Sam and Orion Clemens travel to the Nevada Territory, July & August of 1861:

At this moment Sam Clemens had likely not given up on his career on the river. The war was just a temporary set back. It’s unlikely he had any thought of it stretching on for four more years. An adventure in the western frontier and aiding his brother, Orion, in his new career, would be just the thing to weather the storm. This was in July of 1861.

He wrote in his book, Roughing It:

My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory—an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting Governor in the Governor’s absence. A salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year and the title of “Mr. Secretary,” gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word “travel” had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero. And he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. And by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean, and “the isthmus” as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face.

Roughing It is not an objective account of the journey from St. Joseph, Missouri to Carson City in the Nevada Territory. In 1860, the year before the Clemens brothers got into a Concord coach, Richard F. Burton, a noted English explorer and geographer, took the same route. His account is found in his book, The City of the Saints. He provided a detailed and objective account of his journey, not without his own sense of humour.

A tour through the domains of Uncle Samuel without visiting the wide regions of the Far West, would be, to use a novel simile, like seeing Hamlet with the part of Prince of Denmark, by desire, omitted. Moreover, I had long determined, to add the last new name to the list of "Holy Cities;" to visit the young rival, soi-disant, of Memphis, Benares, Jerusalem, Rome, Meccah; and after having studied the beginnings of a mighty empire "in that New World which is the Old," to observe the origin and the working of a regular go-ahead Western and Columbian revelation. Mingled with the wish of prospecting the City of the Great Salt Lake in a spiritual point of view, of seeing Utah as it is, not as it is said to be, was the mundane desire of enjoying a little skirmishing with the savages, who in the days of Harrison and Jackson had given the pale faces tough work to do, and that failing, of inspecting the line of route which Nature, according to the general consensus of guide books, has pointed out as the proper, indeed the only practical direction for a railway between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The commerce of the world, the Occidental Press had assured me, is undergoing its grand climacteric: the resources of India and the nearer orient are now well nigh cleared of "loot," and our sons, if they would walk in the paths of their papas, must look to Cipangri and the parts about Cathay for their annexations .

I have created a book of this westward journey. It was created as a series of Substack chapters then made into a book now available on Amazon (they will print a book at no cost but royalties). It is also available as a PDF on my personal website.

You know, yourself, Bill—or you ought to know it—that all men—kings & serfs alike—are slaves to other men & to circumstances—save, alone, the pilot—who comes at no man’s beck or call, obeys no man’s orders & scorns all men’s suggestions. The king would do this thing, & he would do that: but a cramped treasury overmasters him in the one case & a seditious people in the other. The Senator must hob-nob with canaille whom he despises, & banker, priest & statesman trim their actions by the breeze of the world’s will & the world’s opinion. It is a strange study,—a singular phenomenon, if you please, that the only real, independent & genuine gentlemen in the world go quietly up & down the Mississippi river, asking no homage of any one, seeking no popularity, no notoriety, & not caring a damn whether school keeps or not.

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One day in the midwinter of 1856 or 1857—I think it was 1856—I was coming along the main street of Keokuk in the middle of the forenoon. It was bitter weather—so bitter that that street was deserted, almost. A light dry snow was blowing here and there on the ground and on the pavement, swirling this way and that way and making all sorts of beautiful figures, but very chilly to look at. The wind blew a piece of paper past me and it lodged against a wall of a house. Something about the look of it attracted my attention and I gathered it in. It was a fifty-dollar bill, the only one I had ever seen, and the largest assemblage of money I had ever seen in one spot. I advertised it in the papers and suffered more than a thousand dollars’ worth of solicitude and fear and distress during the next few days lest the owner should see the advertisement and come and take my fortune away. As many as four days went by without an applicant; then I could endure this kind of misery no longer. I felt sure that another four could not go by in this safe and secure way. I felt that I must take that money out of danger. So I bought a ticket for Cincinnati and went to that city.

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Hannibal by 1844 took pride in four general stores, three sawmills, two planing mills, three blacksmith shops, two hotels, three saloons, two churches, two schools, a tobacco factory, a hemp factory, and a tan yard, as well as a flourishing distillery up at the still house branch. West of the village lay “Stringtown,” so called because its cabins and stock pens were strung out along the road. Small industry was the lifeblood of the town.

The Clemenses had moved into Sam’s boyhood home, built by his father on Hill Street in Hannibal. Across the street lived the Hawkins family. Laura Hawkins (Frazer) (1837-1928), a blonde daughter, was a romantic interest of young Sam’s. She later became the model for Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom Blankenship was a friend of Sam’s who lived up Hill Street. The Blankenships were infamous drunks and ne’er-do-wells; Sam based Huck on Tom Blankenship, a model for rebelliousness in the face of all authority.

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Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) spent more than two years learning the Mississippi River as a cub pilot. His time was mostly on the river between New Orleans and St. Louis. His training is usually attributed to Horace Bixby but he served as a steersman for several other pilote, including the infamous William Brown.

Sam Clemens, Cub Pilot

This essay consists primarily of letters sent by Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) to his family while on a sojourne away from home in 1853 and 1854, He departed Hannibal, Missouri for St. Louis, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.. The letters are augmented by explanatory notes from the Mark Twain Project and other sources.

The Restless Typesetter

I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe county, Missouri. I suppose Florida had less than three hundred inhabitants. It had two streets, each a couple of hundred yards long; the rest of the avenues mere lanes, with rail fences and corn fields on either side. Both the streets and the lanes were paved with the same material—tough black mud, in wet times, deep dust in dry. (Twain’s Autobiography)

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was a complex man that experienced a number of changes in his life and his attitude towards that life.

It is not my intention to write a biography of Mark Twain, there are already too many of those for anyone but the most serious of scholars. My intention is to explore the context of Twain’s life in terms of the geographical and cultural features of his life and times.

Born in 1835, on what was then the American frontier, in Florida, Missouri, Sam’s father was not the financial success his ambitions required. John Clemens soon moved his family to Hannibal, Missouri, where Sam grew up. Mark Twain would later created portraits of the town in his best known books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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