Chapter Nine

Rural Upbringing

Quite different environmental forces shaped Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Theodore Roosevelt into the contrasting figures they became. Clemens was born the sixth child in a southern family all crammed into a one-story, two-room, shake-roof, rented frame house in Florida, Missouri. Florida survives into our day as a hamlet of some eight inhabitants total. On November 30, 1835, at Sammy’s birth, the place was four years old and had a population of about a hundred, lying close to what was then the American frontier. Less than a year earlier the Clemenses had migrated to the spot from Tennessee—worthy immigrants and proud, though hardly prosperous: yet another family of small slaveholders scraping by in an agrarian land. The family lingered four years in the hamlet of Florida before relocating once more, in November 1839, still in Missouri but thirty miles northeast, to Hannibal, then hardly more than a woodlot for replenishing steamboats on the Mississippi River.

Born two months prematurely, Sammy was just turning four at the time of the move. In Hannibal the boy’s father, John Marshall Clemens, ran a general store, borrowed to buy town lots, and as a village lawyer pursued what ill-paid legal business came his way. None of it worked out well. America was in the throes of a severe economic depression after the Panic of 1837, an ordeal that stretched well into the 1840s. But part of the problem lay in the elder Clemens’s temperament. As child and man, he rarely smiled and was never heard to laugh. Thus, “my father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy,” Sam recalled years afterward, “a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak,” the boy’s spirited ways displeasing to a parent austere and undemonstrative.

Sam’s other parent was different. During a long life the mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, was “all animation and champagne and charm,” according to her son after her death at eighty-seven. Life seemed a holiday to her, and she relished every innocent festival. Yet for all her liveliness, Jane Clemens was of a reverent disposition, as her husband—Sam’s stern father—was not. Freethinking Judge Clemens went to church once and never again, but his wife attended regularly, in her easygoing way. Thus the minister Joshua Tucker of Hannibal recalled Sister Clemens as “a woman of the sunniest temperament, lively, affable, a general favorite,” whereas Brother Clemens, her husband, appeared on briefer acquaintance to be “a grave, taciturn man,” although recognized as the “foremost citizen in intelligence and wholesome influence” of that riverfront village out on America’s edges.

In Hannibal young Sam Clemens developed from his fifth into his eighteenth year. Delicate early in childhood, given too much to thinking—a cousin remembered—he was nevertheless always full of fun, from the start funny. And Sam outgrew his feeble first years, so that by seven or eight he could romp as vigorously as any of his playmates. He came to have many such, this high-spirited, imaginative shunner of school and organizer of village pranks and escapades. Will Bowen, John Briggs, Norval (“Gull”) Brady, Barney Farthing, Sam Honeyman, Arch Fuqua: all banded together and played at pirates and Robin Hood or waved green garter snakes at terrified girls or swam in Bear Creek and the Mississippi, in which waters Sam nearly drowned nine times, on each occasion fetched up by some villager or other, drained out, reinflated, and set on his way. There was a hill at the north end of Hannibal, wooded, rising nearly 300 feet above the river—Holliday’s Hill—and a great limestone cave gaped three miles south of town; so that among such stimulating surroundings Sam and his friends found endless recreation to fill their summer hours.

In two wonderful novels, Mark Twain has done more than anyone else will ever be able to do to preserve the feel of childhood in the 1840s in one immortal place, on the west bank of the Mississippi a hundred miles upstream from St. Louis. The majestic, mile-wide river itself provided much to nourish a youngster’s imagination; and from Hannibal’s wharf it offered scope for aspiration by furnishing daily sightings of strangers aboard steamboats mooring, amid belchings of smoke and the stopping of paddle wheels and the gauge-cocks screaming. Exotics on deck gazed down through eyes that had seen or soon would rest upon far-off places: St. Jo, St. Looey, Memphis, New Orleans. This daily recurring evidence of elsewhere might in itself have sufficed to infect one young villager with wanderlust and a restlessness that lasted in perpetuity.

Sam Clemens’s riverfront childhood wasn’t all summertime pleasure, of course: “a boy’s life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it.” And the horrifying contributed its part, too, in shaping so unique a temperament, one ever curious about the surrounding world, retentive, waking to the town’s absurdities and cruelties, alert as well to all the different voices heard, to the furnishings of different rooms in houses, to the views from high bluffs and the glorious river sunsets and the scent of trees blooming and the graveyard silent on its hilltop in eerie, shadowy moonlight.

At different times the boy witnessed a murder in broad daylight on the town’s main street, and at the water’s edge a runaway slave’s body, drowned, was freed from underbrush and shot straight upward waist-high. Again, there was a fire in the jail one night, the town derelict inside screaming, moaning, pleading to be saved; but the keys were on the far side of the village with the marshal, who didn’t get there in time. And in 1847, Sam Clemens peered through a keyhole at the autopsy of his uncle, as he later recorded. He was eleven, and one observes the child in disbelief: bent over at the keyhole of a closed door, rapt in an upstairs hallway on Hill Street. Only it wasn’t his uncle, as Clemens when grown wrote privately, because no uncle of Sam Clemens died in 1847. It was the father who died that year and lay lifeless under Dr. Meredith’s knife on the bed in the room beyond the keyhole. The eleven-year-old was peering at the autopsy of his own dead father.

Pneumonia had taken John Marshall Clemens. He was forty-eight, dying in Hannibal on March 24, 1847. On his deathbed, with his family gathered round, the judge beckoned to his favorite child to come near. Pamela bent down, and her father kissed her. It was about the only time the man was seen to kiss anybody; and even then, with death looming, he offered to kiss no one else, not even his wife at the last, Sam’s mother. She had married the grave young lawyer back in Kentucky twenty-four years earlier to spite another man; and for all her exuberance, no affection had ever been openly expressed between the two of them. Not much affection was manifest in Hannibal anyway—the frontier village wasn’t a kissing town—so that “the absence of exterior demonstration of affection for my mother had no surprise for me,” Sam, observing at the bedside, would later recollect. “By nature she was warm-hearted, but it seemed to me quite natural that her warm-heartedness should be held in reserve in an atmosphere like my father’s,” even during these final farewells.

Judge Clemens kissed his favorite child, and afterward he addressed all his family. “Cling to the land and wait,” he told them; “let nothing beguile it away from you.” With that, and without further goodbye to wife or children—nothing beyond three final words, “Let me die”—Judge Clemens passed from the earth and left his survivors deep in shameful, humiliating poverty.

But they did own the land that their sire had spoken of: 70,000 acres bought and paid for along the Obed River in northeast Tennessee. When the railroad reached there, the land would make every one of the Clemenses rich. For now, though, they were very poor, a widow in her mid-forties taking in boarders, with a family left to provide for. She had borne seven children. Three had died, two when old enough to count among Sam’s early griefs. Now her husband was dead as well. Of the remaining children, Pamela at nineteen might earn a bit of money giving piano lessons. The eldest, Orion, at twenty-one had gone off to St. Louis to make his way and send back what earnings he could. And the two others, Sam not yet twelve and Henry a couple of years younger, before the end of the decade found their schooldays effectively over.

Sam was apprenticed to a newspaper office as a printer’s devil. Years later a niece reported that this interval had been a hard, unhappy time for all the Clemenses. She said that her mother—the Pamela who had been kissed by a dying father—only spoke of the time “once or twice. Uncle Sam was very lonely at that printer’s. They came home late one night and found him asleep on the floor,” forsaking his pallet at the shop for more companionable surroundings.

Then his older brother returned from St. Louis a printer himself and acquired a Hannibal newspaper. Sam could come work at the paper for Orion, ten years his senior. This was early in 1851. The fifteen-year-old lasted a year and a half in his brother’s printing shop. There he made a start at acquiring the directness and clarity of his literary style, learning to discriminate between good and bad writing while correcting copy and reading the newspapers from far and wide that exchanged issues with the Western Union. In time the apprentice was allowed to insert squibs of his own as filler for blank column space. Readers of Orion’s Hannibal paper were regaled as well with “Our Assistant’s Column,” brother Sam’s contribution, treating miscellaneous topics for a riverport grown to a population of some 2,500 people. On May 26, 1853, for instance, the column informed its readers of America’s first world’s fair, opening in New York City on Sixth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-Second streets, where, according to reports, fifteen to twenty thousand people were congregating around the Crystal Palace, a great exhibition hall built for the occasion and before which “drunkenness and debauching are carried on to their fullest extent.”

Sam wanted to have a look at the Crystal Palace up close. He was restless in Hannibal anyway, and longed to see the world. But he told nobody of his plans, only letting his mother know that he was headed downriver to St. Louis, to where his sister Pamela had moved, she two years married by that time and the mother of a year-old daughter. By then, too, Sam had learned a trade that he could ply just about anywhere; every town supported a newspaper or two or three. So not long after his column with the note on the fair appeared, Sam Clemens in early June 1853, halfway through age seventeen, set off on the packet boat downriver (“wanted!” reads Orion’s urgent advertisement in his paper, “an apprentice to the printing business! apply soon”) and never lived in Hannibal again.

In St. Louis the seventeen-year-old spent a couple of months working at typesetting jobs and putting aside money for the fare that would let him launch forth on his travels. Then he made his way to New York, visited the Crystal Palace, and wrote his sister Pamela about it. “From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight—the flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering jewelry, gaudy tapestry, &c., with the busy crowd passing to and fro—tis a perfect fairy palace—beautiful beyond description.” He wrote to his family of other sights: of the Washington Street market downtown; and of Edwin Forrest, viewed perishing at the Broadway Theatre in The Gladiator; and of the travails of getting across traffic-clogged Broadway, inserting yourself into the mob to be “borne, and rubbed, and crowded along” so that your feet never touched the pavement, he said, from one side of the wide boulevard to the other.

Sam wrote to his sister, and to his mother, and to his younger brother Henry and his older brother Orion; and that last-named, the newspaper editor who by then had relocated to Muscatine, Iowa, 120 miles upriver from Hannibal, reprinted portions of those letters in his Muscatine Journal. For at a time when pictures were rare and many people stayed put all their lives, readers savored verbal descriptions of far-off places. Orion’s reporter back East was meanwhile moving on, after two months, to Philadelphia. “I will try to write for the paper occasionally,” Sam answered a brother’s appeal, “but I fear my letters will be very uninteresting.” Still, for subscribers in Muscatine he wrote about the Liberty Bell and Franklin’s gravesite and the Fairmount Bridge spanning the Schuylkill in Philadelphia’s outskirts—America’s earliest cable suspension bridge, and thus “the first bridge of the kind I ever saw.”

This nomad—he had gone on down to Washington briefly for a look, before wandering back to Philadelphia and again to New York City—was having a fine time all this while. Philadelphians had sought to encourage him lest he grow downhearted. “‘Downhearted,’ the devil! I have not had a particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four months ago.” He was relishing his freedom, so that not until April 1854 did Clemens return to his family, first to St. Louis, where sister Pamela and her husband, Will Moffett, and little Annie were living, then to Muscatine, with his mother, Orion, and Henry.

Late that same year, newly married, Orion Clemens moved to his bride’s hometown of Keokuk, Iowa, as proprietor of the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office, on the third floor at 52 Main Street. There his two younger brothers joined him, helping to print posters, circulars, and bills of lading to customers’ orders. Sam would remain in Keokuk a year and a half, mostly a happy interval, during which he labored alongside his brother Henry and grew close to that favorite of the family. But he tired of job work, underpaid at a not always reliable five dollars a week. Sam had been reading about the Amazon River, another frontier much in the news at the time. To brother Henry, he proposed journeying to South America and up the Amazon to harvest coca leaves. Sam meant “to start to Brazil, if possible, in six weeks from now, in order to look carefully into matters there” and with luck make his fortune selling coca leaves to pharmacies in the States. Meanwhile he had contracted with a Keokuk newspaper to write travel letters at five dollars apiece along the way.

He wrote only three of them, two from St. Louis and one from Cincinnati. In Cincinnati, waiting over winter till the ice melted and river traffic resumed, Sam got by setting type through a succession of lonely days. Those ended after five months, in mid-April 1857, when the young man, now twenty-one, boarded the packet steamer Paul Jones bound for New Orleans, on the first stage of a journey to the Southern Hemisphere to make his millions.

During that passage downriver another dream intruded on the first. The pilot of the Paul Jones let young Clemens steer the boat a ways, and for a consideration was talked into taking him on as a cub, to teach him the craft of steamboat piloting. It would cost $500 and start straight off with a trip back up from New Orleans to St. Louis, the cub standing watches in the pilot house alongside this veteran, Horace Bixby. Once arrived at St. Louis, Sam borrowed $100 from his brother-in-law, Pamela’s husband and a prospering commission merchant; and with that down payment he entered yet another phase of his education, the Amazon put behind him.

He was about to become what youths along the river back then most wanted to be, watching from shore day after day while, amid black smoke and fanfare, steamboats touched in and departed: ornamented decks crowded with passengers; gorgeous paddle-boxes; flag snapping at the jackstaff; the captain sounding his bell; and, high in filigree splendor above all the commotion, the pilot in the glass pilot house forty feet above the water gazing down. Just about every boy in every riverside village longed to be that pilot, for his was the best job in the world. The pay, once you were licensed, was $250 a month, much more than a preacher made in a year. And having moved out into the stream, you answered to nobody; not even the captain told a pilot what to do, guiding the great laden craft through chutes or shaving in close or striking for the middle of the road along 1,300 miles of the Lower Mississippi, each shifting feature of which he knew by heart, in daylight and darkness, upriver or down.

Once licensed—as Sam Clemens was officially licensed in April 1859—he would have gone on being a pilot for the rest of his days if fate hadn’t interfered. But meanwhile he had set his younger brother Henry on the way to a life on the river as well, getting him aboard the Pennsylvania as a mud clerk. Under a different pilot, William Brown, they steamed downriver, Henry at every stop leaping ashore to keep track of cargo, Sam up above the texas deck in the lofty pilot house as an apprentice steersman still.

But this other pilot, Brown, proved to be a scoundrel, “a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault-hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant,” as Clemens would later immortalize the man. During the voyage, Brown quarreled with his mud clerk, springing at young Henry and meaning to do him harm. Sam, steering, broke off and swung a stool a good solid blow that stretched Brown out on deck. Not stopping there, he leapt on the hated pilot and, avenging his innocent younger brother along with much else, pummeled the man in an act of insubordination that constituted a supreme offense aboard any vessel under way. Brown was so generally disliked, however, that the Pennsylvania’s captain merely transferred the offending cub to another boat at New Orleans, secretly in sympathy with what Sam had done and meaning to rehire him as soon as he found a pilot to replace this present one. Thus the Pennsylvania, with the captain, the pilot Brown, and the mud clerk Henry still aboard, started on the return trip northward toward St. Louis, Sam reassigned to the A. T. Lacey and due to follow a couple of days later.

It was the fate of the Pennsylvania to be blown up on that northbound trip. Sixty miles below Memphis at six in the morning, on a half-head of steam and a call from the pilot house to come ahead full, four of the vessel’s boilers exploded, leaving good Captain Kleinfelter unscathed amid the shrieks and flames, but hurling Brown overboard to perish and sending Henry Clemens high aloft to fall into the river. Badly scalded, Henry swam back toward the boat to help others of the more than 400 aboard; but he himself was so seriously burned that with the rest of the grievously wounded he had to be taken to a public hall in Memphis for very tardy care. Sam, following behind, found his brother on a pallet in that grim scene of suffering; “as the newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help.” Henry died, delirious, eight days after the accident, Sam at his side through much of the long ordeal.

A letter Sam Clemens composed from Memphis on June 18, 1858, as Henry lay dying, amounts to a prolonged wail of remorse and self-recrimination, bemoaning the injustice of his brother’s impending death, wishing it could have been his own instead. “Men take me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me ‘lucky’ because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up!” The loss of one whom he saw as blameless—“my poor sinless brother” Henry, the glory, pride, and light of his life, he said—this most painful loss was made the more so because of the feeling that Sam was not only responsible for it but had escaped his own death unfairly.

Four months later, on October 3, 1858, in Keokuk, Iowa, the eldest Clemens brother, Orion, sat down to write to a Miss Wood, answering her inquiry about that youngest in the family, deceased. Miss Wood had been on hand in Memphis through the eight days of Henry’s mortal agony, “like a good angel,” wrote Orion, “to aid and console, and I bless and thank you for it with my whole heart.” He told her he wished he could have been the family member who was with Henry when he died, but fate had willed otherwise. Another Clemens brother had been there to grieve helplessly through those final, heart-wrenching nights and days. “Sam, whose organization is such as to feel the utmost extreme of every feeling, was there. Both his capacity of enjoyment,” Orion wrote, “and his capacity of suffering are greater than mine; and knowing how it would have affected me to see so sad a scene, I can somewhat appreciate Sam’s sufferings.”