The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  But of all the acts of violence with which the teenage Sam Clemens was familiar, none compares to the brutal murders in Union Township, twenty-five miles northwest of Hannibal, of ten-year-old Thomas Bright and his twelve-year-old sister Susannah on October 30, 1849. While the children were gathering nuts in the woods near their home, they were assaulted by a slave known as Glascock’s Ben, who bludgeoned Thomas to death and raped Susannah before killing her and cutting off her ears and nose with a Barlow knife. The case became a cause célèbre in Marion County. At the trial, the prosecution alleged Glascock’s Ben had raped three women in Virginia before he was sold to Thomas Glascock and moved with him to Missouri. The implication was that the Virginia authorities permitted him to be sold and carried out of state because of his value as chattel. Ben was convicted and, as was normal at the time, his execution was a public spectacle. Early in the afternoon of January 11, 1850, he was strung up before a crowd of some five thousand people—the first legal execution in the history of Marion County. Sam may have witnessed the hanging. If so, he never explicitly mentioned it. But he apparently reimagined it in the execution of the murderer Robert Hardy in his posthumously published sketch “A Curious Scrap of History” (written in 1894), set in a fictionalized Hannibal in the 1840s: “People came from miles around to see the hanging, they brought cakes and cider, also the women and children, and made a picnic of the matter. It was the largest crowd the village had ever seen. The rope that hanged Hardy was eagerly bought up, in inch samples, for everybody wanted a memento of the memorable event.”37

  Whether or not he viewed the execution, Sam certainly was familiar with Ben’s crimes. The transcript of the trial in Palmyra was splashed over the first two pages of Ament’s Missouri Courier for December 6, 1849, and Ben’s confession to the crimes while walking to the gallows was printed in the paper six weeks later and subsequently reprinted in pamphlet form. Ben admitted that he thought his life would be spared because, like Tom Driscoll in Pudd’nhead Wilson, he was precious property. In any event, Sam alluded to Ben’s atrocities in chapter 29 of Tom Sawyer when Injun Joe orders a confederate to mutilate Widow Douglas: “You slit her nostrils—you notch her ears like a sow!” (In the original manuscript, his command is even more striking: “You cut her nose off—and her ears.”) Sam referred again to Glascock’s Ben in “Villagers of 1840–3” as “the hanged nigger” who “raped and murdered a girl . . . in the woods.” As late as 1901, over a half century after the gruesome crimes, Sam solicited information about the incident from his publisher because he was planning a story based on it in which Tom and Huck rescue the children. He could not remember names but, as he noted, the culprit “raped a young girl and clubbed her and her young brother to death. It was in Marion County, Missouri.”38

  One other dimension to the case of Glascock’s Ben is worth mentioning. On October 26, 1849, Thomas Hart Benton, U.S. senator from Missouri, spoke in Hannibal while campaigning for reelection. He was engaged in the political fight of his life. He had announced his opposition to slavery earlier that year and his political enemies in the state, where politics was both a form of entertainment and a contact sport, accused him of “free soil” sympathies. Sam mentions Benton in chapter 22 of Tom Sawyer: “the greatest man in the world (as Tom supposed), Mr. Benton, an actual United States Senator, proved an overwhelming disappointment—for he was not twenty-five feet high.” Ament was even more disappointed. A rabidly proslavery Democrat, he filled the Missouri Courier with invective denouncing Benton, including one article titled “Benton’s Speech—The Dictator in the Ditch.”39 Whatever traction Benton may have earned with his campaign appearance in Hannibal dissipated four days later with the murder of the Bright children by a criminal slave. Benton was defeated in his bid for reelection, and he never again served in the Senate.

  Despite his poor health as an infant, Sam was a robust adolescent. With the exception of the time he had the measles, he bragged at his seventieth birthday celebration in 1905 that “I have seldom taken a dose of medicine, and have still seldomer needed one.” To be sure, he suffered from chilblains every winter from the age of five until early adulthood, when he cured them with kerosene, a toxic allopathic remedy. Luckily, he escaped the yellow fever epidemic in 1849–50 that threatened, according to his mother, to “depopulate the town,” and also the annual cholera epidemics along the river, though eventually he became bedridden with the disease while living in St. Louis in 1853. When he was ill, Jane Clemens doctored him with home remedies, “glorified quack-poisons,” and patented medicines such as Perry Davis’s Pain-Killer, a tonic that contained alcohol, camphor, capsicum, gum myrrh, and gum opium,40 the same nostrum Aunt Polly administers to the hero and Tom to the family cat in Tom Sawyer.

  Sam also drank Mississippi River water for its purported medicinal benefits, a variation on the custom of clay eating practiced in the South. “People who drink it never like to drink any other [water],” he said. Unlike the clear water of the Ohio River, the Big Muddy was wholesome and nutritious, according to folk belief, “and a man that drank Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to.” The “good alluvial loam” would “line you inside with more aluminum than would otherwise be the case.” Every tumbler of the father of waters “holds nearly an acre of land in solution,” Sam joked in Life on the Mississippi, and if you “let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger; the other, thirst.” Charles Dickens drank Mississippi River water—what he dubbed “liquid mud” during his North American speaking tour in 1842—and, he remarked in American Notes, “It is considered wholesome by the natives, and is something more opaque than gruel. I have seen water like it at the filter-shops, but nowhere else.”41

  The treatment of mental illness in Hannibal during Sam’s childhood was more medieval than modern. He was familiar with at least two cases. Elizabeth Campbell Bowen, sister of the Bowen brothers, was mentally disabled from birth and suffered her entire life from neglect. Sam described her plight in chapter 53 of Life on the Mississippi. Startled one night by a girl who carried a skull and “wore a shroud and a doughface,” Eliza had “looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions”; she “went mad” and “never got a shred of her mind back.” She spent “[t]hirty-six years in a madhouse” so that “some young fools might have some fun!” In August 1876 Will Bowen wrote Sam that his sister had finally died “in the Asylum.” Sam subsequently considered incorporating the incident into a Huck-Tom sequel he never wrote in which a young girl “made up a skull and doughface into an apparition and so frightened an old woman that she went crazy.”

  Then there was the son of one of the local physicians, James Ratcliff, who lived in chains in a shed behind the family home: “Fed through a hole. Would not wear clothes, winter or summer. Could not have fire. . . . Believed his left hand had committed a mortal sin,” so he “chopped it off.” He became the model for the character of Crazy Meadows, “a slender, tall, wild-looking man” in the “Schoolhouse Hill” version of The Mysterious Stranger.42

  There was one hazard Sam fortunately never faced: the barbarity of Injun Joe, depicted in Tom Sawyer as the locus of all evil in St. Petersburg. Injun Joe Douglass was in fact an innocuous figure, employed by the Fuqua family and others in the village as a man of all work. He was a mestizo, part Mexican and part Osage or Cherokee, and he had apparently survived a scalping as a teenager in Oklahoma before arriving in Hannibal in the early 1850s. He lived in a hollow tree on Bear Creek and, according to Barney Farthing, he “was a great friend of the boys.” In his only nonfictional reference to Joe, Sam simply remarked that he was one of the “intemperate ne’er-do-wells in Hannibal.”43 Certainly he was not the hellhound portrayed in Tom Sawyer.

  In the spring of 1849 Hannibal became a way station to the West, a crossroads during t
he Gold Rush. It was “just far enough north to be where West was South and East was North,” James M. Cox once explained. A decade earlier, six-day-per-week steamboat service had been established during the summer months between Keokuk, Iowa, sixty-five miles north of Hannibal, and St. Louis, about a hundred miles south as the buzzard flies, with travel connections to all points on the compass. By 1846 three steamboats on average stopped in Hannibal every day, a total of 1,080 during the year. “All emigrants went through there,” Sam noted. Over two hundred Hannibal citizens rushed to California after the discovery of gold, about eighty of them in the spring of 1849. Among them were Bill Briggs (John’s brother); Sam’s former teacher Sam Cross; his former classmate Reuel Gridley; Ben Hawkins (Laura’s brother); Benjamin Horr (Elizabeth’s brother); Hugh Meredith, the Clemens family physician, and his son Charles; Neil Moss (Mary’s brother); William Owsley; and Sam’s cousin Jim Quarles. The next year, Archibald Robards—a local entrepreneur who owned a flour mill, a machine shop and foundry, a hotel, and slaves and was one of the elders in the Campbellite church and its most generous benefactor—led a group of fifteen men, including his son John, Sam’s schoolmate, to California via New Mexico. “I remember the departure of the cavalcade when it spurred westward,” Sam remembered over a half century later. “We were all there to see and to envy.” As Jane and Pamela informed Orion in late January 1850, “Nearly all those who went from here last spring have written back that they are making large fortunes.” Others were not so lucky: Melicent Holliday became a widow after her husband Richard, for whom Holliday’s Hill is named, joined the exodus and died in California. A half century later, Sam condemned the “Californian rush for wealth” for the change it wrought in the nation. It “begot the lust for money which is the rule of life to-day, and the hardness and cynicism which is the spirit of to-day.”44 But when he traveled west to the mining camps in 1861 he was no less culpable, ironically, than the hoards he condemned for succumbing to the sound of the chink of gold.

  The Gold Rush also funneled a steady stream of vagrants and varmints through the village. Barney Farthing recalled that “every day during the spring and summer” of 1849 and 1850 “long trains of canvas covered wagons, drawn by horses, mules, or oxen” passed through Hannibal. “Long processions of big whiskered men, wearing red shirts, blue jeans trousers, and high top boots, carrying at shoulder or belt, guns, pistols, and big butcher knives, rode or walked beside these trains.” Sam remembered in particular a “young California emigrant who was stabbed with the bowie knife by a drunken comrade: I saw the red life gush from his breast”—probably the murder in a local saloon reported in the Hannibal Courier on April 11, 1850. Injun Joe’s threats to the Widow Douglas are also likely based on an actual incident in May 1850, when a young Californian passing through the town shouted “coarse challenges and obscenities” at the door of the Widow Weir, who shot and killed him. Sam also recalled, both in interviews and his autobiography, how the boys in his gang “used to dig in the little plot” at the mouth of McDowell’s Cave “in emulation of the Forty-niners, who were passing through our town. We’d keep an account of the gold we dug every day,”45 much as he mined for precious metals in Nevada in 1861–62 and much as Tom and Huck hunt for buried treasure in chapters 25–26 of Tom Sawyer.

  Explored in 1819 by a hunter named Jack Simms and located some two miles downriver from Bear Creek, the limestone labyrinth was called Simms’s Cave or Saltpeter Cave by the whites in the region before it was purchased by Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell—a rabid Southerner, prominent St. Louis physician, and founder of the first medical school in the city—and renamed McDowell’s Cave. While privately owned, it was open to the public until late 1845, when McDowell sealed it with an iron or oaken door so that he could stockpile munitions, either to support an American military invasion of Mexico or to repel a Mexican invasion of the American Southwest. In fact, several dozen men from the Hannibal region had joined the army to fight in Mexico—including “Honest John” Hawkins and his son Ben, the father and brother of Sam’s sweetheart Laura Hawkins—and had bivouacked in Santa Fe. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, McDowell unbarred the door and again opened it to visitors—with a twist. He permitted a relative, Dr. E. D. McDowell, to install a sarcophagus, a copper cylinder filled with alcohol containing the body of his fourteen-year-old daughter, in the cave. He believed the body would eventually mummify like the bodies of several Indians who had been found in the saltpeter caves of Kentucky. But as Sam explained in Life on the Mississippi, “The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it.”46 Given the threat of vandalism, McDowell was compelled to remove and bury the body after only three or four years. Over the next decade, the cave reportedly sheltered escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, and when the Civil War erupted McDowell may have again cached weapons there for the Confederate Army. At the end of the century, Jesse James may have used it as a hideout.

  But in the late 1840s the “great Missouri labyrinth” was a favorite recreation site for local residents. Both Laura Hawkins and Orion in his final Lorio letter to the St. Louis Reveille mention picnics there. “Usually my elder sister” and Sam’s sister Pamela, Laura recalled, accompanied them “to see that we didn’t get lost among the winding passages where our candles lighted up the great stalagmites and stalactites, and where water was dripping from the stone roof overhead.” The boys in town also used it as a hideout, though at the time it had been only partially mapped and some erstwhile explorers, according to local legend, had starved to death in its depths. Orion speculated in 1847 that it was “at least eight or ten square miles” in extent. In 1852, in one of the first pieces he wrote for publication outside Hannibal, Sam reported that the cave was “of unknown length; it has innumerable passages, which are not unlike the streets of a large city. The ceiling arches over, and from it hang beautiful stalactites, which sparkle in the light of the torches, and remind one of the fairy palaces spoken of in the Arabian Nights. There are several springs, rivers, and wells, some of which are of unknown depth.” In the final chapters of Tom Sawyer, Tom and Becky become lost in McDougal’s Cave, the name given “the vast labyrinth of crooked aisles” in the novel. “It was said,” Sam wrote in the novel, “that one might wander days and nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never find the end of the cave; and that he might go down, and down, and still down, into the earth, and it was just the same—labyrinth under labyrinth, and no end to any of them. No man ‘knew’ the cave. That was an impossible thing.”

  The Hannibal boys explored it anyway, according to Barney Farthing. One day in 1850, two years after the end of the Mexican-American War and a few months after the corpse of the McDowell girl was moved to the family plot in St. Louis, the intrepid band of boys gathered “at our rendezvous, the foot of Lover’s Leap,” south of town on a direct route to the cavern. Like Tom at the head of Tom Sawyer’s Gang, Sam was the “self-appointed and undisputed leader” of the group on these excursions. In addition to Sam and Barney, the group included Tom Blankenship; Bob Bodine, who nearly forty years later would become a U.S. congressman from Missouri; John Briggs; George Butler, the nephew of the Civil War general Ben “Beast” Butler; and John Meredith. They were outfitted with “purloined candles and horse pistols that were too rusty to fire.” The upshot of the expedition was that the boys became lost in the cave for thirty hours, much as Tom and Becky become lost after the school picnic. During the night they spent belowground, according to Farthing, “all of us recalled” the stories about folks who had died in the cave. “Finally we fell asleep, sobbing.” They were rescued by a search party the next day.47

  In the summer of 1850 Orion left St. Louis to edit a weekly paper in Hannibal, a move he had been contemplating for several months. The telegraph had arrived in Hannibal in September 1849, wiring the town to the rest of the world, so the moment seemed
propitious. As early as January 1850 he apparently invited Sam to join him in the venture, though his brother hung fire. “Sam says he can’t leave Ament,” Jane notified Orion. Sam intended “to make him pay wages” after his apprenticeship ended “and you would want him to wait.” She urged Orion to find some St. Louis investors to purchase the paper for him. “I think about the time you come up they will be through and you can get it at your own way. I think if you could get some of the printers in St. L[ouis] that are doing well to buy the of[fice] and give you an intrust [interest] let you come up and take charge of the office, get some old person to assist a little in editing merely to have their name.” He could employ his twelve-year-old brother Henry as a printer’s devil, and she “could board the hands.” In February, Henry acknowledged in a letter to Orion that “if you come and buy the Journal office” he would apprentice with him. In April, Jane advised Orion that J. S. Buchanan had put the Hannibal Journal up for sale. That same month Orion contacted a New York real estate agent and offered to sell parcels of the Tennessee land for ten cents an acre through his agency and the next month he received fifty dollars for a section. This money, in addition to five hundred dollars he borrowed at an exorbitant rate of interest from his distant cousin John Moorman Johnson, a Baptist minister and farmer who lived near Hannibal, enabled Orion to buy a handpress and type and to move his family from the second floor of Grant’s Drug Store back across Hill Street into the clapboard house his father had built. Jane took in a few boarders, including Orion’s apprentices, to help make ends meet. “She used the provisions I supplied her,” Orion recalled. “We therefore had a regular diet of bacon, butter, bread, and coffee.”48