Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  Mark Twain drafted his initial plan for “Schoolhouse Hill” in a notebook entry of mid-November 1898, which read in part:

  Story of little Satan, jr, who came to Petersburg (Hannibal) went to school, was popular & greatly liked by Huck & Tom who knew his secret. The others were jealous, & the girls didn’t like him because he smelt of brimstone. This is the Admirable Crichton [Scottish prodigy James Crichton (1560–?85), famous for his linguistic ability and his extraordinary memory]. He was always doing miracles—his pals knew they were miracles, the others thought them mysteries. He is a good little devil; but swears, & breaks the Sabbath. By & by he is converted, & becomes a Methodist. & quits miracling. In class meeting he confesses who he is—is not believed; his new co-religionists turn against him as a ribald humbug . . . . When his fortunes & his miseries are at the worst, his papa arrives in state in a glory of hellfire & attended by a multitude of old-fashioned & showy fiends—& then everybody is at the boy-devil’s feet at once & want to curry favor. (NB 40, CU-MARK, TS pp. 51–52; published in full in MSM, 428–29)

  Shortly after making this entry, Mark Twain began writing “Schoolhouse Hill.” He worked on it through the latter half of November and December 1898, completing only 139 pages before putting the manuscript aside. Thirty-three pages of working notes establish his commitment to the story, however, and indicate the direction it was to have taken: Little Satan, or Forty-four, was to fall in love (“the kind that sex arouses”) with Hellfire Hotchkiss (or with Annie Fleming, daughter of Petersburg’s Presbyterian pastor) and find that the purely intellectual happiness of Hell was tame compared to earthly love. Meanwhile, dismayed by mankind’s pettiness, ignorance, and lack of freedom, he would help humans recover their original innocence by ridding them of their vanity and by founding a church to abolish their diseased “Moral Sense.” He would preach against hypocrisy and, with the help of an army of little red devils summoned from Hell, print his own Bible—which Mark Twain planned to publish as an appendix, together with Forty-four’s sermons and dialogues. And Forty-four was to work his wonders in a world Mark Twain populated with Hannibal residents—including John, Jane, Orion, and Pamela Clemens—in new as well as familiar fictional guises (MSM, 430–49).

  Given this well elaborated scheme, it is difficult to say exactly why Mark Twain abandoned “Schoolhouse Hill” after only six chapters. Perhaps as his philosophical purpose continued to evolve, the story’s humor came to seem inappropriate. In a letter of 12 and 13 May 1899 to William Dean Howells, Mark Twain reported that he had embarked anew on a work in “tale-form” that he had not started “right” before: “I believe I can make it tell what I think of Man, & how he is constructed, & what a shabby poor ridiculous thing he is, & how mistaken he is in his estimate of his character & powers & qualities & his place among the animals” (NN-B, in MTHL, 2:698–99). “Schoolhouse Hill” had been, in this estimation, just a false start. Even so, it remains an entertaining, even illuminating, fantasy, brisk in its humor and language, caustic in its commentary upon human nature, and sharply evocative of small town life.

  214.20–215.1 Henry Bascom] HENRY BEEBE.

  216.22–23 Archibald Ferguson, the old Scotch schoolmaster] JOHN D. DAWSON. The setting, however, was SAMUEL CROSS’s wooden schoolhouse.

  218.25 Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled] Robert Burns’s ode (1794) commemorating the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, in which Robert Bruce’s Scottish army defeated a superior English force under Edward II, establishing Scotland’s independence. William Wallace had been the leader of the Scottish struggle for independence until he was captured by the English and executed in 1305. His example inspired Bruce.

  218.27 Sally Fitch] SARAH H. ROBARDS.

  218.32 Becky Thatcher] ANNA LAURA HAWKINS.

  218.36–219.1 ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon] The opening line of Robert Burns’s song, “The Banks o’ Doon” (1792); see the note at 99.27.

  219.2 Jack Stillson] JOHN H. GARTH.

  219.8–9 Oh, here’s a hand, my trusty fere, and gie’s a hand o’ thine, and we’ll] From Robert Burns’s song, “Auld Lang Syne” (1799).

  221.36 Margaret Stover] Working notes suggest this character was to be modeled after one of WILLIAM PERRY OWSLEY’s children, possibly Elizabeth (MSM, 431).

  222.20 “The New Short-Hand Method, called Phonography”] Mark Twain probably had in mind A Manual of Phonography, or, Writing by Sound, by Isaac Pitman, the Englishman who invented this form of shorthand. The first of many American editions of Pitman’s manual was published in 1844. His system is still in use today.

  223.33 “Quarante-quatre, sir. Forty-four.”] Working notes for this story indicate that Young Satan was only one of the devil’s “myriads” of offspring and that Mark Twain thought of calling him “404” or “94” or “No. 45 in New series 986,000,000” before settling on Forty-four. The significance, if any, which these numbers had for Mark Twain has not been satisfactorily explained (see MSM, 435–36, 443, 444, 472–73).

  225.30 held the age] Had the advantage; originally, the advantage held by the player to the left of the dealer in poker (Cassidy, 1:21).

  225.32–33 he went in a procession all by himself, like Parker’s hog] Mark Twain frequently used this expression (changing Parker to Baxter, Smith, or Jackson) to characterize a person with no group affiliation or loyalty (see, for example, SLC 1863; SLC 1865; N&J2, 136; FM, 207).

  228.17–18 Henry’s father, the nigger-trader] WILLIAM B. BEEBE.

  229.3–4 the Hotchkisses] ORION and PAMELA ANN CLEMENS.

  230.12–13 the Fox-girl Rochester rappings] In early 1848 Margaret and Kate Fox, two teenaged sisters residing near Rochester, New York, alleged they had received messages from spirits who communicated by means of rapping noises. The incident marked the beginning of a spiritualist movement in America, and over the next few years sensational stories of rappings, trance-writing, and other “spirit manifestations” were reported throughout the country. In 1888 the sisters, who had become famous as professional mediums, denounced the movement as a fraud and confessed they produced the raps by cracking the joints of their big toes (Kerr and Crow, 80–83, 104; McCabe, 50–62).

  230.22–23 widow Dawson] ELIZABETH W. SMITH.

  232.24 widow Guthrie] MELICENT S. HOLLIDAY.

  235.2 Dr. Wheelright] WILLIAM HUMPHREY PEAKE.

  237.29 MissPomeroy] MARY ANN NEWCOMB.

  237.33 Judge Taylor] ZACHARIAH G. DRAPER.

  239.5–6 It was in reality a Blizzard, but that expressive word had not then been invented] Uses of “blizzard” to mean “a sharp blow” and a verbal “blast” have been documented as early as 1829 and 1834, respectively. By 1859, about ten years after the time of “Schoolhouse Hill,” the word had acquired at least a limited currency for “snowstorm.” American newspapers brought that meaning into general use during the severe winter of 1880–81 (OED 1933, l:925; OED 1972–86, 1:292).

  243.20–21 Crazy Meadows] Mark Twain planned to draw on his recollections of the JAMES RATCLIFFE family for the unhappy incidents of Crazy Meadows’s life.

  254.34–35 man is prone to evil as the sparks to fly upward] Job 5:7: “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks to fly upward.”

  Huck Finn

  (1902)

  This anecdote—which Mark Twain titled, probably tentatively, for its narrator—is based on an incident that occurred in Hannibal. Mark Twain had included a version of the story in chapter 53 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), in his account of his 1882 return to the town. During a conversation with an “old gentleman” he met on the street:

  I asked about Miss——.

  “Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago—never was out of it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.”

  If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the
room where Miss——sat reading at midnight by a lamp. The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface; she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions. She did not recover from the fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. But they did.

  In 1897 Mark Twain recalled this same incident in “Villagers of 1840–3,” identifying the prankster as Roberta Jones (97). That year, amid ideas for lectures and for new stories about Huck and Tom, he made three notebook entries which indicate that he planned to reprise and rework this episode: “Tale of scaring the woman into insanity by skull & dough face”; “Scaring woman with doughface”; and “Scaring poor Miss * * to madness—Roberta Jones” (NB 41, CU-MARK†, TS pp. 36, 45, 58). And in his notebook for 1902, which contained numerous notes for a story about Huck and Tom “50 Years Later,” he wrote: “Dough-face—old lady now, still in asylum—a bride then. What went with him? Shall we visit her? And shall she be expecting him in her faded bridal robes & flowers?” and “doughface, but scare no one mad” (NB 45, CU-MARK†, TS pp. 12, 21).

  Mark Twain probably wrote this story in 1902, when he was contemplating writing a novel in which Tom and Huck return to St. Petersburg as old men.

  Biographical Directory

  This directory provides biographical information about some one hundred and sixty Missourians, principally residents of Hannibal and St. Louis in the 1840s and 1850s—among them the members of Samuel L. Clemens’s own family. Clemens recalled most of these individuals in the nonfiction pieces published in this volume, “Letter to William Bowen,” “Jane Lampton Clemens,” and “Villagers of 1840–3.” He fictionalized some of them in the eight stories included here and in such works as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

  Each directory entry reports all of its subject’s appearances in the texts published here, as well as significant appearances in other works. Entries are ordered alphabetically by last name (or first name when the last is not known). Individuals Mark Twain alludes to by initial are so listed, with a cross reference to the full name and biography (“H., Mrs. See ELIZABETH HORR.”). In family entries (“BLANKENSHIP family,” “BOWEN family,” etc.) a brief genealogical or historical overview may precede the biographies of specific family members, which are arranged, in census fashion, in order of birth. Within entries, names printed in SMALL CAPITALS direct the reader to an independent entry for the person named (“Bowen married SARAH H. ROBARDS” indicates an entry for Robards).

  Much of the detail in the Biographical Directory was recorded by Clemens himself—in his autobiographical dictations, letters, notebooks, working notes for stories planned or in progress, and in his published works containing direct personal reminiscence, such as Life on the Mississippi (1883). In order to verify and supplement the information Clemens preserved in those sources—and in “Villagers of 1840–3,” the richest source of all—independent documentation has been sought wherever possible. Documents consulted include Hannibal newspapers of the 1840s and 1850s; memoirs and letters by Mark Twain’s contemporaries; census, court, and genealogical records; city directories; and city and county histories. Sources cited by abbreviation or by author’s last name are fully defined in References.

  ARMSTRONG, JESSE M. (b. 1827?), was a clerk in a Hannibal store as a young man. In the late 1850s he opened a dry-goods firm with his brother-in-law George A. Hawes, a distant relative of Clemens’s, and in 1870 he became a director and assistant cashier of the newly formed Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank. In “Villagers” (95), Clemens apparently confused Armstrong with Amos J. Stillwell (1828–88), who worked in a Hannibal mill from 1848 to 1851, ran a St. Louis commission business from 1851 to 1855 with Clemens’s brother-in-law, WILLIAM ANDERSON MOFFETT, then returned to Hannibal and became a prosperous pork-packer and bank president. It was Stillwell, not Armstrong, who was murdered in 1888 in the manner described in “Villagers.” Both the New York Times and the New York Tribune for 31 December 1888 gave the event front-page coverage. In an account of the murder published in 1908 (a decade after Clemens wrote “Villagers”), Minnie T. Dawson reported that Stillwell’s second wife, Fannie, fell in love with Joseph Carter Hearne, a prominent surgeon about three years younger than herself and twenty-three years younger than her husband. Stillwell was murdered in his bed with an axe taken from his barn, but investigators failed to find an indictable suspect. The widow inherited a substantial estate, and she married the doctor a year later. When the couple left Hannibal, they were followed to the train station by a jeering crowd. In 1895 they were formally charged with the murder. After Hearne was acquitted, charges against his wife were dropped (Marion Census 1850, 310, 312; Fotheringham, 10, 29, 30; “The Farmers & Merchants Bank,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 22 Apr 1905, 1; Portrait, 198, 578–79; Holcombe, 604, 614–15, 953; Greene, 329; MTBus, 72; “Murdered by a Burglar,” New York Times, 31 Dec 88, 1; “Murdered in His Bed,” New York Tribune, 31 Dec 88, 1; Dawson, 12, 34, 40–42, 118, 152).

  B. See BENJAMIN L. CLEMENS.

  BARRET, RICHARD F. (1804–60), called Dr. Ray in “Villagers” (103), was a former suitor of Jane Clemens’s whom she had hoped to marry. Clemens learned of this early romance in the spring of 1886—evidently from his sister, Pamela—a few months after his mother had revealed it to Orion Clemens. In a letter of 19 May 1886 to William Dean Howells, Clemens re-created his mother’s account:

  “I will tell you a secret. When I was eighteen, a young medical student named Barrett lived in Columbia (Ky.) eighteen miles away; & he used to ride over & see me. This continued for some time. I loved him with all my whole heart, & I knew that he felt the same toward me, though no words had been spoken. He was too bashful to speak—he could not do it. Everybody supposed we were engaged—took it for granted we were—but we were not. By & by there was to be a party in a neighboring town, & he wrote my uncle telling him his feelings, & asking him to drive me over in his buggy & let him (Barrett) drive me back, so that he might have that opportunity to propose. My uncle should have done as he was asked, without explaining anything to me; but instead, he read me the letter; & then, of course, I could not go—& did not. He (Barrett) left the country presently; & I, to stop the clacking tongues, & to show him that I did not care, married, in a pet. In all these sixty-four years I have never seen him since.” (NN-B, in MTHL, 2:567)

  After studying medicine at Transylvania University, Barret established a lucrative practice in Green County, Kentucky. In 1832 he married Maria Buckner, daughter of a Kentucky lawyer and congressman. He moved to St. Louis in 1840 and assisted Dr. Joseph N. McDowell (father of JOHN MCDOWELL) and others in founding Missouri Medical College. A “pioneer in various important business enterprises,” he was regarded as “one of the most active men of his generation . . . in developing the resources of the States of Illinois, Iowa and Missouri” (Conard, 1:160, 161). In his later years, Barret was described as “eminently noble and engaging,—a figure tall, graceful, and courtly, and a countenance of the Roman model,” and although “at times irascible, his disposition was usually gentle and amiable. . . . His pride of race and scholarly habits made him appear exclusive and aristocratic, but his impulses were ardent, and his manners polite and engaging” (Scharf, 1:677). Mark Twain’s list of potential characters for “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (S&B, 173) includes a Dr. Rayley, possibly to be based on Barret, but the character does not appear in the story (Conard, 1:160–62; Scharf, 1:676–77, 2:1544; Barret, 1).

  BEEBE family.

  WILLIAM B. BEEBE was a forwarding and commission agent who kept a store near the Hannibal steamboat landing. He is mentioned in “Jane Lampton Clemens” and in “Villagers” (89, 104) as the man who bought JENNY, the Clemens family’s slave. He appears as Bat Bradish, the slave trader, in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (146–213 passim) and is alluded to as “the nigger-trader” in “Schoolhouse Hill” (215, 228). Between 1843 a
nd 1847, John Marshall Clemens twice battled Beebe in court over financial disagreements (Henry Beebe to SLC, 14 Nov 1908, CU-MARK; Wecter 1952, 111–13).

  HENRY BEEBE (b. 1836) was WILLIAM’s son. In “Letter to William Bowen” (20,21), Clemens recalled details about Henry that he later used in “Schoolhouse Hill,” where he portrayed him as the bully Henry Bascom (214–28 passim). A working note for that story refers to both father and son: “Henry Bascom (Beebe) the bully new rich man & slave trader” (MSM, 432). In 1908 Beebe asked Clemens whether he recalled him as a schoolmate “64 years ago,” adding “I have not visited Hannibal since 1852 and have lost track of all but you.” He said that he took “great pleasure” in reading Mark Twain’s books, “and oftimes thought I recognized the characters mentioned in them” (Beebe to SLC, 14 Nov 1908, CU-MARK).

  BEN, “The Hanged Nigger,” mentioned in “Villagers” (101), was a young slave who belonged to Thomas Glascock of Shelby County. He was accused in October 1849 of killing a ten-year-old white boy, then raping the boy’s twelve-year-old sister and slitting her throat. The Palmyra jail had to be guarded to prevent his being lynched. Although he reportedly claimed the law would not hang him because he was worth a thousand dollars, he was convicted and, after a full confession, hanged on 11 January 1850. Clemens was then fourteen and a printer’s apprentice for the Missouri Courier, which reported the crime at length. The Courier office also published a twenty-five cent pamphlet giving Ben’s “detailed confession” of “the manner in which he did the atrocious deed and his villainous transactions and adventures through life” (“Confession of Ben,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 21 Feb 50). Clemens wrote in his 1897 notebook: “Negro smuggled from Va in featherbed when lynchers were after him. In Mo he raped a girl of 13 & killed her & her brother in the woods & before being hanged confessed to many rapes of white married women who kept it quiet partly from fear of him & partly to escape the scandal” (NB 41, CU-MARK†, TS p. 57). In 1901, contemplating a book on the history of lynching, Clemens wrote to his publisher, summarizing Ben’s crimes and requesting help in obtaining an account of his punishment to “be found in the St Louis Republican, no doubt—date, along about 1849” (SLC to Francis E. (Frank) Bliss, 26 Aug 1901, TxU, in Wecter 1952, 215; Holcombe, 298–99; Haines, 42–43; Missouri v. Ben; Hannibal Missouri Courier: “Atrocious Murder and Rape,” 8 Nov 49; “Trial at Palmyra,” 6 Dec 49; “Execution at Palmyra,” 17 Jan 50; “Confession of Ben,” 21 and 28 Feb 50).