Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  PITTS family.

  JAMES P. PITTS (b. 1807?), a harness maker, moved to Hannibal in 1836. In “Villagers” (102) Clemens recalls how Pitts greeted every steamboat even though he had no business to conduct at the landing. In chapter 55 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), written fifteen years before “Villagers,” Clemens attributed this behavior to John Stavely, another Hannibal saddler. Evidently Life on the Mississippi was correct: one history of Hannibal comments on “John W. Stavely, who came here in 1842” and whose regular and conspicuous appearance at the wharf led neighboring towns to call Hannibal “Stavely’s Landing” (Greene, 71; Holcombe, 971; Marion Census 1850, 307, 314; N&J2, 478 n. 160).

  WILLIAM R. (BILL) PITTS (b. 1832?), JAMES’s son, at fourteen began a six-year apprenticeship in the harness-maker and saddler’s trade, which he completed in four years by working overtime. From the age of twenty, he ran his own business, retiring in 1890. He served twice on the city council and helped to found the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank in 1870. Clemens met him on two return visits to Hannibal, in April 1867 and in May 1902. He mentions Bill Pitts in his “Letter to William Bowen” and in “Villagers” (21, 102). Mark Twain’s working notes indicate that he planned to portray Pitts as Jake Fitch in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as George Pratt in “Schoolhouse Hill” (HH&T, 383; MSM, 431), but neither character appears in the stories (Marion Census 1850, 314; Holcombe, 971; Greene, 398, 407; “Mark Twain Sees the Home of His Boyhood,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 May 1902, 1).

  PRENDERGAST, THOMAS B. (1830?–69), recalled in “Villagers” (102), was a white minstrel performer famous as a tenor and a female impersonator (Rice, 66, 217; Wittke, 68–69, 236, 237; Brown, 297).

  PRISCELLA. see PAMELA ANN CLEMENS.

  QUARLES family.

  JOHN ADAMS QUARLES (1802–76) was Clemens’s uncle. Clemens was particularly fond of him and stated in his autobiography, “I have not come across a better man than he was” (SLC 1897–98, 36–37, in MTA, 1:96). Quarles married Jane Lampton Clemens’s younger sister, Martha Ann (Patsy) Lampton (1807–50), with whom he had ten children. In the mid-1830s the family moved from Tennessee to Florida, Missouri, where John Quarles built a general store and became a prosperous shopkeeper and farmer, active in the town’s development. He purchased over 230 acres of farm land near Florida and by Clemens’s recollection owned some fifteen or twenty slaves. Until Clemens was about twelve, he spent two to three months every year on the Quarles farm, which some fifty years later he recalled as “a heavenly place for a boy.” Clemens acknowledged that while he “never consciously used” Quarles in a book, “his farm has come very handy to me in literature, once or twice. In ‘Huck Finn’ and in ‘Tom Sawyer Detective’ I moved it down to Arkansas. It was all of six hundred miles, but it was no trouble” (SLC 1897–98, 37, in MTA, 1:96). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 384) identify Quarles as the model for Uncle Fletcher; in the story, mention is made of Uncle Fletcher’s farm, thirty miles from St. Petersburg (154, 155, 156), but the character himself does not appear (Selby, chart 23, 134; Wecter 1952, 36, 40, 50; Gregory 1969, 230–33).

  JAMES A. (JIM) QUARLES (1827–66), JOHN ADAMS QUARLES’s son, was born in Tennessee and brought to Florida, Missouri, as a child. In 1848 he moved to Hannibal and opened a copper, tin, and sheet iron manufactory in partnership with George W. Webb. In 1851 James married sixteen-year-old Sophronia (Fronnie) Reno, with whom he had two sons. By the fall of 1852 he had entered into two additional business partnerships to sell stoves, but both of these enterprises failed. Clemens records Quarles’s “dissipation” and neglect of business and family in “Villagers” (97). In an August 1897 notebook entry Clemens included James Quarles in a list of characters for “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (NB 42, CU-MARK, TS p. 24, in S&B, 173), but no one based on him figures in the story (Bible 1817; Marion Census 1850, 310; Selby, 133; marriage notice, Hannibal Journal and Western Union, 2 Oct 51, cited in Wecter 1950, 7; “Dissolution,” Hannibal Western Union, 7 Aug 51; “Dissolution,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 2 Sept 52).

  R., SAM. SEE SAMUEL R. RAYMOND.

  RALLS, JOHN (1807–82), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was a Mexican War veteran and lawyer who lived in New London, Missouri. In 1861, when Clemens and a few friends flirted with the Confederacy by forming the Marion Rangers, they had Colonel Ralls swear them in as private soldiers. In “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885), Clemens recalled Ralls’s “old-fashioned speech . . . full of gunpowder and glory, full of that adjective-piling, mixed metaphor, and windy declamation which was regarded as eloquence in that ancient time and that remote region” (Conard, 5:292; Ellsberry 1965b, 2:29–0).

  RATCLIFFE (or RATCLIFF) family. The father, James (1795?–1860), a pioneer physician in Hannibal, had an affluent practice, sat on the first municipal board of health, and owned one of the best houses in town. (In historical records of Marion County his surname also appears as Ratliff and Rackliff.) Will records show that Ratcliffe was survived by his second wife and five sons. Aside from the account given in “Villagers” (102–3), little is known of this family. In the 1880s Mark Twain wrote about the homicidal Ratcliffe son in “Clairvoyant” (29), and in his 1905–8 notebook he recalled the “Ratcliffe family—crazy. One, confined, chopped his hand off; chased stepmother with knife” (NB 48, CU-MARK†, TS p. 10). Mark Twain apparently drew on one of the Ratcliffe men in creating Crazy Meadows, the village lunatic with the “wild mad laugh” in “Schoolhouse Hill” (242–46); a marginal note on the manuscript reads: “Crazy’s history and misfortunes and his family and lost boy—Ratcliff” (MSM, 411; Holcombe, 897; Wecter 1952, 198; Marion Census 1850, 309; Ellsberry 1965a, 5).

  RAY, DR. See RICHARD F. BARRET.

  RAYMOND, SAMUEL R. (SAM), had settled in Hannibal by 1849. He helped organize the Liberty Fire Company and dressed in fireman’s uniform for the company’s fund-raising parties. In 1850 he became editor and co-proprietor with ROBERT SYLVESTER BUCHANAN of the Hannibal Journal. In 1851 Raymond and his partner sold the Journal to Orion Clemens, and Raymond moved to Pike County, Missouri. Back in Hannibal by 1853, Raymond edited the Messenger and by 1859 was proprietor of the Gazette. Mark Twain mentions him twice in “Villagers” (96, 102), in the first instance wondering if he had married MARY NASH. In fact, in 1850 Raymond married Helen Holmes, who died a year later of cholera. An entry in Mark Twain’s 1897 notebook hints that Raymond was the illegitimate son of either ROBERT, ARGYLE, or JOSEPH SYLVESTER BUCHANAN: “The new fire Co—Raymond, whose real name was Buchanan” (NB 41, CU-MARK†, TS p. 58). Working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” indicate that he planned to introduce Raymond as “Fire Marshal Sam . . . Rumford,” who was “envied because said to be illegitimate” (HH&T, 383, 384), but Rumford instead appears in the story as captain of a militia company, with no illegitimacy mentioned (167–68, 178, 210). Raymond is also included in the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 436) as the model for Joe Buckner of the Big 6 Fire Company, but that character does not appear in the story (Hannibal Missouri Courier: “Liberty Fire Company,” 4 Oct 49; “The New Fire Engine,” 29 Nov 49; “Grand Levee & Tea-Party!” 20 Dec 49; “The ‘Journal,’ of this city . . . ,” 31 Jan 50; “Married,” 9 May 50; “New Paper,” 3 Feb 53; “Mr. S. R. Raymond . . . ,” Hannibal Western Union, 29 May 51; Fotheringham, 48).

  REAGAN, JIM (JIMMY). In a 1902 letter Clemens told ANNA LAURA HAWKINS FRAZER that the “ ‘new boy’ ” in one of his books “was Jim Reagan—just from St. Louis” (“Laura Hawkins Frazer Always Remembered as Idol of His Boyhood,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 3C). The book was Tom Sawyer (1876), in chapter one of which Tom challenges a newcomer to a fight. In “Boy’s Manuscript” (2, 8–10, 14), Reagan possibly was the model for Billy Rogers’s rival, Jim Riley. Reagan is mentioned in “Villagers” (105).

  RICE, SAMUEL D., a Methodist minister according to one history of Hannibal, probably was the “Rev. Mr. Rice,” recalled in “Villagers
” (97) as a Presbyterian. In 1838 Rice purchased the Hannibal Commercial Advertiser from JOSEPH SYLVESTER BUCHANAN. When the paper failed in 1839, some Hannibal citizens formed a stock company and purchased the newspaper office for Rice’s benefit. In 1843 Rice officiated at the marriage of Clemens’s uncle, JAMES ANDREW HAYS LAMPTON. He was elected city recorder in 1845, and afterward started a newspaper in Louisiana, Missouri, where he died (Holcombe, 898, 941, 987; Woodruff, 24).

  RICHMOND, JOSHUA (b. 1816?), a mason, was Clemens’s first Sunday school teacher at the Old Ship of Zion, a small brick Methodist church situated on Hannibal’s public square. Clemens remembered him as “a very kindly and considerate Sunday-school teacher, and patient and compassionate, so he was the favorite teacher with us little chaps. . . . I was under Mr. Richmond’s spiritual care every now and then for two or three years, and he was never hard upon me” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:214). Clemens mistakenly recalled in his autobiography and in “Villagers” (95) that Richmond married ARTEMISSA BRIGGS; in 1849 he married Angelina Cook (Marion Census 1850, 310, 322; “Married,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 18 Jan 49; Wecter 1952, 86, 183).

  RICHMOND, LETITITIA. No information. In “Villagers” (94), Clemens mistakenly writes that she married DANA F. BREED.

  ROBARDS family.

  ARCHIBALD SAMPSON ROBARDS (1797–1862), formerly a plantation owner in his native Kentucky and an officer in the Fifth Kentucky Regiment, moved to Hannibal with family and slaves in 1843. He became wealthy in the milling business, and in 1853 his flour won the highest prize at New York’s Crystal Palace Exhibition. In 1849 he took a company of fifteen to the California gold fields, furnishing the necessary vehicles, provisions and stock. Robards did much to advance Hannibal’s agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial interests. He was mayor in 1846 and 1854 and an elder in the Christian Church. He married Amanda Carpenter (1807–65), with whom he had six children. Clemens recalls Robards and five of his children in “Villagers” (93–94; see also the note at 100.18). He included the same five—“George, Clay, John Robards Jane & Sally Robards”—among other old Hannibal acquaintances he listed in his 1902 notebook, after his final visit to the town (NB 45, CU-MARK†, TS p. 21; Marion Census 1850, 317, where the name is entered as Roberts, as it was then pronounced; Marion Census 1860, 761; Portrait, 143–44; Holcombe, 945, 991–92; “Flour! Flour! Flour!” Hannibal Journal, 2 May 53).

  GEORGE C. ROBARDS (1833?–78) is described in Clemens’s autobiography as a “slender, pale, studious” youth with long black hair who was the “only pupil who studied Latin” at DAWSON’s school (AD, 8 Mar, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:179, 181). In “Villagers” (93, 94), Clemens alludes to Robards’s unhappy romance with MARY JANE MOSS and reports his abandonment of Hannibal. Robards returned by 1860, however, for he is listed in the census that year as a Hannibal farmer. He served as a major in the Confederate Army, was a Hannibal real estate and insurance agent in the mid-1870s, and was elected county assessor in 1876 (Marion Census 1850, 317; Marion Census 1860, 761; Holcombe, 992; Portrait, 144; Hallock, 120).

  SARAH H. (SALLY or SALLIE) ROBARDS (1836–1918), Samuel Clemens’s classmate in DAWSON’s school, took piano lessons from Pamela Clemens. She married river-boat pilot and captain BARTON STONE BOWEN and, after Bowen’s death, the Reverend H. H. Haley, a pastor of Hannibal’s Christian Church. In an autobiographical sketch, Clemens recalled that while in Calcutta in 1896, he met Sally Robards—one of Hannibal’s “dearest and prettiest girls”—and learned that when they were teenagers she had seen him prancing around nude rehearsing for his role as a bear in a play (SLC 1900, 1–6, where Robards is called Mary Wilson, in MTA, 1:125–30). He recalled her in his 1902 notebook: “Sally Robards—pret[t]y. Describe her now in her youth & again in 50 ys After when she reveals herself” (NB 45, CU-MARK†, TS p. 21). She is mentioned in “Villagers” (94). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431) indicate that Sally Fitch (218, 221) was based on her (Marion Census 1850, 317; Marion Census 1860, 761; Portrait, 144; Holcombe, 981; RoBards 1915; “Mrs. Haley Is Laid to Rest,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 8 Aug 1918, clipping in RoBards Scrapbooks, vol. 2).

  JOHN LEWIS ROBARDS (1838–1925), characterized in “Villagers” (93–94), attended Methodist Sunday school with Clemens. At DAWSON’s school, where the pair were classmates, Robards always won the silver medal for “Amiability” and Clemens the medal for “Good Spelling” (AD, 7 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:67). “I was alway[s] trading Good Spelling for Amiability—for advantage at home,” Clemens recalled (SLC 1898b, 7†). When he was twelve years old, Robards accompanied his father on the expedition to California. He reportedly “loved to read history and the classics, and early chose to be a soldier, and applied himself diligently for examination at West Point. While thus engaged, being a capital shot, his right eye was impaired by a fragment of a cap of the pistol, and this destroyed his prospects for a successful career” (Holcombe, 992). After attending the University of Missouri and studying law in Louisville, Kentucky, Robards returned to Hannibal in 1861 to practice. Clemens mistakenly notes in “Villagers” that he married “a Hurst—new family.” In April 1861 Robards married Sara (Sallie) Crump Helm, whose family had settled in Hannibal in 1852; the couple had seven children, three of whom lived to adulthood. In 1861 John Robards, Samuel Clemens, and others formed the Marion Rangers, whose misadventures as Confederate irregulars Mark Twain described in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). In that sketch Clemens poked fun at his friend’s practice of spelling his name “RoBards” by portraying him as a Dunlap who changed his name to “d’Un Lap.” He later regretted the attack: “I think John Robards deserved a lashing, but it should have come from an enemy, not a friend” (SLC to the Reverend John Davis, 19? Apr 87, ViU, excerpted in Wecter 1952, 298 n. 13). Robards was a leading member of Park Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the founder of Mount Olivet Cemetery. When the bodies of Henry and John Marshall Clemens were transferred from Hannibal’s old Baptist cemetery to Mount Olivet in 1876, Robards oversaw the transfer, and in 1890 he attended the burial service for Jane Lampton Clemens (Portrait, 143–45; Holcombe, 608, 992; RoBards 1915; “RoBards—Sarah Crump Helm . . . ,” St. Louis Christian Advocate, 13 Feb 1908, clipping in RoBards Scrapbooks, vol. 1; “The Death of Mrs. J. L. RoBards,” Hannibal Journal, 4 Jan 1918, clipping in RoBards Scrapbooks, vol. 1; “RoBards Rites to Be Friday,” unidentified Hannibal newspaper, 1925 clipping in RoBards Scrapbooks, vol. 3; AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2: 182–83; Wecter 1952, 118–19; “The Funeral of Mrs. Clemens,” unidentified Hannibal newspaper, 30 Oct 90, clipping in Scrapbook 20: 126–27, CU-MARK).

  HENRY CLAY ROBARDS (1841?–85), mentioned in “Villagers” (94), was a captain in the Confederate Army. He died in Columbia, Missouri (Marion Census 1850, 317; Portrait, 144).

  RUTTER, RICHARD H. (DICK) (b. 1835?), whose name appears in “Villagers” (98), worked alongside Samuel Clemens, WILLIAM T. LEAGUE, and WALES R. MC-CORMICK in the late 1840s as a printer’s apprentice on the Hannibal Missouri Courier. He was the son of John P. Rutter, a former clerk of the Marion County Circuit Court in Palmyra. In August 1850 Dick Rutter was living on the outskirts of Palmyra with three siblings and his unemployed father (Marion Census 1850, 281; Marion Census 1860, 1016; SLC to W. H. Powell, 3? Dec 1907, MoHM; Frank Daulton to SLC, 5 Mar 83, CU-MARK; Holcombe, 842–43).

  SANDY was a young slave who worked for the Clemenses in Hannibal. Mark Twain reported in his autobiography: “I used Sandy once . . . it was in ‘Tom Sawyer;’ tried to get him to whitewash the fence, but it did not work” (SLC 1897–98, 49, in MTA, 1:102). Sandy appears in chapters 1 and 2 of Tom Sawyer as Jim, “the small colored boy” (not to be confused with Jim in Huckleberry Finn, who is modeled after DANIEL). Clemens recalls Sandy in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (89).

  SCHNEIDER (or SCHNIETER), CHARLEY, in “Villagers” (101), was the man whom John Marshall Clemens saved from an attempted assault by ALLEN B. MCDONALD.

 
SELMES family.

  TILDEN RUSSELL SELMES (1808?–70) was originally from England. One of Hannibal’s leading merchants, he was proprietor of the Wildcat store at the corner of Main and Hill streets and in the early 1850s was one of four owners of the ferry line crossing the river at Hannibal. He was elected mayor in 1852 and 1853, and by 1860 had established the Hannibal City Bank. His wife, Mary, died in 1849, and he married Sarah P. Benton in 1850. Clemens mentions Selmes twice in “Villagers” (94, 96) and refers to him in “Clairvoyant” (32). While the working notes to “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 384) mention “Old Selmes (English),” he does not appear in the story (Marion Census 1850, 310; Marion Census 1860, 770; Caroline Schroter to Jane Lampton Clemens, 29 May 70, CU-MARK; Greene, 51, 52, 257; Fotheringham, 51, 73; Holcombe, 941; “Obituary,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 12 July 49; “Married,” Hannibal Western Union, 14 Nov 50; Conard, 2:534).

  SARAH JOHNSON SELMES, the merchant’s beautiful daughter, is mentioned in “Villagers” (96). In 1848 she married Robert M. Funkhouser, who became one of St. Louis’s most prominent merchants (Davis, 3; Conard, 2:534; Edwards and Hopewell, 143).

  SEXTON family. Louisa Sexton (b. 1812? in Kentucky) and her daughter, Margaret (b. 1836? in Missouri), are both described in “Villagers” (99). They boarded with the Clemens family in the mid-1840s, and young Samuel and Henry Clemens were rivals for Margaret’s attention. In January 1850 Margaret evidently was taking music lessons from Pamela, for Jane Clemens wrote of her as one of the “music scollars” who played “dewets” at the house (Jane Lampton Clemens to Orion Clemens, 30 Jan 50, NPV, in MTBus, 16). By the summer of 1850 Mrs. Sexton and Margaret had moved to St. Louis. Writing his family from Virginia City on 16 February 1863, Clemens enclosed his photograph for Margaret, commenting: “Had your letter arrived a little sooner, I could have sent it to her myself, as a Valentine” (LI, 245; St. Louis Census 1850, 418:361).