Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  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; Honey-man, 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” (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” and “Villagers” (21, 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 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” and “Villagers” (27, 96), was a Hannibal jeweler and watchmaker. He had four children whom Clemens knew: John, RICHARD C., DEMUND 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” and in “Villagers” (21, 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 $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, 2:2
74). 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 1976a, 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” (95) includes mention of him and Margaret (b. 1840?), a daughter (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). 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).

  USTICK, THOMAS WATT (b. 1801?), was a promiment 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 1867b; 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).

  References

  This list defines the abbreviations used in citations and provides full bibliographic information for works cited by author’s last name or by short title. Any document or edition of a book owned by Clemens or his family is identified with an asterisk (*), excepting Clemens’s own writings.

  Abbott, Keene.

  1913. “Tom Sawyer’s Town.” Harper’s Weekly 57 (9 August): 16–17.

  AD Autobiographical Dictation.

  American Publishing Company.

  1866–79. “Books received from the Binderies, Dec 1st 1866 to Dec 31. 1879,” the company’s stock ledger, NN-B.

  AMT

  1959. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Edited by Charles Neider. New York: Harper and Brothers.

  Anderson, Morris.

  1943. “Red-Letter Books Relating to Missouri.” Missouri Historical Review 38 (October): 85–93.

  Anderson Auction Company.

  1911. “The Library and Manuscripts of Samuel L. Clemens [Mark Twain]. Part I.” Sale no. 892 (7 and 8 February). New York: Anderson Auction Company.

  ATS

  1982. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Foreword and notes by John C. Gerber; text established by Paul Baender. Mark Twain Library. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

  Ayres, John W.

  1917. “Recollections of Hannibal.” Letter dated 22 August. Undated clipping from the Palmyra (Mo.) Spectator, Morris Anderson scrapbook, MoHM. Reprinted in part by Wecter 1952, 149.

  Barret, Richard F.

  1826. “An Inaugural Dissertation, on the Modus Operandi of Narcotics and Sedatives.” M.D. diss., Transylvania University, Kentucky.

  Barrett, William Fletcher.

  1884. “Mark Twain on Thought-Transference.” Journal of Society for Psychical Research 1 (October): 166–67.

  Bayly, Thomas Haynes.

  1844. Songs, Ballads and Other Poems. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley.

  BDAC

  1961. Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774–1961. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

  Bell, Raymond Martin.

  1984. “The Ancestry of Samuel Clemens, Grandfather of Mark Twain.” 413 Burton Avenue, Washington, Pa.: Raymond Martin Bell. Mimeograph.

  Bellamy, Gladys Carmen.

  1950. Mark Twain as a Literary Artist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

  Bible

  * 1817. “Family Record. Births, Marriages, Deaths.” In The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments, Together with the Apocrypha: Translated Out of the Original Tongues . . . by the Special Command of His Majesty King James I. of England. Philadelphia: M. Carey. CU-MARK; owned originally by Jane and John Marshall Clemens.

  * 1862. “Family Record. Births. Marriages. Deaths.” In The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, Translated Out of the Original Tongues; and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised. New York: American Bible Society. PH in CU-MARK, courtesy of Rachel M. Varble; location of original is not known. Owned originally by Orion and Mollie E. Clemens.

  Bowen, Clarence W.

  1926–43. The History of Woodstock, Connecticut. 8 vols. Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press.

  Bowen, Elbert R.

  [1959]. Theatrical Entertainments in Rural Missour
i before the Civil War. University of Missouri Studies, vol. 32. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

  Branch, Edgar Marquess.

  1982a. “Sam Clemens, Steersman on the John H. Dickey.” American Literary Realism 15 (Autumn): 195–208.

  1982b. “A New Clemens Footprint: Soleather Steps Forward.” American Literature 54 (December): 497–510.

  Brashear, Minnie M.

  1934. Mark Twain, Son of Missouri. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

  1935. “Mark Twain’s Niece, Daughter of His Sister, Pamela, Taking Keen Interest in Centennial.” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 March, 11.

  Brown, T. Allston.

  1870. History of the American Stage. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald.

  Budd, Louis J., ed.

  1977. “A Listing of and Selection from Newspaper and Magazine Interviews with Samuel L. Clemens, 1874–1910.” American Literary Realism 10 (Winter): iii–100.

  Burke, Sir Bernard.

  1904. A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage, the Privy Council, Knightage and Companionage. Edited by Ashworth P. Burke. London: Harrison and Sons.

  Cadets of Temperance.

  [1850]. “The Property of Cadets of Temperance Hannibal Mo.” MS of two pages containing the membership roster, MoHM.

  Campbell, R. A., ed.

  1875. Campbell’s Gazetteer of Missouri. Rev. ed. St. Louis: R. A. Campbell.

  Cassidy, Frederic G., ed.

  1985–. Dictionary of American Regional English. 1 vol. to date. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press.

  Cayleff, Susan E.

  1987. Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

  Chapman, John W.

  1932. “The Germ of a Book: A Footnote on Mark Twain.” Atlantic Monthly 150 (December): 720–21.

  Clemens, Mary E. (Mollie).

  * 1862–66. “Mrs. Orion Clemens. ‘Journal.’ For 1862.” PH of MS of fifty-five pages in CU-MARK, courtesy of Franklin J. Meine; location of original is not known. Published in part by Lorch 1929b, 357–59.