Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  In a few moments a long creamy wave, beaten into foam, crept swiftly with a hissing sound across the sand. This appeared to be only a few inches in depth. Following with equal speed, and at a distance of about sixty feet behind the advance of this sheet, was a straight, unbroken mass of water of at least four feet in height. The front of this mass was not rounded into a wave, but rose sheer and straight, a perfect wall of water. From this front wall the mass rose gradually to the rear, and was covered with logs and débris of all kinds, rolling and plunging in the tremendous current. In ten minutes from the passage of the advance wave, the water at my feet was at least fifteen feet deep, and the stream nearly half a mile wide. . . . The rain which furnished all this water was a waterspout of probably an hour’s duration. (Dodge 1877, 84–85)

  77.27 Sioux . . . Brulé’s, mostly] Like the Oglala (see the note at 70.28), the Brulé were one of the principal tribes of the Teton Sioux.

  78.24 four stakes drove in the ground] In The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants, Dodge wrote:

  Either the character and customs of the Indians have greatly changed, or Cooper and some other novelists knew nothing of Indians when they placed their heroines as captives in the hands of these savages. . . . No words can express the horror of the situation of that most unhappy woman who falls into the hands of these savage fiends. The husband or other male protectors killed or dispersed, she is borne off in triumph to where the Indians make their first camp. Here, if she makes no resistance, she is laid upon a buffalo robe, and each in turn violates her person, the others dancing, singing, and yelling around her. If she resists at all her clothing is torn off from her person, four pegs are driven into the ground, and her arms and legs, stretched to the utmost, are tied fast to them by thongs. Here, with the howling band dancing and singing around her, she is subjected to violation after violation, outrage after outrage, to every abuse and indignity, until not unfrequently death releases her from suffering. (Dodge 1877, 395)

  80.18–19 Injuns . . . are afraid to hurt a crazy man] Dodge claimed that the Indians avoided “madmen or idiots,” believing them to be “directly under the malevolent influence of the Bad God.” As evidence he cited the case of “a prominent scientist”:

  In a country full of hostile Sioux, without a blanket or mouthful to eat, he started alone, armed only with his butterfly net and loaded only with his pack for carrying specimens. One day, when busily occupied, he suddenly found himself surrounded by Indians. He showed no fear, and was carried to the village. His pack was found loaded with insects, bugs, and loathsome reptiles. The Indians decided that a white man who would come alone into that country unarmed, without food or bedding, for the accumulation of such things, must be crazy; so, the pack having been destroyed as “bad medicine,” the doctor was carefully led out of camp and turned loose. (Dodge 1883, 220–23)

  Mark Twain may also have been influenced by Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837). In that novel Nathan Slaughter paints lizards, snakes, and skulls on his skin and feigns an epileptic fit to frighten Indians.

  Jane Lampton Clemens

  (1890)

  In early November 1890, in response to a proposal from a newspaper syndicate “that furnishes all the western newspapers with patent insides,” Orion Clemens wrote a biographical sketch of Jane Lampton Clemens, who had died on 27 October (Orion Clemens to SLC, 1 Nov 90, CU-MARK). The surviving pages of his sketch show it to have been anecdotal but conventional (HH&T, 381–82). After reading it in manuscript, Mark Twain sent Orion a “dispatch to halt.” He was, however, evidently inspired by Orion’s sketch and decided to write a memorial “magazine article” himself (Orion Clemens to SLC, 13 Nov 1890, CU-MARK). The result was “Jane Lampton Clemens,” a warm and unconventional tribute, richly revealing of its author as well as its subject, although there is no indication that Mark Twain ever attempted to publish it. It was probably written in November or December 1890.

  82.16–19 It dates back forty-seven years; she was forty years old, then, and I was eight. . . . my brother, two years older than I . . . lay dead] The dating in this passage is imprecise. BENJAMIN L. CLEMENS died on 12 May 1842, at the age of nine, forty-eight years before Mark Twain wrote this sketch. JANE LAMPTON CLEMENS then was thirty-eight and Samuel Clemens was six-and-a-half.

  84.18–21 I saw a vicious devil of a Corsican . . . chasing his grown daughter. . . . My mother spread her door wide to the refugee] The brutal father, Hannibal taverner JESSE H. PAVEY, is identified in a page of autobiographical notes Mark Twain made about 1897: “The Paveys. Aunt P. protects a daughter” (SLC 1897c†). “Aunt P.” was Aunt Polly, JANE LAMPTON CLEMENS’s fictional counterpart.

  86.7–10 the Lambtons, now Earls of Durham . . . ancestors of hers] The Lambton family had been owners of Lambton Castle, in Durham County, England, since shortly after the Norman Conquest (1066). John George Lambton (1792–1840) had been created first Earl of Durham in 1833. His grandson, also John George Lambton (1855–1928), was third earl in 1890, the year Mark Twain wrote this sketch. Jane Clemens’s paternal grandfather, William Lampton (1724–90), who evidently belonged to a collateral branch of the family, emigrated to Virginia about 1740 (Burke, 528–29; Debrett, P409; Selby, 112; Keith, 3–4, 7).

  86.21 an ancestor—one Clement—who did something] Gregory Clement, a London merchant and member of Parliament. In January 1649 Clement was a member of the high court of justice that tried Charles I and signed the king’s death warrant. In 1660, when the monarchy was restored under Charles II, Clement went into hiding, but was found and executed that October.

  86.32 “Col. Sellers” was a Lampton] Colonel Sellers, the irrepressible speculator and visionary based on JAMES J. LAMPTON, first appeared in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age (1874).

  87.2–14 the Lampton heir came to this country . . . breeding ancestors of future American Claimants. . . . “The Earl” . . . was a Kentuckian] Lampton family tradition held that Samuel Lampton, who emigrated to Virginia with his brother William about 1740, was the legitimate heir to the ancient Lambton estate in Durham County, England, but had been displaced by a usurping younger brother who became the Earl of Durham. Peerage records fail to support any American claim to the Lambton lands or title, making no mention of either Samuel or William Lampton, both of whom died long before the earldom was created in 1833. Nevertheless, JESSE MADISON LEATHERS, of Kentucky, great-grandson of Samuel Lampton, professed himself the rightful earl throughout an impecunious, vagrant lifetime, occasionally appealing to Mark Twain for financial assistance. In The American Claimant (1892), Mark Twain mocked the Lampton pretensions, portraying Colonel Sellers as successor to one Simon Lathers in attempting to appropriate the title and estate of the “Earl of Rossmore” (“Mark Twain’s Blue Blood,” unidentified clipping, reprinting the Louisville [Ky.] Ledger of unknown date, CU-MARK; Keith, 3, 4; Selby, 112; Burke, 528–29).

  87.26–27 a letter from some red-hot Virginian son of my other branch] Mark Twain had in mind a letter in which his third cousin Sherrard Clemens (1820–80)—lawyer, duelist, and Democratic congressman from Virginia (1852–53, 1857–61)—attacked his support of a Republican candidate for president: “I regret, very deeply, to see, that you have announced, your adhesion, to that inflated bladder, . . . Rutherford Burchard Hayes. You come, with myself, from Gregory Clemens, the regicide, who voted for the death of Charles, and who was beheaded, disembolled, and drawn in a hurdle. It is good, for us, to have an ancestor, who escaped, the ignominy of being hung. But, I would rather have, such an ancestor, than adhere, to . . . Hayes, who, is the mere, representative, of Wall street brokers, three ball men, Lombardy Jews, European Sioux, class legislation, special priviledges to the few, and denial of equality of taxation, to the many” (Sherrard Clemens to SLC, 2 Sept 76, CU-MARK; BDAC, 706; “Sherrard Clemens,” New York Times, 3 June 80, 5; Bell, 34, 36).

  89.17–20 A woman . . . sold to a Mr. B.] JENNY, the slave sold to WILLIAM B. BEEBE.

  90.1�
�13 My father . . . consented to take his note . . . for $250 and let him off at that] In late 1844—nearly three years after agreeing to accept this payment (reduced from $470)—JOHN MARSHALL CLEMENS was still trying to collect from William Lester of Vicksburg, Mississippi (John Marshall Clemens to Messrs. Coleman and Johnson, 2 Nov 44, NPV; Wecter 1952, 75–76). It is not known if Lester ever paid the debt.

  90.19–32 my father . . . writes this: “I still have Charley. . . . I expect to sell him for whatever he will bring. . . .” It makes a body homesick for Charley, even after fifty years. Thank God I have no recollection of him as house servant of ours] Although Samuel Clemens assumed Charley was a slave, a close reading of John Marshall Clemens’s letter of 5 January 1842 suggests that Charley may have been a horse. John Clemens originally had planned to return home after his stop in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but changed his plans and decided to continue on horseback through “Tennessee & Kentucky & try to effect a sale of my Tennessee lands.” He purchased “an old saddle & a new bridle & blanket” and explained to his wife that after his journey to Tennessee he would sell Charley and then “take water again,” although “steamboat travelling does not agree with me—my health is improved though by riding—and I think I shall stand the travelling cold as it will be over land, better than I do on a boat” (John Marshall Clemens to Jane Lampton Clemens and children, 5 Jan 42, CU-MARK). A promissory note given to Clemens by Abner Phillips of Tennessee “for value received this 24th day of January 1842” suggests Clemens may have sold Charley for ten barrels of tar to be delivered in Missouri within the year (Phillips 1842). If the value of this transaction was forty or fifty dollars (the amount Clemens was offered for Charley in New Orleans and Vicksburg), the price seems appropriate for a horse, but uncommonly low for a male slave, unless very old or in very poor health (Trexler, 38–41).

  Villagers of 1840–3

  (1897)

  Mark Twain made these notes about the people of Hannibal, Missouri, in late July or early August 1897, during a summer stay in Weggis, Switzerland. Hannibal, on the Mississippi River, had barely a thousand inhabitants when Clemens’s family settled there in November 1839, a few weeks before his fourth birthday. By June of 1853, however, when seventeen-year-old Clemens left to seek employment as a printer in St. Louis, the town’s population had more than tripled. Although his family’s connection to Hannibal ended just a few months later—with Jane, Orion, and Henry Clemens moving to Muscatine, Iowa—Clemens himself never lost touch with his boyhood home. He maintained lifelong friendships with a few of its residents and kept informed about others through correspondence and also through occasional reunions. He visited Hannibal at least seven times between his initial departure and the writing of “Villagers”: in 1855 to attend to family property; in 1858 to bury his brother Henry; in 1861 before serving for a few weeks in a company of Confederate irregulars; in 1867 to lecture; in 1882 while he was traveling on the Mississippi River in preparation for the writing of Life on the Mississippi; in 1885 to lecture again; and in 1890 to bury his mother. Moreover, he supplemented his own store of information by purchasing a copy of Return Ira Holcombe’s History of Marion County, Missouri upon its publication in 1884; the volume contained sketches of Hannibal’s prominent citizens, including one of John Marshall Clemens that Orion Clemens had helped to prepare.

  Clemens was keenly aware that his boyhood impressions had a strength and vividness unrivaled in his store of memories. In 1886, having depicted antebellum Hannibal as St. Petersburg in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn during the preceding ten years, he acknowledged that “recent names & things take no hold on my bald-headed memory; they slip-up & slide off: but when you come to the names & things of thirty-five years ago, you are uttering music, & my memory is alert” (SLC to George H. Himes, 17 Jan 86, MoPeS†). “Villagers,” with its wealth of arresting, highly accurate detail about the people, events, and social customs of Clemens’s youth, proves that Hannibal’s “hold” on him remained consistently strong.

  Although writing for himself only, Clemens superficially disguised his immediate family, a stratagem that perhaps facilitated his particularly candid portraits of his stern and undemonstrative father (Judge Carpenter), his feisty, good-hearted, and eloquent mother (Joanna Carpenter), and his feckless older brother Orion (Oscar Carpenter), as well as his passing remarks about his sister Pamela (Priscella Carpenter), his younger brother Henry (Hartley Carpenter), and himself (Simon Carpenter). He attempted no disguise for other relatives, however, not even when his memories included unpleasant details: his cousin James Quarles’s alcoholism and dissipation, for example, and his aunt Ella Lampton’s affair with the young doctor who boarded with her and her husband. And he used the real names of other Hannibal residents, with only two exceptions: Dr. Richard F. Barret (called Dr. Ray), an early suitor of Jane Clemens’s, and the “unbeliever” Blennerhasset, whose identity remains unknown. Hannibal is referred to as “St P”—an abbreviation for St. Petersburg—but the names of other towns and cities appear without disguise. Although Clemens’s title assigned the dates “1840–3” to this compendium of recollections, only a few actually belong to that period, when he was between the ages of four and eight. Possibly “1840–3” was merely an inadvertence, since his recollections actually span the years 1840–53, the length of his residence in Hannibal.

  In an 1895 interview, Clemens remarked: “I don’t believe an author, good, bad or indifferent, ever lived, who created a character. It was always drawn from his recollection of someone he had known. Sometimes, like a composite photograph, an author’s presentation of a character may possibly be from the blending of . . . two or more real characters in his recollection. But, even when he is making no attempt to draw his character from life . . . he is yet unconsciously drawing from memory” (Budd, 52–53). In compiling “Villagers,” Clemens had at least one literary project in mind—a book, which he tentatively called his “New Huck Finn.” In July 1897, with an eye to shaping that story, he had filled thirteen pages of his notebook with random recollections of Hannibal (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS pp. 56–62). “Villagers” clearly was to serve the same function as the notebook, but in a more comprehensive and orderly fashion. Before the summer of 1897 was over Clemens began two new stories based on his memories of Hannibal: “Hellfire Hotchkiss” and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.” The latter apparently was intended to be the “New Huck Finn.”

  It was probably when he was writing “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” in mid-August 1897, that Clemens separated the final nine pages of “Villagers”—“to persuade the other . . . of her tongue.” (105.21–108.12 in the present text)—from the rest of the manuscript. The discussion of Oscar Carpenter (Orion Clemens) in the opening chapter of “Hellfire Hotchkiss” grew directly out of the characterization of him in the concluding pages of “Villagers,” and Clemens may have hoped to utilize the earlier description in his new story. When he discontinued work on “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” he stored the manuscript in an envelope together with the final pages of “Villagers,” labeling the “Villagers” segment “rejected MS that may come good.” The separated pages were mistakenly published as part of “The Hellfire Hotchkiss Sequence” in 1967 (S&B, 200–203). Two years later, when “Villagers” was first published, it was reported to be “a fragment inasmuch as the last entry breaks off in the middle of a sentence at the bottom of a page” (HH&T, 23). Not until August 1981 did Sam Howard, then an undergraduate at Claremont College, point out that the fragment included in “The Hellfire Hotchkiss Sequence” was in fact the proper ending of “Villagers,” which is here published in its entirety for the first time. Almost all of the individuals mentioned in it are now identified, from contemporary documents and other sources, in the Biographical Directory.

  96.15 “Last Link is Broken”] A sentimental song by William Clifton, written about 1840:

  The last link is broken that bound me to thee,

  And the words thou hast spoken have render’d me free;

  That bright g
lance misleading, on others may shine,

  Those eyes smil’d unheeding when tears burst from mine.

  (Clifton 1840)

  In chapter 38 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), Mark Twain reported that this was among the songs found on the piano in the “finest dwelling” of every river town “between Baton Rouge and St. Louis.” It is sung in such a dwelling by the Grangerford girls in chapter 17 of Huckleberry Finn (1885), but in chapter 38 is characterized by Tom Sawyer as “painful music” attractive to rats (Gribben, 1:148).

  97.10–11 Put cards in minister’s baptising robe. Trouble in consequence] In an 1871 lecture Clemens had attributed this prank to his fellow humorist Artemus Ward:

  Once when a schoolboy, a friend and he got hold of a pack of cards and indulged heavily in euchre. A Baptist minister was stopping at the house, and to secrete the cards they placed them in his black gown, which hung in a closet. But what was his horror to see the minister one day, in the river baptising his converts, and presently the cards commenced to float upon the water, the first cards being a couple of bowers and three aces. Well, he got walloped for this, and his aunt pictured to him the humiliation of the minister. Said she: “I don’t see how he got out of it.” Artemus replied: “I don’t see how he could help going out on a hand like that.” (Lorch 1968, 298)

  In some autobiographical notes that may have been written in the same year as “Villagers,” Clemens confessed: “It was Will Bowen & me. I put it on Artemus Ward” (SLC 1897c†). The embarrassed minister was WILLIAM BOWENS’s grandfather, the Reverend BARTON WARREN STONE.

  97.27–28 “Oh, on Long Island’s Sea-girt Shore.”] The opening line of “Rock-away,” lyrics by Henry John Sharpe, music by Henry Russell: