Excerpts from Life on the Mississippi
AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle of April. [LOTM p 247]
Although “Twain’s Geography” has been removed from the Web, I continue to work on it on my home computer. I have been incorporating David Fears’ “Mark Twain Day By Day” entries, courtesy of the Center from Mark Twain Studies. I had reached the summer of 1880, when the Clemens family summered at Quarry Farm. August 3rd saw the arrival and speech of Fredrick Douglass at the Emancipation Day celebrations in Elmira, just a short distance from the farm.
David Fears' Mark Twain Day By Day has provided me with an excellent base for the where and when of Mark Twain. This is quite significant when trying to determine Twain's Geography. I have found we have something in common in that our projects do not deal specifically with Twain's literature. I can't speak for Fears' motivations except to note that he seems to have wanted to get a handle on what was happening in the man's life at that moment. For myself, I want to find indications of Twain's interpretation of his where and when. As I've mentioned before, Twain is my Virgil through a to
I have been required to terminate public access to Twain's Geography. The material is safe, secure and continues to be developed. I am just no longer bearing the expense of a web service to publish it. The general apparent lack of interest by the viewing public and the expenses of publishing on AWS have forced me to do this.
Cairo, Illinois has recently come to my attention because of feedback on my entry for this location in Twain’s Geography. I can readily see why Cairo may have been missed by Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi, Most of the town is actually situated on the Ohio River. My respondent denies any significant economic activity in the town she grew up in, and this is likely the case for her, her parents and probably her grandparents. I found a publication from 1910 that goes into great detail on the history of development – and periods of destruction experienced by this town.
Anarchy may not be the bad thing most people believe it to be. The word has been hijacked as a synomym for chaos, not its original meaning. A Wikipedia article defines anarchy as a “society being freely constituted without authorities or a governing body.
History may not repeat itself but today’s economic and social reality does rhyme with Mark Twain’s Gilded Age of the 1870’s – and into the 20th century. Mega-corporations and our current neo-feudalism are reflections of the railroads and other large industries of those earlier years. And, the consequences of this are as well.
Sometime in May or June of 1853 seventeen year old Sam Clemens left home for the first time. He departed the small Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, later reflected in stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, boarded a packet steamer bound for St. Louis, and began a life of travel. Packet steamers were vessels that transported both freight and passengers. Some packets were faster but not so reliable; some were larger but also slower; some were more luxurious, but carried less freight.
Mark Twain and his friend, the reverend Joseph Twichell, visited Bermuda fro May 17 to 21 of 1877. They spend a good deal of time walking along the roads, viewing the countryside. At one point they stopped at a cottage for a drink of water and conversation with a man whose name was not Mr. Smith. He had a sorry tale to tell of his neighbors and their dead cats and the litigation caused by the cats demise.
The illustration is actually from "A Tramp Abroad" but I thought it an appropriate caricature of the two men.
Much of this chapter is taken up by the transcripts of a murder trial. The behaviour of the guilty parties is characterized as like Thugees, although that term does not appear in the transcripts. The photograph displayed on this page is from https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/11/18/245953619/what-a-thugs-life-looked-like-in-nineteenth-century-india