Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  BLANKENSHIP family. The father, Woodson (b. 1799?), a laborer from South Carolina, was one of Hannibal’s drunkards. The 1850 census lists him and his wife, Mahala (b. 1813?), with eight children, all born in Missouri: BENSON, 21; TOM, 19; Martha, 18 or 19; Nancy, 16; Sarah, 14; Elizabeth, 12; Mary, 6; and Catherine, 3. In “Villagers” and “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (96, 131), Clemens recalls the unproven charge that the Blankenship girls were prostitutes (Marion Census 1850, 308, 309; AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:174).

  BENSON (BENCE, or BEN) BLANKENSHIP (b. 1829?) is called “the boys’ friend & loafer” in Clemens’s 1897 notebook (NB 42, CU-MARK†, TS p. 24). In 1847 he helped a runaway slave hiding on Sny Island (across the river from Hannibal, near the Illinois shore) by carrying provisions to him for several weeks, spurning a fifty-dollar reward for his capture—a source for an incident in chapters 8 through 11 of Huckleberry Finn (MTB, 1:63–64; Wecter 1952, 148). He is mentioned in “Villagers” (96).

  TOM BLANKENSHIP (b. 1831?) was the model for Huckleberry Finn, who first appears in chapter 6 of Tom Sawyer. When Clemens’s sister, Pamela, heard that chapter read aloud, she exclaimed, “Why, that’s Tom Blankenship!” (MTBus, 265). Clemens himself remarked in 1906:

  In “Huckleberry Finn” I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us. We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy’s. (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:174–75)

  And in a letter of the same date to a former Hannibal acquaintance, Clemens commented: “You may remember that Tom was a good boy, notwithstanding his circumstances. To my mind he was a better boy than Henry Beebe & John Reagan put together, those swells of the ancient days” (8 Mar 1906 to Alexander C. Toncray, NN-B†). In April 1861 Blankenship was given a thirty-day sentence for stealing turkeys, and in June 1861 he was reported “at his old business” again, having allegedly stolen some onions from a Hannibal garden (Hannibal Messenger, 21 Apr and 4 June 1861, reprinted in Lorch 1940, 352). One of his sisters, when asked in 1899 if he had been the model for Huck, said: “Yes, I reckon it was him. Sam and our boys run together considerable them days, and I reckon it was Tom or Ben, one; it don’t matter which, for both of ’em’s dead” (Fielder, 10). In 1889 WILLIAM BENTON COONTZ sent Clemens a clipping from the Hannibal Journal which reported that Tom had died years earlier of cholera (Smith 1889). Nevertheless, Clemens claimed to have heard in 1902 (presumably in the spring of that year, during his last visit to Hannibal) that Tom “was Justice of the Peace in a remote village in Montana, and was a good citizen and greatly respected” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:175). Blankenship appears as Huck in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896), and, in the present volume, in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33–81), “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134–213), “Schoolhouse Hill” (214, 227), and “Huck Finn” (260–61).

  BLENNERHASSET, whom Clemens describes as Hannibal’s only “unbeliever,” a Kentucky lawyer and freethinker, appears in “Villagers” (100, 103). No one named Blennerhasset is known to have lived in Hannibal in the 1840s and 1850s.

  BOWEN family. Clemens was closely acquainted with this large family for almost two decades—during his Hannibal years (1839–53) and while he was a Mississippi River cub pilot and pilot (1857–61). He recurrently alluded to members of the family in private as well as public writings. In an 1882 notebook, for example, he observed that the “histories” of brothers “Will Bowen, [and] Sam . . . make human life appear a grisly & hideous sarcasm” (N&J2, 474–75). A year later, in chapter 4 of Life on the Mississippi, he wrote that “four sons of the chief merchant” were among the Hannibal boys who became steamboat pilots. And in an 1899 letter he recalled steering “a trip for Bart Bowen” and being “partner with Will Bowen on the A. B. Chambers (one trip), and with Sam Bowen a whole summer on a small Memphis packet” (26 Feb 99 to John B. Downing, MTL, 2:675).

  SAMUEL ADAMS BOWEN, SR. (1790–1853), of Tennessee, in 1821 married his cousin, Amanda Warren Stone (1802–81), the daughter of BARTON WARREN STONE. The Bowens settled in Hannibal by 1836 and were the parents of seven children: JOHN, MARY, BARTON, ELIZABETH, WILLIAM, SAMUEL, and Amanda. By 1839 Captain Bowen was operating a Hannibal tobacco warehouse and was the county’s first tobacco inspector. He and his wife are mentioned in “Villagers” (97). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383, 384) indicate that Bowen was the model for Captain Harper in that story (156). He was cast as Captain Wright in the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), although that character does not appear in the story (des Cognets, 65–66, 93; Pilcher, 259; Lewis Census, 371; St. Louis Census 1850, 416:336; Marion Census 1860, 761; “Died,” Canton (Mo.) Northeast Reporter, 10 Nov 53, 2; genealogical record, MoSHi; Holcombe, 899).

  JOHN HENLEY BOWEN (1822–91), mentioned in “Villagers” (97), was a steamboat clerk in the late 1840s and then a St. Louis forwarding and commission merchant. By 1860 he was a steamboat agent and a representative of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. He was river editor of the St. Louis Globe in the mid-1870s and, a decade later, engaged in mining in Mexico (des Cognets, 65; genealogical record, MoSHi; chart of John H. Bowen family plot, Bellefontaine Cemetery Association, St. Louis; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 137; Morrison, 29; Kennedy 1860, 12, 64; Scharf, 1:927; Gould 1873, 119; Gould 1875, 139).

  MARY RUSSELL BOWEN (b. 1827?), mentioned in “Villagers” (97), married MOSES P. GREEN in the late 1840s. The Greens were strong supporters of the Union during the Civil War. During the winter of 1861/62 Mary Bowen Green was president of the Soldier’s Relief Society of Hannibal, which supplied Union troops with clothes and medicines (Marion Census 1850, 305; des Cognets, 65; Holcombe, 428).

  BARTON W. STONE (BART) BOWEN (1830?–68) married SARAH H. ROBARDS, with whom he had one daughter. He was both a pilot and a captain, as Clemens states in “Villagers” (94, 97). In 1858 he piloted the Alfred T. Lacey when it conveyed Clemens to Memphis, where Henry Clemens lay dying from injuries suffered in the Pennsylvania explosion. A year later, when Clemens was Bowen’s co-pilot on the Alfred T. Lacey, Bowen encouraged him to write his burlesque of Captain Isaiah Sellers and arranged for the New Orleans Crescent to publish the sketch in its “River Intelligence” column on 17 May 1859. A steamboat clerk who worked on the Gladiator in 1864 recalled that Bowen had a quarter interest in the boat and “was the captain, a most courteous and efficient commander, and deservedly recognized as being the best dark-night pilot on the river” (Rowland 1907). In 1907 Clemens remarked that Bowen had “stepped down a grade” from pilot when he became a captain, but added: “I never lost any part of my respect & affection for him on account of that retrogression; no, he was a high-minded, large-hearted man, & I hold him in undiminished honor to this day” (SLC to John B. Downing, 25–28 Feb 1907, CU-MARK†, L1, 340 n. 4). Bowen died from steam burns suffered in a boat wreck (Marion Census 1860, 761; “Death of a Steamboat Captain,” San Francisco Times, 23 Jun 68, 1; MTB, 1:139; Way, 176, 188; summaries of “A Card,” New Orleans True Delta, 11 Oct 57, 1, and “River Intelligence,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 7 Dec 58, 4, provided by Edgar M. Branch; ET&S1, 126–33; Branch 1982b, 505; Morris Anderson, 91; MTLBowen, 16, 17; des Cognets, 66).

  ELIZABETH CAMPBELL (ELIZA) BOWEN (1834?–?76) evidently was retarded, as Clemens noted in “Villagers” (97). On 25 August 1876 William Bowen wrote Clemens that Eliza had died “in the Asylum” (CU-MARK; des Cognets, 66; Lewis Census, 371; Marion Census 1860, 854).

  WILLIAM (WILL, or BILL) BOWEN (1836–93), a schoolmate, was probably young Clemens’s closest friend. During an o
utbreak of measles in 1844, to end the suspense of waiting to catch the disease, Clemens crawled into Bowen’s sickbed, was infected, and nearly died. He and Bowen were among the boys who pried loose a boulder atop Holliday’s Hill and watched it crash down the hillside, narrowly missing a black drayman, and making “infinitesimal mince-meat” of a cooper-shop (The Innocents Abroad, chapter 58). By the spring of 1857 Bowen was a licensed pilot. After Clemens received his license in 1859, he twice was Bowen’s co-pilot—on the steamers A. B. Chambers and Alonzo Child—during the ensuing two years. From 1861 to 1866 Bowen and Clemens were estranged. Their falling-out resulted from a misunderstanding about repayment of a two-hundred-dollar loan Clemens had made to Bowen and from political differences; Jane Clemens reported that “when Sam and W B were on the Alonzo Chi they quarreled and Sam let go the wheel to whip Will for talking secesh and made Will hush” (Jane Lampton Clemens to “all in the Teritory,” 12 and 14 Oct 62, NPV, in MTBus, 73). Despite his early Southern sympathies, Bowen piloted a transport for the North during the Civil War. He left the river in 1868 to sell fire and marine insurance in St. Louis, and moved to Austin, Texas, about 1880. In 1888 he visited the Clemens family in Hartford. Bowen was married twice: in 1857 to Mary Cunningham (“Mollie” in Clemens’s “Letter to William Bowen,” 23), who died in 1873; and in 1876 to Dora Goff of St. Louis. His illness, mentioned in “Villagers” (97), remains unidentified, but evidently his health had deteriorated by the time he was thirty. Clemens recorded some of his and Bowen’s adventures in “Letter to William Bowen” and “Villagers” (20–21, 97) and used Bowen in several fictional works. He was one of the models for Tom Sawyer, who is a composite of several boys. He figures as Joe Harper in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and in the present volume appears as himself in “Boy’s Manuscript” (12–13) and as Joe Harper in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (156). (Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” explicitly identify Bowen as the model for Harper; see HH&T, 383–84.) In the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), Bowen was cast as Hank Fitch, but that character does not appear in the story (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:219–21; Wecter 1952, 140; L1, 211, 213 n. 22, 338, 340 n. 1, 357, 359 n. 1, 389; MTLBowen, 7, 15, 25–26; MTB, 1:54, 118; Ferris, 19).

  SAMUEL ADAMS (SAM) BOWEN, JR. (1838?–78), was another of Clemens’s schoolmates who became a river pilot. In the summer of 1858 he and Clemens co-piloted the John H. Dickey. In 1861 they joined the Marion Rangers, a volunteer Confederate company which disbanded after a few weeks—an experience recounted by Mark Twain twenty-four years later in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). Bowen later was arrested by Union soldiers and confined to the stockade in Hannibal. He was allowed to resume piloting after swearing allegiance to the Union, but he continued to assist the Southern cause by secretly carrying Confederate army mail between St. Louis and Memphis. In 1878, while piloting the Molly Moore, Bowen contracted yellow fever, died, and was buried at the head of an island in the Mississippi River. When floodwaters later exposed the gravesite, Clemens reportedly made arrangements to have the coffin reinterred. Bowen is included in “Villagers” (97), with emphasis on the details of his irregular marriage. Clemens had previously given an account of that marriage in chapter 49 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), calling Bowen “George Johnson” and characterizing him as a “shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, good-hearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing.” In his autobiography he again discussed Bowen’s marriage, describing it as a “curious adventure” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:185–86). Clemens’s working notes show that he considered casting Bowen in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” as Joe Harper’s brother Jack and in “Schoolhouse Hill” as Hank Fitch’s brother Sam (HH&T, 384; MSM, 431), but neither character appears in the stories (Lewis Census, 371; Branch 1982a, 195–96; Grimes, 18–19; N&J2, 527, 561–62).

  BRADY, VIRGINIA (JENNY) (b. 1837?), mentioned as Clemens’s classmate in “Villagers” (95), was the daughter of carpenter James Brady, Hannibal’s first mayor. Her brother Norval (b. 1839) was an occasional playmate of Clemens’s. Mark Twain’s working notes show that he considered portraying her as Jenny Mason in “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), but that character does not appear in the story (Marion Census 1850, 308; Holcombe, 941; Wecter 1952, 141; Sweets 1986–87, 1).

  BREED, DANA F. (1823–92), left New England in 1842 to settle in Hannibal. He worked as a store clerk until November 1849, when he opened a dry goods store with THOMAS K. COLLINS. He did not, despite what Clemens says in “Villagers” (94), marry LETITITIA RICHMOND. In 1851 he married Elizabeth Foreman; after her death in 1874, he married Mrs. Faustina Williams. In 1890, when Clemens came to Hannibal for his mother’s funeral, Breed met him at the train station and served as a pallbearer (“New Store!” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 29 Nov 49; Holcombe, 910; Hagood and Hagood 1985, 8; “The Funeral of Mrs. Clemens,” unidentified Hannibal newspaper, 30 Oct 90, clipping in Scrapbook 20: 126–27, CU-MARK).

  BRIGGS family. William (b. 1799?) and Rhoda Briggs (b. 1811?) of Kentucky were listed in the 1850 Hannibal census with eight children, ranging in age from nine months to nineteen years (Marion Census 1850, 315–16). Clemens mentions three of the children in “Villagers.”

  WILLIAM (BILL) BRIGGS, JR. (b. 1831?), in 1849 joined the gold rush to California (“Letter from California,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 17 Jan 50). Clemens encountered him in San Francisco in 1863, and wrote home: “The man whom I have heard people call the ‘handsomest & finest-looking man in California,’ is Bill Briggs. I meet him on Montgomery street every day. He keeps a somewhat extensive gambling hell opposite the Russ House. I went up with him once to see it” (SLC to Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett, 18? May 63, L1, 252). Amelia Ransome Neville, in her memoir of San Francisco, provides a description of Briggs in his later years:

  In the eighties it happened that we knew Bill Briggs, successful professional gambler of that later time who came to Shasta Springs for summer visits. Conservative guests avoided him, but others found him an engaging person, devoted to his small son and talking of everything but cards. His profession he left at home, and nothing could persuade him into a game while he sojourned among us. But he wore his mustache and wide-awake hat and the largest solitaire diamond I have ever seen in a ring. When he died, he left a fortune to the little son, then at a military school, and a reputation for square dealing. (Neville, 41)

  Clemens recalls Briggs in “Villagers” (95).

  ARTEMISSA BRIGGS (b. 1833?) was an early infatuation of Clemens’s who kindly but firmly rejected his attentions. Both in “Villagers” (95) and his autobiography, Clemens indicates that she married stonemason JOSHUA RICHMOND, but the Hannibal Journal of 16 March 1853 records her marriage to bricklayer William J. Marsh. Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) show that Clemens planned to introduce her as Cassy Gray, but that character does not appear in the story (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:212, 214; Wecter 1952, 183, 305 n. 15; Fotheringham, 39).

  JOHN B. BRIGGS (1837–1907) was one of Clemens’s “special mates” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:219). In 1850 both joined the Hannibal chapter of the Cadets of Temperance, nearly sixty boys pledged not to smoke or chew tobacco. Briggs worked in DAVID J. GARTH’s tobacco factory, married Mary Miller, another Clemens classmate, and later became a farmer. In some autobiographical notes Clemens recalled an early misadventure that may have involved Briggs: “Burglaries (with John Briggs?) of potatoes &c which we could have got at home. Caught nearly—family back—hear them from under bed” (SLC 1898b, 1†). When he visited Hannibal in 1902, he spent an afternoon with Briggs and remarked “We were like brothers once” (“Friendship of Boyhood Pals Never Waned,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 5C, partially paraphrased in MTB, 3:1170–71). In his notebook for 1902, Clemens reminded himself to “draw a fine character of John Briggs. Good & true
& brave, & robbed orchards tore down the stable stole the skiff” (NB 45, CU-MARK†, TS p. 13). That same year, he considered using an event from his friend’s youth in a story:

  The time John Briggs’s nigger-boy woke his anger & got a cuffing (which wounded the lad’s heart, because of his love & animal-like devotion to John (it is two or 3 years gone by—a lifetime to a boy, yet John still grieves & speaks to Huck & Tom about it & they even meditate a flight south to find him)—John went, hearing his father coming, for he had done something so shameful that he could never bring himself to confess to the boys what it was; no one knew but the negro lad. John’s father is in a fury, & accuses the lad, who doesn’t deny it; Beebe comes along no corporeal punishment is half severe enough—he sells him down the river. John aghast when he sneaks home next day & learns it. “What did you sell him for, father?” Tells him. John is speechless,—can’t confess. (SLC 1902†)