The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  A Swiss girl lay on her dying bed,

  Far from her native land,

  And wildly thought in troubled dreams

  By childhood’s home to stand.

  With fancy’s eye, she saw the cot,

  And shadowy mountains round,

  And heard the Swiss boy’s ringing horn

  Far through the valley sound.

  But all was changed, for they were gone,

  Who gave the scene its charm,

  The grey-haired father’s stooping form,

  Her mother’s brow so calm.

  With aching heart, she turned away,

  “This is no home for me”—

  She started up with heavenly joy,

  “Oh what is this I see?”

  “I see a city built of gold,

  With pearly gates so fair,

  No sun doth shine, or day doth dawn,

  Nor sorrow enter there.”

  “Before God’s throne, bright angels throng,

  My Father’s face I see,

  A blessed home I’ve found at last,

  Dear ones I come to thee.”

  Strange as it may seem, this doggerel—with its archaic diction, lockstep meter, and maudlin sentimentality—betrays all the earmarks of the hackneyed verse Sam had written earlier for the Hannibal Journal. And it resembles in particular “The Heart’s Lament,” the utterly conventional ode composed in twenty-four lines of iambic tetrameter that had appeared in the Daily Journal the previous year. “The Swiss Girl’s Home” also shares a rhyme and metrical scheme with Felicia Hemans’s chestnut “Casabianca,” and it foreshadows a dream Becky Thatcher has while she and Tom are lost in McDougal’s Cave in Tom Sawyer: “I’ve seen such a beautiful country in my dream,” Becky tells Tom. “I reckon we are going there.”14 That is, at age eighteen Sam was fully able to compose with a straight face the type of stricken verse he burlesqued in Emmeline Grangerford’s “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d” in chapter 17 of Huck Finn.

  Sam returned briefly to New York from Philadelphia—no details survive of this trip—before he beat a hasty retreat to Muscatine. In December 1853 a fire in the New York print shops of Harper & Bros. and George F. Colledge & Bros., while he was working in Philadelphia, had thrown dozens of typesetters out of work in an already depressed job market. Sam reluctantly surrendered to the financial stress of trying to survive on a jour printer’s income at the end of his Wanderjahr, as he explained in 1899. He traveled sometime in late spring or early summer 1854 back to St. Louis, “sitting upright in the smoking-car two or three days and nights,” then connecting by steamboat to Muscatine. He was so tired he “fell asleep at once, with my clothes on, and didn’t wake again for thirty-six hours.” Throughout the trip, some twelve hundred miles without a layover, Sam’s “head was in a turmoil night and day fierce enough and exhausting enough to upset a stronger reason than mine.” For protection he traveled with a revolver he had purchased in the East, though he remarked in jest when he finally arrived at Orion’s home that he had bought it to kill his brother. That is, he returned home with a pistol in his pocket if only to prove he no longer needed his brother’s permission to pack it.15

  But Sam had no future in Muscatine. For that matter, neither did Orion. He was half owner of a Whig newspaper, but as soon as he settled there, he had changed his party affiliation from Whig to Republican to signal his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.16 The act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the western territories to “popular sovereignty”—that is, to settlement by slaveholders. Opponents of slavery, including Orion, were outraged, and passage of the act led inexorably to border ruffians like William Quantrill and to the rehearsal for the Civil War in “bloody Kansas.”

  Sam worked in the Muscatine Journal shop for a few weeks to earn a grubstake. His most vivid memory of this period was of a lunatic named Bill Israeel, who

  caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it, unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil. I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn’t have any half-measures; I must say he was the sole and only son of the Devil—he whetted his knife on his boot. It did not seem worthwhile to make trouble about a little thing like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and saved my skin whole.17

  He re-created the incident in chapters 20–21 of The Prince and the Pauper (1882), where a crazed hermit and self-described archangel (apparently a fallen one) threatens to kill young King Edward with a rusty butcher knife he slowly whets.

  Sam returned to St. Louis by early August 1854, when he joined a citizen militia charged with suppressing a nativist riot. Thomas Hart Benton, standing (but defeated) for reelection to Congress, had appealed for immigrant votes and on election day, August 7, the local Know-Nothing firebrands in response marauded through the ethnic neighborhoods of the city, killing ten people, wounding thirty-three, and damaging nearly a hundred buildings. Sam likely sympathized more with the mob than with the militia he had joined. As Louis J. Budd notes, “it is fair to say that he watched” the riots “without disapproval.” Nevertheless, from the window of his boardinghouse he “saw some of the fightings and killings” and so the next day he went “to an armory where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under command of a military man. We drilled till about ten o’clock at night; then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before them.” The militia had been mobilized to protect the offices of Anzeiger des Westens, the German-language newspaper he had helped to typeset the year before, at Third Street between Chestnut and Market—a site that is today almost directly beneath the Gateway Arch. “Our column moved at once,” Sam remembered. “It was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy. We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was behind my friend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home.” Ironically, Sam soon remarked in one of his letters to the Muscatine Journal that police were “queer animals and have remarkably nice notions as to the great law of self-preservation. I doubt if the man is now living that ever caught one at a riot.”18 Not only does this comment anticipate Sam’s lifelong criticism of police corruption and incompetence, but the incident also foreshadows Sam’s “campaign that failed” seven years later, even to his desertion from the Marion Rangers at the outset of the Civil War. He always preferred flight to fight.

  In St. Louis during these months Sam made an initial effort to become a riverboat pilot. “When I was a boy,” he reminisced in “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875), there was “but one permanent ambition among my comrades” in Hannibal. It was “to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.” He was so eager to go on the river that, at the age of sixteen, he persuaded a sailor to tattoo “an anchor and rope on the back of my left hand with India ink. The color was a deep, dark blue, and extravagantly conspicuous.”19 Sam approached the crews of a few boats “that lay packed together like sardines at the long St. Louis wharf” but “got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks.” With a letter of introduction from Orion, he also approached James J. Clemens Jr. in August 1855 for a loan to pay a pilot to teach him the river, but his cousin refused. He had already advanced his poor relations plenty of money over the years, and he thought Sam “should stick to his present trade or art” rather than pursue a pipe dream.20

  Sam resided in a boardinghouse at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Washington Street owned by the Pavey family, relatives of Hannibalians. “It was a large, cheap place & had in it a good many young fellows who were students at a Commercial College,” he remembered. His roommate, Jacob Burrough, was a journeyman chairmaker, a r
abid republican and autodidact “fond of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott & Disraeli” and the model for the character of Barrow in The American Claimant (1892), “a short man about forty years old, with sandy hair, no beard, and a pleasant face badly freckled but alive and intelligent, and he wore slop-shop clothing which was neat but showed wear.” Sam and Burrough seem to have bonded over books. Sam remembered that his roommate was the only other lover of literature in the house. Twenty-two years later Sam conceded that at the time he had been “a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right. . . . Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense & pitiful chuckle-headedness—& an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19–20.” Sam again became a habitué of the theater, attending performances of the St. Louis Varieties, Ingomar the Barbarian starring George W. Jamieson at the People’s Theater, and The Merchant of Venice (“I had always thought that this was a comedy, until they made a farce out of it”).21

  He returned to work for the Evening News, though he lasted there only a few months. “He was a good printer,” his coworker William Waite remembered, “but mighty independent.” After all, he had earned a living at his craft in busier shops and bigger cities. But he was occasionally tardy for work and Charles G. Ramsey, owner and editor of the News, badgered him. According to Waite, Ramsey “would say: ‘Here’s that —— boy late again,’” the type of rebuke Sam resented his whole life. “One morning he turned on Ramsey and replied: ‘Take your dashed situation, and go to (a warm country)!’”—or words to that effect. “He left the office and we heard nothing of him for several years.” After burning his bridges in St. Louis, Sam again fled upriver to rejoin Orion, who had recently resettled in Keokuk, Iowa.22

  As Sam relates the tale in his autobiography, Orion was a victim of romantic entanglements when he became engaged to two women simultaneously, one of them Mollie Stotts of Keokuk, the daughter of one of his mother’s friends, and the other “a winning and pretty girl” who lived forty miles away in Quincy, Illinois. “He didn’t know whether to marry the Keokuk one or the Quincy one,” Sam recalled in 1906, “or whether to try to marry both of them and suit everyone concerned. But the Keokuk girl soon settled that for him. She was a master spirit and she ordered him to write the Quincy girl and break off that match, which he did. Then he married the Keokuk girl and they began a struggle for life which turned out to be a difficult enterprise, and very unpromising.” On December 19, 1854, Mollie and Orion were wed in Keokuk. On March 14, 1855, apparently at her insistence, Orion began to offer his half interest in the Muscatine Journal for sale; and in June 1855 they moved to Keokuk, population 650, eighty miles downriver from Muscatine, fifteen miles from Hannibal, and about two hundred miles north of St. Louis, so that she could be near her family.23

  At the tender age of twenty, Mollie was nine years younger than Orion and a year older than Sam. But the way the younger brother told the story a quarter century later, she was a regular harridan and

  a bald-headed old maid. She was poor & taboo; she wanted position & clothes, oh, so badly; she had the snaffle on his ass before he knew what he was about—for he was editor of a daily paper & a good catch. She is saturated to the marrow with the most malignant form of Presbyterianism,—that sort which considers the saving of one’s own paltry soul the first & supreme end & object of life. So you see she has harried him into the church several times, & then made religion so intolerable to him with her prayings & Bible readings & her other & eternal pious clack-clack that it has had the effect of harrying him out of it again.

  Orion “bought a little bit of a job-printing plant—on credit, of course—and at once put prices down to where not even the apprentices could get a living out of it.”24 After Orion married, Jane moved from Muscatine to St. Louis to live with the Moffetts.

  On the surface, Orion’s future again seemed promising. The proprietor of a print shop, unlike the editor of a newspaper, need not pander to public opinion, express political views, or hew a party line. When Sam arrived in Keokuk from St. Louis after quitting the Evening News, his brother offered him five dollars a week and board to work for him and Sam agreed. After all, he had no job in St. Louis to which he might return. “I worked in that little job office,” he remembered, “without ever collecting a cent of wages, for Orion was never able to pay anything.” Henry and Sam lived in the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office on the third floor of the Ogden Building on Main Street, much to the annoyance of the music teacher on the second floor, until Sam took singing and piano lessons from him. The range of Sam’s musical talent was not extensive; according to his friend George F. Carvell, a fellow steamboatman, he could play but one song on the guitar, “Star of the Evening, Beautiful Star,” and he sang and played on the piano only a handful of tunes, including a few Negro spirituals and “Grasshopper on the Sweet Potato Vine,” a ditty about a horse by the name of Methusalem. But he continued to read widely. According to Paine, the residents of Keokuk remembered that Sam often carried around a volume of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales. Several years later, Sam would publish a parody of Poe’s “The Raven” in the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise.25

  Coincidentally, the Keokuk real estate market began to boom in 1856, soon after Sam settled there. “Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable,” he recalled, “and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks.” The town grew like a mushroom in manure sheltered from the sun. According to the 1856 Keokuk directory, which Sam helped set in type, the city boasted twenty-three brickyards, the same number of lawyers, nineteen stone quarries, twelve churches, ten butcher shops, eight lumberyards, three breweries, and an undertaker. From only 620 residents in 1847 the population burgeoned to over 6,000 in 1855, when Sam moved there, to 11,000 a year later, and to 15,000 in 1857, the year he left. Over six hundred houses were erected in the town in 1856 alone. Sam bought several building lots in Keokuk at the height of the excitement, probably on credit. The next year property values plummeted, an early example of the poor investment decisions that plagued Sam his entire life. As Kevin Mac Donnell notes, “A downtown hotel was auctioned off in 1857 for unpaid taxes for one-tenth of what it had sold for the year before, and a thousand city lots were put up at public auction for back taxes. Lots that sold for $1,000 a few years before were sold for $10 in 1857.” Keokuk “was one of the most stirring and enterprising young cities in America,” Sam remembered a decade later, “but railroads and land speculations killed it in a single night, almost.”26 He resided in Keokuk for fifteen months and left just before the real estate crash, though he may have first worked briefly as a printer across the river in Warsaw, Illinois. It is among the least documented periods in his life and one of the few lacunae in the record.

  While living in Keokuk, Sam became a temporary convert to phrenology, a pseudoscience that presumed a person’s traits or “temperaments” could be judged by the curvature of the head. The belief anticipated his mature conviction that character is predetermined, a product of nature and nurture over which the individual has virtually no control. “One of the most frequent arrivals in our village of Hannibal was the peripatetic phrenologist,” he remembered in his autobiography, “and he was popular, and always welcome. He gathered the people together and gave them a gratis lecture on the marvels of phrenology, then felt their bumps and made an estimate of the result, at twenty-five cents per head.” When his own bumps were “read” or palpitated, Sam was told he possessed a well-developed organ of sanguinity. On the other hand, Orion—according to the lumps on his skull—possessed an overdeveloped “nervous temperament.” Sam was so intrigued that he copied passages into his notebook almost verbatim from George Sumner Weaver’s Lectures on Mental Science According to the Philosophy of Phrenology (1852). Though he later qualified his belief in the pseudos
cience, even referring to “phrenological frauds” in Tom Sawyer and to phrenology as a “quack” branch of medicine in Huck Finn, he occasionally invoked its jargon for the rest of his life, as in a February 1862 letter to his mother and sister in which he cautioned them to avoid people with “the organ of Hope preposterously developed” and in chapter 31 of Roughing It, where he referred to a stage driver’s “bump of locality.”27

  At the age of twenty, a handsome and eligible beau, Sam was romantically linked with “a right smart chance of gals in Keokuk,” as he later put it. Among them were Ella Creel, his second cousin on the Lampton side of the family; Ella Patterson, a relative of his sister-in-law Mollie Clemens; Belle Stotts, Mollie’s sister; Ann Virginia Ruffner, a visitor to Keokuk in May 1856 whom he escorted to church; Iowa Burns, who lived a block from the print shop; and the three daughters of a local alderman, near neighbors of Mollie’s family, Mary Jane (aka Mane), Esther (aka Ete), and especially their sister Annie Taylor. Both Mane and Annie were students at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Sam and Annie corresponded until at least June 1, 1857, and she subsequently became an English teacher at Lindenwood College in St. Charles, Missouri. Years later, Sam crossed paths with Mary Jane Taylor in the West. She died in Dayton, Nevada, in early September 1863 at the age of thirty-one.28