Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  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:

  Higgins (everybody knows HIGGINS,) plied his single leg with amazing industry and perseverance, keeping up a running fire of comment not calculated to initiate him in the good graces of the person addressed. When the leg became tired, its owner would seat himself and recover a little breath, after which, the indomitable leg would drag off the persevering Higgins at an accelerated pace. (“The New Costume,” Hannibal Western Union 10 July 51)

  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:

  Mrs. Holiday liked children, and her house, I remember, had a special attraction for us. She owned a piano, and it was not merely a piano; it was a piano with a drum attachment. Oh, ‘The Battle of Prague,’ executed with that marvelous drum attachment! It was our favorite selection, because it had so much drum in it. I must have been about ten at that time, and Sam was two years older. (Abbott, 17)

  In “Villagers” Clemens mistakenly says Mrs. Holliday’s father was “a British General in the Revolution” (95–96); 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 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:

  My school days began when I was four years and a half old. . . . There were no public schools in Missouri in those early days, but there were two private schools in Hannibal—terms twenty-five cents per week per pupil, and collect it if you can. 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. I was sent to Mrs. Horr’s school, and I remember my first day in that little log house with perfect clearness. . . . Mrs. Horr was a New England lady of middle-age with New England ways and principles, and she always opened school with prayer and a chapter from the New Testament. (AD, 15 Aug 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 107, 108)

  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, 97, 101) Clemens alludes to Mrs. Horr or “Mrs. H.” four times (Marion Census 1850, 314; Ellsberry 1965a, 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.

  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 w
ith 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).

  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). 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). 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) Lakenan is mentioned three times (Marion Census 1850, 314; Holcombe, 608–10; Ellsberry 1965a, 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 hi
s 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. 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, LI, 13, 17; Knox, 110; Edwards 1866, 533; “Death of A. J. H. Lampton,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 4 Feb 79).