The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Sam picked up his lifelong tobacco habit as early as the age of eight, certainly before Marshall Clemens died. In 1882 he confessed that he “began to smoke immoderately when I was eight years old; that is, I began with one hundred cigars a month,” and in 1906 he corroborated the fact: he had been “a smoker from my ninth year—a private one during the first two years, but a public one after that—that is to say, after my father’s death.” But he quit smoking for several months in the summer of 1850 when he joined the Cadets of Temperance. An affiliate of the Sons of Temperance, the Cadets promoted abstinence from liquor and tobacco. Sam was attracted less by the pledge of its members, as he admitted later, “not to smoke, never to drink or gamble, to keep the Sabbath, and not to steal watermelons” than by the regalia they wore during holiday parades, particularly their red merino sashes. “I was clothed like a conflagration,” he wrote in “Autobiography of a Damned Fool.” “I have never enjoyed any dress so much as I enjoyed that ‘regalia.’” Elsewhere he allowed that “it was a pretty good sort of organization, and some of the very best boys in the village” belonged to it, including his brother Henry, John Briggs (the model for Ben Rogers in Tom Sawyer), Jimmy McDaniel (who, ironically, eventually became a cigarmaker), John Meredith, and Tom Nash. Sam joined the Cadets, he conceded, even though the bylaws of the organization “didn’t allow a boy to smoke, or drink or swear, but I thought I never could be truly happy till I wore one of those stunning red scarfs and walked in procession when a distinguished citizen died.” In Tom Sawyer, Sam re-created his predicament:

  Tom joined the new order of Cadets of Temperance, being attracted by the showy character of their “regalia.” He promised to abstain from smoking, chewing, and profanity as long as he remained a member. Now he found out a new thing—namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. Tom soon found himself tormented with a desire to drink and swear.

  He tolerated the prohibitions for four months, but in the end “there were not enough holidays to support” his membership in the group. He marched in his regalia on May Day and the Fourth of July 1850 but, as he later said, “you can’t keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year,” and “never an infernal distinguished citizen died during the whole time” he belonged to it.23 After the second parade, he quit.

  The leading industry of Hannibal was meatpacking—particularly pork. If Chicago was the “hog butcher of the world,” then Hannibal was the hog butcher of the region—what Carl Sandburg might have called the city of the pig shoulders. Dixon Wecter described the village as a “miniature porkopolis.” The three packing companies in the town, with their pigsties on Bear Creek, a half mile from the Clemens house, employed three hundred workers in season. With a forty-thousand-square-foot slaughterhouse, the firm of Samuel & Moss was among the largest pork and beef packinghouses in the United States. According to Lorio in one of his Hannibal letters to the St. Louis Reveille, the senior partner, William Samuel, “cleared some twenty thousand dollars by dealing in pork” during the fall and winter of 1846–47. The junior partner, Russell Moss, was the father of Mary Moss, one of Sam’s classmates, whom he thought “very sweet and pretty at 16 or 17.” Two new slaughterhouses were built on Bear Creek in 1846, and Dowling & Company, one of the rivals of Samuel & Moss, built a twenty-thousand-square-foot slaughterhouse a year later that enabled the business to ship five hundred barrels of processed meat and lard per day. The packers paid local farmers a premium price, about five cents per pound for porkers that weighed at least 180 pounds, and the Missouri Courier reported in December 1849 that together the “slaughtering houses kill from 1000 to 1500 [hogs] per day” during the late fall and winter.24

  The result was environmental disaster. The farmers herded their droves through the streets of Hannibal en route to slaughter, and not until 1911 were the streets cleaned routinely. The first town council considered the packinghouses a public health hazard and decreed “that no vegetable matter, unclean substance or filthy water be thrown into the streets or into Bear Creek, that refuse from the slaughterhouses be conducted into the Mississippi and out into the current so that it could not return to the shore.”25 But the ordinance did not prevent tons of offal from draining into the river. Bear Creek became so polluted with dissolved fat it was nicknamed Soap Alley. For obvious reasons, the preachers baptized their converts and boys went swimming in the creek upstream from the packing plants or in the Mississippi above the mouth of the creek.

  All of this may begin to explain the ubiquity of swine in Sam’s writing. “Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse” (1852), a comic monologue and one of the earliest pieces that can be confidently attributed to him, tells of “a show of some kind” with the “attractive title” of “Napoleon Crossing the Rhine” on display at a local store. The exhibit turns out to be a pork bone (a bony part, or Bonaparte) crossing a pig rind (the Rhine)—an example of the coarse, lowbrow humor of the tavern and docks. In Tom Sawyer the children play with pig bladders from the slaughterhouses, and Sam also mentioned hogs rooting contentedly in the unpaved streets of towns in The Gilded Age, Huck Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Life on the Mississippi, and the “Tupperville-Dobbsville” fragment (ca. 1876–80). In Life on the Mississippi, Sam also mentioned Bear Creek as the open sewer and “famous breeder of chills and fever in its day.” The prevailing breezes down the river valley usually wafted the stench from the stockyards south, away from the center of town, but sometimes it hung in the air like a miasma. The richest person in town, Melicent Holliday, the model for the “fair, smart,” and “good-hearted” Widow Douglas in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, lived in a mansion at the crest of the highest hill in the region, upwind from the packinghouses, to escape the stench below. As Huck declares in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (1897–1902), the “polecats couldn’t stand” the stink of the slaughterhouses, “where the creek comes in. . . . [I]t smelt like the very [dam]nation.” Then there were the tanyards in the ravine where various incarnations of “the fragrant town drunkard” Jimmy Finn (Pap Finn in Huck Finn and Si Higgins in “Autobiography of a Damned Fool”) sleep with the hogs and die in a tanning vat “of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion.” According to Sam’s autobiographical dictation, Judge Clemens once tried to reform Jimmy Finn “but did not succeed,” much like the “new judge” in St. Petersburg who fails to reform Pap in chapter 5 of Huck Finn. All available evidence suggests that Jimmy Finn hastened his own inglorious demise in 1845, when Sam was nine, by selling his body to one of the local sawbones for whiskey money.26

  At the very least, the presence in Hannibal of slavery and the meatpacking plants when Sam was a boy should dispel the myth of the bucolic village, the idyllic “white town drowsing in the sunshine” of “Old Times on the Mississippi” or the allegorical “Delectable Land” of Tom Sawyer.27 Not until 1851, with the start of construction on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad along the river, was Bear Creek finally covered through town, becoming an underground sewer. While Sam may have depicted his hometown through a haze of nostalgia as the near-idyllic St. Petersburg in Tom Sawyer, he portrayed it in increasingly realistic terms during the course of his career: as Guilford in Simon Wheeler, Detective (ca. 1877), Bricksville in Huck Finn, Camelot in A Connecticut Yankee, Dawson’s Landing in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Hadleyburg in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), Eseldorf (or ass-town) in “The Chronicle of Young Satan” version of The Mysterious Stranger (1900), and Indiantown in “What Was It?” (1903). In what Henry Nash Smith has called “the matter of Hannibal,” as in many other literary trends during his career, Sam was ahead of the curve. He pioneered the so-called revolt from the village over a generation before Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920).

  Then there was the grinding poverty of Sam’s hardscrabble b
oyhood. “In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn’t know it,” he remembered in 1890, because “everybody was comfortable.” Not necessarily. He readily allowed elsewhere that “the class lines were quite clearly drawn” in the village—that is, some families were less equal than others, particularly the white-trash, dirt-poor Blankenships, who lived in a ramshackle, barnlike building behind the Clemens home on Hill Street and were effectively ostracized by respectable folks. The paterfamilias, Woodson Blankenship, was a peckerwood from South Carolina, another one of the models for Muff Potter in Tom Sawyer. In the Hannibal of Sam’s childhood, the position of town drunk was practically an elected office. In 1845, when Sam was nine, the elder Blankenship’s name appeared on the roll of tax delinquents. Much as Huck’s mother is absent from all the stories in which he appears, moreover, Mother Blankenship is never explicitly mentioned in any of Sam’s reminiscences about the family; in “Villagers of 1840–3” he merely notes in passing that the parents were “paupers and drunkards.” The oldest son Bence was “a hard case with certain good traits,”28 including his charity toward the fugitive slave Neriam Todd. He earned the family livelihood by fishing.

  Bence’s younger brother Tom Blankenship was “a kindly young heathen.” That is, he was exactly like Huck, an urchin and juvenile pariah. As Paine reported, he was “a ruin of rags, a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart and possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of conduct to any living soul.” Tom, “ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed,” was also the envy of all the other boys because as an outcast and untouchable he was “the only really independent person” in the village. Younger than Ben Clemens but four years older than Sam, Tom Blankenship “was a good boy, notwithstanding his circumstances,” Sam averred in 1906. “To my mind he was a better boy” than a pair of “swells of the ancient days” put together: Henry Beebe, the son of the slave trader, and John or Jim Reagan, another model for the “new boy” in Tom Sawyer, whose family had moved to Hannibal from St. Louis. Because there was no free public education in the village at the time, none of the nine Blankenship ragamuffins attended school—another reason they were envied by the other children. Not that Tom Blankenship lived an altogether enviable life. He spent most of the winter of 1861, when he was thirty years old and Sam was silver mining in Nevada, in the county lockup for stealing turkeys. Though Sam heard that Tom eventually moved to Montana and became a judge, the truth is probably much more mundane. He likely died in middle age of cholera in Missouri.29

  Tom’s sisters were no less the victims of their parents’ poverty. Sam once insisted that in his hometown “no young girl was ever insulted, or seduced, or even scandalously gossiped about. Such things were not even dreamed of in that society, much less spoken of and referred to as possibilities.” He knew better. As he makes clear in “Villagers of 1840–3,” he was familiar with adultery, prostitution, child marriage, and acts of rape in the Hannibal of his boyhood. Some of the Blankenship girls were in fact accused of prostitution—“not proven,”30 Sam hastened to add, though among the businesses in the town before he left in 1853 were a couple of bawdy houses. It was hardly the pastoral village of legend. As early as the fall of 1846 the Hannibal Gazette reported on “the fearful inroads that vice, in its worst forms, and all kinds of immorality are making in Hannibal.” Years later, upon learning that Tom’s sister Becca had died, he noted that she had worked as a housekeeper for a Hannibal family for forty-five years and “was a highly respected lady” and “a member of the Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman.” Becca may in fact have been Tom’s twin.31 Eventually, Sam wrote in 1897, the Blankenship family “played out”—the phrase refers to an exhausted mine—“and disappeared.”32

  Even the play of the village children was fraught with danger. Sam claimed that as a child in Hannibal he nearly drowned nine times. He was rescued once by a slave who “plucked me out of Bear Creek by the hair of my head when I was going down for the third time,” on another occasion by a slave who worked for a local hotel, and a third time, when he was nine, by a tailor’s apprentice. On still another occasion, he recalled that he once “jumped overboard from the ferry boat in the middle of the river” on a stormy day “to get my hat” and “swam two or three miles after it (and got it,) while all the town collected on the wharf and for an hour or so looked out across the angry waste of ‘whitecaps’ toward where people said Sam Clemens was last seen before he went down.” Before he returned the townspeople began to fire a cannon to raise his body, an incident he later incorporated into both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His nearest brush with death, however, occurred when he swam across the river near the town of Scipio:

  When I got near the other shore one leg cramped. I crawled up on the bank and rubbed my leg to get the cramps out of it. The sun was going down and the chill of evening was setting in and I had to swim back. After a while I started and when I got halfway across my leg commenced drawing up, then the other began to cramp, but I swam on. Once, when near the shore, I thought I would let down, but was afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep I was a goner, but finally my knees struck the sand and I crawled out. That was the closest call I ever had.

  Jane Clemens plucked up her courage, according to her son, and remarked that “people who are born to be hanged are safe in the water.” Her warning echoes Jim’s advice to Huck: “keep ’way fum de water as much as you kin,” even though you “don’t run no resk” of drowning “’kase it’s down in de bills dat you’s gwyne to get hung.”33

  Whether or not Sam nearly drowned nine times, certainly this incident occurred: in August 1847, less than five months after the death of Marshall Clemens, Sam’s ten-year-old classmate Clint Levering drowned in the Mississippi while swimming with friends, including eleven-year-old Sam, who tried in vain to rescue him. As he described the accident in Life on the Mississippi, Clint (renamed Lem Hackett) “drowned—on a Sunday. He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing. Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil.” In fact, Clint probably drowned on Friday, August 13. Sam changed the day of the week in order to satirize the Sunday school books whose morality required sinful boys who played on the Sabbath to be stricken dead in retribution for their misbehavior. He included this entry in “Villagers of 1840–3”: “Clint Levering drowned. His less fortunate brother lived to have a family and be rich and respected.” Clint’s death also became grist for Sam’s literary mill in Tom Sawyer when Huck alludes to the drowning of “Bill Turner” the previous summer.34

  There was yet another childhood mishap: Sam’s boyhood chum Tom Nash, a fellow member of the Cadets of Temperance, was injured while skating on the river. He broke through the ice and, though he climbed out, caught a chill, followed by a cold, then scarlet fever, and lost his hearing. He worked for the rest of his life around Hannibal as a house and sign painter, glazier, and paper hanger and became an object of pity. “He is a young man raised in our midst, and we hope our citizens will encourage him. He works cheap,” the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger editorialized in 1856. In “The Chronicle of Young Satan” Sam reimagined Nash in the character of Nikolaus Bauman who, after a similar accident, suffers an even worse fate: Nikolaus is left “a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying night and day for the blessed relief of death.”35

  Sam also long remembered a boyhood prank that nearly ended in injury or worse. With Will Bowen, John Briggs, and perhaps one or two other boys he dislodged a boulder on Holliday’s Hill that

  rolled down the slope, tearing up saplings, mowing bushes down like grass, ripping and crushing and smashing everything in its path—eternally splintered and scattered a wood pile at the foot of the hill, and then sprang from the high bank clear over a dray in the road—the negro glanced up once and dodged—and the next second it made infinitesimal mince-meat of a frame cooper-shop, and the coopers swarmed out like bees. Then we said it was perfectly magnificent, and left. Becaus
e the coopers were starting up the hill to inquire.

  Sam not only mentioned the prank in The Innocents Abroad (1869) but reminisced with Briggs about the incident upon his return to Hannibal a half century later. Briggs remembered that the boys had dug “the dirt out from under [the rock] for three Sundays,” and Sam added without a hint of remorse that “if it had killed that negro we would have had a dead negro on our hands with not a cent to pay for him.” After the boulder smashed into the cooper’s shop, the boys ran home and “played innocents,” though “the patroles gave us a close chase.”36