by Twain, Mark
PAMELA ANN (also PAMELIA or MELA) CLEMENS (1827–1904), pronounced Pəmee′-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 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,” where his brother figures as Burton and B. Carpenter (93, 104). Among some fragmentary autobiographical notes probably made within a year of writing “Villagers,” Clemens commented: “Dead brother Ben. My treachery to him” (SLC 1898b, 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 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:
My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. She had none at all with my brother Henry, who was two years younger than I, and I think that the unbroken monotony of his goodness and truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction. . . . I never knew Henry to do a vicious thing toward me, or toward anyone else—but he frequently did righteous ones that cost me as heavily. It was his duty to report me, when I needed reporting and neglected to do it myself, and he was very faithful in discharging that duty. He is Sid in Tom Sawyer. But Sid was not Henry. Henry was a very much finer and better boy than ever Sid was. (AD, 12 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:92–93)
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 1929a, 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 t
he 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 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:
All the negroes were friends of ours, & with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. . . . We had a faithful & affectionate good friend, ally & adviser in “Uncle Dan’l,” a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro-quarter, whose sympathies were wide & warm, & whose heart was honest & simple & knew no guile. He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for half a century, & yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, & have staged him in books under his own name & as “Jim,” & carted him all around—to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, & even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon—& he has endured it all with the patience & friendliness & loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race & my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling & this estimate have stood the test of fifty years & have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then. (SLC 1897–98, 44–46, in MTA, 1:100–101)
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 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 1965a, 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 school-house. In “Villagers” (93, 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, 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 grea
tly 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).
