The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  The first issue of the weekly Hannibal Western Union—the title betrays Orion’s political sympathies—appeared on September 5. In his prospectus for the paper, Orion declared that as “a thorough Whig” his “political articles will bear the genuine whig stamp,” but he vowed that “no effort will be spared to obtain for the public the very latest news, on all subjects” and that he would impart to the paper “a high degree of interest and usefulness to every class of readers.” A subscription cost two dollars a year, payable in advance, and a twelve-line classified ad a dollar. Orion accepted farm produce and cordwood in lieu of cash. He ran the paper on a shoestring, in part by engaging two apprentices, his brother Henry and a “green, good-natured, bashful” country boy some five years older than Henry named Jim Wolf, who wanted to learn the trade and worked for room and board. Wolf later became the butt of Sam’s practical jokes and, in his autobiography, he expressed regret for his behavior. His ruses had been “all cruel and all barren of wit. Any brainless swindler could have invented them,” whereas Wolf “brought all his native sweetnesses and gentlenesses and simplicities with him.” 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.” Wolf appears in A Tramp Abroad (1880) in the role of the “loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad countrified” raconteur Nicodemus Dodge.49

  In the fragmented political landscape of the early 1850s, Orion threaded a needle in his editorials because he could not risk alienating his readers and advertisers. He may have been opposed to slavery, but he was equally critical of Southern fire-eaters and Northern abolitionists. A conservative Whig, he attacked Free-Soilers and never editorially condemned involuntary servitude. He defended the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act as measures necessary for the preservation of the Union. His paper carried advertisements for runaway slaves and slave sales, on the one hand, and for a colonization paper, the Christian Statesman, on the other. As Philip Fanning notes, Orion “rebuked alike the Northern radicals who obstructed the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and their counterparts in the South who openly called for secession.” He took no side in theological debates, moreover, except to express disapproval of the Latter-Day Saints, whose capital was located in Nauvoo, Illinois, only sixty miles upstream from Hannibal, where Joseph Smith was killed in 1844. As Orion put it, Mormons were “about as tractable and peaceable as so many grizzly bears.”50 Meanwhile, he fended off his local competitors, including Joe Buchanan’s Hannibal Journal, William League and J. T. Hinton’s Whig Messenger, and Ament’s Missouri Courier.

  Orion finally lured Sam away from Ament’s shop in January 1851 by promising him a salary of $3.50 a week. It was “an extravagant wage,” Sam remembered in his autobiography, “but Orion was always generous, always liberal with everybody except himself.” Besides, the promise “cost him nothing in my case, for he never was able to pay me a single penny as long as I was with him.”51 In effect, Sam became an unpaid apprentice like Henry Clemens and Jim Wolf. But Orion was the breadwinner, the sole support of the family, and for the first time in their lives all three surviving Clemens brothers worked side by side.

  On January 9, a few days after Sam joined the Western Union staff, a fire broke out in the plant on Bird Street. Sam lampooned Wolf’s response to the fire in his first known writing, “A Gallant Fireman,” a 150-word squib in the January 16 issue of the paper. Edgar Marquess Branch speculates that it was “produced by the young compositor while he stood at his case setting it into type.” It was not an auspicious start to a literary career. With the building on fire, Sam explained, Wolf had “immediately gathered the broom, an old mallet, the wash-pan and a dirty towel” and run some ten blocks with them. By the time he returned the fire had been doused, at which point he uttered a malapropism: “If that thar fire hadn’t bin put out, thar’d a’ bin the greatest confirmation of the age!”52

  After the fire, Orion moved the handpress to a room over Stover & Horr’s Clothing Store on Main Street and soldiered on. The Western Union was issued without interruption the following week. With an additional five hundred dollars borrowed from John Moorman Johnson, Orion bought the Hannibal Journal (and a piano) in late summer from Buchanan, who promptly vamoosed for California, and merged the two papers. The first weekly issue of the consolidated Hannibal Journal and Western Union appeared on September 4, 1851—the title would soon be shortened to the Hannibal Journal—and Orion bragged that it had “a larger circulation, by over one hundred,” than any other paper in the region.

  About the same time, according to Sam, Orion “was hit a staggering blow by a new idea—an idea that had never been thought of in the West by any person before—the idea of hiring a literary celebrity to write an original story for his Hannibal newspaper for pay!” He wanted a tale “which could be continued through three issues of his weekly paper and cover a few columns of solid bourgeois each time. He offered a sum to all the American literary celebrities of that day” but “Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and all the others declined.” (There is no evidence other than this singular statement by Sam that Orion contacted any of these distinguished men of letters, or if he did that any of them replied.) Finally, “a celebrity of about the third degree took him up—with a condition.” He would not write “an original story for the sum offered—which was five dollars—but would translate one from the French for that sum. My brother took him up” and “the story came.”53 Published without signature in three successive issues of the newspaper, on September 25 and October 2 and 9, 1851, the science fiction tale “More Wonderful Still!” was translated from French “expressly for the Hannibal Journal and Western Union,” the headnote trumpeted.54

  After the merger of the Journal and Western Union, Orion reduced the subscription price of the paper from two dollars to one dollar a year “and the advertising rates in about the same proportion,” Sam recalled, in hopes of boosting circulation, attracting more advertisers, and increasing net profit. Instead, the strategy backfired. As Sam wisecracked, he instead “created one absolute and unassailable certainty—to wit: that the business would never pay him a single cent of profit.” Orion repeatedly flirted with disaster. Twice within a six-week period in early 1852, on January 22 and March 2, the Journal offices again caught fire. The first time, both Ament and William League of the Messenger assisted the Journal staff in producing the next issue of the paper in their shops. Orion eventually collected about $150 in insurance money. The second time the blaze was much larger. It consumed Garth’s tobacco factory adjacent to the Journal office, a loss totaling about five thousand dollars. Ament helped move the Journal handpress, paper, and type across the street before they were destroyed. Afterward, Orion slashed expenses and, rather than pay office rent, moved the entire Journal operation into the Clemens house. Still, some indications of Orion’s financial distress were evident as early as June 1852, when he postponed his plans to enlarge the paper and warned subscribers that his carriers would try to collect money owed him. “He kept that paper alive during four years,” Sam remembered, “but I have at this time no idea how he accomplished it.” Ament performed yet another favor for him when in November 1852 he sold his interest in the Missouri Courier and moved to Palmyra, where he soon was rewarded for his party service by appointment as receiver of the U.S. Land Office by President Franklin Pierce. Orion congratulated his old rival: he was “a clever man and a man of strict integrity. . . . Although he has given us some hard raps for what he was pleased to call our ‘rabid whiggery,’ yet we are willing to render justice to a political opponent.”55

  Like many another country editor, Orion weathered the storm by filling his news columns and feuilleton with material culled from his exchanges. In the age before the telegraph and wire services, the flow of information was facilitated by a system of gifting through the mail. The Postal Service Act of 1792 authorized presses to exchange free copies of their newspapers and magazines without a postage fee. A
mong the exchanges sent to the Hannibal Journal were the Boston Carpet-Bag (a short-lived humor magazine edited by B. P. Shillaber), Godey’s Lady’s Book, Knickerbocker, the Boston Olive Branch, Peterson’s, Sartain’s, Scientific American, and Spirit of the Times. Articles from all of them were copied occasionally in the Journal. In the absence of international copyright or even an effective domestic copyright law, moreover, Orion reprinted for free works by such authors as Sylvanus Cobb Jr., the elder Alexandre Dumas, Fanny Fern, Oliver Optic, and the humorist Josh Silsbee. He reproduced Charles Dickens’s story “The Fate of a Drunkard” and an excerpt from Bleak House at about the same time he encouraged Sam to read Dickens. (“I was ashamed, but I couldn’t do it,” Sam admitted.) One of the first issues Sam helped to typeset included an article about the “rapping” Fox sisters, who gained wide fame as spiritual mediums—years before they revealed that they had made the sounds at their séances by cracking their toes under a table. The Journal also reprinted columns by the travel writer J. Ross Browne—this a decade before Sam befriended Browne in California. No doubt Sam read, if he did not typeset, a piece in the Hannibal Journal in November 1852, copied from the London papers, describing a new “method of finding drowned persons” by filling a loaf of bread with quicksilver or mercury and floating it on the water, where it ostensibly would settle over a decomposing body. Sam later alluded to precisely this practice in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. If, as Herman Melville’s Ishmael declares, the whaleship was his Harvard and Yale, then the print shop was Sam’s Columbia and Princeton; and indeed Abraham Lincoln once called the printing house “the poor boy’s college.” By typesetting “acres of good and bad literature,” Sam learned over time—“unconsciously at first, consciously later—to discriminate between the two.” As a result, he worked to polish his style. In addition to Sam, such distinguished writers as Benjamin Franklin, Bret Harte, W. D. Howells, and Walt Whitman all worked in early life as printers. Harte, for one, remembered how the discipline of composing at the case shaped his writing. He learned “to combine the composition of the editorial with the setting of its type” and “to save my fingers mechanical drudgery somewhat condensed my style.”56

  Sam turned his familiarity with the Carpet-Bag to advantage when, at the age of seventeen, he sent its editors the manuscript of “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,” a crude anecdote depicting the confrontation of an eastern dude and a Pike County frontiersman. It appeared in the May 1, 1852, issue alongside sketches by the popular humorists Charles Farrar Browne (aka Artemus Ward) and George Horatio Derby (aka John Phoenix). The publication is remarkable for a couple of reasons. Sam’s submission to a nationally circulated comic paper betrays, as David E. E. Sloane has noted, “a measurable degree of literary ambition” in the teenager, and the joke exhibits all the characteristics of Southwestern humor, including not merely the defeat but the humiliation of the victim. The victor adds insult to injury. Coarse as it is, it also enjoyed a long shelf life. Signed “S.L.C.” and set in Hannibal, it was copied from the Carpet-Bag at least seven times over the next few years in newspapers from Nyack, New York, to Palmyra, Missouri. Sam also contributed a pair of articles to the Philadelphia American Courier in 1852, including “Hannibal, Missouri,” in which he mentioned “the crystal waters of the proud Mississippi”57—a surprising reference to a river well known for its chocolate-brown color.

  In chapter 51 of Life on the Mississippi, Sam observed that when he was a schoolboy in Hannibal “a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious pow-wow, in the presence of the village boys.” No doubt he refers to the performance of a couple of confidence men in March 1852. They advertised their appearance at Benton Hall in the Hannibal Journal on March 11, and the next issue, dated March 18, contained a review of the production that fleshes out details:

  Last week a profusion of bills, ornamenting the hotels and sides of prominent buildings, announced that the above “celebrated” troupe were going to perform certain specified wonders at Benton Hall. All the little boys in town gazed on the groups of astonishing pictures which appeared on the above mentioned bills and were thereby wrought up to an intense pitch of excitement. It was to be a real theatre, and the “troupe,” (which nobody had ever heard of before,) was so “celebrated.” Well, the momentous evening came. Those who enjoyed the felicity of paying a quarter to see the show found a large man on the first story, who received the money, and a small man at the top of the second pair of steps, who received the tickets. These men, thus engaged in this apparently humble occupation, were the very persons who were afterwards transformed into heroes and soldiers by the power of paint. In the hall we found forty or fifty of our citizens, sitting in front of a striped curtain, behind which was all the mysterious paraphernalia of the theatre.

  When the curtain was pulled to one side, the first appearance on the stage was the large man who received the money at the top of the first pair of stairs. He was evidently a novice, and acted his part about as you have seen boys, in a thespian society. He was intended to be a lover of the distinguished danseuse, who played the part of a miss in short dresses, though her apparent age would have justified her in wearing them longer, and we have seen spectacles on younger looking people. Then the small man, who came in first as a corporal in the army, and then pretended to be drunk, for the amusement of the audience, made up the third character in this burlesque of a farce, the dullness of which was not relieved even by the disgusting blackguardisms with which it was profusely interlarded.

  After this wretched abomination was finished, the danseuse favored the audience with several dances, very skillfully performed, and the only part of the whole performance which was worth going half a square to see, if the charge had been nothing.58

  Afterward the two frauds disappeared into the Missouri night without a trace, no doubt to lie low until they played the next town.

  Sam likely did not write this notice; it was almost certainly penned by Orion. But even if Sam was not the author, he may have set it in type and he undoubtedly witnessed the performance. Over thirty years later, the scam became the basis for the antics of the Duke and King in chapters 20–22 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which a pair of unnamed con artists, not that their names matter, “sell” the gullible audience. Like the actual frauds who performed in Hannibal, one of them cross-dresses, and the other is a “novice”; they advertise with handbills; and they charge a quarter per person to attend the show. In chapter 21, the Duke and King similarly rehearse the swordfight from Richard III with “a couple of long swords that the duke made out of oak laths.”59 In a passage deleted from Life on the Mississippi, moreover, Sam remembered that one of the charlatans delivered a crack-brained version of Hamlet’s soliloquy like the one declaimed by the Duke in Huck Finn. Sam embellished their appearances in Huck Finn (e.g., by depicting the King’s rollicking performance of “the Royal Nonesuch”) but he gleaned all the elements of the fictional episode from an actual event.

  Another affair during Sam’s typesetting days on the Hannibal Journal left a lasting impression on him. On Saturday evening, January 23, 1853, he met a stranger, Dennis McDermid or McDavid, a “harmless whisky-sodden tramp” who was “begging for a match” on the chilly streets of the village. Sam fetched him a box, “then hied me home and to bed.” Around midnight the town marshal arrested McDermid “for breaking down the door of a negro cabin with an ax” and locked the tramp in the small jail or calaboose near the mouth of Bear Creek. At three or four in the morning, “the church bells rang for fire and everybody turned out,” including Sam. McDermid had set his straw bed on fire and ignited the woodwork of the jail. When he reached the site of the jail, Sam remembered,

  two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them,
and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that the man’s death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this, I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me.

  Sam was tortured “for a long time afterward” by the thought that he was “as guilty of the man’s death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out.”60 He worried that if he talked in his sleep his brother Henry would learn his secret.

  Orion improved the occasion by editorializing on temperance in the next issue of his paper and inadvertently rubbing salt in Sam’s wound in another article his brother may have set in type. He implied that the fire in the calaboose was no accident, but divine retribution for sin:

  This man was an insane Irishman—made insane by liquor. . . . It is supposed he set his bed clothes on fire with matches, as he usually carried them in his pocket to light his pipe. . . . Attempts were made to obtain the keys, and also to break down the doors, both of which proved unavailing. The Marshal, who has charge of the keys, slept four or five squares distant, and though the keys were always kept in one place in the Recorder’s office, known to one or two others, in the hurry and confusion they were overlooked in the search. Before they were obtained, the fire had progressed so rapidly as already to have destroyed the man’s life. Every effort was made to rescue him. To those outside endeavoring to force an entrance, he seemed to be leaning against the door, shrieking and moaning, until, stifled by the smoke and heated air, he fell to the floor.