Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  418.24 five foolish virgins] Matthew 25:1–13.

  418.29–30 Twenty years ago Mr. Richmond had become possessed of Tom Sawyer’s cave . . . made a tourist-resort of it] The limestone cave that Clemens called “McDougal’s cave” in Tom Sawyer was during his childhood at first called Simms Cave for the brothers who discovered it, then Saltpetre Cave for the mineral found there (potassium nitrate, thought to be derived from bat guano), and finally McDowell’s Cave (see “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” note at 214.3–4; Sweets 1986b, 1–2). After the publication of Tom Sawyer in 1876, it began to be called Mark Twain Cave or Tom Sawyer’s Cave. Joshua Richmond was evidently one of several owners in or after 1886, when the cave formally opened to the public. Evan T. Cameron, guide to the cave since 1886 and later manager, established a “permanent tour route through the cave’s maze of passageways, built a small ticket building near the entrance, purchased lanterns that people could carry for lighting, hired cave guides, and advertised the attraction as Mark Twain Cave” (Weaver 2008, 15–16, 97). The current public entrance to the Mark Twain Cave “was blasted out of the hillside to make an easy, comfortable entrance” for the tourist, as the original “was a steep climb up the hill” (George Walley to John Lockwood, 21 Sept 2005, photocopy in CU-MARK).

  418.42–419.4 they make the finest kind of Portland cement there now . . . being ground into cement] In August 1901 the Atlas Portland Cement Company began construction of the “largest Portland cement plant in the United States and the first cement plant west of the Mississippi,” in Cave Hollow, where many of the entrances to the cave were situated (Sweets 1986a, 3). The telegram Mark Twain received has not been found.

  419.9–11 Reuel Gridley attended that school of ours . . . Then came the Mexican war and he volunteered] Reuel Colt Gridley (1829–70), who must have been about seventeen or eighteen years old when he attended Dawson’s school, enrolled in the Third Regiment Missouri Mounted Volunteers at the age of eighteen on 5 May 1847 in New London, Missouri, was mustered into service the following month, and was honorably discharged on 28 October 1848 (Missouri Digital Heritage 2009b, reel s912).

  419.11–21 A company of infantry was raised . . . and Mr. Hickman . . . was made captain of it . . . Hickman is dead—it is the old story] Philander A. Hickman (b. 1824) was born in Virginia. Unlike Gridley, he did not join the Missouri Volunteers. He enrolled in the infantry as a first lieutenant on 5 March 1847, was mustered into the Fourteenth Regiment on 9 April, and became a captain on 22 October. He married Sarah M. Brittingham (1828–89) on 11 May 1848, and was honorably discharged from the infantry on 25 July (Marion Census 1850, 309; Heitman 1903, 1:528; Robarts 1887, 30). After the discovery of gold in California, Hickman and two of his in-laws emigrated, but he returned to Hannibal in the 1850s and established a store which sold stoves and hardware. In the 1870s, he became a representative in the state legislature. Clemens had last seen him in Hannibal in 1882: “Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young han[d]somely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me—a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65, now, his graces all vanished” (17 May 1882 to OLC, CU-MARK, in MTL, 1:429). He was dead within three years (“The Emigration,” unidentified clipping in Meltzer 1960, 15; Fotheringham 1859, 30; Honeyman 1866, 26; Hallock 1877, 79, 178; Stone, Davidson, and McIntosh 1885, 115).

  419.21–22 As Susy said, “What is it all for?”] See the Autobiographical Dictation of 2 February 1906.

  419.23–420.3 Reuel Gridley went away to the wars . . . dead these many, many years—it is the old story] After he was discharged from the Volunteers in 1848, Gridley returned to Hannibal, where he worked as a carpenter and attempted but failed to learn piloting on the Mississippi River from steamboat captain Bart S. Bowen, who found him “so much given to larking, that he couldn’t learn” (“River News,” Cincinnati Commercial, 13 Feb 1865, 4). In September 1850 he married Susannah L. Snider (b. 1832?), and in 1852 left for California, where he operated an express mail service in Oroville; his wife joined him two years later. Before 1863, he moved to the Reese River area in Nevada and opened another store—Gridley, Hobart and Jacobs—in a mining camp that later became the town of Austin. Gridley, who described himself to Clemens as “Union to the backbone, but a Copperhead in sympathies,” made a bet on the Democratic candidate for mayor and lost to Dr. H. S. Herrick, who backed the Republican candidate. Gridley had agreed to give Herrick a fifty-pound sack of flour, “and carry it to him on his shoulder, a mile and a quarter, with a brass band at his heels playing ‘John Brown.’ ” If Gridley had won, Herrick was to have carried the flour “to the tune of ‘Dixie’ ” (17 May 1864 to JLC and PAM, L1, 282, 285–86 n. 11). After a year spent selling and reselling the flour sack around the country, in the summer of 1865 Gridley took the sack and his proceeds to the St. Louis Fair, which the Western Sanitary Commission held to raise funds for “the relief of sick and wounded Union soldiers” (L1, 284 n. 3). He found it was illegal in Missouri to repeatedly resell the same item, but “it was suggested that the flour be baked into cakes which could be sold. That Gridley refused to do for he felt that the flour came from the west and that was where it belonged. Thus the tour ended on a sour note and he headed home” (Elizabeth H. Smith 1965, 16). The total amount raised by Gridley is uncertain. In 1872, Clemens estimated $150,000; other estimates range from $40,000 to $275,000. When Gridley returned home in July 1865, he was almost bankrupt and his health was “completely broken down” (Tinkham 1921, 66). After he died on 24 November 1870 in Paradise City, California, Clemens eulogized him in a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune (11 Dec 1870, L4, 270–71; see RI 1993, 294–98, 660–64; Marion Census 1850, 310; “Missouri Marriage Records, 1805–2002” 2009; Butte Census 1860, 574; Elizabeth H. Smith 1965, 11–13).

  420.4–11 first Jews I had ever seen . . . “Twice Levin—twenty-two.”] The Levin family apparently lived in Hannibal for a short time during the 1840s. Something of the townspeople’s attitude toward the boys is revealed in Clemens’s 1897 notes for a planned novel, “New Huck Finn” (Notebook 41, TS pp. 59–60, CU-MARK; the boy who drowned was Clint Levering):

  *The Lev’n boys—the first Jew family ever seen there—an awful impression among us—it realized Jews, they had been creatures of vanished ages, myths, unrealities—the shudder visited every boy in the town—under breath the boys discussed them & were afraid of them. “Shall we crucify them?”

  It was believed that the drowning of Writer Levering was a judgment on him & his parents because his great-grandmother had given the 11 boys protection when they were being chased & stoned.

  All this feeling against Jews had been bred by the German youth who got so many verses by heart, before the 11s appeared. The ground was all prepared, & yet the Jew was a surprise at last when he came—as explained* above. . . .

  Instead of 11, call them 9 (Nein) & 18.

  Tom stands by them & has fights.

  420.12–13 Irving Ayres—but no matter, he is dead] Ayres (b. 1837?), another of Clemens’s schoolmates, was the younger son of Thomas J. Ayres (b. 1816?), Hannibal postmaster and tavern keeper, who in 1836 established the Brady House, a downtown hotel in a double-log house with hogs beneath the floor, “crowded with boarders” and fleas that “hopped upstairs, downstairs, into the parlors, bed-rooms, beds, and indeed every nook and cranny” (Holcombe 1884, 202, 896). In his 1897 notebook, Clemens listed Irving and his elder brother Tubman (b. 1829?) as characters in notes for his planned “New Huck Finn” (Notebook 41, p. 61, CU-MARK).

  420.13–16 George Butler . . . was a nephew of General Ben Butler . . . dead, long and long ago] Clemens’s schoolmate George H. Butler (1839?–86) was the son of Andrew Jackson Butler (1815–64) and nephew of Andrew’s brother, Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818–93), the controversial Civil War general and Massachusetts congressman and governor who was known both for his brutality during the war and for his progressive politics afterwards. After working as an engineer in California, George joined the Union army Tenth Infantry
in May 1861 and served as a first lieutenant during the battle of Ball’s Bluff on 21 October 1861, in Loudoun County, Virginia. The catastrophic battle resulted in a Confederate victory when Union forces attempted to cross the Potomac to capture Leesburg, Virginia; caught in a Confederate counterattack, they were driven over a high bluff into the river and suffered heavy casualties. Butler served as regimental quartermaster from late 1862 until his resignation from the army in June 1863 (Marion Census 1850, 313; NNDB 2009; American Civil War 2009a; Missouri Digital Heritage 2009b, box 13; Heitman 1903, 1:269; Sonoma Census 1860, 649).

  420.17 Will Bowen (dead long ago)] Bowen died on 19 May 1893 of sudden heart failure while on a business trip to Waco, Texas (Hornberger 1941, 8). See the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 March 1906, 402.16–33 and note.

  420.17 Ed Stevens (dead long ago)] Clemens’s classmate and friend Edmund C. Stevens (b. 1834?) by the age of sixteen had learned the trade of watchmaking from his father, Thomas B. Stevens (b. 1791?), the town jeweler. As a child he led a classroom “rebellion” against their stern teacher, Miss Newcomb, and was one of the gang who rolled a giant boulder down Holliday’s Hill. He was a corporal to Clemens’s second lieutenant in the Marion Rangers; Clemens described him in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”: “trim-built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat; bright, educated, but given over entirely to fun. There was nothing serious in life to him. As far as he was concerned, this military expedition of ours was simply a holiday” (SLC 1885b, 194). Clemens wrote Stevens’s brother in 1901: “We were great friends, warm friends, he & I. He was of a killingly entertaining spirit; he had the light heart, the carefree ways, the bright word, the easy laugh, the unquenchable genius of fun, he was a friendly light in a frowning world—he should not have died out of it” (28 Aug 1901 to Stevens, CU-MARK). Clemens recalled him in “Villagers of 1840–3” and planned to use him as Jimmy Steel in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as Ed Sanders, watchmaker, in “Schoolhouse Hill” (Inds, 96, 134–213, 214–59, 349; HH&T, 383; MSM, 432).

  420.17–18 John Briggs . . . is still living] In 1902 Clemens said of John B. Briggs (1837–1907), with whom he had shared many childhood scrapes, “We were like brothers once,” and in his notebook reminded himself to “draw a fine character of John Briggs. Good & true & brave, & robbed orchards tore down the stable stole the skiff” (“Friendship of Boyhood Pals Never Waned,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 5C; Notebook 45, TS p. 13, CU-MARK). Briggs joined the Cadets of Temperance with Clemens in 1850, and in 1860 served with Clemens in the Marion Rangers. “Briggs and I,” Clemens said in 1902, “were the best retreaters in the company” (Love 1902, 5). Briggs later worked in a tobacco factory and became a farmer. He was almost certainly one of three boys upon whom Clemens based the “composite” character of Tom Sawyer, and perhaps of Ben Rogers as well, in Tom Sawyer. In 1902 notes for “New Huck Finn,” Clemens contemplated using an incident from Briggs’s childhood, in which Briggs’s father sold a young slave boy down the river, evidently believing he had struck John, when in fact John had struck the boy, “something so shameful that he could never bring himself to confess” (SLC 1902b; SLC 1982, 270; Inds, 134–213, 307; HH&T, 383). See the notes at 417.19–23 and 417.24–27 above and the Autobiographical Dictation of 8 May 1908.

  420.19–421.12 In 1845, when I was ten years old, there was an epidemic of measles . . . vain of it] The deadly epidemics of measles that occurred in the 1840s were called “black” or “virulent” measles. In the spring of 1844, when Clemens was nine years old, the measles broke out in Hannibal “with uncommon virulence. Nearly 40 citizens died. . . . There were seven deaths in one day, all from measles” (Holcombe 1884, 900). Paine wrote that “in later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required” (MTB, 1:29). In “The Turning Point of My Life,” Clemens said that it was the cause of his mother’s apprenticing him to a printer: “I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old” (SLC 1910, 118–19).

  421.13 Dr. Cunningham] Unidentified.

  Autobiographical Dictation, 20 March 1906

  421.22–38 John D. Rockefeller, junior’s, Bible Class . . . as are his son’s] John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839–1937), president of Standard Oil, was generally recognized as the world’s richest man, with a personal fortune estimated in 1901 as over $900 million. He served as superintendent of the Sunday school of Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue Baptist Church from 1872 until 1905. His son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874–1960), graduated from Brown University and became his father’s business associate, eventually taking charge of his philanthropic enterprises. He expounded the Scriptures at the Sunday school of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in New York. Clemens was acquainted with both Rockefellers through a mutual friend, Standard Oil executive Henry H. Rogers. Both men’s Bible lessons were regularly reported in the press, provoking much objection and ridicule (Chicago Daily Tribune: “Church and Clergy,” 29 Oct 1893, 12; “How J. D. Rockefeller, Jr., Teaches Bible Class,” 10 Feb 1901, 36; New York Times: “Rockefeller to His Pupils,” 12 Oct 1903, 1; “Story of Mr. Rockefeller,” 15 June 1903, 1, and letters to the editor in the editions of 8 Feb 1906 [8], 9 Feb 1906 [8], and 13 Feb 1906 [6]; Case Western Reserve University 2008).

  422.17 young John is using no new whitewash upon Joseph] See the note at 423.11–16.

  422.22–25 exposition, three years ago . . . “Sell all thou hast . . . poor.”] This verse occurs in slightly different versions in three of the Gospels: Matthew 19:21, Mark 10:21, and Luke 18:22. Rockefeller made it part of his 11 January 1903 Bible class talk, during which he argued that Jesus’s teachings are not to be taken literally (“Rockefeller Would Keep His Wealth,” Washington Times, 12 Jan 1903, 3).

  422.38 Three years ago I went with young John to his Bible Class and talked to it] Clemens recalled his 28 January 1902 appearance “at the regular monthly meeting” of Rockefeller’s Bible class. The New York Times reported:

  Mark Twain attempted to teach the class how to reach a person of great eminence, an Emperor, for instance. At 9:20 he stopped short and informed the young men that he would have to go.

  “I’m a farmer now,” he said. “Not a very good farmer yet, but a farmer just the same. So I’ll have to go now to be up early in the morning to take care of my crop. I don’t know yet what the crop will be, but I think from present indications it will be icicles.” (“Mr. Rockefeller’s Class,” 29 Jan 1902, 9)

  Before his facetious abortive ending, Clemens read from his “Two Little Tales,” comprising “The Man with a Message for the Director-General” and “How the Chimney-Sweep Got the Ear of the Emperor,” published in the Century Magazine for November 1901 (SLC 1901; “Mark Twain at Bible Class,” New York Sun, 29 Jan 1902, 2, cited in Schmidt 2008a).

  422.41–423.4 Some days ago a Bible Class official sent me word . . . letter which could be read to those people? . . . following letter] Dr. Edward M. Foote (1866?–1945), chairman of the “Entertainment Committee” of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, wrote on 9 March, inviting Clemens to “speak a few words upon some topic” to the Bible class on March 22, or send a “written message” instead (CU-MARK). Isabel Lyon noted his reply on the bottom of the letter, “I daren’t be with them. I’d like to mighty well.” The letter to Foote inserted below was transcribed from a manuscript draft in the Mark Twain Papers; it is not known whether any letter was actually sent to Foote, or “privately to young John himself,” as Clemens claims (425.19) (“Dr. Edward M. Foote, Retired Surgeon, 79,” New York Times, 15 Feb 1945, 19).

  423.11–16 Eight years ago I . . . explained Joseph . . . to say about him] In “Concerning the Jews,” Clemens summarized chapter 47 of Genesis and explained Joseph as follows:

  We have all thoughtfully—or unthoughtfully—read the pathetic story of the years of plenty and the years of fami
ne in Egypt, and how Joseph, with that opportunity, made a corner in broken hearts, and the crusts of the poor, and human liberty—a corner whereby he took a nation’s money all away, to the last penny; took a nation’s live-stock all away, to the last hoof; took a nation’s land away, to the last acre; then took the nation itself, buying it for bread, man by man, woman by woman, child by child, till all were slaves; a corner which took everything, left nothing; a corner so stupendous that, by comparison with it, the most gigantic corners in subsequent history are but baby things, for it dealt in hundreds of millions of bushels, and its profits were reckonable by hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was a disaster so crushing that its effects have not wholly disappeared from Egypt to-day, more than three thousand years after the event.

  The essay was actually published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for September 1899 (SLC 1899b, 530). Mark Twain’s “Collected Works” were issued in numerous editions published both by the American Publishing Company and by Harper and Brothers, beginning in 1899. “Concerning the Jews” was included in volume 22, How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (SLC 1900a, 250–75; HHR, 540; see BAL, 2:3458, and Johnson 1935, 150–53).

  423.16–21 by the newspapers I lately saw . . . published estimate of Joseph differs from mine] Rockefeller discussed Joseph in his Bible class meetings on 4, 18, and 25 February 1906. He called Joseph a “grand young man” and “a splendid example of a young business man,” and argued that in cornering the corn market Joseph had served the people by giving them “a market for their product,” by making them tenants but not slaves, by letting them “have corn on their own terms,” and by saving them from famine. “The people seemed to be pleased, for we have no record of censure. He did not lose their confidence, but was regarded with gratitude by them. According to the usages of his time, I believe he acted commendably” (New York Times: “Avoid All Temptation, Says Rockefeller, Jr.,” 5 Feb 1906, 9; “Faith Is Essential, Says Rockefeller, Jr.,” 19 Feb 1906, 4; “Young Mr. Rockefeller Again Praises Joseph,” 26 Feb 1906, 9).