship!” (MTBus, 265). Clemens himself remarked in 1906:

And in a letter of the same date to a former Hannibal acquaintance, Clemens commented: “You may remember that Tom was a good boy, notwithstanding his circumstances. To my mind he was a better boy than Henry Beebe & John Reagan put together, those swells of the ancient days” (8 Mar 1906 to Alexander C. Toncray, NN-B). In April 1861 Blankenship was given a thirty-day sentence for stealing turkeys, and in June 1861 he was reported “at his old business” again, having allegedly stolen some onions from a Hannibal garden (Hannibal Messenger, 21 Apr and 4 June 1861, reprinted in Lorch 1940, 352). One of his sisters, when asked in 1899 if he had been [begin page 303] the model for Huck, said: “Yes, I reckon it was him. Sam and our boys run together considerable them days, and I reckon it was Tom or Ben, one; it don’t matter which, for both of ’em’s dead” (Fielder, 10). In 1889 William Benton Coontz sent Clemens a clipping from the Hannibal Journal which reported that Tom had died years earlier of cholera (Smith 1889). Nevertheless, Clemens claimed to have heard in 1902 (presumably in the spring of that year, during his last visit to Hannibal) that Tom “was Justice of the Peace in a remote village in Montana, and was a good citizen and greatly respected” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:175). Blankenship appears as Huck in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896), and, in the present volume, in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33–81), “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134–213), “Schoolhouse Hill” (214, 227), and “Huck Finn” (260–61).

Blennerhasset, whom Clemens describes as Hannibal’s only “unbeliever,” a Kentucky lawyer and freethinker, appears in “Villagers” (100, 103). No one named Blennerhasset is known to have lived in Hannibal in the 1840s and 1850s.

Bowen family. Clemens was closely acquainted with this large family for almost two decades—during his Hannibal years (1839–53) and while he was a Mississippi River cub pilot and pilot (1857–61). He recurrently alluded to members of the family in private as well as public writings. In an 1882 notebook, for example, he observed that the “histories” of brothers “Will Bowen, and Sam . . . make human life appear a grisly & hideous sarcasm” ( N&J2, 474–75). A year later, in chapter 4 of Life on the Mississippi, he wrote that “four sons of the chief merchant” were among the Hannibal boys who became steamboat pilots. And in an 1899 letter he recalled steering “a trip for Bart Bowen” and being “partner with Will Bowen on the A. B. Chambers (one trip), and with Sam Bowen a whole summer on a small Memphis packet” (26 Feb 99 to John B. Downing, MTL, 2:675).

Samuel Adams Bowen, Sr. (1790–1853), of Tennessee, in 1821 married his cousin, Amanda Warren Stone (1802–81), the daughter of Barton Warren Stone. The Bowens settled in Hannibal by 1836 and were the parents of seven children: John, Mary, Barton, Elizabeth, William, Samuel, and Amanda. By 1839 Captain Bowen was operating a Hannibal tobacco warehouse and was the county’s first tobacco inspector. He and his wife are mentioned in “Villagers” (97). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383, 384) indicate that Bowen was the model for Captain Harper in that story (156). He was cast as Captain Wright in the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), although that character does not appear in the story (des Cognets, 65–66, 93; Pilcher, 259; Lewis Census, 371; St. Louis Census 1850, 416:336; Marion Census 1860, 761; “Died,” Canton (Mo.) Northeast Reporter, 10 Nov 53, 2; genealogical record, MoSHi; Holcombe, 899).

John Henley Bowen (1822–91), mentioned in “Villagers” (97), was a steamboat clerk in the late 1840s and then a St. Louis forwarding and commission merchant. By 1860 he was a steamboat agent and a representative of the Hannibal and St. Joseph [begin page 304] Railroad. He was river editor of the St. Louis Globe in the mid-1870s and, a decade later, engaged in mining in Mexico (des Cognets, 65; genealogical record, MoSHi; chart of John H. Bowen family plot, Bellefontaine Cemetery Association, St. Louis; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 137; Morrison, 29; Kennedy 1860, 12, 64; Scharf, 1:927; Gould 1873, 119; Gould 1875, 139).

Mary Russell Bowen (b. 1827?), mentioned in “Villagers” (97), married Moses P. Green in the late 1840s. The Greens were strong supporters of the Union during the Civil War. During the winter of 1861/62 Mary Bowen Green was president of the Soldier’s Relief Society of Hannibal, which supplied Union troops with clothes and medicines (Marion Census 1850, 305; des Cognets, 65; Holcombe, 428).

Barton W. Stone (Bart) Bowen (1830?–68) married Sarah H. Robards, with whom he had one daughter. He was both a pilot and a captain, as Clemens states in “Villagers” (94, 97). In 1858 he piloted the Alfred T. Lacey when it conveyed Clemens to Memphis, where Henry Clemens lay dying from injuries suffered in the Pennsylvania explosion. A year later, when Clemens was Bowen’s co-pilot on the Alfred T. Lacey, Bowen encouraged him to write his burlesque of Captain Isaiah Sellers and arranged for the New Orleans Crescent to publish the sketch in its “River Intelligence” column on 17 May 1859. A steamboat clerk who worked on the Gladiator in 1864 recalled that Bowen had a quarter interest in the boat and “was the captain, a most courteous and efficient commander, and deservedly recognized as being the best dark-night pilot on the river” (Rowland 1907). In 1907 Clemens remarked that Bowen had “stepped down a grade” from pilot when he became a captain, but added: “I never lost any part of my respect & affection for him on account of that retrogression; no, he was a high-minded, large-hearted man, & I hold him in undiminished honor to this day” (SLC to John B. Downing, 25–28 Feb 1907, CU-MARK, L1, 340 n. 4). Bowen died from steam burns suffered in a boat wreck (Marion Census 1860, 761; “Death of a Steamboat Captain,” San Francisco Times, 23 June 68, 1; MTB, 1:139; Way, 176, 188; summaries of “A Card,” New Orleans True Delta, 11 Oct 57, 1, and “River Intelligence,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 7 Dec 58, 4, provided by Edgar M. Branch; ET&S1, 126–33; Branch 1982 [bib20134], 505; Morris Anderson, 91; MTLBowen, 16, 17; des Cognets, 66).

Elizabeth Campbell (Eliza) Bowen (1834?–?76) evidently was retarded, as Clemens noted in “Villagers” (97). On 25 August 1876 William Bowen wrote Clemens that Eliza had died “in the Asylum” (CU-MARK; des Cognets, 66; Lewis Census, 371; Marion Census 1860, 854).

William (Will, or Bill) Bowen (1836–93), a schoolmate, was probably young Clemens’s closest friend. During an outbreak of measles in 1844, to end the suspense of waiting to catch the disease, Clemens crawled into Bowen’s sickbed, was infected, and nearly died. He and Bowen were among the boys who pried loose a boulder atop Holliday’s Hill and watched it crash down the hillside, narrowly missing a black drayman, and making “infinitesimal mince-meat” of a cooper-shop (The Innocents Abroad, chapter 58). By the spring of 1857 Bowen was a licensed pilot. After Clemens received his license in 1859, he twice was Bowen’s co-pilot—on the steamers A. B. Chambers and Alonzo Child—during the ensuing two years. From 1861 to 1866 [begin page 305] Bowen and Clemens were estranged. Their falling-out resulted from a misunderstanding about repayment of a two-hundred-dollar loan Clemens had made to Bowen and from political differences; Jane Clemens reported that “when Sam and W B were on the Alonzo Chi they quarreled and Sam let go the wheel to whip Will for talking secesh and made Will hush” (Jane Lampton Clemens to “all in the Teritory,” 12 and 14 Oct 62, NPV, in MTBus, 73). Despite his early Southern sympathies, Bowen piloted a transport for the North during the Civil War. He left the river in 1868 to sell fire and marine insurance in St. Louis, and moved to Austin, Texas, about 1880. In 1888 he visited the Clemens family in Hartford. Bowen was married twice: in 1857 to Mary Cunningham (“Mollie” in Clemens’s “Letter to William Bowen,” 23), who died in 1873; and in 1876 to Dora Goff of St. Louis. His illness, mentioned in “Villagers” (97), remains unidentified, but evidently his health had deteriorated by the time he was thirty. Clemens recorded some of his and Bowen’s adventures in “Letter to William Bowen” (20–21) and “Villagers” (97) and used Bowen in several fictional works. He was one of the models for Tom Sawyer, who is a composite of several boys. He figures as Joe Harper in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and in the present volume appears as himself in “Boy’s Manuscript” (12–13) and as Joe Harper in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (156). (Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” explicitly identify Bowen as the model for Harper; see HH&T, 383–84.) In the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), Bowen was cast as Hank Fitch, but that character does not appear in the story (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:219–21; Wecter 1952, 140; L1, 211, 213 n. 22, 338, 340 n. 1,357, 359n. 1, 389; MTLBowen, 7, 15, 25–26; MTB, 1:54, 118; Ferris, 19).

Samuel Adams (Sam) Bowen, Jr. (1838?–78), was another of Clemens’s schoolmates who became a river pilot. In the summer of 1858 he and Clemens co-piloted the John H. Dickey. In 1861 they joined the Marion Rangers, a volunteer Confederate company which disbanded after a few weeks—an experience recounted by Mark Twain twenty-four years later in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). Bowen later was arrested by Union soldiers and confined to the stockade in Hannibal. He was allowed to resume piloting after swearing allegiance to the Union, but he continued to assist the Southern cause by secretly carrying Confederate army mail between St. Louis and Memphis. In 1878, while piloting the Molly Moore, Bowen contracted yellow fever, died, and was buried at the head of an island in the Mississippi River. When floodwaters later exposed the gravesite, Clemens reportedly made arrangements to have the coffin reinterred. Bowen is included in “Villagers” (97), with emphasis on the details of his irregular marriage. Clemens had previously given an account of that marriage in chapter 49 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), calling Bowen “George Johnson” and characterizing him as a “shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, good-hearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing.” In his autobiography he again discussed Bowen’s marriage, describing it as a “curious adventure” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:185–86). Clemens’s working notes show that he considered casting Bowen in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” as Joe [begin page 306] Harper’s brother Jack and in “Schoolhouse Hill” as Hank Fitch’s brother Sam (HH&T, 384; MSM, 431), but neither character appears in the stories (Lewis Census, 371; Branch 1982 [bib21035], 195–96; Grimes, 18–19; N&J2, 527, 561–62).

Brady, Virginia (Jenny) (b. 1837?), mentioned as Clemens’s classmate in “Villagers” (95), was the daughter of carpenter James Brady, Hannibal’s first mayor. Her brother Norval (b. 1839) was an occasional playmate of Clemens’s. Mark Twain’s working notes show that he considered portraying her as Jenny Mason in “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), but that character does not appear in the story (Marion Census 1850, 308; Holcombe, 941; Wecter 1952, 141; Sweets 1986–87, 1).

Breed, Dana F. (1823–92), left New England in 1842 to settle in Hannibal. He worked as a store clerk until November 1849, when he opened a dry goods store with Thomas K. Collins. He did not, despite what Clemens says in “Villagers” (94), marry Letititia Richmond. In 1851 he married Elizabeth Foreman; after her death in 1874, he married Mrs. Faustina Williams. In 1890, when Clemens came to Hannibal for his mother’s funeral, Breed met him at the train station and served as a pallbearer (“New Store!” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 29 Nov 49; Holcombe, 910; Hagood and Hagood 1985, 8; “The Funeral of Mrs. Clemens,” unidentified Hannibal newspaper, 30 Oct 90, clipping in Scrapbook 20:126–27, CU-MARK).

Briggs family. William (b. 1799?) and Rhoda Briggs (b. 1811?) of Kentucky were listed in the 1850 Hannibal census with eight children, ranging in age from nine months to nineteen years (Marion Census 1850, 315–16). Clemens mentions three of the children in “Villagers.”

William (Bill) Briggs, Jr. (b. 1831?), in 1849 joined the gold rush to California (“Letter from California,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 17 Jan 50). Clemens encountered him in San Francisco in 1863, and wrote home: “The man whom I have heard people call the ‘handsomest & finest-looking man in California,’ is Bill Briggs. I meet him on Montgomery street every day. He keeps a somewhat extensive gambling hell opposite the Russ House. I went up with him once to see it” (SLC to Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett, 18? May 63, L1, 252). Amelia Ransome Neville, in her memoir of San Francisco, provides a description of Briggs in his later years:

Clemens recalls Briggs in “Villagers” (95).

Artemissa Briggs (b. 1833?) was an early infatuation of Clemens’s who kindly but firmly rejected his attentions. Both in “Villagers” (95) and his autobiography, Clemens indicates that she married stonemason Joshua Richmond, but the Hannibal Journal of 16 March 1853 records her marriage to bricklayer William J. Marsh. Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) show that Clemens planned to [begin page 307] introduce her as Cassy Gray, but that character does not appear in the story (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:212, 214; Wecter 1952, 183, 305 n. 15; Fotheringham, 39).

John B. Briggs (1837–1907) was one of Clemens’s “special mates” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:219). In 1850 both joined the Hannibal chapter of the Cadets of Temperance, nearly sixty boys pledged not to smoke or chew tobacco. Briggs worked in David J. Garth’s tobacco factory, married Mary Miller, another Clemens classmate, and later became a farmer. In some autobiographical notes Clemens recalled an early misadventure that may have involved Briggs: “Burglaries (with John Briggs?) of potatoes &c which we could have got at home. Caught nearly—family back—hear them from under bed” (SLC 1898 [bib21479], 1). When he visited Hannibal in 1902, he spent an afternoon with Briggs and remarked “We were like brothers once” (“Friendship of Boyhood Pals Never Waned,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 5C, partially paraphrased in MTB, 3:1170–71). In his notebook for 1902, Clemens reminded himself to “draw a fine character of John Briggs. Good & true & brave, & robbed orchards tore down the stable stole the skiff” (NB 45, CU-MARK, TS p. 13). That same year, he considered using an event from his friend’s youth in a story:

Clemens’s description is not entirely clear, but apparently the father believed the slave had struck or threatened John when, in fact, it was John who had committed the “shameful” act of striking the slave. Clemens recalls John Briggs in “Villagers” (95). His working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383) indicate that he considered including Briggs as Ben Rogers, although he ultimately did not do so. (Presumably Clemens had had Briggs in mind when he depicted Ben Rogers in chapter 2 of Tom Sawyer and chapter 2 of Huckleberry Finn.) In working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432), Briggs was cast as David Gray, but Gray is not among the characters in the story (Cadets of Temperance 1850; AD, 13 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:99–100; Greene, 96d; “Good-Bye to Mark Twain,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 3 June 1902, 1; “Not Funny This Time,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 2 June 1902, 1).

Briggs, Carey, mentioned in “Villagers” (105), has not been identified.

Brittingham family. A large family, originally from Maryland, that settled in Hannibal by 1840. Thomas E. Brittingham (b. 1798?) ran a drugstore on North Main Street with his two sons. Clemens worked directly over Brittingham’s drugstore in 1848–49 when he was a printer’s apprentice on the Missouri Courier. And he may [begin page 308] have been briefly employed by the druggist: in chapter 42 of Roughing It (1872) he recalled that one of his boyhood jobs was as a clerk “in a drug store a part of a summer.” Clemens probably was remembering Thomas when he alluded to a Brittingham in “Clairvoyant” (32). Possibly, however, he was thinking of James S. Brittingham (b. 1816?), a clerk in Tilden Russell Selmes’s store from 1844 to 1858. The exact family relationship of the two men is unknown (Marion Census 1840, 89; Marion Census 1850, 308, 310; Holcombe, 909; T. P. McMurry to SLC, 16 July 72, CU-MARK; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 56).

Brown, William Lee (Bill) (1831?–1903), is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). In an autobiographical dictation of 21 May 1908, Clemens called this classmate W. B. “Buck” Brown and identified him as the oldest and largest student in John D. Dawson’s one-room schoolhouse:

Clemens perhaps confused William with his brother, James Burkett (Buck) Brown (1827–1915), who later became mayor of Hannibal. The 1850 Hannibal census (compiled in October) lists William as a cooper who attended school “within the year,” as had Clemens (Marion Census 1850, 320; Holcombe, 910; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 97; Wecter 1952, 305 n. 16).

Buchanan family included the households of brothers Robert and Joseph Sylvester Buchanan.

Robert Buchanan (1802–75) came from St. Louis to Hannibal in 1832, acquired 300 acres of land, and established the first tannery in Marion County. Twice married, he had eight children, and Clemens was well acquainted with the three eldest: Henry Charles (b. 1830), a tinner and tinware manufacturer who became a wealthy real estate investor; Edwin or Edward (1834?–?80), an apprentice blacksmith whom Mark Twain called a “dull-witted lout” in chapter 51 of Life on the Mississippi; and Joseph Elija. In “Villagers” (96), Clemens calls Robert Buchanan the proprietor of the Hannibal Journal, although other sources say his brother Joseph was the owner. Both were involved in running the paper. Orion Clemens learned the trade of printing in the Journal office in the early 1840s. When the Buchanan brothers joined the California gold rush in 1850, Pamela Clemens wrote Orion that “Robt. Buchanan has taken the Journal Office and put it into the hands of young Bob and Sam Raymond,” meaning Buchanan’s nephew Robert Sylvester Buchanan and Samuel R. Raymond (29 Jan 50, NPV, in MTBus, 15). In an 1874 letter to Orion, Clemens recalled how “old Robert Buchanan . . . used to set up articles at the case without previously putting them in the form of manuscript. I was lost in admiration of such marvelous intellectual capacity” (9 Dec 74, NPV, in MTB, 1:facing 536). And in some autobiographical notes made about 1898, Clemens wrote: “The printing office—that was the darling place—Buchanan Journal (2 offices) then Courier” [begin page 309] (SLC 1898 [bib21479], 6). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) suggest that he planned to introduce Robert Buchanan as Big Bob Turner, but the story does not include him (Marion Census 1850, 319; Holcombe, 899, 911; Greene, 579; “Interesting Letter from California,” Hannibal Western Union, 9 Jan 51; “The equilibrium of California emigration . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 29 Apr 52; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 21–22; Kennedy 1859, 76; Marion Census 1860, 866; Hallock, 46).

Joseph Sylvester (Big Joe) Buchanan (b. 1806?), a native of Missouri, is mentioned in “Villagers” (96). He was a steamboat engineer before turning to journalism. He helped to found Hannibal’s first newspaper, the short-lived Commercial Advertiser, in 1837. In 1840, together with Matthew S. Fife, he began publishing a newspaper that went through several name changes before becoming the Hannibal Journal in March 1842. In January 1850 Big Joe turned the Journal over to his son, Robert Sylvester Buchanan, and joined the gold rush. His name appears in Clemens’s 1897 notebook amid plans for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” but no character based on him figures in the story (Marion Census 1850, 325; Holcombe, 898, 899, 987; MTB, 1:27; MTBus, 15;“The ‘Journal’ . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 31 Jan 50; Wecter 1952, 223; NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 60).

Argyle (’Gyle) Buchanan (b. 1806?), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was a farmer near Hannibal. His exact relation to Robert and Joseph Sylvester Buchanan is not known (Marion Census 1850, 305).

Robert Sylvester (Young Bob) Buchanan (b. 1829), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was the son of Joseph Sylvester Buchanan. He became a printer and, in 1850, co-proprietor of the Hannibal Journal with Samuel R. Raymond. They dissolved their partnership in 1851 and sold the newspaper office to Orion Clemens. Young Bob and Urban E. Hicks, a Journal printer, were expelled from the Methodist church for “going to see Dan. Rice’s Circus” (Hicks to SLC, 30 Mar 86, CU-MARK). Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) suggest that Mark Twain planned to portray him as Little Bob Turner, but the character does not appear in the story (Marion Census 1850, 318; Marion Census 1860, 208; “Dissolution,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 6 Mar 51; Wecter 1952, 239).

Joseph Elija (Little Joe) Buchanan (b. 1830), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was the son of Robert Buchanan. He worked as a printer’s devil on the Hannibal Journal in 1850 and later became a steamboat engineer. In 1897 Mark Twain included Buchanan’s name in a notebook list of Hannibal people and incidents he planned to use in writing “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.” He did not use Buchanan in the story, however (Greene, 579; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 21–22; Wecter 1952, 223; Honeyman, 6; Stone, Davidson, and McIntosh, 62; NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 60).

Burton. See Benjamin L. Clemens.

Carpenter family. See Clemens family.

Clemens family. Called the Carpenters in “Villagers,” the writer’s family provided models for several characters in his stories about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

John Marshall Clemens (1798–1847), born in Virginia, studied law in Columbia, Kentucky, and in 1822 was licensed to practice. After he married Jane Lampton [begin page 310] in 1823, they lived for approximately two years in Columbia before moving to Gainesboro, Tennessee, where their first child, Orion, was born. In 1827 the family settled in Jamestown, Tennessee, where John Clemens became a county commissioner, then a county court clerk, and opened a store. With an eye to the family’s future, he began his purchase of thousands of acres of land, most of it just south of Jamestown. His total acquisition—which Samuel Clemens estimated at “seventy-five thousand acres,” costing “somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred dollars” (SLC 1870, 3)—brought John Clemens’s heirs years of frustration, but none of the wealth he envisioned. In the spring of 1835, the family and their one slave, Jenny, moved to Florida, Missouri, where Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born. In Florida, John Clemens practiced law, kept store, and did some farming. He was appointed judge of Monroe County Court in 1837; it was this appointment that earned him the honorific “Judge,” which he bore the rest of his life. In November 1839 John Clemens moved his family to Hannibal, where he promoted the construction of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad and helped found and govern the Hannibal Library Institute. He kept a store on Main Street until the early 1840s, when he was forced into poverty by Ira Stout, a dishonest land speculator. It was probably in 1844 that John Clemens was elected justice of the peace; the earliest evidence placing him in that position is a court record dated 17 September 1844. Albert Bigelow Paine’s statement that he was elected in 1840 is disproved by newspaper accounts of the election, and Dixon Wecter’s conjecture that he was elected in 1842 is inconsistent with an 1843 court record showing the position was held by another man (Clemens v. Townsend ; MTB, 1:41; Wecter 1952, 103, 291 nn. 5, 7). Samuel Clemens’s recollection that his father “was elected County Judge by a great majority in ’49” (“Villagers,” 104) also is incorrect. John Clemens declared his candidacy for clerk of the circuit court in November 1846 but died of pneumonia in March 1847, more than four months before the election. “My father may have hastened the ending of his life by the use of too much medicine,” Orion Clemens observed in 1880. “He doctored himself from my earliest remembrance. During the latter part of his life he bought Cook’s pills by the box and took one or more daily” (notes on SLC to Orion Clemens, 6 Feb 61, L1, 116 n. 11). Presbyterian pastor Joshua Thomas Tucker called John Clemens “a grave, taciturn man, a foremost citizen in intelligence and wholesome influence” (Wecter 1952, 86). He was more fully characterized in The History of Marion County, Missouri, in a biographical sketch prepared with Orion’s assistance:

Samuel Clemens confirmed these descriptions, remembering his father as “exceedingly dignified in his carriage and speech” and “austere” in manner; “pleasant with [begin page 311] his friends, but never familiar” (AD, 29 Dec 1906, CU-MARK). John Clemens is mentioned in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (90); he is Judge Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 101, 103–5, 106), and James Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–19, 125) (Wecter 1952, 6–7, 14, 15, 28–57 passim, 69–70, 103, 110–11, 114–15; Tompkins and Eve; Gregory 1965, 30; Brashear 1934, 95; Pamela A. Moffett to Samuel E. Moffett, 15 Oct 99, CU-MARK; Return Ira Holcombe to SLC, 24 Sept 83, CU-MARK; SLC to Orion Clemens, 4 Sept 83, CU-MARK).

Jane Lampton Clemens (1803–90), born in Adair County, Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens in part to spite a former suitor, Richard F. Barret (Wecter 1952, 17–18, 23). Mark Twain characterized his mother in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (82–92). In an autobiographical sketch he commented that she had “come handy to me several times in my books, where she figures as Tom Sawyer’s ‘Aunt Polly.’ I fitted her out with a dialect, & tried to think up other improvements for her, but did not find any” (SLC 1897–98, 49, in MTA, 1:102). Jane Clemens’s Hannibal pastor, Joshua Thomas Tucker, called her “a woman of the sunniest temperament, lively, affable, a general favorite” (Wecter 1952, 86). She is Joanna Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 103–4, 105–8) and Sarah Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–19). She is Aunt Polly in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134–209 passim), as she had previously been in Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1885), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896).

Orion Clemens (1825–97), pronounced O´-ree-ən, clerked in a store after the family moved to Hannibal in 1839. When he reported that he was taught to “adjust the scales one way for buying and another way for selling,” his father placed him in the Hannibal Journal office, where he began his printer’s apprenticeship under Robert and Joseph Sylvester Buchanan (Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK). About 1842 he moved to St. Louis to work in the printing house of Thomas Watt Ustick, returning to Hannibal in mid-1850 to start a weekly called the Western Union. Within a year he purchased the Hannibal Journal and on 4 September 1851 published the first issue of the consolidated Hannibal Journal and Western Union, shortening the name to Hannibal Journal after six months. He sold the paper and its printing establishment to William T. League in September 1853 and moved with his mother and brother Henry to Muscatine Iowa, where he bought an interest in the Muscatine Journal. On 19 December 1854 he married Mary Eleanor (Mollie) Stotts (1834–1904), with whom he had one child, Jennie (1855–64). The following June, Orion sold the Muscatine Journal and moved to Keokuk, Iowa, his wife’s home town, purchasing the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. In June of 1857 he sold the unprofitable print shop and in the fall of the year moved to Jamestown, Tennessee, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar. He returned to Keokuk in July 1858, evidently remaining until May 1860, when he moved to Memphis, Missouri, to attempt to set up a law practice. On 27 March 1861, Orion was appointed secretary of the newly formed Nevada Territory, a position secured for him by Edward Bates, an old acquaintance from St. Louis, who was Lincoln’s first attorney general. Accompanied by Samuel Clemens, Orion arrived in Carson City on 14 August 1861. Until late 1864, when Nevada became a state, Orion was comparatively prosperous since, despite his failure to become wealthy by speculating in mining stock, he enjoyed a government salary. Unable to secure a state office [begin page 312] comparable to his territorial post, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to practice law in Carson City, then in California, where he also prospected and tried his hand at writing correspondence for the Meadow Lake Morning Sun and the San Francisco American Flag. Finally, however, Orion was forced to leave the West. He returned to St. Louis in September 1866, while his wife, Mollie, went to live with her parents in Keokuk. He was an occasional correspondent for the San Francisco Times in late 1866 through early 1867. He lived chiefly in St. Louis (Mollie joined him there in 1869) for about three years, supporting himself by working as a newspaper compositor. In late 1870 Orion and Mollie moved to Hartford, Connecticut. There, until 1872, Orion edited the American Publisher, the house paper of the American Publishing Company, Mark Twain’s publishers. In the fall of 1873, after trying unsuccessfully to find work elsewhere, Orion moved to New York City, where he worked as a newspaper proofreader. Mollie joined him a few months later, and they remained in New York until mid-1874, when, with Samuel Clemens’s help, they returned to Keokuk to purchase a chicken farm. Over the next two decades Orion tried, in vain, to earn a living as a chicken farmer, lawyer, lecturer, and author. From the mid-1870s until his death in 1897, Orion was dependent on quarterly checks sent him by his brother. Meanwhile he compiled, often in public, a record of spectacular vacillation on political and religious matters. In a letter of 9 February 1879, Mark Twain regaled William Dean Howells with some of Orion’s exploits:

Orion’s impulsive, impractical nature proved a source of anxiety and exasperation to the entire family, as did his sudden and severe shifts in mood. As Mark Twain recalled in his autobiography, Orion’s “day was divided—no, not divided, mottled—from [begin page 313] sunrise to midnight with alternating brilliant sunshine and black cloud. Every day he was the most joyous and hopeful man that ever was, I think, and also every day he was the most miserable man that ever was. . . . He was always truthful; he was always sincere; he was always honest and honorable,” but “he was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth” (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:269, 272). Mark Twain considered Orion an author’s “treasure” and urged Howells to “put him in a book or a play right away. . . . One can let his imagination run riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him” (SLC to Howells, 9 Feb 79, NN-B, in MTHL, 1:253, 256). Orion influenced the characterization of Washington Hawkins in The Gilded Age (1874). He appears as Oscar Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 105–8) and “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–24). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and “Schoolhouse Hill” (HH&T, 384; MSM, 432) reveal that Plunket the editor and Oliver Hotchkiss (166, 167, 224, 229–59) were based on Orion (Wecter 1952, 78, 225, 239; MTB, 1:27, 100; MTA, 2:268–74; Bible 1862; Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, 3, 5–11, 15, 21; Orion Clemens to SLC, 7 Jan 61, CU-MARK; Lorch 1929 [bib00642]; L1, 58, 79 n. 11, 114 n. 9, 115, 121, 325 n. 5, 342 n. 1, 375 n. 5; correspondence between Orion Clemens, Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, and other family members, 1867–74, CU-MARK; Pamela A. Moffett to Samuel E. Moffett, 23 Feb 80, CU-MARK).

Pamela Ann (also Pamelia or Mela) Clemens (1827–1904), pronounced Pə-mee´-la, was born in Jamestown, Tennessee. She attended Elizabeth Horr’s Hannibal school and in November 1840 was commended by her teacher for her “amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies” (Horr 1840). In 1839 she joined the Campbellites after having been introduced to the movement by the daughters of its founder, Alexander Campbell (see the note at 112.3). In February 1841 she and her mother joined the Presbyterian Church. Pamela played piano and guitar and helped to support the family by giving music lessons. In September 1851, she married William Anderson Moffett and moved to St. Louis. “Her character was without blemish, & she was of a most kindly & gentle disposition,” Samuel Clemens wrote after her death (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK). Pamela is Priscella Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 105) and—as Mark Twain’s working notes indicate (MSM, 432)—Hannah Hotchkiss in “Schoolhouse Hill” (224, 229–38, 244). She was probably the model for Tom’s cousin Mary in Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33), and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (150, 155, 156, 162, 168) (Bible 1817; Moffett 1881; MTBus, 5, 19, 24; Sweets 1984, 17; Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK; Wecter 1952, 109).

Pleasant Hannibal Clemens lived for only three months after his birth in 1828 or 1829. In “Villagers” (104) he is Han Carpenter (Orion Clemens to SLC, 18 May 85, CU-MARK; MTBus, 44).

Margaret L. Clemens (1830–39) was born in Jamestown, Tennessee, and died in Florida, Missouri. “Margaret was in disposition & manner like Sam full of life,” Jane Clemens later wrote, recalling the morning that Margaret left for school with Pamela, reciting lines from her lesson: “God is a spirit & they that worship him must worship him in spirit & in truth. When they came from school M. was sick & never was in her right mind 3 minuts at a time. She died in about a week” (Jane Lampton [begin page 314] Clemens to Orion Clemens, 25 Apr 80?, CU-MARK). In “Villagers” (104) she is M. Carpenter (Bible 1817).

Benjamin L. (Ben) Clemens (1832–42) was born in Three Forks of Wolf, Fentress County, Tennessee. One of Clemens’s early memories was of kneeling with his mother at Benjamin’s deathbed. He recalls this incident in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (82–83) and alludes to it and to his unexplained “case of memorable treachery” toward Benjamin in “Villagers” (93, 104), where his brother figures as Burton and B. Carpenter. Among some fragmentary autobiographical notes probably made within a year of writing “Villagers,” Clemens commented: “Dead brother Ben. My treachery to him” (SLC 1898 [bib21479], 7). And in his 1902 notebook he noted: “I saw Ben in shroud” (NB 45, CU-MARK, TS p. 21; Bible 1817; Wecter 1952, 33–34).

Samuel Langhorne (Sam) Clemens (1835–1910) was born in Florida, Missouri, on 30 November 1835, six months after his family settled there. He calls himself Simon Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 99, 101). In his autobiography he claimed that after his father’s death in March 1847 he was taken from school “at once” and made a printer’s devil in Joseph P. Ament’s Missouri Courier newspaper office (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:276). Apparently, though, he was a part-time assistant to Henry La Cossitt of the Hannibal Gazette for one year before he began his apprenticeship to Ament in the spring of 1848. And he received at least some schooling after his father’s death, since the 1850 Hannibal census (compiled in October) reports his attendance “within the year” (Marion Census 1850, 307). By January 1851 Clemens had left Ament’s newspaper office and was setting type for Orion on the Hannibal Western Union. On 16 January 1851 the paper printed a sketch by him, “A Gallant Fireman,” his earliest known publication (see ET&S1, 62). He remained with Orion on the Hannibal Journal, contributing several sketches, until he moved to St. Louis in 1853, probably in the first two weeks of June. Although Mark Twain gave to Tom Sawyer many of his own Hannibal experiences, he acknowledged that Tom was “a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture” (“Preface,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). According to Albert Bigelow Paine the three boys were Clemens himself, “chiefly, and in a lesser degree John Briggs and Will Bowen” (MTB, 1:54). During his 1902 visit to Hannibal, Clemens commented: “Sometimes it was Will Bowen, John Garth, Ed Stevens, Jim Holmes, Meredith, or myself, just as the occasion was fit” (“Good-bye to Mark Twain,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 3 June 1902, 1; Wecter 1952, 131, 200–202, 236, 263; L1, 1; Marion Census 1850, 307, 318).

Henry Clemens (1838–58) was a family favorite. “Do you remember Henry’s studious habits when he was only three years old? His bright face & lovable ways?” Pamela reminisced in a letter to Orion (Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK). Like his brother Samuel, Henry belonged to the Cadets of Temperance and worked on the Hannibal Journal. After Samuel left for St. Louis, Henry continued to assist Orion on the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal and in the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. In the spring of 1858, he became a “mud clerk” (purser’s assistant) on the steamer Pennsylvania, employment which Samuel Clemens, then a cub pilot, helped him to obtain. Henry died on 20 June 1858 from injuries suffered in the explosion of the Pennsylvania, as Mark Twain recounted in a moving letter [begin page 315] written at the time (see L1, 80–82) and in 1883 in chapter 20 of Life on the Mississippi. Shortly after Henry’s death, Orion contrasted his brothers: “Sam a rugged, brave, quick tempered, generous hearted fellow—Henry quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on Sam for protection,—Sam & I too leaning on him for knowledge picked up from conversation or books, for Henry seemed never to forget any thing, and devoted much of his leisure hours to reading” (Orion Clemens to Miss Wood, 3 Oct 58, NPV, in MTB, 3:1591–92). In his autobiography, Mark Twain recalled:

Sid Sawyer (Tom’s half-brother) is mentioned in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33) and appears in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (150, 153–56, 162, 168) and “Schoolhouse Hill” (214), as he had in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In “Villagers” (93, 99) Henry Clemens is Hartley Carpenter (Cadets of Temperance 1850; MTB, 1:85, 100; Lorch 1929 [bib10218], 418).

Collins, Thomas K. (1822–85), mentioned in “Villagers” (94, 102), was born in Maryland and came to Hannibal in 1840 to clerk in his brother’s store. In 1849, with Dana F. Breed as partner, he opened a dry goods store and became one of Hannibal’s leading merchants. He was elected mayor in 1874 (Holcombe, 917–18, 941; Thomas S. Nash to SLC, 23 Apr 85, CU-MARK).

Coontz, William Benton (Ben) (1838–92), was an occasional playmate of Clemens’s and a Cadet of Temperance. After graduating from Bacon College (Ohio) in 1856, he was a riverboat pilot, grocer, leather dealer, steamboat agent, and salesman. He was a member of the Hannibal city council from 1871 to 1874, and mayor in 1877. In “Villagers” (102) Clemens notes that Coontz’s son, Robert, attended West Point. In fact, Robert Coontz (1864–1935) graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1885 and became a high-ranking naval officer. When Clemens returned to Hannibal in 1890 for Jane Clemens’s funeral, William Coontz greeted him at the train station. Coontz perhaps was the model for Pete Kruger in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (167), since early working notes for that story call the character Pete Koontz (HH&T, 383). In his notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), Mark Twain considered portraying Coontz as a “fool—½ idiot” named Flip Coonrod, but the character does not appear in the story (Holcombe, 918–19; Portrait, 506; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 252 n. 7; Cadets of Temperance 1850; “The Funeral of Mrs. Clemens,” unidentified Hannibal newspaper, 30 Oct 90, clipping in Scrapbook 20:126–27, CU-MARK).

Craig, Joe, a schoolmate recalled in “Letter to William Bowen” (20), probably was the son of Joseph Craig, who settled in Hannibal by 1833 and owned the tanyard [begin page 316] where town drunkard Jimmy Finn slept (Holcombe, 895, 900; Henry Beebe to SLC, 14 Nov 1908, CU-MARK; Marion County 1845).

Cross, Samuel (1812–86), was seven years old when his family immigrated to Pennsylvania from Ireland. He moved to Missouri in 1837 and by 1840 was a teacher in Hannibal. With John Marshall Clemens, Zachariah G. Draper, and Hugh Meredith, Cross helped found the Hannibal Library Institute. A member of the First Presbyterian Church—like Jane and Pamela Clemens—he was also one of the church’s elders. In the spring of 1849 he led a party of Hannibal citizens to California and settled in Sacramento, where he practiced law and eventually became a judge. Cross ran the school Clemens attended in the mid-1840s, after instruction by Elizabeth Horr and Mary Ann Newcomb. (Cross’s older brother, William, was also a Hannibal schoolteacher, though not one of Clemens’s instructors, as previously thought; see Wecter 1952, 131.) In an autobiographical dictation of 15 August 1906, Clemens recalled the “early days” when Hannibal had only two schools, both of them private: “Mrs. Horr taught the children, in a small log house at the southern end of Main Street; Mr. Sam Cross taught the young people of larger growth in a frame schoolhouse on the hill” (CU-MARK, in MTE, 107). Clemens mentions Cross only in passing in “Villagers” (97). His working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 436) show that he re-created the physical setting of Cross’s school—a frame house on the public square facing Center Street, a “coasting hill”—in the opening chapter of that story, although he based the schoolmaster there on John D. Dawson (Marion Census 1840, 89; Greene, 257; Wecter 1952, 111, 131, 217–18; “Hannibal Academy . . . ,” Hannibal Western Union, 19, June 51; Sweets 1984, 63; “The Emigration,” clipping from unidentified Hannibal newspaper, ca. May 49, facsimile in Meltzer, 15; “We received . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 3 Jan 50; Wright, 282; “Death of Judge Samuel Cross,” Sacramento Bee, 14 June 86, 3; “Death of Judge Cross,” Sacramento Record-Union, 14 June 86, 3; MSM, 436; Marion Census 1850, 311).

Daniel (b. 1805?) was a slave owned by Clemens’s uncle, John Adams Quarles, who had a farm of several hundred acres near Florida, Missouri. In 1897, Clemens recalled that during his summers there:

On 14 November 1855 Quarles emancipated his “old and faithful servant Dann who is now in the fiftieth year of his age about Six feet high complexion black” (Quarles, 240). Daniel appears as Uncle Dan’l in The Gilded Age (1874). He is Jim in [begin page 317] Huckleberry Finn (1885), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33–76 passim), and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134–212 passim).

Davis, Francis (b. 1812), mentioned briefly in “Villagers” (99), was co-owner with William Shoot of Hannibal’s Shoot and Davis Livery Stable. He married Josephine Pavey, and his son by a previous marriage, George Davis, married her younger sister Rebecca Pavey (Marion Census 1850, 312; Marion Census 1860, 762; Holcombe, 903).

Davis (or Davies), John (1810?–85), a Welshman mentioned in “Villagers” (95), married Clemens’s schoolteacher, Mary Ann Newcomb, in the late 1840s. He was employed as a teamster in 1850, but by 1859 had changed the spelling of his name to Davies and was selling “books and fancy goods” from his store on Main Street (Marion Census 1850, 320–21; Fotheringham, 20; Hagood and Hagood 1985, 19; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 41; “Former Florida Neighbor of Clemens Family Head of School Attended Here by Mark Twain,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 12B).

Davis, Lucy, is mentioned in “Villagers” (95) as a Hannibal “schoolmarm.” In a letter to Clemens on 31 March 1870, William Bowen reported meeting “Old Lucy Davis” on the St. Louis wharf: “Old Luce’ asked for you instanter! Said you were the worst Boy, ‘and I declare in my heart he’s the funniest man in my acquaintance’ Wants to know if you still climb out on the roof of the house and jump from 3d story windows” (CU-MARK).

Dawson family.

John D. Dawson (b. 1812?), from Scotland, had fourteen years’ teaching experience when he opened his school in Hannibal in April 1847. In 1849 he went to California, where he was a miner in Tuolumne County by 1850. Dawson’s was the last school attended by Clemens, who remarked in 1906: “I remember Dawson’s schoolhouse perfectly. If I wanted to describe it I could save myself the trouble by conveying the description of it to these pages from Tom Sawyer” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:179). The school described in Tom Sawyer (chapters 6–7, 20–21) is reprised in the opening chapter of “Schoolhouse Hill” (214–24), with the schoolmaster modeled after Dawson. The school’s location, however, as described in “Schoolhouse Hill,” reflects Clemens’s recollection of Samuel Cross’s schoolhouse. In “Villagers” (93, 94, 94, 94) Clemens mentions Dawson’s school four times (Wecter 1952, 132–33; “Letter from California,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 17 Jan 50; Tuolumne Census, 135).

Theodore Dawson was the schoolmaster’s son. Clemens recalled him as “inordinately good, extravagantly good, offensively good, detestably good—and he had pop-eyes—and I would have drowned him if I had had a chance” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:179). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) show that he planned to introduce “pop-eyed” Theodore as Gill Ferguson, but he did not do so.

Draper, Zachariah G. (1798–1856), born in South Carolina, was one of the leading citizens of Hannibal, where he settled in 1827 and held several political offices, [begin page 318] including those of postmaster, city councilman, county court judge, and state representative. He was one of John Marshall Clemens’s few intimate friends. In 1841 both were jurymen in the trial of three Illinois abolitionists sentenced to twelve years in the penitentiary for trying to induce slaves to escape to Canada. Both helped found the Hannibal Library Institute in 1844, and in 1846 they initiated plans to construct a railroad from Hannibal to St. Joseph. Draper heads the list of “Villagers” (93), and he probably was one of the “three ‘rich’ men” Mark Twain alludes to later in that work (see the note at 100.18). He did not die “without issue,” as Clemens states, but fathered five children, three of whom died at an early age. Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” ( MSM, 432) reveal that Judge Taylor (237–38) was based on Judge Draper (Marion Census 1850, 315; Holcombe, 253, 256–58, 894, 895, 900, 901, 942, 959; Greene, 92; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 9 n. 1, 161; Wecter 1952, 72–73, 110, 111; Brashear 1934, 200, n. 11; eulogy, Hannibal Journal, 27 May 52, excerpted in Wecter 1950, 1).

Elgin, William C. (1802?–51), born in Virginia, moved to Hannibal in 1836. He worked for several years as a merchant, and by 1847 was proprietor of the City Hotel. A contemporary of Clemens’s called “Col. Elgin . . . a prominent figure in Hannibal society. . . . He had a great gift of Mesmerism which he practiced greatly to the entertainment of some and the annoyance of others, among the latter his wife. . . . he used to claim that he could mesmerize her hand or leg without her knowledge and render either member ‘paralized’ temporarily” (Ayres 1917). In June 1851, Colonel Elgin and twenty-three other residents died when cholera struck Hannibal. Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383, 385) identify Elgin as the model for Colonel Elder (166–68, 170, 178, 203, 210). For clarification of the reference to him in “Villagers” (101), see Allen B. McDonald (Marion Census 1850, 306; “City Hotel,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 13 Jan 49; Wecter 1952, 120, 214; “Obituary,” Hannibal Western Union, 26 June 51).

Fife, Matthew S. (b. 1810?), mentioned in “Villagers” (93), was editor of several Hannibal newspapers in the early 1840s, including the Hannibal Journal, where Orion Clemens served his printer’s apprenticeship before moving to St. Louis about 1842. Fife also was Jane Clemens’s dentist. In his 1897 notebook Clemens recalled him in conjunction with Dr. Hugh Meredith and Mrs. Utterback, a faith healer who twice cured his mother of a toothache: “Mrs. Utterback cured Ma. Dr. Fife pulled her teeth   Dr Meredith—hoarse deep voice” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 61). By the mid-1850s Fife had settled in St. Louis, where he worked as a wholesale shoe dealer (Holcombe, 899, 987; SLC 1897–98, 63–64, in MTA, 1:108; St. Louis Census 1860, 651:184; Knox, 58; Kennedy 1859, 160; Edwards 1867, 333).

Finn, James (Jimmy) (d. 1845), as Clemens notes in his autobiography, was “Town Drunkard, an exceedingly well defined and unofficial office” in Hannibal in the 1840s. The position was first held by “General” Gaines, then by Woodson Blankenship, who for a time was the “sole and only incumbent of the office; but afterward Jimmy Finn proved competency and disputed the place with him, so we had two town drunkards at one time” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:174). In [begin page 319] 1867 Mark Twain recalled that the temperance people tried to reform Finn, but “in an evil hour temptation came upon him, and he sold his body to a doctor for a quart of whiskey, and that ended all his earthly troubles. He drank it all at one sitting, and his soul went to its long account and his body went to Dr. Grant” (SLC 1867 [bib21404], 1). Chapter 23 of A Tramp Abroad (1880) contains a similar story in which Finn, lying sick in the tanyard, agrees to sell his skeleton to the doctor. In Life on the Mississippi (1883) Mark Twain wrote that he died “a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion” (chapter 56). James McDaniel, a Hannibal contemporary of Clemens’s, confirmed that Finn “was found dead in Jim Craig’s tan-yard” (Abbott, 16). Court records of 6 November 1845 show that Marion County reimbursed Joseph Craig (father of Clemens’s schoolmate Joe Craig) for boarding and nursing Finn when he was ill, and assumed the cost of “making a coffin, furnishing shroud and burying James Finn a pauper” (Marion County 1845). Finn was the primary model for Huck’s father (“pap Finn”) in Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885), although Blankenship (father of Tom Blankenship, the acknowledged model for Huck) and Gaines may have contributed to his characterization. Finn also may have influenced the characterization of Jimmy Grimes in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (136). He is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (20).

Foreman (or Forman), James A. (Jim) (1835?–1903), was a Hannibal clerk who in 1850, like Clemens, joined the Cadets of Temperance. By 1854 he was clerking in a St. Louis dry goods store. Clemens and Foreman met again in May 1902 in St. Louis, where Foreman was a cashier in a printing firm. That summer Clemens wrote Anna Laura Hawkins Frazer: “Guess again! Jim Foreman is in one of the books, but you have not spotted him” (“Laura Hawkins Frazer Always Remembered as Idol of His Boyhood,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 3C). A page of Clemens’s Hannibal notes includes the phrase “Jim Foreman the model boy” and identifies Foreman’s fictional counterpart—the “Model Boy, Willie Mufferson,” who appears in chapter 5 of Tom Sawyer (SLC 1897 [bib21475]). The allusion to Foreman’s “Handkerchief” in “Villagers” (99) is explained by a passage in Tom Sawyer: “His Willie Mufferson’s white handkerchief was hanging out of his pocket behind, as usual on Sundays—accidentally. Tom had no handkerchief, and he looked upon boys who had, as snobs” (ATS, 38; Marion Census 1850, 306; Hagood and Hagood 1985, 27; Cadets of Temperance 1850; Knox, 52, 61; Gould 1902, 674, 2620).

Fuqua, Archibald (Arch) (b. 1833?), Clemens’s classmate in Dawson’s school, was one of six children of Mary Ann and Nathaniel Fuqua, a tobacco merchant. In his autobiography Clemens remembered envying young Arch’s “great gift”—his ability to crack his big toe with a snap audible at thirty yards (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:180). In “Boy’s Manuscript” (12–13) Arch is Archy Thompson, the boy who sells a louse to William Bowen (Marion Census 1850, 318; Marion Census 1860, 750–51; Wecter 1952, 142).

Gaines. In his autobiography Clemens remembered “General” Gaines as “our first town-drunkard” (SLC 1897–98, 54, in MTA, 1:105). He recorded Gaines’s boast— [begin page 320] “Whoop! Bow your neck & spread!”—in his “Letter to William Bowen” (20) and in 1876 used the phrase in the speech of a tall-talking raftsman in the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn (1885), a passage he published in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and later removed, at his publisher’s suggestion, from Huckleberry Finn (HF, 110). Jim’s remarks about “ole Gin’l Gaines” in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (35) led Dixon Wecter to speculate that Gaines was an “ancient and disreputable relic of the Indian Wars” (Wecter 1952, 150). Working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” mention “Genl. Gaines (new town drunkard)” and suggest that he was to be the model for a “Genℓ Haines” (HH&T, 383); the character who appears in the story is called Cap. Haines (180–81, 186, 188, 193, 209).

Garth family. Clemens knew two sons of tobacco and grain merchant John Garth (1784–?1857) and his wife, Emily (d. 1844?) (Portrait, 776–77; Hagood and Hagood 1985, 29).

David J. Garth (1822–1912) in the 1850s became Hannibal’s leading manufacturer of tobacco. Clemens recalled in his autobiography that Garth sold one extremely cheap brand of cigar known as “Garth’s damndest”: “He had had these in stock a good many years, and although they looked well enough on the outside, their insides had decayed to dust and would fly out like a puff of vapor when they were broken in two” (AD, 13 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:101). Garth was Clemens’s Sunday school teacher at the First Presbyterian Church. By 1862 he had moved to New York City, where he established Garth, Son & Company, a nationwide chain of tobacco warehouses and wholesale houses. Garth is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and “Villagers” (95, 101). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” ( MSM, 432) include “Kaspar Helder (poor little German cigar   (Garth’s d—dest),” but the story mentions neither the character nor the cigar (Marion Census 1850, 317; Greene, 96d; Portrait, 776; “David J. Garth Dead at 90 Years,” New York Times, 19 July 1912, 9).

John H. Garth (1837–99), Clemens’s close friend, attended Missouri State University, then worked in the family’s Hannibal tobacco company. He married another childhood friend of Clemens’s, Helen V. Kercheval, and in 1862 moved to New York City, where he worked with his brother in the tobacco business. Nine years later he returned to Hannibal and was active in various enterprises—banking, the lumber business, and manufacturing. When Clemens visited Hannibal in May 1882, he was the Garth’s guest at “Woodside,” their 600-acre estate just outside of town. Although Clemens says in “Villagers” (101) that the Garths raised three children, Hannibal histories mention only two, Anna and John David. Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) show that Jack Stillson (219) was modeled after John Garth (Portrait, 776–77; Greene, 271; MTB, 3:1332; John H. Garth to SLC, 7 July 83, CU-MARK; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 246).

Glover, Samuel Taylor (1813–84), practiced law in his native Kentucky before moving to Palmyra, Missouri. He was well known in Hannibal as the defense counsel in three highly publicized trials of the 1840s. In 1841 he helped defend three Illinois abolitionists accused of urging slaves to escape to Canada; John Marshall Clemens [begin page 321] and other jurymen found them guilty—a verdict applauded in the courtroom—and they were sentenced to twelve years in the penitentiary. In 1846 Glover successfully defended Hannibal merchant William Perry Owsley when he was tried for the murder of Sam Smarr. He also was one of two lawyers appointed to defend Ben, a slave, who in October 1849 was accused of murdering a young white girl and her brother. Glover served as John Marshall Clemens’s lawyer in 1843, when Clemens successfully sued William B. Beebe to recover a debt of $484.41. Glover was active in the Whig party, and in the early 1850s he became acquainted with Orion Clemens, who, as editor of the Hannibal Journal, was an ardent Whig supporter. Although Glover stammered, he was praised as a masterful courtroom advocate and an accomplished public speaker. After moving to St. Louis in 1849, and particularly after the Civil War, he was considered to be the West’s most brilliant constitutional lawyer, but as Clemens indicates in “Villagers” (102), Hannibal residents were unimpressed. During Clemens’s 1882 visit to Hannibal an old resident of the town informed him that a “perfect chucklehead,” evidently Glover, had become the “first lawyer in the State of Missouri” (Life on the Mississippi, chapter 53). Glover’s history somewhat resembles that of the protagonist of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), who struggles for nearly twenty years against the public’s misperception of him as a fool (Holcombe, 251, 258, 276, 299; Clemens v. Beebe; NCAB, 25:370–71; Scharf, 2:1494; Conard, 3:66; Orion Clemens to SLC, 7 Jan 61, CU-MARK; Orion Clemens to Samuel T. Glover, 9 Oct 78, CU-MARK).

Green, Moses P. (b. 1820?), was Hannibal city attorney from 1852 to 1856, mayor in 1864, and a delegate to the Missouri State Convention in 1865. As “Villagers” (97) notes, Green was a “Union man,” who in 1862 headed a committee to secure emancipation of the slaves. He married Mary Russell Bowen (Fotheringham, 27; Holcombe, 519, 551, 941).

Grosvenor, Lemuel (1814–70), a native of Boston who was educated at Andover Theological Seminary, came to Hannibal in August 1846 to serve as temporary pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. He offered to spend an hour a day giving “young gentlemen” free instruction in either Latin or Spanish (Hannibal Gazette, 10 June 47, quoted in Welsh, 39). Grosvenor was almost certainly the Presbyterian clergyman who in “Villagers” (105) ministers to John Marshall Clemens on his deathbed. In May 1848 he moved to Illinois (Clarence W. Bowen, 1:260–61, 6:304; Sweets 1984, 44; Fotheringham, 104–5).

H., Mrs. See Elizabeth Horr.

Hannicks, John (b. 1810?), from Virginia, is mentioned in “Villagers” (102). He and his wife, Ellen (b. 1816?), and their three children were among the forty-three free blacks living in Hannibal in 1850. Mark Twain described him in the first installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875), later chapter 4 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), as “a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice,” who reports the first sign of dark smoke above one of the river’s points by shouting, “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!” In 1851 a local newspaper praised the “exertions of [begin page 322] good-humored ‘John,’ the Drayman, in turning out with his dray and hauling water” to the scene of a fire (“Fire,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 15 May 51). In a list of anecdotes in his 1887–88 notebook, Mark Twain included “John Hanicks’ laugh” and his “Giving his ‘experience’” (N&J3, 355; Marion Census 1850, 310; DeBow, 660).

Hardy, Richard (Dick), an artist and sign painter, is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (20) and “Villagers” (96) (“Behold the Sign!!!” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 16 Dec 52; Thomas S. Nash to SLC, 23 Apr 85, CU-MARK).

Han. See Pleasant Hannibal Clemens.

Hartley. See Henry Clemens.

Hawkins family. Six members of the family are mentioned in “Villagers,” and Mark Twain used two Hawkins children in his books.

Sophia Bradford Hawkins (b. 1795?) and her husband, Elijah, a farmer, moved to Missouri from their native Kentucky in 1839 with their children and slaves. They bought a large tract of land in Ralls County, but resided chiefly in Hannibal, in Marion County. They had ten children, eight of whom can be identified: Eleanor, Jameson F., Benjamin M., Elijah (’Lige, or ’Lije), Catherine (Kitty), George William (Buck), Anna Laura, and Jefferson. According to “Villagers” (95), Mrs. Hawkins was widowed by about 1840 (Portrait, 248–49; Jackson 1976 [bib20647], 51; Marion Census 1840, 90; Marion Census 1850, 305; “A ‘green one,’ . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 25 Mar 52; Frazer, 73; William Bowen to SLC, 31 Mar 70, CU-MARK).

Benjamin M. (Ben) Hawkins (b. 1822?) went to California in the 1849 gold rush and returned to Hannibal in 1851. He served as a second lieutenant in the Mexican War and was Hannibal city marshal in 1852, 1853, and 1855. In 1856 he was elected county sheriff on the Know Nothing ticket, and he later became a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army. Clemens mentions him in “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and “Villagers” (95). Working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383–84) indicate that Captain Haskins, the militia captain and sheriff (167, 185, 188, 208, 213), is modeled after him (Marion Census 1860, 768; “The Emigration,” clipping from unidentified Hannibal newspaper, ca. May 49, facsimile in Meltzer, 15; “Late from California,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 29 Nov 49; “Local Items,” Hannibal Western Union, 16 Jan 51; Holcombe, 284, 331–32, 428, 941; Portrait, 248, 249).

Elijah (’Lige, or ’Lije) Hawkins (b. 1828?) opened a Hannibal dry goods store in January 1849. In “Villagers” (95), Clemens writes that he became a “rich merchant in St Louis and New York,” but Hawkins was still a resident of Hannibal in 1870. The marginal note “’Lige” on the final manuscript page of “Tupperville-Dobbsville” (CU-MARK) suggests that Clemens planned to use Hawkins in that story (Marion Census 1850, 305; “O! For California! New Firm,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 31 June 49; Caroline Schroter to Jane Lampton Clemens, 29 May 70, CU-MARK).

Sophia F. C. Hawkins (b. 1833?), a native of Kentucky, is said in “Villagers” (95) to [begin page 323] have married a “prosperous tinner” In 1850 she was living with the widowed Sophia Bradford Hawkins, Elijah, and Anna Laura, but her exact relation to them has not been determined (Marion Census 1850, 306).

Anna Laura Hawkins (1837–1928), born in Georgetown, Kentucky, on 1 December 1837, was only a few years old when her family moved to Hannibal. Laura, as she was called, at one time lived in a two-story frame house on Hill Street, almost directly across from the Clemenses. She and Samuel Clemens were childhood playmates, sweethearts, and classmates. “I remember very well when we moved into the house opposite where Mr. John M. Clemens lived,” she said in an 1899 interview. “I remember also the first time I ever saw Mark Twain. He was then a barefooted boy, and he came out in the street before our house and turned hand-springs, and stood on his head, and cut just such capers as he describes in Tom’s ‘showing off’ before Becky. We were good friends from the first” (Fielder, 11). In 1913 she recalled that she “liked to play with him every day and all day long. Sam and I used to play together like two girls. He had fuzzy light curls all over his head that really ought to have belonged to a girl.” She remembered him as “a gentle boy, and kind of quiet, and he always did have that drawl. He was long-spoken, like his mother” (Abbott, 17). In 1918 Laura said:

She also recalled: “He took me out when I was first learning to skate, and I fell on the ice with such force as to make me unconscious; but he did not forsake me” (Wharton, 676). Laura Hawkins attended Van Rensselaer Presbyterial Academy in Rensselaer, Missouri, and in 1858 married James W. Frazer (1833–75), a Ralls County physician, with whom she had two sons. Although Clemens mistakenly believed her dead when he wrote “Villagers” in 1897, she had returned to Hannibal in 1895 and become matron of the Home for the Friendless. Clemens dined with her in Hannibal in 1902 and in October 1908 had Laura and her granddaughter as guests at his home in Redding, Connecticut, when he gave her his photograph inscribed “To Laura Fraser, with the love of her earliest sweetheart” (MoFlM). Laura Hawkins is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and in “Villagers” (95). She probably influenced the characterization of Amy Johnson in “Boy’s Manuscript” (1–18). Mark Twain portrayed her as Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and “Schoolhouse Hill” (218), and used her name for one of the principal characters in The Gilded Age (Wecter 1952, 181–83; “Mrs. Fraser Dies; Chum of Twain,” New York Times, 27 Dec 1928, 23; “Laura Hawkins Frazer Always Remembered as Idol of His Boyhood,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 3C; Holcombe, 647; photograph of the Frazers’ gravestone in Rensselaer, Missouri, courtesy MoFuWC).

[begin page 324] Jefferson Hawkins, Laura’s brother, is mentioned in “Villagers” (95). He died when very young and was buried in Hannibal (Portrait, 248).

Hayward, Mrs. See Mildred Catherine Shoot.

Hicks, Urban East (1828–1905), a journeyman printer, came to Hannibal in the mid-1840s and apparently worked for the Hannibal Gazette until May 1848, then for the Hannibal Journal. Probably beginning in the fall of 1850 he worked on Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Western Union where, by January 1851, Samuel Clemens and Jim Wolf were apprentices. Hicks was a member of the Sons of Temperance. He appears to have been fond of public entertainments and was expelled from the Methodist Episcopal Church South for going to a circus. As Clemens notes in “Villagers” (98), Hicks “saw Jenny Lind,” suggesting that he was the unnamed Hannibal villager who declared, in a letter published by Orion, that seeing Jenny Lind perform in St. Louis had been worth every cent of the ten-dollar cost (see Wecter 1952, 193–94). In his autobiography Clemens wrote that it might have been in May 1850 (he was sure of the month, but not the year) that he and Hicks attended performances by an itinerant mesmerist, at which Hicks won brief local celebrity by proving to be an apt subject. Spurred by envy, Clemens pretended that he, too, was mesmerized and outdid Hicks with faked feats of telepathy (AD, 1 Dec 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 118–25). In the spring of 1851 Hicks emigrated to the Pacific Northwest, where he worked on newspapers and served as a volunteer in the Yakima and Klikitat Indian wars. He remained in the region for the rest of his life, working as a newspaper editor, publisher, and compositor in Oregon and Washington. In 1886, upon receiving news of Hicks’s whereabouts, Clemens wrote: “I remember Urban E. vividly & pleasantly; & also the fencing-matches with column-rules & quack-medicine stereotypes. . . . if I could see Hicks here I would receive him with a barbecue & a torchlight procession, & put the entire house at his disposal” (SLC to George H. Himes, 17 Jan 86, MoPeS). An entry in Clemens’s notebook for 1897 shows that he considered using his and Hicks’s experience with the hypnotist in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy”: “The mesmerizer—Tom gets no pay, yet was superior to Hicks, who got $3 a week” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 58). The incident was not included, however (“Remarks of Mr. U. E. Hicks . . .,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 13 Jan 49; Hicks, 20; Hicks to SLC, 30 Mar 86, CU-MARK; George H. Himes to SLC, 30 Jan 86, 23 Jan 1907, CU-MARK; Wecter 1952, 205).

Higgins was “the one legged mulatto, who belonged to Mr. Garth,” according to Hedrick Smith, a Hannibal contemporary of Clemens’s (Smith 1889). An 1851 article in Orion Clemens’s newspaper, possibly written by Samuel Clemens (see Wecter 1952, 238–39), reported Higgins’s reaction when a Miss Jemima walked through town in the first bloomer costume seen there:

[begin page 325] Higgins is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). In chapter 8 of Huckleberry Finn, Jim tells a story about “dat one-laigged nigger dat b’longs to ole Misto Bradish” ( HF, 55). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 384) list “One-legged Higgins (Bradish’s nigger),” but in the story itself he has become “Higgins’s Bill, the one-legged nigger” (184).

Holliday, Melicent S. (b. 1800?), a native of Virginia, was considered the grand lady of Hannibal. She lived just north of town on Holliday’s Hill (called Cardiff Hill in Mark Twain’s fiction) in a mansion built for her by a brother. Anna Laura Hawkins Frazer recalled that when she and Samuel Clemens were young, “our favorite walk” was up Holliday’s Hill:

In “Villagers” (95–96) Clemens mistakenly says Mrs. Holliday’s father was “a British General in the Revolution”; in fact, her grandfather, Angus McDonald, fought in the Continental army and in 1777 was commissioned lieutenant-colonel by George Washington. Mrs. Holliday was married twice. Nothing is known about her first husband. Her second husband, Captain Richard T. Holliday, went bankrupt in 1844. He served as justice of the peace in 1844–45, concurrently with Judge John Marshall Clemens, and was elected city recorder for the years 1846 through 1848. He joined the 1849 gold rush, but died shortly after arriving in California. Having been told by a fortune-teller that she would meet a future husband on the river, Mrs. Holliday frequently traveled on the Mississippi. After the Civil War she lost her property and lived with friends, spending a few days with one, then moving on to another. On several occasions she annoyed the Clemenses in St. Louis by appearing uninvited and remaining for lengthy visits. Pamela Clemens’s daughter remembered the elderly Mrs. Holliday as a “pathetic character” who “finally died in an insane asylum” (MTBus, 50). Mark Twain portrayed her as the widow Douglas in Tom Sawyer, where she is described as “fair, smart and forty, a generous, good-hearted soul and well-to-do, her hill mansion the only palace in the town, and the most hospitable and much the most lavish in the matter of festivities that St. Petersburg could boast” (chapter 5). She reappears as widow Douglas in Huckleberry Finn and in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134, 153, 156, 165, 208). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) indicate that widow Guthrie (232, 236) was modeled after Mrs. Holliday (Marion Census 1850, 326; Wecter 1952, 157–58; Greene, 96g; NCAB, 15:235–36; Clemens v. Townsend; Missouri v. Owsley;Holcombe, 941; MTBus, 26, 49–50; Morris Anderson, 89–90).

Honeyman family. Robert D. Honeyman, a carpenter and contractor, and his wife, Amanda, are listed in the 1850 census together with five children between the ages of two and fourteen. Clemens recalled the three eldest children in “Villagers” (Marion Census 1840, 90, and 1850, 310; Greene, 259; Wecter 1950, 8; Honeyman, 27).

Lavinia Honeyman (b. 1835?) was probably a classmate of Clemens’s, though [begin page 326] her schooling continued beyond his; in 1853 her grandiloquent valedictory oration at Misses Smith & Patrick’s School was published in Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Journal (Wecter 1952, 184). She is mentioned in “Villagers” (102).

Samuel H. (Sam) Honeyman (b. 1837?), mentioned in “Villagers” (98), was an occasional playmate of Clemens’s and a member of the Cadets of Temperance. In 1866 he published Hannibal’s city directory, advertising his services as an agent for the Missouri State Horse Insurance and Detective Company. A contemporary, Norval Brady, recalled that Honeyman lost an arm in the Civil War and died shortly after the hostilities ended (Marion Census 1850, 310; Cadets of Temperance 1850; Honeyman, 27, 64; “ ‘Gull’ Brady Was Last Survivor,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 6C).

Letitia Honeyman (b. 1840), mentioned in “Villagers” (98), was a schoolmate of Clemens’s (Marion Census 1850, 310).

Horr, Elizabeth (1790?–1873), born in New York, was Clemens’s first schoolteacher. Her husband, Benjamin W. Horr (1789?–1870), was a cooper and an elder in the Presbyterian Church to which Jane and Pamela Clemens belonged. Samuel Clemens never forgot Elizabeth Horr. Early in 1870, he wrote to her about his marriage and sent her a copy of The Innocents Abroad. She thanked her “kind Pupil” for his “generous expression of remembrance” (Horr to SLC, 16 May 70, CU-MARK). In an 1897 notebook entry for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” Clemens recalled “Mrs. Horr, with the little colored pictures as rewards of merit” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 59). In 1906 he remembered:

He also recalled being disciplined with a switch on the first day of school, as well as Mrs. Horr’s later prediction that he would one day be “President of the United States, and would stand in the presence of kings unabashed” (AD, 10 Sept 1906, CU-MARK). In “Villagers” (95, 95, 97, 101) Clemens alludes to Mrs. Horr or “Mrs. H.” four times (Marion Census 1850, 314; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 17; Sweets 1984, 17, 63).

Hunter, Ella. See Ella Evelina (Hunter) Lampton.

Hurst family. Clemens mistakenly writes in “Villagers” (94) that his boyhood friend John Lewis Robards “married a Hurst—new family.” In fact, in 1861 Robards married Sara Helm, whose family was relatively “new” to Hannibal, having arrived from Kentucky in 1852 (Holcombe, 608, 992). No Hurst family has been identified among the town’s residents.

[begin page 327] Hyde family. Clemens mentions Eliza Hyde and her “tough and dissipated” brothers, Ed and Dick, in “Villagers” (96). They were the children of Edmund Hyde, who died in the late 1840s, and his wife, Mary (Marion Census 1850, 315; “Final Settlement,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 11 Oct 49).

Eliza Hyde, on 27 April 1848, married Robert Graham, the “stranger” Clemens mentions in “Villagers” (96). See the note at 96.15 for a discussion of “The Last Link is Broken,” the song Clemens associated with her (Hannibal Journal, 4 May 48, cited in Wecter 1950, 5).

Ed Hyde appears to have left Hannibal by October 1850, since his name is not listed in the census.

Richard E. (Dick) Hyde (b. 1830?), a native of Missouri, had no occupation in 1850 and resided with his wife in his mother’s home. In his autobiography Clemens recalled the “rowdy young Hyde brothers” who tried to murder their “harmless old uncle: one of them held the old man down with his knees on his breast while the other one tried repeatedly to kill him with an Allen revolver which wouldn’t go off” (SLC 1900, 7, in MTA, 1:132). An entry in Clemens’s 1897 notebook suggests that Shad and Hal Stover in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (127, 130, 132, 133) were modeled after Ed and a Henry Hyde (NB 40, CU-MARK, TS p. 24, in S&B, 173). Henry might be another brother not listed in the census, but Clemens may have meant Richard (Marion Census 1850, 315; Hannibal Journal, 17 May 49, cited in Wecter 1950, 4).

Jackson, referred to in “Villagers” (97) as the man who married Roberta Jones, has not been identified.

Jenny, a slave, was a young girl when Jane’s grandmother gave her to Jane and John Marshall Clemens, possibly in the spring of 1825. She accompanied the Clemenses in their move that year from Columbia, Kentucky, to Gainesboro, Tennessee. When the family moved to Jamestown, Tennessee, in 1827, Jenny was hired out to Patsy and John Adams Quarles, Jane’s sister and brother-in-law in Overton County, Tennessee. By the spring of 1835, having rejoined the Clemenses, Jenny traveled with them to Florida, Missouri. Annie Moffett Webster recalled hearing Jane Clemens tell stories in a “soft drawling voice” about “the long ride” from Jamestown to Florida: Jane Clemens “could not be reconciled to the fact that Jenny always secured the pacing horse leaving the trotting horse for Orion.” Jane also “told many stories of Jenny who could only be managed by threats to ‘Rent her to the Yankees.’ The Northern people demanded so much more than Southerners did, that that was a threat that frightened her” (Webster 1918, 13, 14). Probably in late 1842 or early 1843 the Clemenses sold Jenny to William B. Beebe of Hannibal. Clemens recalled Jenny’s sale in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (89) and in “Villagers” (104), where he noted her subsequent employment as a steamboat chambermaid. In his 1905–8 notebook, Clemens wrote: “We sold slave to Beebe & he sold her down the river. We saw her several times afterward. She was the only slave we ever owned in my time” (NB 38, CU-MARK, TS p. 10; Marion Census 1840, 90; Varble, 99, 104, 115–16; Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK; Wecter 1952, 72).

[begin page 328]

Jones, Roberta, is identified in “Villagers” (97) as the perpetrator of a practical joke that misfired with a tragic consequence. The incident is the subject of the brief sketch “Huck Finn,” where Roberta Jones is called Rowena Fuller (260–61). Although Clemens notes in “Villagers” that Roberta married a man named Jackson, the Hannibal Journal of 23 November 1848 records her marriage to William B. Hall of Ohio (cited in Wecter 1950, 7). See the note at 97.27–28 for the opening lines of “Rockaway,” a song that Clemens associated with her.

Kercheval family.

William F. Kercheval (1813?–97) was a trader, according to the 1850 Hannibal census. Clemens identifies him in “Villagers” (101) as a tailor. In 1849–50 Kercheval was co-owner of a dry goods firm, and in the fall of 1851 he became manager of the “People’s Store,” which also sold dry goods. Clemens claimed in his autobiography that of the nine times he almost drowned as a boy, he was saved once by Kercheval’s “good slave woman” and once by the tailor’s “good apprentice boy” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:184; Marion Census 1850, 305; Hagood and Hagood 1985, 44; “Fall of 1849. Kercheval & Green . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 18 Oct 49; “Dissolution of Copartnership,” Hannibal Western Union, 12 Dec 50; “W. F. Kercheval . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 1 Jan 52).

Helen V. Kercheval (1838–1923), William’s daughter, married Clemens’s friend John H. Garth on 18 October 1860. In his autobiography Clemens called her “one of the prettiest of the schoolgirls” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:184). She is mentioned twice in “Villagers” (101, 101). In working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), Clemens cast her as Fanny Brewster, but the character does not appear in the story (Marion Census 1850, 305; Portrait, 776; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 246).

Kribben, William J. (Bill) (d. 1878), of St. Louis, was a Mississippi steamboat pilot. In 1863 he was arrested by Union soldiers on the charge of disloyalty, but was released on bond pending a trial, the outcome of which is not known. During the Civil War he was secretary and treasurer of the Western Boatmen’s Benevolent Association and contributed to the organization’s decline by embezzling its “ample fund” (Life on the Mississippi, chapter 15). He died of yellow fever when co-piloting the Molly Moore with Samuel Adams Bowen, Jr. Clemens’s notebook entries during his 1882 visit to the Mississippi River indicate that Kribben was buried at the head of Island 68 in Arkansas (N&J2, 527, 562). “Villagers” (97) calls him “the defaulting secretary” (Kennedy 1857, 302, where his name is entered as W. S. Kibben; “Paroled,” clipping from unidentified newspaper, ca. Apr 63, CU-MARK; McNeil 1861; M. Clabaugh to SLC, 19 July 90, CU-MARK).

Lakenan, Robert F. (1820–83), born in Winchester, Virginia, was admitted to the bar in 1845 and shortly afterward moved to Hannibal. As Mark Twain recalled in his autobiography, he “took an important position in the little town at once, and maintained it. He brought with him a distinguished reputation as a lawyer. He was educated, cultured . . . grave even to austerity” and “was contemplated with considerable awe by the community” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:181–82). [begin page 329] In the late 1840s he helped to found the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad and became its director, then its general attorney. Except for the years 1861 to 1866, when he retired to his farm in Shelby County, he lived in Hannibal. In 1876 he was elected state senator and in 1882 state representative. He was married twice: in January 1850 to Lizzie Ayres, who died the following December, and in 1854 to a reluctant Mary Jane Moss. In “Villagers” (93, 94, 94) Lakenan is mentioned three times (Marion Census 1850, 314; Holcombe, 608–10; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 37; “Married,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 10 Jan 50; “Died,” Hannibal Western Union, 19 Dec 50).

Lampton family.

James J. Lampton (1817–87) was Jane Lampton Clemens’s “favorite cousin” (SLC 1897–98, 19, in MTA, 1:89). Born in Kentucky to Jennie and Lewis Lampton (the brother of Jane’s father), he studied both law and medicine and was a major in the Kentucky militia. He lived for a time in Louisiana, Missouri (about twenty-five miles southeast of Hannibal), but by the late 1850s had moved to St. Louis with his wife, four daughters, and a son. One daughter, Katharine, remembered Samuel Clemens’s frequent visits to the Lampton home when he was a Mississippi River pilot: “He and father were great cronies; both were keenly intellectual men, deeply interested in politics and all the great questions of the day” (Paxson, 4). Although a lawyer by profession, in the 1860s Lampton worked as a salesman and bill collector, then went into business for himself as a cotton and tobacco agent. His eldest daughter, Julia, regarded as the beauty of the family, went insane after learning of President Lincoln’s assassination; she tried to hang herself, claiming she was Judas Iscariot, and was placed in the St. Louis County Asylum. A relative who met Lampton in 1863 described him as “a man of tall, erect figure, with a military bearing. . . . a very pleasant gentleman; affable, cultured and well educated” (Keith, 9, 15). Mark Twain portrayed his cousin in The Gilded Age (1874) as Colonel Sellers, the incorrigible optimist who believes each new speculative venture will yield him a fortune. In his autobiography Clemens described Lampton as “a man with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be loved”; and he recalled seeing him in St. Louis in 1885: “He was become old & white-headed, but . . . the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination—they were all there; & before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin’s lamp & flashing the secret riches of the world before me” (SLC 1897–98, 21–22, 25–26, in MTA, 1:90, 91–92). “Jane Lampton Clemens” (86–87) includes a brief discussion of Lampton (St. Louis Census 1860, 649:353; Kennedy 1860, 303; Edwards 1867, 505; Varble, 29; Paxson, 4; Keith, 9, 15, 51; Turner, 593–94; MTBus, 121; James J. Lampton to SLC, 24 Dec 79, CU-MARK; Katharine Lampton Paxson to SLC, 13 Dec 1904, CU-MARK; “Died,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 3 Mar 87, 7).

James Andrew Hays (Jim) Lampton (1824–79), described in “Villagers” (98), was the son of Benjamin Lampton and his second wife, Polly Hays. He was the half brother of Jane Lampton Clemens, but as he was twenty-one years her junior, Jim generally kept company with her older children, Orion and Pamela. Born in Columbia, Kentucky, Lampton was about ten when his family moved to Florida, Missouri. [begin page 330] He was orphaned by the age of eighteen, and the following year, in December 1843, married Margaret Glascock. She died in early 1845, leaving a baby who survived only a few months. Lampton inherited property through this infant, including a slave named Lavinia. He settled briefly in Hannibal, where he rented the dwelling next to the Clemenses’ Hill Street home, then attended McDowell Medical College in St. Louis. In November 1849 he married Ella Evelina Hunter and moved to New London, about 10 miles south of Hannibal, evidently intending to practice medicine there. He soon retired from the profession, however, because he couldn’t bear the sight of blood. In New London he served as an agent for Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Western Union. By the fall of 1853 the Lamptons had returned to St. Louis, where Jim worked as a clerk in the surveyor general’s office until he became a steamboat agent in the mid-1860s. An active Mason, Lampton was described by a fellow lodge member as “a cultured gentleman, of large worldly experience and bright intelligence. . . . His genial disposition made him friends, and his frank and honest nature held them to him. He was a transparent man, and carried his whole true character in full view of the world” (Garrett, 7–8; Bible 1862; Woodruff, 24; Colonial Dames, 39; MTBus, 17–18; Varble, 161–63, 209–10; Hannibal Journal, 22 Nov 49, cited in Wecter 1950, 7; “Agents for the Western Union,” Hannibal Western Union, 10 Oct 50; SLC to Pamela A. Moffett, 3? Sept 53, 8 Oct 53, L1, 13, 17; Knox, 110; Edwards 1866, 533; “Death of A. J. H. Lampton,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 4 Feb 79).

Ella Evelina (Hunter) Lampton (1834?–1904), the wife of James Andrew Hays Lampton, was born in Virginia. Her birthdate is uncertain, in part because she may have deliberately reduced her age by as much as ten years. A notation in Jane Clemens’s Bible records Ella’s birth in May 1834 (Bible 1817), making her fifteen years old when she married James Lampton, even though one history of the Lampton family reports her earlier marriage to a man named Plunkett (Keith, 9). Other documents give 1837 as Ella’s birthdate. Her work as a newspaper correspondent, disparaged in “Villagers,” remains unidentified. James and Ella Lampton took young Dr. John J. McDowell into their home as a boarder probably in the late 1850s; in 1860 he lived with them in Carondelet, a St. Louis suburb. Ella and John McDowell’s intimacy, as “Villagers” (98) notes, was “an arrant scandal to everybody with eyes.” Although Clemens and his aunt cared little for one another, he assisted her when his uncle’s death left her in straitened circumstances. In 1881 he wrote his sister, Pamela: “I have no feeling toward Ella (now) but compassion for her bereavements & hard fortune, & admiration of her courage & spirit in facing disaster with a brave front” (4 Feb 81, NPV, in MTBus, 136). During the 1880s he sent her money and tried to find secretarial work for her daughter, Catherine, but was increasingly irritated by requests for assistance. On the envelope to one of her letters, he wrote: “Neither read nor answered—a woman who has been all her life a coarse, vain, rude, exacting idiot” (Ella Lampton to SLC, 2 Aug 85, CU-MARK; St. Louis Census 1860, 656:637; St. Louis Census 1900, 893:15; Pamela A. Moffett to SLC, 7 Feb 81, CU-MARK; SLC to Charles L. Webster, 31 Mar 83, 17 May 83, NPV, in MTBus, 212–14; SLC to Annie Moffett Webster, 18 Oct 86, NPV, in MTBus, 366; “Funerals,” St. Louis Star, 23 Aug 1904, 8).

Catherine C. (Kate) Lampton (b. 1856), mentioned briefly in “Villagers” (98), [begin page 331] was the only child of Ella and James Andrew Hays Lampton. Born in St. Louis, she had the red hair that was considered a Lampton family trait (Bible 1817; MTBus, 136; Gould 1882, 683).

League, William T. (Bill) (1832–70), was a printer’s apprentice in the Missouri Courier office, which opened in Hannibal in the spring of 1848. Clemens recalled him in a 1907 letter to the editor of the Hannibal Courier-Post: “Next spring it will be 59 years since I became an apprentice in the Courier office under Joseph P. Ament, along with William T. League, Wales McCormick & a Palmyra lad named Dick Rutter. Two of the group still survive: viz, the Courier & the undersigned” (3? Dec 1907 to W. H. Powell, MoHM). In the fall of 1851 League helped to establish the weekly Hannibal Whig Messenger and in 1852 became its sole proprietor. It was League who bought out Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Journal in September 1853. Clemens mentions League in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). In noting in “Villagers” (98) that League became proprietor of the “‘Courier’” and “made it a daily and prosperous,” Clemens was thinking of the daily Hannibal Messenger, established by League in 1858 and renamed the Hannibal Courier in the mid-1860s. League, however, had sold the paper in 1860 (Marion Census 1850, 319; Shoemaker, 254; Orion Clemens 1853; Holcombe, 988; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 10).

Leathers, Jesse Madison (1846?–87), a distant cousin of Clemens’s from Kentucky, wrote the author on 27 September 1875 and introduced himself as the great-grandson of Samuel Lampton, of Culpepper County, Virginia, whose brother William was Samuel Clemens’s great-grandfather. He believed he had legitimate claim to the earldom of Durham and expressed his hope of recovering the title and estate from the Lambton family in England. Clemens thought his relative’s chances “inconceivably slender” and said as much in a cordial letter of 5 October 1875 (“Mark Twain’s Blue Blood,” unidentified clipping, reprinting the Louisville Ky.Ledger of unknown date, CU-MARK). Leathers soon wrote that he was “out of business, and money, (a thing that has often happened with me)” and made the first of several requests for financial assistance (24 Jan 76, CU-MARK). Although Clemens sent Leathers small sums of money over the years, supplementing his meager and intermittent income as a newspaper advertising solicitor and a collections agent, he avoided meeting him and did nothing to further his claim to the earldom. He did, however, encourage Leathers to write and publish his autobiography as a means of earning money, a project begun but abandoned. Leathers died in a New York City charity hospital of tuberculosis complicated by alcoholism. Clemens used his story as the basis for The American Claimant, published in 1892 (Leathers to SLC, sixteen letters between 1875 and 1886; Leathers to Olivia L. Clemens, 6 Apr 81; G. E. Hutchinson to “Gentlemen,” 23 Oct 79; John W. Chapman to SLC, 7 and 14 Feb 87, all documents in CU-MARK; Chapman, 721).

Levering family. Alice and Franklin Levering came to Hannibal in 1841 (Marion Census 1850, 307; Holcombe, 962). Clemens knew their two oldest children.

Clint Levering (1837?–47), a playmate of Clemens’s, died at the age of ten. While “bathing with a number of his playmates, he was carried beyond his depth, [begin page 332] and in spite of the exertions of those who were with him, was drowned” (Hannibal Gazette, 20 Aug 47, in Wecter 1952, 169). In chapter 54 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), where he called Clint “Lem Hackett,” Mark Twain described the terrified reaction of the village boys, who were encouraged to view Clint’s death as divine retribution for sinfulness. In his 1897 notebook, he wrote that the drowning was regarded as “a judgment” on Clint and his parents because Clint’s great-grandmother had given protection to two Jewish boys “when they were being chased & stoned” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 59); in the notebook entry, however, he mistakenly calls the drowned boy “Writer” (i.e., “Righter”), the name of Clint’s younger brother. Clint Levering’s drowning is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (20) and in “Villagers” (101).

Aaron Righter Levering (1839–1912), referred to in “Villagers” (101), was a Cadet of Temperance with Clemens. At thirteen he began work in a hardware store and at twenty started his own hardware business. In 1870 he helped to organize the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Hannibal, and became the cashier. A deacon in the Fifth Street Baptist Church, he was for many years a Sunday school superintendent and public school director. When Clemens visited Hannibal in 1902, he attended a reception at the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank where he was greeted by Levering and fellow bank officers John Lewis Robards and William R. Pitts (Holcombe, 962, 1064; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 252 n. 7; Cadets of Temperance 1850; “The Farmers & Merchants Bank,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 22 Apr 1905, 1; “Mark Twain Sees the Home of His Boyhood,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 May 1902, 1).

Lockwood, Lucy. No information. Though Clemens says in “Villagers” (95) that she married Lot Southard, the Hannibal Missouri Courier of 8 November 1849 records Southard’s marriage to Emma Beecham.

M. See Margaret L. Clemens.

McCormick, Wales R., mentioned in “Villagers” (98), was a printer’s apprentice with Clemens on Joseph P. Ament’s Hannibal Missouri Courier. In his autobiography, Clemens recalled that he and McCormick boarded with Ament’s family. Although paid no wages, they were promised two suits a year, but instead received their employer’s old clothes. Cast-off shirts gave Clemens “the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus-tent” and were so snug on the “giant” McCormick as to nearly suffocate him, “particularly in the summertime.” Clemens characterized Wales as “a reckless, hilarious, admirable creature; he had no principles, and was delightful company” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:276). In his notebook for 1887–88, Clemens remembered that McCormick had been reprimanded several times by the itinerant preacher Alexander Campbell for saying “Great God! when Great Scott would have done as well. . . . Weeks afterward, that inveterate lighthead had his turn, & corrected the Reverend. In correcting the pamphlet-proof of one of Campbell’s great sermons, Wales changed ‘Great God!’ to ‘Great Scott,’ & changed Father, Son & Holy Ghost to Father, Son & Caesar’s Ghost. In overrunning, he reduced it to Father, Son & Co., to keep from overrunning” (N&J3, 305). [begin page 333] McCormick also abbreviated Jesus Christ to J. C., and when told by Campbell never to diminish the Savior’s name, “enlarged the offending J. C. into Jesus H. Christ” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:279–82). In another reminiscence, Clemens wrote that “Wales inserted five names between the Savior’s first & last names—said he reckoned Rev. Campbell will be satisfied now” (SLC 1898 [bib21479], 5–6). By 1850 McCormick had left Hannibal, eventually settling in Quincy, Illinois, where Clemens saw him while on a lecture tour in 1885. McCormick was the inspiration for the handsome and flirtatious printer named Doangivadam in “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”: “Hamper him as you might, obstruct him as you might, make things as desperate for him as you pleased, he didn’t give a damn, and said so. He was always gay and breezy and cheerful, always kind and good and generous and friendly and careless and wasteful, and couldn’t keep a copper, and never tried” (MSM, 268). Letters from McCormick indicate that Clemens regularly gave him financial assistance in the middle and late 1880s (SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 23 Jan 85; Wales R. McCormick to SLC, 3 Feb 85, 23 Jan 88, 12 Nov 88, all in CU-MARK; Jackson and Teeples, 239).

McDermid (or McDavid), Dennis (d. 1853), was “that poor fellow in the calaboose” recalled in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). He died in the fire that destroyed Hannibal’s small jail in the early hours of 23 January 1853. Writing in the Hannibal Journal on 27 January, Orion Clemens reported that Dennis McDermid (called McDavid in the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger of 25 January) had been made “insane by liquor” and was imprisoned for “breaking down the door of a negro cabin with an ax, and chasing out the inmates.” He had started the blaze when he “set his bed clothes on fire with matches, as he usually carried them in his pocket to light his pipe” (Wecter 1952, 254–55). In 1883, in chapter 56 of Life on the Mississippi, Clemens remembered giving the matches to the “whiskey-sodden tramp.” Claiming to have been only ten years old at the time (in fact, he was seventeen), he confessed to having felt “as guilty of the man’s death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them.” In an autobiographical sketch written in 1900, he explained that it was his “trained Presbyterian conscience” that made him feel guilty even though he had meant the tramp “no harm, but only good, when I let him have the matches” (SLC 1900, 6, in MTA, 1:131).

McDonald, Allen B. (b. 1805?), “the desperado” mentioned in “Villagers” (95), was a plasterer from Kentucky (Marion Census 1850, 323). The story of McDonald’s fight with Charley Schneider (or Schnieter) is given in the History of Marion County, Missouri much as it is in “Villagers” (101). When John Marshall Clemens was justice of the peace,

McDowell, John J. (b. 1834?), a native of Kentucky and a physician, was the son of Joseph Nash McDowell (1805–68), a brilliant, but eccentric, surgeon who in 1840 helped to found the first medical college in St. Louis. (A discussion of the father can be found in Wecter 1952, 160–61, where, however, he is confused with his uncle, Ephraim D. McDowell, “the originator of ovariotomy.”) John McDowell started living with Clemens’s aunt and uncle, Ella and James Andrew Hays Lampton, by the summer of 1860, and Clemens comments in “Villagers” (98) on the “arrant scandal” of McDowell’s affair with Ella. In 1870 McDowell described his relationship with the Lamptons in more innocent terms: “When I was a youth, I determined to leave home to find some one who would be kind to me. My mother was dead, and my father . . . had a second time entered the marriage relation. My stepmother and I could not agree. Mr. and Mrs. Lampton met me, took me to their home and were so kind to me that I never left them. I have felt as one of the family ever since that day” (Keith, 10; St. Louis Census 1850, 415:258; St. Louis Census 1860, 656:637; Scharf, 2:1526–27; Varble, 252–53).

McManus, Jimmy, mentioned in “Villagers” (97), was a boatman who robbed Clemens in June 1858 after the explosion of the steamboat Pennsylvania, in which Henry Clemens died. In an 1882 notebook, Clemens recalled: “McManus (Jimmy) robbed me of brass watch chain, & $20—& robbed old Calhoun of underclothes” (N&J2, 454; Kennedy 1860, 333).

McMurry, T. P. (Pet) (d. 1886), mentioned in “Villagers” (98), was the journey-man printer for the Hannibal Missouri Courier office in the late 1840s, when Clemens and Wales McCormick were apprentices there. He married in 1853 and became a merchant, eventually settling in Knox County, Missouri. In a letter to Clemens of 16 July 1872, McMurry recalled him as “a little sandy-headed, curly-headed boy . . . mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge Cigar, or a diminutive pipe,” who loved to sing “the poor drunken man’s expression, who was supposed to have fallen in the rut by the wayside: ‘If ever I git up agin, I’ll stay up,—if I kin!’” (CU-MARK). When Clemens lectured at Quincy, Illinois, in 1885, he was visited by McMurry, “an old man with bushy gray whiskers down to his breast, & farmer-like clothes on”:

McMurry was probably the model for the title character of “Jul’us Caesar,” a sketch Clemens wrote in 1855 or 1856 but never published (see ET&S1, 111–17). In an [begin page 335] 1897 notebook, Clemens alluded to a prank he had played on McMurry: “Drinking Pet’s bottle of medicine & re-filling it” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 60; Hannibal Journal, 15 Aug 53, cited in Wecter 1950, 7; Mrs. T. P. McMurry to SLC, 18 Aug 89, CU-MARK).

Meredith family.

Hugh Meredith (1806–64), recalled in “Villagers” (93), was born in Pennsylvania. He was the Clemens family’s physician in Florida and Hannibal, Missouri. Meredith and John Marshall Clemens were active in planning improvements for both towns, and in 1844 both helped found the Hannibal Library Institute. Dr. Meredith joined the Gold Rush in 1849, but returned home early in 1851. He took charge of Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Journal for several weeks during the winter of 1851/52, while Orion was in Tennessee attending to the Clemens family’s property there. In his autobiography Clemens recalled the occasion when Orion—making a surprise visit to Hannibal, but unaware that Meredith’s family was living in the Clemenses’ former house—unwittingly climbed into bed with the doctor’s “two ripe old-maid sisters” (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:272–74; Marion Census 1850, 326; Gregory 1965, 31; Wecter 1952, 55, 111, 116–17, 241–42; Brashear 1934, 200 n. 11; “We received . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 3 Jan 50; “Returned Californians,” Hannibal Western Union, 9 Jan 51; “Dr. Hugh Meredith . . . ,” Hannibal Western Union, 3 Apr 51).

Charles Meredith (b. 1833?), mentioned in “Villagers” (93), was born in Pennsylvania and was the oldest of the doctor’s five children. He once saved Clemens from drowning in Bear Creek. In 1849–51 he traveled to the California gold fields with his father, and in the spring of 1852 made a second trip west (Marion Census 1850, 326; SLC 1903, 3; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 91; “From the Plains,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 24 June 52).

John D. Meredith (1837–70), mentioned twice in “Villagers” (93, 96), was born in Missouri. He was a Cadet of Temperance with Clemens. Orion Clemens taught the trade of printing to one of Dr. Meredith’s sons—probably John, who made printing his profession and in the late 1850s worked for the Hannibal Messenger. In his autobiography Samuel Clemens recalled Meredith as “a boy of a quite uncommonly sweet and gentle disposition. He grew up, and when the Civil War broke out he became a sort of guerrilla chief on the Confederate side, and I was told that in his raids upon Union families in the country parts of Monroe County—in earlier times the friends and familiars of his father—he was remorseless in his devastations and sheddings of blood” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:185; Marion Census 1850, 326; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 128; Cadets of Temperance 1850; Orion Clemens 1880–82, 4; Fotheringham, 41).

Moffett, William Anderson (Will) (1816–65), was Clemens’s brother-in-law. In 1835 or 1836 William and his brother Erasmus moved from their native Virginia to Florida, Missouri, where they found jobs in a grocery. In the early 1840s the brothers moved to Hannibal and with partner George Schroter opened a general store. William moved to St. Louis in the spring of 1851 and established Moffett, [begin page 336] Stillwell and Company, a firm of commission merchants; after that partnership dissolved in 1855, he formed a commission business with his old partner, Schroter. On 20 September 1851 he married Pamela Ann Clemens, with whom he had two children: Annie E. (1852–1950) and Samuel Erasmus (1860–1908). In the spring of 1857, Moffett loaned Clemens the $100 initial payment for his apprenticeship as a river pilot, and Clemens often stayed with the Moffetts in St. Louis during his piloting years. Moffett died in St. Louis, leaving Pamela a widow at age thirty-seven. In his autobiography, Clemens recalled Moffett as “a merchant, a Virginian—a fine man in every way” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:289). “Villagers” (105) includes a less flattering description (Bible 1862; Marion Census 1850, 306; Webster 1918, 1–2; “We direct attention . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 3 Apr 51; MTBus, 19, 26, 33, 36, 38; Portrait, 579).

Moss family.

Russell W. Moss (b. 1810?), a native of Kentucky, entered the meat packing business in 1850 with William Samuel, and their firm, situated on Hannibal’s levee, reputedly was the second largest pork and beef packing house in the United States. Moss is described as “rich” in “Villagers” (94; see also the note at 100.18). He and his wife, Mary (b. 1816), also from Kentucky, had six children; the two oldest are mentioned in “Villagers” (Marion Census 1850, 312; “Mammoth Packing House,” Hannibal Western Union, 14 Nov 50; Holcombe, 903).

Mary Jane Moss (b. 1832?) was “the ‘belle of Hannibal’” (Anna Laura Hawkins Frazer to SLC, 16 Mar 1909, CU-MARK). She was friendly with Pamela Clemens and frequently visited the Clemens home. “It was not deemed proper in Hannibal in the 40’s for a young woman to go down Main street unaccompanied by an older person,” and Mary Moss used “to stop at the Clemens house at the head of the street to beg Jane Clemens, always good company for both old and young, to go along with her shopping” (Brashear 1935). In 1854 she married lawyer Robert F. Lakenan—“to please her parents, not herself,” Mark Twain recalled in his autobiography (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:182). In “Villagers” (93, 94) Clemens also comments on Mary Moss’s unhappy marriage (Marion Census 1850, 312; Holcombe, 609, 610).

Cornelius (Neil) Moss (b. 1836) attended Sunday School with Clemens at the Old Ship of Zion Methodist Church and later was a classmate at Dawson’s school. According to “Villagers” (94), by age thirty, after studying at Yale, Moss was “a graceless tramp in Nevada.” He evidently was the destitute schoolmate whom Clemens met in Virginia City and wrote about in chapter 55 of Roughing It (1872):

In an 1863 letter to his family, Clemens wrote that Moss had recently left San Francisco to work a mining claim in Coso, California: “He says he has had a very hard [begin page 337] time ever since he has been in California—has done pretty much all kinds of work to make a living—keeping school in the country among other things” (18? May 63, L1, 252). In chapter 5 of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain assigned some of Neil Moss’s experiences to Tom Driscoll, who is ridiculed when he returns home from Yale flaunting Eastern fashions (Marion Census 1850, 312).

N., Miss. See Mary Ann Newcomb.

Nash family.

Abner O. Nash (1804?–59) opened one of Hannibal’s first general stores in 1831, when there were fewer than a dozen families living in the area. He was elected to the town’s first Board of Trustees, later was its president, and was a founding member of the Presbyterian Church. He declared bankruptcy in 1844, and in 1849 accepted the low-paying postmastership. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) alludes to him as “the aged and needy postmaster, who had seen better days” (chapter 5). Twice married, Nash and his second wife, Andosia, had six children residing with them in 1850. Nash is mentioned in “Villagers” (96). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383) indicate that postmaster Oliver Benton (166) was modeled after him (Marion Census 1850, 318; Greene, 281; Wecter 1952, 298 n. 15).

Mary Nash (b. 1832?) was the postmaster’s daughter by his first marriage. In his autobiography, mistakenly calling her Mary Lacy (the name of another schoolmate), Clemens claimed she was one of his early infatuations but 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 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” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:213). In “Villagers” (96) Clemens wonders if Mary Nash had married Samuel R. Raymond; she actually married John Hubbard of Frytown in 1851. On her fiftieth wedding anniversary she sent Clemens a greeting and he responded with congratulations. Working notes show that he considered portraying her as “wild” Mary Benton, the daughter of postmaster Oliver Benton, in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as “bad” Louisa Robbins in “Schoolhouse Hill,” but the characters do not appear in the stories (HH&T, 383; MSM, 431). In his characterization of Rachel (“Hellfire”) Hotchkiss (119–33), Mark Twain may have drawn on his recollection of Mary Nash (Marion Census 1850, 318, 319; “Married,” Hannibal Western Union, 23 Jan 51; SLC to Mary Nash Hubbard, 13 Jan 1901, MoHM).

Thomas S. (Tom) Nash (b. 1835?), Mary’s half brother, was one of Clemens’s playmates, a Cadet of Temperance, and a fellow pupil in Samuel Cross’s school. In his autobiography Clemens recalled the winter night when he and Tom skated on the Mississippi, with Tom falling through the ice; the accident led to “a procession of diseases” culminating in scarlet fever, which left Tom deaf (AD, 12 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:97–98). In working notes for the “St. Petersburg Fragment,” an early version of his “Mysterious Stranger” tale, Mark Twain wrote that “Tom Nash’s mother took in a deserted child; it gave scarlet-fever death to 3 of her children & [begin page 338] deafness to 2” (MSM, 416). In the Jacksonville, Illinois, asylum for the deaf and dumb, Tom learned to talk in a loud unmodulated voice. He returned to Hannibal in 1849, worked in the post office for four years, was apprenticed to William T. League of the Hannibal Messenger, and in later years was a house and sign painter. When Clemens returned to Hannibal in 1902, “old and white headed” Tom Nash greeted him at the train station, made a trumpet of his hands at Clemens’s ear, nodded toward the crowd, “and said, confidentially—in a yell like a fog horn—‘same damned fools, Sam’” (AD, 12 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:98–99). Clemens recalls Nash in “Villagers” (96). His working notes show that he considered portraying Nash as Jack Benton in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as Frank Robbins in “Schoolhouse Hill” (HH&T, 383; MSM, 431), but the characters do not appear in the stories (Marion Census 1850, 318; Cadets of Temperance 1850; Thomas S. Nash to SLC, 23 Apr 85, CU-MARK; Fotheringham, 44; Stone, Davidson, and McIntosh, 163).

Newcomb, Mary Ann (1809–94), was one of Clemens’s schoolteachers. Born in Vermont and educated in the East, she traveled west to join the faculty of Marion College, near Palmyra, Missouri, but settled in Florida instead. She ran a school there and became acquainted with the Clemens family. In 1839 she moved to Hannibal. Apparently Mary Newcomb’s Select School was Clemens’s second school, after Elizabeth Horr’s. Class was conducted in the basement of the Presbyterian church on Fourth Street, between Bird and Hill streets. Advanced students were taught in half of the room by Miss Newcomb, younger students in the other half by Miss Torrey. Miss Newcomb became a boarder in the Clemens house, taking her noon meal and sometimes her evening meal there. Her two granddaughters claimed that when Clemens visited Hannibal in 1902 he said “I owe a great deal to Mary Newcomb, she compelled me to learn to read.” Their grandmother “often commented on Mark Twain’s drawl” and recalled the Clemens family as “delightful”:

In the late 1840s Miss Newcomb married widower John Davis. Mark Twain’s working notes for “Autobiography of a Damned Fool,” an unfinished story written in 1877, indicate she was the model for Mrs. Bangs, “a very thin, tall, Yankee person, who came west when she was thirty, taught school nine years in our town, and then married Mr. Bangs. . . . She had ringlets, and a long sharp nose, and thin, colorless lips, and you could not tell her breast from her back if she had her head up a stovepipe hole looking for something in the attic” (S&B, 140, 163). Miss Newcomb was the prototype for Miss Watson, the widow Douglas’s stern spinster sister, who is characterized in chapter one of Huckleberry Finn and mentioned in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33) and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134, 187, 201, 208). Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) indicate that she was the model for Miss Pomeroy (237). In “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and “Villagers” [begin page 339] (95, 95, 96), Clemens refers to her by name and as “Miss N.” (Marion Census 1850, 320–21; Gregory 1965, 31).

Oscar. See Orion Clemens.

Ouseley. See Owsley.

Owsley, William Perry (b. 1813), was the Hannibal merchant who shot Sam Smarr. He was a member of an extensive and well-to-do Kentucky family; a distant cousin, also named William Owsley, was governor of Kentucky from 1844 to 1848. He married Almira Roberts and by the mid-1830s had settled in Marion County. Owsley was the father of six children, two of whom, Elizabeth (Bettie) and Anna (Nannie), were classmates of Clemens’s in John D. Dawson’s school. He shot Smarr in 1845, at the corner of Hill and Main streets, just a few yards from the Clemens home. Nine-year-old Samuel Clemens saw Smarr die, and justice of the peace John Marshall Clemens took depositions of twenty-nine witnesses. Smarr, a farmer, believed Owsley had stolen two thousand dollars from a friend, and in the weeks prior to the shooting denounced Owsley as “a damned pick pocket” and “the damnedest rascal that ever lived in the county.” Reportedly Smarr said, “I dont like him, and dont want him to put himself in my way, if he does ever cross my path I will kill him.” About a week before the shooting, Smarr walked up and down the street past Owsley’s store, calling out “O yes! O yes, here is Bill Owsley, has got a big stock of goods here, and stole two thousand dollars from Thompson in Palmyra.” His companion, Tom Davis, joined in the abuse of Owsley and fired his pistol once or twice in the street. When Owsley learned the cause of the commotion, it “appeared to affect him a good deal, he had a kind of twitching and turned white around the mouth, and said it was insufferable, and he could not stand it.” Several other townsmen warned Owsley that his life had been threatened and in the week that followed observed him grow increasingly moody and absent-minded. On the afternoon of 22 January 1845, Smarr, who had come into town to sell some beef, was walking down Main Street with Joseph Brown. In Brown’s own words:

Smarr was carried into Orville R. Grant’s drugstore and laid on the floor, his opened shirt exposing a bullet hole. He died in about half an hour. When the case was brought to trial a year later, Owsley was successfully defended by Samuel Taylor Glover. Although Clemens says in “Villagers” (101) that “he presently moved away,” Owsley kept his shop on Main Street until June 1849, when he sold the business and left for California. In 1853 he was back in Hannibal, working as a dry goods clerk. When Clemens visited Hannibal in 1902, “he dined and spent a few hours very pleasantly” at the home of Owsley’s daughter Elizabeth (“Mark Twain Going Home,” Hannibal Morning Journal, 3 June 1902). Clemens fictionalized the [begin page 340] murder of Smarr in chapter 21 of Huckleberry Finn, where Colonel Sherburn kills “old Boggs,” and later recalled Smarr’s death in an autobiographical sketch (SLC 1900, 7, in MTA, 1:131). He mentions the incident in his “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and “Villagers” (101). Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) indicate that schoolgirl Margaret Stover (221) was modeled after one of the Owsley children—probably Elizabeth (Marion Census 1850, 323; Owsley, 28, 29, 133; AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:179; Missouri v. Owsley for all details and witness testimony regarding the shooting; Holcombe, 276, 901; Wecter 1952, 106–9; “O! For California! New Firm,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 31 June 49; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 101; advertisement for Rayburn’s dry goods store, Hannibal Journal, 5 May 53; John and Elizabeth Owsley Hatch to SLC, 15 Oct 1909, CU-MARK; SLC to Elizabeth Owsley Hatch, 23 Oct 1909, CtHMTH).

Pavey family.

Jesse H. Pavey (1798?–?1853), a native of Kentucky, was the proprietor of Pavey’s Tavern, near the corner of Main and Hill streets in Hannibal. He and his wife, Catharine (b. 1800?), had at least eight children: Mary J. (see Mary J. Shoot), Julia, Josephine, Sarah, Napoleon W. (Pole), Rebecca (Becky), Fanny, and Susan. By the summer of 1850 Pavey had resettled his family in St. Louis, where he worked as a carpenter. In 1855, when Clemens worked in St. Louis as a journeyman printer, he boarded at the widowed Mrs. Pavey’s home. In an August 1897 notebook entry, which tentatively lists characters for “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” Clemens included “The tavern gang—at Pavey’s,” and in a 1902 notebook he recalled, “Becky Pavey & Pole   ‘Pig-tail done’ tavern   Bladder-time. Weeds” (NB 42, CU-MARK, TS p. 24, in S&B, 173; NB 45, CU-MARK, TS p. 21). (Pigtail and bladder, two types of prepared tobacco, were evidently manufactured at the tavern.) Clemens describes a confrontation between his mother and Jesse Pavey in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (84), and in “Villagers” (98) he condemns Pavey’s laziness and bad temper (Hannibal Journal, 7 Jan 47, locating Pavey’s Tavern on Second (i.e., Main) near Hill, cited by Dixon Wecter in his annotated copy of MTB, 1:27, CU-MARK; St. Louis Census 1850, 416:291; James Green 1850, 270; Morrison, 197; SLC to Laura Hawkins Frazer, ca. Feb 1909, Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 3C; Varble, 219, 221; SLC to Frank E. Burrough, 15 Dec 1900, MoCgS; N&J1, 37).

Josephine Pavey (b. 1828?), mentioned in “Villagers” (99), married Francis Davis, the partner of livery keeper William Shoot (Marion Census 1850, 312; Holcombe, 903).

Napoleon W. (Pole) Pavey (b. 1833?), characterized in “Villagers” (98–99), was the “notoriously worldly” boy described at length in the first installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875), later chapter 4 of Life on the Mississippi (1883): he left Hannibal for a long time, then “turned up as apprentice engineer or ‘striker’ on a steamboat” and swaggered around town “in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman. . . . This fellow had money, too, and hair oil. . . . No girl could withstand his charms. He ‘cut out’ every boy in the village.” Pavey is listed as a steamboat engineer, “Second Class,” in [begin page 341] the 1857 St. Louis city directory (St. Louis Census 1850, 416:291; Kennedy 1857, 171, 304).

Rebecca (Becky) Pavey (b. 1835?) is recalled in “Villagers” (99) as a heartbreaker (see also the note at 99.6–7). She married George Davis, the stepson of her sister Josephine (St. Louis Census 1850, 416:291; Marion Census 1850, 312).

Peake, William Humphrey (b. 1775?), was one of John Marshall Clemens’s few intimates. When Mark Twain visited Hannibal in 1902, he told a reporter that “he remembered old Dr. Peake better than almost any of the Hannibal citizens of fifty years ago. He described Dr. Peake as a Virginian, who, on state occasions, wore knee breeches and large silver buckles on his low cut shoes, and wore a wig. He, Judge Draper and the elder Clemens, Sam’s father, were subscribers for the Weekly National Intelligencer, published at Washington, D. C., and it was their custom to discuss the speeches made in Congress from the time the paper was received until the next copy came to hand” (“Good-bye to Mark Twain,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 3 June 1902, 1). In his autobiography, Mark Twain similarly recalled Peake, who “had great influence and his opinion upon any matter was worth much more than that of any other person in the community.” He remembered the time he made the skeptical doctor a believer in mesmerism: when pretending to be hypnotized, he recited details of Peake’s past which the old man did not remember revealing to him (AD, 1 Dec, 2 Dec 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 124–28). Peake is mentioned three times in “Villagers” (93, 102, 104). Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) indicate that the oracular Dr. Wheelright (235, 238) was based on him (Marion Census 1850, 326; Hannibal Gazette, 1 July 47, cited in Wecter 1950, 1).

Pitts family.

James P. Pitts (b. 1807?), a harness maker, moved to Hannibal in 1836. In “Villagers” (102) Clemens recalls how Pitts greeted every steamboat even though he had no business to conduct at the landing. In chapter 55 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), written fifteen years before “Villagers,” Clemens attributed this behavior to John Stavely, another Hannibal saddler. Evidently Life on the Mississippi was correct: one history of Hannibal comments on “John W. Stavely, who came here in 1842” and whose regular and conspicuous appearance at the wharf led neighboring towns to call Hannibal “Stavely’s Landing” (Greene, 71; Holcombe, 971; Marion Census 1850, 307, 314; N&J2, 478 n. 160).

William R. (Bill) Pitts (b. 1832?), James’s son, at fourteen began a six-year apprenticeship in the harness-maker and saddler’s trade, which he completed in four years by working overtime. From the age of twenty, he ran his own business, retiring in 1890. He served twice on the city council and helped to found the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank in 1870. Clemens met him on two return visits to Hannibal, in April 1867 and in May 1902. He mentions Bill Pitts in his “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and in “Villagers” (102). Mark Twain’s working notes indicate that he planned to portray Pitts as Jake Fitch in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as George Pratt in “Schoolhouse Hill” (HH&T, 383; MSM, 431), but neither character appears in the [begin page 342] stories (Marion Census 1850, 314; Holcombe, 971; Greene, 398, 407; “Mark Twain Sees the Home of His Boyhood,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 May 1902, 1).

Prendergast, Thomas B. (1830?–69), recalled in “Villagers” (102), was a white minstrel performer famous as a tenor and a female impersonator (Rice, 66, 217; Wittke, 68–69, 236, 237; Brown, 297).

Priscella. See Pamela Ann Clemens.

Quarles family.

John Adams Quarles (1802–76) was Clemens’s uncle. Clemens was particularly fond of him and stated in his autobiography, “I have not come across a better man than he was” (SLC 1897–98, 36–37, in MTA, 1:96). Quarles married Jane Lampton Clemens’s younger sister, Martha Ann (Patsy) Lampton (1807–50), with whom he had ten children. In the mid-1830s the family moved from Tennessee to Florida, Missouri, where John Quarles built a general store and became a prosperous shopkeeper and farmer, active in the town’s development. He purchased over 230 acres of farm land near Florida and by Clemens’s recollection owned some fifteen or twenty slaves. Until Clemens was about twelve, he spent two to three months every year on the Quarles farm, which some fifty years later he recalled as “a heavenly place for a boy.” Clemens acknowledged that while he “never consciously used” Quarles in a book, “his farm has come very handy to me in literature, once or twice. In ‘Huck Finn’ and in ‘Tom Sawyer Detective’ I moved it down to Arkansas. It was all of six hundred miles, but it was no trouble” (SLC 1897–98, 37, in MTA, 1:96). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 384) identify Quarles as the model for Uncle Fletcher; in the story, mention is made of Uncle Fletcher’s farm, thirty miles from St. Petersburg (154, 155, 156), but the character himself does not appear (Selby, chart 23, 134; Wecter 1952, 36, 40, 50; Gregory 1969, 230–33).

James A. (Jim) Quarles (1827–66), John Adams Quarles’s son, was born in Tennessee and brought to Florida, Missouri, as a child. In 1848 he moved to Hannibal and opened a copper, tin, and sheet iron manufactory in partnership with George W. Webb. In 1851 James married sixteen-year-old Sophronia (Fronnie) Reno, with whom he had two sons. By the fall of 1852 he had entered into two additional business partnerships to sell stoves, but both of these enterprises failed. Clemens records Quarles’s “dissipation” and neglect of business and family in “Villagers” (97). In an August 1897 notebook entry Clemens included James Quarles in a list of characters for “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (NB 42, CU-MARK, TS p. 24, in S&B, 173), but no one based on him figures in the story (Bible 1817; Marion Census 1850, 310; Selby, 133; marriage notice, Hannibal Journal and Western Union, 2 Oct 51, cited in Wecter 1950, 7; “Dissolution,” Hannibal Western Union, 7 Aug 51; “Dissolution,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 2 Sept 52).

R., Sam. See Samuel R. Raymond.

Ralls, John (1807–82), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was a Mexican War veteran and lawyer who lived in New London, Missouri. In 1861, when Clemens and a few [begin page 343] friends flirted with the Confederacy by forming the Marion Rangers, they had Colonel Ralls swear them in as private soldiers. In “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885), Clemens recalled Ralls’s “old-fashioned speech . . . full of gunpowder and glory, full of that adjective-piling, mixed metaphor, and windy declamation which was regarded as eloquence in that ancient time and that remote region” (Conard, 5:292; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20417], 2:29–30).

Ratcliffe (or Ratcliff) family. The father, James (1795?–1860), a pioneer physician in Hannibal, had an affluent practice, sat on the first municipal board of health, and owned one of the best houses in town. (In historical records of Marion County his surname also appears as Ratliff and Rackliff.) Will records show that Ratcliffe was survived by his second wife and five sons. Aside from the account given in “Villagers” (102–3), little is known of this family. In the 1880s Mark Twain wrote about the homicidal Ratcliffe son in “Clairvoyant” (29), and in his 1905–8 notebook he recalled the “Ratcliffe family—crazy. One, confined, chopped his hand off; chased stepmother with knife” (NB 48, CU-MARK, TS p. 10). Mark Twain apparently drew on one of the Ratcliffe men in creating Crazy Meadows, the village lunatic with the “wild mad laugh” in “Schoolhouse Hill” (242–46); a marginal note on the manuscript reads: “Crazy’s history and misfortunes and his family and lost boy—Ratcliff” (MSM, 411; Holcombe, 897; Wecter 1952, 198; Marion Census 1850, 309; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 5).

Ray, Dr. See Richard F. Barret.

Raymond, Samuel R. (Sam), had settled in Hannibal by 1849. He helped organize the Liberty Fire Company and dressed in fireman’s uniform for the company’s fundraising parties. In 1850 he became editor and co-proprietor with Robert Sylvester Buchanan of the Hannibal Journal. In 1851 Raymond and his partner sold the Journal to Orion Clemens, and Raymond moved to Pike County, Missouri. Back in Hannibal by 1853, Raymond edited the Messenger and by 1859 was proprietor of the Gazette. Mark Twain mentions him twice in “Villagers” (96, 102), in the first instance wondering if he had married Mary Nash. In fact, in 1850 Raymond married Helen Holmes, who died a year later of cholera. An entry in Mark Twain’s 1897 notebook hints that Raymond was the illegitimate son of either Robert, Argyle, or Joseph Sylvester Buchanan: “The new fire Co—Raymond, whose real name was Buchanan” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 58). Working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” indicate that he planned to introduce Raymond as “Fire Marshal Sam . . . Rumford,” who was “envied because said to be illegitimate” (HH&T, 383, 384), but Rumford instead appears in the story as captain of a militia company, with no illegitimacy mentioned (167–68, 178, 210). Raymond is also included in the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 436) as the model for Joe Buckner of the Big 6 Fire Company, but that character does not appear in the story (Hannibal Missouri Courier: “Liberty Fire Company,” 4 Oct 49; “The New Fire Engine,” 29 Nov 49; “Grand Levee & Tea-Party!” 20 Dec 49; “The ‘Journal,’ of this city . .” 31 Jan 50; “Married,” 9 May 50; “New Paper,” 3 Feb 53; “Mr. S. R. Raymond . . . ,” Hannibal Western Union, 29 May 51; Fotheringham, 48).

[begin page 344] Reagan, Jim (Jimmy). In a 1902 letter Clemens told Anna Laura Hawkins Frazer that the “‘new boy’” in one of his books “was Jim Reagan—just from St. Louis” (“Laura Hawkins Frazer Always Remembered as Idol of His Boyhood,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 3C). The book was Tom Sawyer (1876), in chapter one of which Tom challenges a newcomer to a fight. In “Boy’s Manuscript” (2, 8–10, 14), Reagan possibly was the model for Billy Rogers’s rival, Jim Riley. Reagan is mentioned in “Villagers” (105).

Rice, Samuel D., a Methodist minister according to one history of Hannibal, probably was the “Rev. Mr. Rice,” recalled in “Villagers” (97) as a Presbyterian. In 1838 Rice purchased the Hannibal Commercial Advertiser from Joseph Sylvester Buchanan. When the paper failed in 1839, some Hannibal citizens formed a stock company and purchased the newspaper office for Rice’s benefit. In 1843 Rice officiated at the marriage of Clemens’s uncle, James Andrew Hays Lampton. He was elected city recorder in 1845, and afterward started a newspaper in Louisiana, Missouri, where he died (Holcombe, 898, 941, 987; Woodruff, 24).

Richmond, Joshua (b. 1816?), a mason, was Clemens’s first Sunday school teacher at the Old Ship of Zion, a small brick Methodist church situated on Hannibal’s public square. Clemens remembered him as “a very kindly and considerate Sunday-school teacher, and patient and compassionate, so he was the favorite teacher with us little chaps. . . . I was under Mr. Richmond’s spiritual care every now and then for two or three years, and he was never hard upon me” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:214). Clemens mistakenly recalled in his autobiography and in “Villagers” (95) that Richmond married Artemissa Briggs; in 1849 he married Angelina Cook (Marion Census 1850, 310, 322; “Married,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 18 Jan 49; Wecter 1952, 86, 183).

Richmond, Letititia. No information. In “Villagers” (94), Clemens mistakenly writes that she married Dana F. Breed.

Robards family.

Archibald Sampson Robards (1797–1862), formerly a plantation owner in his native Kentucky and an officer in the Fifth Kentucky Regiment, moved to Hannibal with family and slaves in 1843. He became wealthy in the milling business, and in 1853 his flour won the highest prize at New York’s Crystal Palace Exhibition. In 1849 he took a company of fifteen to the California gold fields, furnishing the necessary vehicles, provisions and stock. Robards did much to advance Hannibal’s agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial interests. He was mayor in 1846 and 1854 and an elder in the Christian Church. He married Amanda Carpenter (1807–65), with whom he had six children. Clemens recalls Robards and five of his children in “Villagers” (see below; see also the note at 100.18). He included the same five—“George, Clay, John Robards   Jane & Sally Robards”—among other old Hannibal acquaintances he listed in his 1902 notebook, after his final visit to the town (NB 45, CU-MARK, TS p. 21; Marion Census 1850, 317, where the name is entered as Roberts, [begin page 345] as it was then pronounced; Marion Census 1860, 761; Portrait, 143–44; Holcombe, 945, 991–92; “Flour! Flour! Flour!” Hannibal Journal, 2 May 53).

George C. Robards (1833?–78) is described in Clemens’s autobiography as a “slender, pale, studious” youth with long black hair who was the “only pupil who studied Latin” at Dawson’s school (AD, 8 Mar, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:179, 181). In “Villagers” (93, 94), Clemens alludes to Robards’s unhappy romance with Mary Jane Moss and reports his abandonment of Hannibal. Robards returned by 1860, however, for he is listed in the census that year as a Hannibal farmer. He served as a major in the Confederate Army, was a Hannibal real estate and insurance agent in the mid-1870s, and was elected county assessor in 1876 (Marion Census 1850, 317; Marion Census 1860, 761; Holcombe, 992; Portrait, 144; Hallock, 120).

Sarah H. (Sally or Sallie) Robards (1836–1918), Samuel Clemens’s classmate in Dawson’s school, took piano lessons from Pamela Clemens. She married river-boat pilot and captain Barton Stone Bowen and, after Bowen’s death, the Reverend H. H. Haley, a pastor of Hannibal’s Christian Church. In an autobiographical sketch, Clemens recalled that while in Calcutta in 1896, he met Sally Robards—one of Hannibal’s “dearest and prettiest girls”—and learned that when they were teenagers she had seen him prancing around nude rehearsing for his role as a bear in a play (SLC 1900, 1–6, where Robards is called Mary Wilson, in MTA, 1:125–30). He recalled her in his 1902 notebook: “Sally Robards—pretty. Describe her now in her youth & again in 50 ys   After when she reveals herself” (NB 45, CU-MARK, TS p. 21). She is mentioned in “Villagers” (94). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) indicate that Sally Fitch (218, 221) was based on her (Marion Census 1850, 317; Marion Census 1860, 761; Portrait, 144; Holcombe, 981; RoBards 1915; “Mrs. Haley Is Laid to Rest,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 8 Aug 1918, clipping in RoBards Scrapbooks, vol. 2).

John Lewis Robards (1838–1925), characterized in “Villagers” (93–94), attended Methodist Sunday school with Clemens. At Dawson’s school, where the pair were classmates, Robards always won the silver medal for “Amiability” and Clemens the medal for “Good Spelling” (AD, 7 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:67). “I was always trading Good Spelling for Amiability—for advantage at home,” Clemens recalled (SLC 1898 [bib21479], 7). When he was twelve years old, Robards accompanied his father on the expedition to California. He reportedly “loved to read history and the classics, and early chose to be a soldier, and applied himself diligently for examination at West Point. While thus engaged, being a capital shot, his right eye was impaired by a fragment of a cap of the pistol, and this destroyed his prospects for a successful career” (Holcombe, 992). After attending the University of Missouri and studying law in Louisville, Kentucky, Robards returned to Hannibal in 1861 to practice. Clemens mistakenly notes in “Villagers” that he married “a Hurst—new family.” In April 1861 Robards married Sara (Sallie) Crump Helm, whose family had settled in Hannibal in 1852; the couple had seven children, three of whom lived to adulthood. In 1861 John Robards, Samuel Clemens, and others formed the Marion Rangers, whose misadventures as Confederate irregulars Mark Twain described in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). In that sketch Clemens poked fun at his friend’s practice of spelling his name “RoBards” by portraying him as [begin page 346] a Dunlap who changed his name to “d’Un Lap.” He later regretted the attack: “I think John Robards deserved a lashing, but it should have come from an enemy, not a friend” (SLC to the Reverend John Davis, 19? Apr 87, ViU, excerpted in Wecter 1952, 298 n. 13). Robards was a leading member of Park Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the founder of Mount Olivet Cemetery. When the bodies of Henry and John Marshall Clemens were transferred from Hannibal’s old Baptist cemetery to Mount Olivet in 1876, Robards oversaw the transfer, and in 1890 he attended the burial service for Jane Lampton Clemens (Portrait, 143–45; Holcombe, 608, 992; RoBards 1915; “RoBards—Sarah Crump Helm. . . ,” St. Louis Christian Advocate, 13 Feb 1908, clipping in RoBards Scrapbooks, vol. 1; “The Death of Mrs. J. L. RoBards,” Hannibal Journal, 4 Jan 1918, clipping in RoBards Scrapbooks, vol. 1; “RoBards Rites to Be Friday,” unidentified Hannibal newspaper, 1925 clipping in RoBards Scrapbooks, vol. 3; AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:182–83; Wecter 1952, 118–19; “The Funeral of Mrs. Clemens,” unidentified Hannibal newspaper, 30 Oct 90, clipping in Scrapbook 20:126–27, CU-MARK).

Henry Clay Robards (1841?–85), mentioned in “Villagers” (94), was a captain in the Confederate Army. He died in Columbia, Missouri (Marion Census 1850, 317; Portrait, 144).

Rutter, Richard H. (Dick) (b. 1835?), whose name appears in “Villagers” (98), worked alongside Samuel Clemens, William T. League, and Wales R. McCormick in the late 1840s as a printer’s apprentice on the Hannibal Missouri Courier. He was the son of John P. Rutter, a former clerk of the Marion County Circuit Court in Palmyra. In August 1850 Dick Rutter was living on the outskirts of Palmyra with three siblings and his unemployed father (Marion Census 1850, 281; Marion Census 1860, 1016; SLC to W. H. Powell, 3? Dec 1907, MoHM; Frank Daulton to SLC, 5 Mar 83, CU-MARK; Holcombe, 842–43).

Sandy was a young slave who worked for the Clemenses in Hannibal. Mark Twain reported in his autobiography: “I used Sandy once . . . it was in ‘Tom Sawyer;’ tried to get him to whitewash the fence, but it did not work” (SLC 1897–98, 49, in MTA, 1:102). Sandy appears in chapters 1 and 2 of Tom Sawyer as Jim, “the small colored boy” (not to be confused with Jim in Huckleberry Finn, who is modeled after Daniel. Clemens recalls Sandy in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (89).

Schneider (or Schnieter), Charley, in “Villagers” (101), was the man whom John Marshall Clemens saved from an attempted assault by Allen B. McDonald.

Selmes family.

Tilden Russell Selmes (1808?–70) was originally from England. One of Hannibal’s leading merchants, he was proprietor of the Wildcat store at the corner of Main and Hill streets and in the early 1850s was one of four owners of the ferry line crossing the river at Hannibal. He was elected mayor in 1852 and 1853, and by 1860 had established the Hannibal City Bank. His wife, Mary, died in 1849, and he married Sarah P. Benton in 1850. Clemens mentions Selmes twice in “Villagers” (94, 96) and refers to him in “Clairvoyant” (32). While the working notes to “Tom Sawyer’s [begin page 347] Conspiracy” (HH&T, 384) mention “Old Selmes (English),” he does not appear in the story (Marion Census 1850, 310; Marion Census 1860, 770; Caroline Schroter to Jane Lampton Clemens, 29 May 70, CU-MARK; Greene, 51, 52, 257; Fotheringham, 51, 73; Holcombe, 941; “Obituary,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 12 July 49; “Married,” Hannibal Western Union, 14 Nov 50; Conard, 2:534).

Sarah Johnson Selmes, the merchant’s beautiful daughter, is mentioned in “Villagers” (96). In 1848 she married Robert M. Funkhouser, who became one of St. Louis’s most prominent merchants (Davis, 3; Conard, 2:534; Edwards and Hopewell, 143).

Sexton family. Louisa Sexton (b. 1812? in Kentucky) and her daughter, Margaret (b. 1836? in Missouri), are both described in “Villagers” (99, 99). They boarded with the Clemens family in the mid-1840s, and young Samuel and Henry Clemens were rivals for Margaret’s attention. In January 1850 Margaret evidently was taking music lessons from Pamela, for Jane Clemens wrote of her as one of the “music scollars” who played “dewets” at the house (Jane Lampton Clemens to Orion Clemens, 30 Jan 50, NPV, in MTBus, 16). By the summer of 1850 Mrs. Sexton and Margaret had moved to St. Louis. Writing his family from Virginia City on 16 February 1863, Clemens enclosed his photograph for Margaret, commenting: “Had your letter arrived a little sooner, I could have sent it to her myself, as a Valentine” (L1, 245; St. Louis Census 1850, 418:361).

Shoot family.

William Shoot (1809–92) was co-owner with Francis Davis of the livery stable mentioned by Clemens in “Villagers” (98). In 1852 the stable and twenty-eight horses were consumed in a fire. A third partner was added to operate the rebuilt Shoot, Jordan & Davis Livery Stable, advertised as “the largest and most splendid Stable, outside of St. Louis, in the State” (“Monroe House,” Hannibal Journal, 19 May 1853). In May 1853 Shoot became proprietor of Hannibal’s finest hotel, the Brady House, which he renamed the Monroe House (Marion Census 1850, 312; Marion Census 1860, 776; Hagood and Hagood 1985, 74; “Another Destructive Fire!” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 1 Apr 52; “The New Hotel,” Hannibal Journal, 11 May 53).

Mary J. Shoot (b. 1822?), the eldest daughter of Jesse H. Pavey, was thirteen years old when she married William Shoot, as Clemens notes in “Villagers” (99). The couple had at least four children: John A., Mildred Catherine (Kitty), Julia F. and Mary B. (Mollie). Mary J. Shoot is listed in the 1866 Hannibal city directory as a dealer in millinery items; by the mid-1870s she had moved to New York with her daughter Mary (Marion Census 1850, 312; Marion Census 1860, 776; Honeyman, 52; SLC to unidentified correspondent, 19 Oct 76, TS in CU-MARK).

Mildred Catherine (Kitty) Shoot (b. 1840?) married Charles P. Heywood in 1858, four years after he arrived in Hannibal from Massachusetts to become paymaster of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. In 1871 she introduced herself to Clemens after he gave a lecture in Homer, New York. Clemens wrote his wife of the meeting and described Shoot as one of the “little-girl friends of my early boyhood” (4 Dec 71, CU-MARK). In “Villagers” (99) he mistakenly calls her “Mrs. Hayward” [begin page 348] (Marion Census 1850, 312; Holcombe, 954–55; Mildred C. Heywood to SLC, 15 Jan 1910, CU-MARK).

Mary B. (Mollie) Shoot (1863?–1954) is incorrectly identified in “Villagers” (99) as “Mrs. Hayward’s daughter.” In fact, she was the much younger sister of Mildred Catherine Shoot (Mrs. Charles P. Heywood). Mary B. Shoot was born in Hannibal, but by the mid-1870s had moved with her mother to New York. Using the stage name Florence Wood, she made her debut in Augustin Daly’s stock company and had modest success as an actress. In noting that she later became a “troublesome” London newspaper correspondent, Clemens was confusing her with Florence Hayward (1865–1925) of St. Louis, a journalist who had annoyed him during his 1896–97 stay in London by pressing him for an interview (“Mrs. Felix Morris, a Former Actress,” New York Times, 19 Apr 1954, 23; Odell, 10:184, 208, 570, 604; 12:242, 251;13:592; 15:6, 217, 503, 792; NCAB, 11:160–61; SLC to Florence Hayward, 29 Oct 96, 29 Jan 97 and 3 July 97, MoHi).

Simon. See Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

Simon was the black drayman who was almost killed when young Samuel Clemens and William Bowen rolled a huge rock down the side of Holliday’s Hill. Clemens relates that boyhood misadventure in chapter 58 of The Innocents Abroad (1869). He mentions Simon in “Villagers” (97).

Smarr, Sam (1788?–1845), a beef farmer, was shot to death in January 1845 by merchant William Perry Owsley. Witnesses said Smarr was generally a peaceful man and “in good circumstances as to property.” He was “as honest a man as any in the state,” said one Hannibal resident, but “when drinking . . . was a little turbulent and made a good deal of noise.” A second witness agreed that Smarr was a kind and good neighbor when sober, but when drinking “he was very abusive, and did not care much what he said.” Another regarded him as “dangerous . . . though some think not.” The murder is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and “Villagers” (101), and is re-created in chapter 21 of Huckleberry Finn (1885), where Colonel Sherburn shoots “old Boggs.” In 1900 Clemens wrote: “I can’t ever forget Boggs, because I saw him die, with a family Bible spread open on his breast. . . . Boggs represents Smarr in the book” (SLC to Miss Goodrich-Freer, 11 Jan 1900, ViU; Missouri v. Owsley).

Smith, Elizabeth W. (Betsy, or Betsey) (b. 1795?), a native of Virginia, was a good friend of Jane Lampton Clemens’s. Mark Twain described “Aunt Betsy” in his autobiography: “She wasn’t anybody’s aunt, in particular; she was aunt to the whole town of Hannibal; this was because of her sweet and generous and benevolent nature, and the winning simplicity of her character.” He remembered taking his mother, aged sixty or so, and Aunt Betsy to their first minstrel show in St. Louis: the two women “were very much alive; their age counted for nothing; they were fond of excitement, fond of novelties, fond of anything going that was of a sort proper for members of the church to indulge in” (AD, 30 Nov 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 115). Betsy Smith was evidently the model for Aunt Betsy Davis in “Hellfire [begin page 349] Hotchkiss” (130–33); working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) indicate that Widow Dawson (230, 231, 235, 237) was modeled after her (Marion Census 1850, 318; Marion Census 1860, 762).

Southard, Lot (b. 1825?), a clerk, boarded at the Clemens home until late in 1846 or January 1847. In 1860 he clerked for Tilden Russell Selmes and by the mid-1860s was a partner in a boot and shoe manufacturing firm. In “Villagers” (95) Clemens says that he married Lucy Lockwood, but the Hannibal Missouri Courier records his marriage on 7 November 1849 to Emma Beecham (Marion Census 1850, 308; Henry Clemens to unidentified correspondent, 4 Feb 47, CU-MARK; Fotheringham, 54; Honeyman, 47; “Married,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 8 Nov 49).

Stevens family.

Thomas B. Stevens (b. 1791?), mentioned in “Clairvoyant” (27) and “Villagers” (96), was a Hannibal jeweler and watchmaker. He had four children whom Clemens knew: John, Richard C., Edmund C., and Jenny (Marion Census 1850, 306; SLC to Pamela A. Moffett, 2 Apr 87, NPV, in MTBus, 379).

Richard C. (Dick) Stevens, as Clemens notes in “Villagers” (96), became a pilot on the upper Mississippi (Kennedy 1857, 302).

Edmund C. (Ed) Stevens (b. 1834?), Clemens’s friend and classmate, became a watchmaker. In 1861 he was a corporal in the Marion Rangers, the inept band of Confederate volunteers Clemens described in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). Stevens, he recalled, was “trim-built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat; bright, educated, but given over entirely to fun. . . . As far as he was concerned, this military expedition of ours was simply a holiday.” In 1901 Clemens wrote: “I had a good deal of correspondence with Ed a year or two before he died. . . . 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” (SLC to John Stevens, 28 Aug 1901, CU-MARK). Clemens recalls Stevens in his “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and in “Villagers” (96). Working notes show that he considered portraying him as Jimmy Steel in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as watchmaker Ed Sanders in “Schoolhouse Hill” ( HH&T, 383; MSM, 432), but those characters do not appear in the stories (Marion Census 1850, 306).

Stone, Barton Warren (1772–1844), is alluded to in “Villagers” (97); see also the note at 97.10–11. He was an eminent frontier evangelist born in Port Tobacco, Maryland, and reared there and in Virginia. Early in the nineteenth century, he became a leader in the Christian Church. In the 1830s he guided most of his group into union with the Disciples of Christ, led by Thomas and Alexander Campbell (see the note at 112.3). The grandfather of Clemens’s best friend, William Bowen, Stone died at the Bowen home in November 1844 (Hill, 734; MTBus, 24).

Stout, Ira, a land speculator, was involved in several real estate transactions with John Marshall Clemens. On 13 November 1839, Stout sold Clemens a quarter of a city block in the heart of Hannibal (the northwest corner of Hill and Main streets) for [begin page 350] $7,000. That same day Clemens sold Stout 160 acres of Florida farm land for $3,000, and a week later sold him an additional 326 acres in Monroe County for $2,000. In his autobiography Mark Twain remembered “several years of grinding poverty and privation which had been inflicted upon us by the dishonest act of one Ira Stout, to whom my father had lent several thousand dollars” (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:274). The transaction by which John Marshall Clemens became responsible for Stout’s debts, alluded to in “Villagers” (104), has not been identified, but when the quarter-block in Hannibal was sold in 1843 for the benefit of Clemens’s creditors, the price amounted to less than $4,000—“a difference so striking,” wrote Dixon Wecter, “as to lend color to the Clemenses’ later bitter prejudice against Stout as a sharp customer.” Wecter’s research of Marion County records led him to characterize Stout as a “dead beat” who became involved “in a web of litigation” with various Hannibal residents, some of whom successfully sued him for nonpayment of debts. By 1850 Stout had moved from Hannibal to Quincy, Illinois (Wecter 1952, 51–52, 56, 69–70; Jackson 1976 [bib20646], 499; “Correction,” Hannibal Western Union, 16 Jan 51).

Striker family. The father, a blacksmith, appears to have moved to Hannibal about 1842 and to have died by 1850. “Villagers” includes mention of him (95) and Margaret (b. 1840?), a daughter (95) (Marion Census 1850, 307).

Strong, Mrs., was a daughter of Hannibal taverner Jesse H. Pavey. According to “Villagers” (99), she settled in Peoria, Illinois. In 1869 Clemens wrote his sister after a lecture there: “One of Mrs. Pavey’s daughters (she married a doctor & is living in an Illinois town & has sons larger than I am,) was in the audience at Peoria. Had a long talk with her. She came many miles to be there” (SLC to Pamela A. Moffett, 14 Jan 69, NPV, in MTBus, 103).

Torrey (or Torry), Miss, evidently was a teacher at Mary Ann Newcomb’s school. Clemens mentions her in “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and refers to her three times in “Villagers” (95, 95, 95). In the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432), Mark Twain cast her as a character named Foster, but she does not appear in the story.

Tucker, Joshua Thomas (1812–97), from 1840 to 1846 the pastor of Hannibal’s First Presbyterian Church, was born in Massachusetts and educated at Yale College and Lane Theological Seminary (Walnut Hills, Ohio). Jane and Pamela Clemens joined the church in February 1841, at which time Samuel Clemens probably left the Methodist Sunday school and began attending the Presbyterian Sunday school instead. In 1847 Tucker moved to St. Louis, where he worked as an editor. He was pastor of Congregational churches in Holliston, Massachusetts, from 1849 to 1867, and Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, from 1867 to 1877. Clemens mentions Tucker in “Villagers” (97), and in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–10, 112) evidently modeled Mr. Rucker after him (“Recent Deaths,” Boston Evening Transcript, 12 June 97, 7; “The Rev. Dr. Joshua T. Tucker,” New York Times, 12 June 97, 7; Tucker, 211–12; Fotheringham, 104–6; Sweets 1984, 4, 6, 17, 51).

[begin page 351] Ustick, Thomas Watt (b. 1801?), was a prominent St. Louis book and job printer. Orion Clemens was hired by Ustick as a typesetter about 1842, and Samuel Clemens worked in Ustick’s printing house in the summer of 1853. Ustick is mentioned in “Villagers” (105). Presumably he was the model for Underwood, the St. Louis printer mentioned in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (113), although no evidence has been found that he was John Marshall Clemens’s (James Carpenter’s) “old and trusty friend” (St. Louis Census 1850, 416:331; James Green 1849, 129; SLC to Jane Lampton Clemens, 31 Aug 53, L1, 9, 11 n. 5).

Wolf (or Wolfe), Jim (b. 1833?), mentioned in “Villagers” (98), was an apprentice printer who lodged with the Clemens family in the early 1850s and worked with Samuel Clemens on the Hannibal Western Union, the newspaper Orion Clemens started in September 1850. Mark Twain remembered Wolf as a tall slim boy some two to three years his senior, who came from a country hamlet and “brought all his native sweetnesses and gentlenesses and simplicities with him” (SLC 1900, 10, in MTA, 1:135). He was “always tongue-tied in the presence of my sister, and when even my gentle mother spoke to him he could not answer save in frightened monosyllables” (AD, 16 Oct 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 137). Endlessly amused by Wolf’s bashfulness, Clemens delighted in making him the butt of practical jokes. “A Gallant Fireman,” Clemens’s first known venture into print, published in the Hannibal Western Union on 16 January 1851, humorously described Jim Wolf’s slow response to the threat of a fire at the newspaper office (see ET&S1, 62). In “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats,” published in 1867 and retold in 1900 in an autobiographical sketch, Clemens recounted how Wolf crawled in his nightshirt onto a slippery roof to silence noisy cats, lost his footing, and landed in the middle of a candy pull hosted by Pamela Clemens (SLC 1867 [bib21403]; SLC 1900, 11–13, in MTA, 1:135–38). In 1897, Wolf traveled from his Illinois home to attend Orion Clemens’s funeral in Keokuk, Iowa, and introduced himself to Pamela’s daughter as the “Hero of the candy pull” (Webster n.d., 5). In chapter 23 of A Tramp Abroad (1880), Clemens portrayed Wolf as bumpkin Nicodemus Dodge (SLC to Pamela A. Moffett, 8 Oct 53, L1, 17; MTBus, 265).