Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  17.24 fox or baste or three-cornered cat or hide’n’whoop] “Fox” and “baste the bear” are essentially games of tag; “three-cornered cat” is a ball game in which there are three batters; and “hide’n’whoop” is a form of hide-and-seek (Routledge, 7–8, 24, 69; Mathews, 1:279, 2:1726).

  Letter to William Bowen

  (1870)

  Four days after his marriage to Olivia Langdon on 2 February 1870, Clemens wrote this letter to William Bowen. The Clemenses had just settled into their house in Buffalo, a wedding gift from Olivia’s father, Jervis. Clemens, occupied as co-owner and co-editor of the Buffalo Express, was enjoying the success of his second book, The Innocents Abroad, a copy of which he had sent to Bowen. Published in late July 1869, Innocents had been very widely and favorably reviewed, and by the time of this letter had sold almost 40,000 copies, earning Clemens royalties of approximately $7,300 (Hirst, 285, 491 n. 17; American Publishing Company, 46–52). Bowen and the other Hannibal villagers named in the letter are identified in the Biographical Directory.

  20.6 The fountains of my great deep are broken up] Genesis 7:11: “the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”

  21.4 Holliday’s Hill] Just north of Hannibal, this rise overlooking the Mississippi River was presumably named for its owners, the family of MELICENT S. HOLLIDAY. It is called Cardiff Hill in Tom Sawyer and in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.”

  21.5 still-house branch] A stream emptying into the Mississippi River from the valley just north of Holliday’s Hill, it provided water for one of Hannibal’s early distilleries (Hagood and Hagood 1986, 205, 206).

  21.7 “the Bay”] The Bay de Charles was a large inlet on the Mississippi about two miles north of Hannibal and extending some five miles to the northwest.

  21.32–33 that poor fellow in the calaboose] DENNIS McDERMID.

  22.21–22 as well as we used to know “boils” from “breaks.”] A boil is a turbulent swirl or eddy in a river. A break, which looks like a streak on the water’s surface, is an ominous sign of a snag or other submerged obstacle (Cassidy, 1:323; Lex, 27; Life on the Mississippi, chapter 9).

  23.1 Mollie] WILLIAM BOWEN’s wife.

  Tupperville-Dobbsville

  (1876–80)

  This depiction of a sleepy Arkansas town on the banks of the Mississippi was probably written between the fall of 1876 and the spring of 1880. Although Mark Twain abandoned the story after writing only nine and a half pages, he revived its imagery for Huckleberry Finn (1885). The dilapidated houses and the muddy streets lined with the town loafers reappear in chapter 21 of the novel, and the widow Bennett’s home shares several characteristics with the Phelps farm (modeled after JOHN ADAMS QUARLES’s farm) in chapter 32. Mark Twain left the fragment untitled. The editorial title used here joins the two names Mark Twain gave to the village; he initially called it Tupperville, but in the final paragraph, which he added at a later time, he called it Dobbsville.

  Clairvoyant

  (1883 or 1884)

  This unfinished tale is a curious blend of fact and fantasy. Set in Hannibal, most of its characters bear names of actual residents: a jeweler named Stevens, storekeepers named Selmes and Brittingham, and a lunatic boy named Ratcliff who tries to murder his mother are all mentioned in “Villagers of 1840–3” (and identified in the Biographical Directory). The story is a product of Mark Twain’s continuing interest in psychic phenomena. In 1878 he wrote an article he called “Mental Telegraphy” (his term for thought transference), in which he claimed to believe in telepathic communication, despite never having seen a convincing clairvoyant performance. Fearing he would not be taken seriously, however, he did not publish the article for thirteen years (SLC 1891). Meanwhile, in 1884 he joined the Society for Psychical Research in London, writing its founder, William Fletcher Barrett, that he was convinced “people can have crystal-clear mental communication with each other over vast distances” (SLC to Barrett, 4 Oct 84, in Barrett, 167). And in 1895 he confirmed his belief in telepathy in a second article on the subject, “Mental Telegraphy Again” (SLC 1895b).

  Albert Bigelow Paine supplied the title “Clairvoyant” on the manuscript of this story, dating it only “80s.” The physical evidence—paper, pencil, and handwriting—suggests late 1883 or 1884 as the most likely date of composition.

  27.2 John H. Day] No John H. Day is mentioned in Hannibal records. Two of Mark Twain’s notes nevertheless suggest that he had known a printer with that last name: his notebook for 1900 mentions “Old printer Day & the spirits” (NB 43, CU-MARK†, TS p. 3), and an undated page of autobiographical notes mentions “Poor old Mr. Day” (Anderson Auction Company, lot 363). A character named “old Mr. Day” is a journeyman printer in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (148–49, 159–61).

  30.27 the Sny] A wooded island and channel across the river from Hannibal, mainly in Pike County, Illinois.

  31.27 Palmyra] The seat of Marion County, approximately twelve miles northwest of Hannibal.

  Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

  (1884)

  When Mark Twain began writing “Indians” in July 1884, he was reading galley proofs of Huckleberry Finn, then scheduled to appear in December. That book concluded with Huck and Tom promising to “go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory.” Mark Twain planned to publish his sequel while that promise was still fresh in the minds of his readers. But he neither completed nor published “Indians,” abandoning his effort in mid-sentence after only nine chapters.

  Mark Twain’s nephew and publishing partner, Charles L. Webster, enthusiastically approved the new literary project. He provided practical assistance by filling Clemens’s requests for books about the West, particularly for “PERSONAL NARRATIVES of life & adventure out yonder on the Plains & in the Mountains . . . especially life among the Indians” (SLC to Charles L. Webster, 6 July 84, NPV, in MTBus, 265). Mark Twain was especially eager to find narratives that would help him refute the romantic portrayals of the Indian popularized by James Fenimore Cooper and others. He had become skeptical of Cooper’s “noble savage” by 1861, when he journeyed overland from Missouri to Nevada Territory, observing Indians along the way and after his arrival. In Roughing It (1872) he wrote that it was the poverty and squalor of the Gosiutes (or Goshutes), natives of the inhospitable Nevada-Utah border region, that prompted him, “a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man,” to wonder if he “had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance.” His disenchantment left him disgusted with Cooper’s romantic portrayals and unsympathetic toward the American Indian: “It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive—and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings—but Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine—at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s” (Roughing It, chapter 19).

  In writing “Indians,” Mark Twain’s primary source of information about Indian character and culture was Our Wild Indians (1883), by army officer Richard Irving Dodge, a book full of biased generalizations, but highly commended for accuracy in its day. Dodge hoped to dispel the romantic image of the “noble Red Man” and at the same time to educate those who saw only an “ignoble savage.” He regarded the Indian as a partially civilized primitive who would become a useful citizen once instilled with a sense of morality: “If our good missionaries would let him alone in his religion . . . and simply strive to supply him with a code of morals, his subsequent conversion might be easy and his future improvement assured.” While he forcefully condemned the government’s policy of “debasing, pauperizing, and exterminating” Indians, he saw “no future for the Indian as Indian.” He advocated the gradual breakup of the tribal system so that Indians could be “individually absorbed in the grea
t family of American citizens” (Dodge 1883, 41, 56–58, 641, 645–46). “There’s a man who knows all about Indians, & yet has some humanity in him,” Mark Twain wrote of Dodge, adding that “knowledge of Indians, & humanity, are seldom found in the same individual” (SLC to William Dean Howells, 22 Feb 77, OFH, in MTHL, 1:172).

  Mark Twain supplemented Our Wild Indians with several other books: The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants (1877), also by Dodge; Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders (1870) by De Benneville Randolph Keim; The Oregon Trail (1849) by Francis Parkman; My Life on the Plains (1874) by George Armstrong Custer; and William F. Cody’s autobiography, The Life of the Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide (1879). His indebtedness to his sources is traced in the explanatory notes that follow (see also HH&T, 81–91).

  Mark Twain’s dependence on these “authorities” helps account for his inability to complete his story. Striving for an unsparingly realistic depiction of the brutality he believed to be characteristic of the Great Plains Indians, Mark Twain made their abduction of his heroine the keystone of his plot—even though his sources asserted that rape was the inevitable fate of such captives. Unable to write frankly about rape, yet convinced that realism demanded he do so, Mark Twain abandoned the story, probably around the middle of August 1884. Although his normal practice with recalcitrant material was to pigeonhole it and return to it at a later date, there is no evidence that he ever resumed work on “Indians.” There are, however, two indications that he was interested in continuing the tale: in 1889 or 1890, he had the incomplete manuscript printed on the Paige typesetter, the mechanical composing machine whose development he financed for a decade; and in November 1890, he made a notebook entry reminding himself to have Tom Sawyer play the role of a medicine man (N&J3, 594).

  33.4–5 Me and Tom Sawyer and the nigger Jim] In the preface to Tom Sawyer (1876), Mark Twain stated that Huck and Tom were both “drawn from life.” He modeled Huck after TOM BLANKENSHIP, and Tom after a number of boys, including himself, JOHN B. BRIGGS, and WILLIAM BOWEN. He based Jim on DANIEL, a slave owned by his uncle JOHN ADAMS QUARLES.

  33.5 old Miss Watson] MARY ANN NEWCOMB.

  33.6–7 away down in Arkansaw at Tom’s aunt Sally’s and uncle Silas’s] The home of Sally and Silas Phelps was a fictional re-creation of JOHN ADAMS QUARLES’s Missouri farm.

  33.13 aunt Polly] JANE LAMPTON CLEMENS.

  33.17 Sid and Mary] Tom Sawyer’s half-brother and his cousin, loosely modeled after HENRY and PAMELA ANN CLEMENS, respectively.

  35.1 widow Douglas] MELICENT S. HOLLIDAY.

  35.9 Gin’l Gaines] The Hannibal drunkard, “General” GAINES.

  41.28 out on the Great Plains] Mark Twain’s setting is the Oregon Trail, which, beginning in the early 1840s, became the great emigrant route to the Pacific Northwest. It ran for about two thousand miles from towns on the Missouri River (Independence, Missouri, was a favorite starting point) to the Columbia River region of Oregon. Most of the action of “Indians” takes place along the section of the trail that followed the Platte and North Platte Rivers through present-day Nebraska and Wyoming toward Fort Laramie.

  43.31 one named Hog Face] In Our Wild Indians, Dodge stated that among Indians “any personal defect, deformity of character, or casual incident furnishing ground for a good story, is eagerly seized upon as a fit name. ‘Powder Face,’ the war chief of the Arrapahoes . . . is known . . . by the title which was given him from having his face badly burned by an explosion of powder when he was a young man” (Dodge 1883, 228). Long before he read Dodge, however, Mark Twain had enjoyed burlesquing Indian names. In an 1862 letter to his mother written from Nevada Territory, he drew a comically repellent portrait of a Washo Indian family and gave them such names as “head-chief Hoop-de-doodle-doo,” “Timid-Rat,” “Bottled Thunder,” and “Princess Invisible Rainbow.” “You see,” he wrote, “like all Indians, they glory in high-sounding names” (SLC to Jane Lampton Clemens, 20 Mar 62, L1, 177).

  45.22–23 Man-afraid-of-his-Mother-in-law] Mark Twain was probably burlesquing the name of a famous Oglala Sioux chief, Man-Afraid-of-His-Horse (or “Man-afraid-of-his-horses,” according to Dodge 1883, 228). The name, handed down from father to son for generations, originated “around 1760 when the Sioux were obtaining their first horses and were having difficulty in learning to ride these strange animals” (Hyde, 68).

  48.23–25 how else they had served the bodies . . . but it would not do to put it in a book] In his 1870 sketch, “The Noble Red Man,” Mark Twain had bitterly condemned Indian atrocities, citing Keim’s Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders as authority for his facts. He commented then that the Indians’ “favorite mutilations cannot be put into print” (SLC 1870b, 428).

  50.3–7 “Tom, where did you learn about Injuns. . . . Cooper’s novels] James Fenimore Cooper had presented an idealized picture of the Indian in his “Leather-Stocking Tales”: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). In 1862 Clemens offered his mother an unflattering portrait of members of the Washo tribe, calling it a “full and correct account of these lovely Indians—not gleaned from Cooper’s novels, Madam, but the result of personal observation” (SLC to Jane Lampton Clemens, 20 Mar 62, L1, 176). He continued his rebuttal of Cooper in “A Day at Niagara” (SLC 1869b), “The Noble Red Man” (SLC 1870b), chapter 19 of Roughing It (1872), and in passing elsewhere, presenting a harsh and unsympathetic view of Indians with which the present story is consistent.

  50.36 hived] Captured (Lex, 111).

  56.4–5 an Injun don’t kill a whole gang . . . unless he is mighty mad or in a desperate hurry] In Our Wild Indians Dodge claimed: “In a close contest, or if the Indians have cause to be exceptionally angry, the wounded man is promptly dispatched. If there be plenty of time and no danger apprehended, the unfortunate prisoner will have full experience of the ingenuity in torture of these fiends” (Dodge 1883, 529).

  56.16–17 they didn’t kill the nigger . . . and ain’t going to] “An Indian will never take the scalp of a colored soldier, nor does he give any reason for it; all to be got out of him by way of explanation is, ‘Buffalo soldier no good, heap bad medicine’ ” (Dodge 1883, 517).

  57.2 hunted up some whites to retaliate on] “Indians believe that the manes or shades of the departed slain in battle require to be appeased by the death of the slayer, if possible; or, failing his, by that of some one of the slayer’s nation or tribe” (Dodge 1883, 182).

  58.2–3 They’re fond of children] In Our Wild Indians, Dodge remarked on the Indians’ “very great fondness” for children:

  In their raids on each other and on the whites, those children who are large enough to help themselves a little, and yet not old enough to be likely to have strong affection or memory, are carried off to the tribe, and adopted into it. These are sometimes adopted by men who have lost children, otherwise they are brought up in the families of their captors. In either case they are treated exactly as are the other children. (Dodge 1883, 532)

  60.25 Brace Johnson was a beautiful man] Brace Johnson resembles James Butler (Wild Bill) Hickok (1837–76), George Armstrong Custer (1839–76), and other historical figures who appear in the works Mark Twain consulted before writing “Indians.” By 1884, the year of the story’s composition, the plainsman and Indian fighter was a national type made familiar by pulp fiction, and the resemblances probably are generic and not indicative of any specific borrowing (Hart, 153–55).

  61.21 he had their religion] Dodge asserted that “nine-tenths” of the white men who lived among the Indians “sooner or later” adopted their religion, believing in “two gods, equals in wisdom and power.” The “Good God” endeavors

  to aid the Indian in all his undertakings. . . . He provides all the good and pleasurable things of life. Warmth, food, joy, success in love, distinction in war, all come from him. The . . . Bad God . . . is always the enemy of each individual red man.
. . . From him proceed all the disasters, misfortunes, privations, and discomforts of life. . . . The Good God is not an exacting or jealous god. For his unremitting labors, his devoted services . . . he demands nothing in return. . . . No thanks are necessary. . . . Of the Bad God they [the Indians] stand in most abject fear, and are constantly devising expedients by which they hope to evade or turn aside some portion of his wrathful power. (Dodge 1883, 100–101, 108–9)

  70.28 these Sioux was Ogillalahs] The Oglala were a division of the Teton, the largest of the seven tribes of the Sioux Indians.

  71.34–72.1 Vaskiss the trader . . . Roubidou the blacksmith] Mark Twain gleaned these names from Francis Parkman’s Oregon Trail. Louis Vasquez (1798–1868) was a famous mountain man and fur trader, and several members of the Robidoux family (spelling of the name varied) were renowned as frontiersmen (Parkman 1880, 95, 99, 103, 113, 130; Parkman 1969, 526–28, 563).

  75.13 water-spout] A torrential burst of rain. Mark Twain apparently witnessed the effects of such a cloudburst while on a mining expedition in Nevada Territory in early January 1861 (L1, 150 n. 3). His description of the experience in chapters 30–31 of Roughing It has details in common with Huck’s account here: the Indians’ uncanny prophetic ability (76.26–77.3) and the eight-day entrapment by floodwaters (77.15). Nevertheless, Huck’s description of the waterspout itself derives from Dodge’s recollection of an occurrence on the Great Plains. Alerted to a “distant roaring, rushing sound,” Dodge watched from the bank of a dry stream: