Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  Clemens’s description is not entirely clear, but apparently the father believed the slave had struck or threatened John when, in fact, it was John who had committed the “shameful” act of striking the slave. Clemens recalls John Briggs in “Villagers” (95). His working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383) indicate that he considered including Briggs as Ben Rogers, although he ultimately did not do so. (Presumably Clemens had had Briggs in mind when he depicted Ben Rogers in chapter 2 of Tom Sawyer and chapter 2 of Huckleberry Finn.) In working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432), Briggs was cast as David Gray, but Gray is not among the characters in the story (Cadets of Temperance 1850; AD, 13 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:99–100; Greene, 96d; “Good-Bye to Mark Twain,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 3 June 1902, 1; “Not Funny This Time,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 2 June 1902, 1).

  BRIGGS, CAREY, mentioned in “Villagers” (105), has not been identified.

  BRITTINGHAM family. A large family, originally from Maryland, that settled in Hannibal by 1840. Thomas E. Brittingham (b. 1798?) ran a drugstore on North Main Street with his two sons. Clemens worked directly over Brittingham’s drugstore in 1848–49 when he was a printer’s apprentice on the Missouri Courier. And he may have been briefly employed by the druggist: in chapter 42 of Roughing It (1872) he recalled that one of his boyhood jobs was as a clerk “in a drug store a part of a summer.” Clemens probably was remembering Thomas when he alluded to a Brittingham in “Clairvoyant” (32). Possibly, however, he was thinking of James S. Brittingham (b. 1816?), a clerk in TILDEN RUSSELL SELMES’s store from 1844 to 1858. The exact family relationship of the two men is unknown (Marion Census 1840, 89; Marion Census 1850, 308, 310; Holcombe, 909; T. P. McMurry to SLC, 16 July 72, CU-MARK; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 56).

  BROWN, WILLIAM LEE (BILL) (1831?–1903), is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). In an autobiographical dictation of 21 May 1908, Clemens called this classmate W. B. “Buck” Brown and identified him as the oldest and largest student in JOHN D. DAWSON’s one-room schoolhouse:

  his age was twenty-five, and to the most of us he seemed not of our world, but a patriarch stricken with age, a relic of a hoary antiquity. He was very studious, very grave, even solemn; he had a kindly smile and a disposition in harmony with it. . . . At the noon recess he always remained at the schoolhouse to study his lessons while he ate his dinner, and Will Bowen and John Briggs and I always remained also, and sacrificed our dinner for the higher profit of pestering him and playing pranks upon him, but he never lost his temper. (CU-MARK†)

  Clemens perhaps confused William with his brother, James Burkett (Buck) Brown (1827–1915), who later became mayor of Hannibal. The 1850 Hannibal census (compiled in October) lists William as a cooper who attended school “within the year,” as had Clemens (Marion Census 1850, 320; Holcombe, 910; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 97; Wecter 1952, 305 n. 16).

  BUCHANAN family included the households of brothers ROBERT and JOSEPH SYLVESTER BUCHANAN.

  ROBERT BUCHANAN (1802–75) came from St. Louis to Hannibal in 1832, acquired 300 acres of land, and established the first tannery in Marion County. Twice married, he had eight children, and Clemens was well acquainted with the three eldest: Henry Charles (b. 1830), a tinner and tinware manufacturer who became a wealthy real estate investor; Edwin or Edward (1834?–?80), an apprentice blacksmith whom Mark Twain called a “dull-witted lout” in chapter 51 of Life on the Mississippi; and JOSEPH ELIJA. In “Villagers” (96), Clemens calls Robert Buchanan the proprietor of the Hannibal Journal, although other sources say his brother JOSEPH was the owner. Both were involved in running the paper. Orion Clemens learned the trade of printing in the Journal office in the early 1840s. When the Buchanan brothers joined the California gold rush in 1850, Pamela Clemens wrote Orion that “Robt. Buchanan has taken the Journal Office and put it into the hands of young Bob and Sam Raymond,” meaning Buchanan’s nephew ROBERT SYLVESTER BUCHANAN and SAMUEL R. RAYMOND (29 Jan 50, NPV, in MTBus, 15). In an 1874 letter to Orion, Clemens recalled how “old Robert Buchanan . . . used to set up articles at the case without previously putting them in the form of manuscript. I was lost in admiration of such marvelous intellectual capacity” (9 Dec 74, NPV, in MTB, 1:facing 536). And in some autobiographical notes made about 1898, Clemens wrote: “The printing office—that was the darling place—Buchanan Journal (2 offices) then Courier” (SLC 1898b, 6†). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) suggest that he planned to introduce Robert Buchanan as Big Bob Turner, but the story does not include him (Marion Census 1850, 319; Holcombe, 899, 911; Greene, 579; “Interesting Letter from California,” Hannibal Western Union, 9 Jan 51; “The equilibrium of California emigration . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 29 Apr 52; Ellsberry 1965a, 21–22; Kennedy 1859, 76; Marion Census 1860, 866; Hallock, 46).

  JOSEPH SYLVESTER (BIG JOE) BUCHANAN (b. 1806?), a native of Missouri, is mentioned in “Villagers” (96). He was a steamboat engineer before turning to journalism. He helped to found Hannibal’s first newspaper, the short-lived Commercial Advertiser, in 1837. In 1840, together with MATTHEW S. FIFE, he began publishing a newspaper that went through several name changes before becoming the Hannibal Journal in March 1842. In January 1850 Big Joe turned the Journal over to his son, ROBERT SYLVESTER BUCHANAN, and joined the gold rush. His name appears in Clemens’s 1897 notebook amid plans for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” but no character based on him figures in the story (Marion Census 1850, 325; Holcombe, 898, 899, 987; MTB, 1:27; MTBus, 15; “The ‘Journal’. . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 31 Jan 50; Wecter 1952, 223; NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 60).

  ARGYLE (’GYLE) BUCHANAN (b. 1806?), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was a farmer near Hannibal. His exact relation to ROBERT and JOSEPH SYLVESTER BUCHANAN is not known (Marion Census 1850, 305).

  ROBERT SYLVESTER (YOUNG BOB) BUCHANAN (b. 1829), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was the son of JOSEPH SYLVESTER BUCHANAN. He became a printer and, in 1850, co-proprietor of the Hannibal Journal with SAMUEL R. RAYMOND. They dissolved their partnership in 1851 and sold the newspaper office to Orion Clemens. Young Bob and URBAN E. HICKS, a Journal printer, were expelled from the Methodist church for “going to see Dan. Rice’s Circus” (Hicks to SLC, 30 Mar 86, CU-MARK). Working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) suggest that Mark Twain planned to portray him as Little Bob Turner, but the character does not appear in the story (Marion Census 1850, 318; Marion Census 1860, 208; “Dissolution,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 6 Mar 51; Wecter 1952, 239).

  JOSEPH ELIJA (LITTLE JOE) BUCHANAN (b. 1830), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was the son of ROBERT BUCHANAN. He worked as a printer’s devil on the Hannibal Journal in 1850 and later became a steamboat engineer. In 1897 Mark Twain included Buchanan’s name in a notebook list of Hannibal people and incidents he planned to use in writing “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.” He did not use Buchanan in the story, however (Greene, 579; Ellsberry 1965a, 21–22; Wecter 1952, 223; Honeyman, 6; Stone, Davidson, and McIntosh, 62; NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 60).

  BURTON. See BENJAMIN L. CLEMENS.

  CARPENTER family. See CLEMENS family.

  CLEMENS family. Called the Carpenters in “Villagers,” the writer’s family provided models for several characters in his stories about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

  JOHN MARSHALL CLEMENS (1798–1847), born in Virginia, studied law in Columbia, Kentucky, and in 1822 was licensed to practice. After he married Jane Lampton in 1823, they lived for approximately two years in Columbia before moving to Gainesboro, Tennessee, where their first child, Orion, was born. In 1827 the family settled in Jamestown, Tennessee, where John Clemens became a county commissioner, then a county court clerk, and opened a store. With an eye to the family’s future, he began his purchase of thousands of acres of land, most of it just south of Jamestown. His total acquisition—which Samuel Clemens estimated at “seventy-five thousand acres,” costing “somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred dollars” (SLC 1870a, 3)—brought John Clemens�
�s heirs years of frustration, but none of the wealth he envisioned. In the spring of 1835, the family and their one slave, JENNY, moved to Florida, Missouri, where Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born. In Florida, John Clemens practiced law, kept store, and did some farming. He was appointed judge of Monroe County Court in 1837; it was this appointment that earned him the honorific “Judge,” which he bore the rest of his life. In November 1839 John Clemens moved his family to Hannibal, where he promoted the construction of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad and helped found and govern the Hannibal Library Institute. He kept a store on Main Street until the early 1840s, when he was forced into poverty by IRA STOUT, a dishonest land speculator. It was probably in 1844 that John Clemens was elected justice of the peace; the earliest evidence placing him in that position is a court record dated 17 September 1844. Albert Bigelow Paine’s statement that he was elected in 1840 is disproved by newspaper accounts of the election, and Dixon Wecter’s conjecture that he was elected in 1842 is inconsistent with an 1843 court record showing the position was held by another man (Clemens v. Townsend; MTB, 1:41; Wecter 1952, 103, 291 nn. 5, 7). Samuel Clemens’s recollection that his father “was elected County Judge by a great majority in ’49” (“Villagers,” 104) also is incorrect. John Clemens declared his candidacy for clerk of the circuit court in November 1846 but died of pneumonia in March 1847, more than four months before the election. “My father may have hastened the ending of his life by the use of too much medicine,” Orion Clemens observed in 1880. “He doctored himself from my earliest remembrance. During the latter part of his life he bought Cook’s pills by the box and took one or more daily” (notes on SLC to Orion Clemens, 6 Feb 61, L1, 116 n. 11). Presbyterian pastor JOSHUA THOMAS TUCKER called John Clemens “a grave, taciturn man, a foremost citizen in intelligence and wholesome influence” (Wecter 1952, 86). He was more fully characterized in The History of Marion County, Missouri, in a biographical sketch prepared with Orion’s assistance:

  He never laughed aloud, and seldom smiled. He was sternly and irreproachably moral. He had a gray eye of wonderful keenness, that seemed to pierce through you. He wore his hair short and combed back. He could wield a vigorous and scathing pen, reminding one of the style of “Junius,” when he chose to write for the papers. He never joined any church, though he inclined to the Campbellites. His shattered nerves made him irritable, but he never swore except once, and then he was very, very angry. His honesty no man questioned, and he carried scruples further than common in that direction. . . . He was a Whig, believed strongly in Henry Clay, and took an interest in politics. He seldom indulged in joking. If he did, the subject was pure and clean, and accompanied with a little twinkle at the corner of the eye, and only a perceptible smile. (Holcombe, 915)

  Samuel Clemens confirmed these descriptions, remembering his father as “exceedingly dignified in his carriage and speech” and “austere” in manner; “pleasant with his friends, but never familiar” (AD, 29 Dec 1906, CU-MARK†). John Clemens is mentioned in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (90); he is Judge Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 101, 103–5, 106), and James Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–19, 125) (Wecter 1952, 6–7, 14, 15, 28–57 passim, 69–70, 103, 110–11, 114–15; Tompkins and Eve; Gregory 1965, 30; Brashear 1934, 95; Pamela A. Moffett to Samuel E. Moffett, 15 Oct 99, CU-MARK; Return Ira Holcombe to SLC, 24 Sept 83, CU-MARK; SLC to Orion Clemens, 4 Sept 83, CU-MARK).

  JANE LAMPTON CLEMENS (1803–90), born in Adair County, Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens in part to spite a former suitor, RICHARD F. BARRET (Wecter 1952, 17–18, 23). Mark Twain characterized his mother in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (82–92). In an autobiographical sketch he commented that she had “come handy to me several times in my books, where she figures as Tom Sawyer’s ‘Aunt Polly.’ I fitted her out with a dialect, & tried to think up other improvements for her, but did not find any” (SLC 1897–98, 49, in MTA, 1:102). Jane Clemens’s Hannibal pastor, JOSHUA THOMAS TUCKER, called her “a woman of the sunniest temperament, lively, affable, a general favorite” (Wecter 1952, 86). She is Joanna Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 103–8) and Sarah Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–19). She is Aunt Polly in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134–209 passim), as she had previously been in Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1885), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896).

  ORION CLEMENS (1825–97), pronounced O’-ree-ən, clerked in a store after the family moved to Hannibal in 1839. When he reported that he was taught to “adjust the scales one way for buying and another way for selling,” his father placed him in the Hannibal Journal office, where he began his printer’s apprenticeship under ROBERT and JOSEPH SYLVESTER BUCHANAN (Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK). About 1842 he moved to St. Louis to work in the printing house of THOMAS WATT USTICK, returning to Hannibal in mid-1850 to start a weekly called the Western Union. Within a year he purchased the Hannibal Journal and on 4 September 1851 published the first issue of the consolidated Hannibal Journal and Western Union, shortening the name to Hannibal Journal after six months. He sold the paper and its printing establishment to WILLIAM T. LEAGUE in September 1853 and moved with his mother and brother Henry to Muscatine, Iowa, where he bought an interest in the Muscatine Journal. On 19 December 1854 he married Mary Eleanor (Mollie) Stotts (1834–1904), with whom he had one child, Jennie (1855–64). The following June, Orion sold the Muscatine Journal and moved to Keokuk, Iowa, his wife’s home town, purchasing the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. In June of 1857 he sold the unprofitable print shop and in the fall of the year moved to Jamestown, Tennessee, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar. He returned to Keokuk in July 1858, evidently remaining until May 1860, when he moved to Memphis, Missouri, to attempt to set up a law practice. On 27 March 1861, Orion was appointed secretary of the newly formed Nevada Territory, a position secured for him by Edward Bates, an old acquaintance from St. Louis, who was Lincoln’s first attorney general. Accompanied by Samuel Clemens, Orion arrived in Carson City on 14 August 1861. Until late 1864, when Nevada became a state, Orion was comparatively prosperous since, despite his failure to become wealthy by speculating in mining stock, he enjoyed a government salary. Unable to secure a state office comparable to his territorial post, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to practice law in Carson City, then in California, where he also prospected and tried his hand at writing correspondence for the Meadow Lake Morning Sun and the San Francisco American Flag. Finally, however, Orion was forced to leave the West. He returned to St. Louis in September 1866, while his wife, Mollie, went to live with her parents in Keokuk. He was an occasional correspondent for the San Francisco Times in late 1866 through early 1867. He lived chiefly in St. Louis (Mollie joined him there in 1869) for about three years, supporting himself by working as a newspaper compositor. In late 1870 Orion and Mollie moved to Hartford, Connecticut. There, until 1872, Orion edited the American Publisher, the house paper of the American Publishing Company, Mark Twain’s publishers. In the fall of 1873, after trying unsuccessfully to find work elsewhere, Orion moved to New York City, where he worked as a newspaper proofreader. Mollie joined him a few months later, and they remained in New York until mid-1874, when, with Samuel Clemens’s help, they returned to Keokuk to purchase a chicken farm. Over the next two decades Orion tried, in vain, to earn a living as a chicken farmer, lawyer, lecturer, and author. From the mid-1870s until his death in 1897, Orion was dependent on quarterly checks sent him by his brother. Meanwhile he compiled, often in public, a record of spectacular vacillation on political and religious matters. In a letter of 9 February 1879, Mark Twain regaled William Dean Howells with some of Orion’s exploits:

  He has belonged to as many as five different religious denominations; last March he withdrew from deaconship in a Congregational Church & the superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that for many months (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been a confirmed infidel, & so felt it to be his duty to retire from t
he flock.

  . . . After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a democratic newspaper merely because his prophetic mind told him Tilden would be President—in which case he would be able to get an office for his services.

  A few days before the Presidential election, he came out in a speech & publicly went over to the democrats; but at the last moment, while voting for Tilden & 6 State democrats, he prudently “hedged” by voting for 6 State republicans, also. He said it might make him safe, no matter who won.

  The new convert was made one of the secretaries of a democratic meeting, & placed in the list of speakers. He wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech. All right—but think of his innocent & pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later: “I was more diffident than I had expected to be, & this was increased by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated upon, & presently they began to get up & go out; & in a few minutes they all rose up & went away.”

  How could a man uncover such a sore as that & show it to another? Not a word of complaint, you see—only a patient, sad surprise.

  . . . His next project was to write a burlesque upon Paradise Lost. . . .

  . . . Afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer meeting epidemic; dropped that to travesty Jules Verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last chapter, last March, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he proposed to write; & now he comes to the surface to rescue our “noble & beautiful religion” from the sacrilegious talons of Bob Ingersoll [the prominent agnostic lecturer and writer]. (NN-B, in MTHL, 1:253–55)

  Orion’s impulsive, impractical nature proved a source of anxiety and exasperation to the entire family, as did his sudden and severe shifts in mood. As Mark Twain recalled in his autobiography, Orion’s “day was divided—no, not divided, mottled—from sunrise to midnight with alternating brilliant sunshine and black cloud. Every day he was the most joyous and hopeful man that ever was, I think, and also every day he was the most miserable man that ever was. . . . He was always truthful; he was always sincere; he was always honest and honorable,” but “he was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth” (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:269, 272). Mark Twain considered Orion an author’s “treasure” and urged Howells to “put him in a book or a play right away. . . . One can let his imagination run riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him” (SLC to Howells, 9 Feb 79, NN-B, in MTHL, 1:253, 256). Orion influenced the characterization of Washington Hawkins in The Gilded Age (1874). He appears as Oscar Carpenter in “Villagers” and “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (93, 105–8, 109–24). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and “Schoolhouse Hill” (HH&T, 384; MSM, 432) reveal that Plunket the editor and Oliver Hotchkiss (166, 167, 224, 229–59) were based on Orion (Wecter 1952, 78, 225, 239; MTB, 1:27, 100; MTA, 2:268–74; Bible 1862; Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, 3, 5–11, 15, 21; Orion Clemens to SLC, 7 Jan 61, CU-MARK; Lorch 1929b; L1, 58, 79 n. 11, 114 n. 9, 115, 121, 325 n. 5, 342 n. 1, 375 n. 5; correspondence between Orion Clemens, Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, and other family members, 1867–74, CU-MARK; Pamela A. Moffett to Samuel E. Moffett, 23 Feb 80, CU-MARK).