by Twain, Mark
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 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 1867a, 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 1897b†). 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—“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 “Gen1 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” and “Villagers” (21, 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 Garths’ 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 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 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” and “Villagers” (20, 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 1976b, 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” and “Villagers” (21, 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” to have married a “prosperous tinner” (95). 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:
The first school I went to was taught by Mr. Cross, who had canvassed the town and obtained perhaps twenty-five private pupils. . . . Mr. Cross did not belie his name . . . Sam Clemens wrote a bit of doggerel about him. . . .
Cross by name and Cross by nature,
Cross hopped out of an Irish potato.
. . . After a year together in that school Sam and I went to the school taught by Mrs. Horr. It was then he used to write notes to me and bring apples to school and put them on my desk. . . . We hadn’t reached the dancing age then, but we went to many “play parties” together and romped through “Going to Jerusalem” [also called musical chairs], “King William was King George’s Son,” and “Green Grow the Rushes—O.” (Frazer, 73)
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 Rails 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�
�� and in “Villagers” (21, 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).
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).
