Haunted Hannibal

History and Mystery In America's Hometown

The History Press

Contents

VIOLENT CRIME, DEATH AND GHOSTS DURING SAMUEL CLEMENS'S BOYHOOD

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven. — Mark Twain

He remembered his dead siblings and revisited the guilt of transgressions against them unforgiven. He recalled old sweethearts, often with photographic clarity of the moments of final partings. His manuscript papers reveal, posthumously, that he had carried inside his head a remarkably detailed mythic version of his boyhood Hannibal. — Ron Powers, Dangerous Water

It is well documented, by historians and by the man himself, that Mark Twain was haunted as an adult by things that happened to him during his childhood. Although Twain remembered many joyous moments and retained a fondness for Hannibal all his life, he was also tormented by memories of murder, drowning, accidental death, disease and mischievous pranks gone awry that occurred during his boyhood days on the banks of the Mississippi.

Although he did not come to Hannibal until he was four years old (Sam Clemens was actually born about forty miles from Hannibal, in Florida, Missouri, in 1835), it was Hannibal that Mark Twain thought of as his hometown, Hannibal that he remembered so vividly when he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It was Hannibal that provided the texture to the tales he would so famously weave in his lifetime. From the unspeakable tragedies he witnessed and experienced during his boyhood in Hannibal would emerge a comic genius upon which Twain would rely throughout his life. Twain was able to transform the pain of childhood heartbreak that would never leave him into humor and wit that would help him retain his sanity and eventually lead him to fame and fortune.

And tragedy there was. During the years Samuel Clemens was a member of the community, from 1839 to 1853, Hannibal was very much the epitome of a wild western frontier town. Missouri had achieved statehood in 1821, just fourteen years before Sammy's birth, and was then considered the western edge of the nation. (Kansas would not become a state until 1861; Oklahoma, not until 1907.) The mighty Mississippi River that flowed alongside the small town brought to Hannibal's shores rough- languaged roustabouts, riverboat gamblers, land speculators, gold rush forty-niners, traveling minstrel show performers and many other colorful characters; they would form a rowdy, sometimes violent and always entertaining sideshow of humanity.

Young Sammy absorbed everything and seemingly forgot nothing. His curiosity and yearning for adventure were evident at a young age, and the escapades he undertook as a very young boy are inconceivable in today's modern society. But some of these escapades would have consequences — deadly consequences in some instances — and from them Twain would never fully recover.

* * *

Take, for instance, young Sammy Clemens witnessing the first premeditated murder in Hannibal's history. On January 22, 1845, when Sammy was just nine years old, a man by the name of Sam Smarr was casually walking down Main Street in front of Grant's Drugstore. His demeanor that day was misleading, however; Sam Smarr was known around town as a notoriously mean drunk. He had a propensity to talk trash when intoxicated, and sometimes in a particularly harsh way.

William P. Owsley owned a mercantile store directly across the street from Grant's Drugstore, just one block from the Clemens residence. Sam Smarr had become obsessed with Owsley, making him a target of his drunken tirades on numerous occasions, saying that Owsley was a "damned son-of-a-bitch" (according to testimonies later taken by Judge John Marshall Clemens). Smarr accused Owsley of swindling a considerable amount of money from the Thompson brothers in Palmyra, Missouri.

Owsley, who did not wish to dignify Smarr's accusations with a response, kept silent. Smarr continued to harass Owsley for several weeks. Apparently, on January 22, Owsley had had enough.

As Sam Smarr walked down the sidewalk in front of Grant's Drugstore, Owsley emerged from his mercantile. He crossed the street, called out, "You! Sam Smarr!" and drew a pistol from his pocket. Smarr turned; some people claimed to have heard him say, "Don't Fire!" Owsley ignored the plea, firing directly into Smarr's chest. He then paused to take aim again and fired a second shot.

Smarr fell but was not yet dead. Grant emerged from his store and, with the aid of several onlookers, carried Smarr into the drugstore and lifted him onto the counter. There, a crowd of curious townsfolk surrounded Sam Smarr, stood by and watched him die. Included in this gathering was young Sammy Clemens.

Owsley was arrested for the murder, tried and acquitted. Maybe the jury thought Smarr had it coming to him. However, after the acquittal, Twain wrote, "there was a cloud upon him — a social chill — and [Owsley] presently moved away."

* * *

Another harrowing scrape with death happened to Sammy on one of his many days of skipping school. It was 1843, a day in September, a beautiful month in Missouri. Sammy must have felt it was too much for anyone to ask a young boy to spend a day such as that one at school, and he quietly stole away.

He had lollygagged the day away and, knowing he was in trouble, decided not to go home for dinner. After dark, Sammy was still nervous about going home, so he stayed out most of the evening. By midnight, he had made up his mind that he should accept his inevitable punishment by daylight and chose to sleep in his father's justice of the peace office and return home in time for breakfast.

Sammy climbed carefully in the window of the first floor of his father's office and crawled onto a lounge to go to sleep. Twain recalled many years later, in 1869's The Innocents Abroad:

As I lay on the lounge and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I fancied I could see a long, dusky, shapeless thing stretched upon the floor. A cold shiver went through me. I turned my face to the wall. That did not answer. I was afraid that that thing would creep over and seize me in the dark. I turned back and stared at it for minutes and minutes — they seemed hours. It appeared to me that the lagging moonlight never, never would get to it. I turned to the wall and counted twenty, to pass the feverish time away. I looked — the pale square was nearer. I turned again and counted fifty — it was almost touching it. With desperate will I turned again and counted one hundred, and faced about, all in a tremble. A white human hand lay in the moonlight! Such an awful sinking at the heart — such a sudden gasp for breath! I felt — I cannot tell what I felt. When I recovered strength enough, I faced the wall again. But no boy could have remained so with that mysterious hand behind him. I counted again and looked — the most of a naked arm was exposed. I put my hands over my eyes and counted till I could stand it no longer, and then — the pallid face of a man was there, with the corners of the mouth drawn down, and the eyes fixed and glassy in death!

The victim was James McFarlane, a man who had been stabbed earlier in the day by the blade of an eight-inch knife. The accused was Vincent Hudson. The two had been drinking and had quarreled over the ownership of a plow. Judge Clemens had planned to do his investigation and then to have McFarlane embalmed the next morning, so the body had been left in his office overnight. Sammy had never made it home to hear that a murder had taken place in Hannibal that day.

Twain comically described his exit from his father's office that night:

I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort of a hurry, but I simply went — that is sufficient. I went out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it. I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.

Not all of the situations young Sammy found himself in ended so comically. On a hot August day in 1847, Sammy and his "gang," which included John Briggs and Will Bowen, had made their way halfway across the Mississippi to fish and swim on Sny Island, a small patch of land and trees in the middle of the river.

Just a few weeks earlier, Neriam Todd, a young slave from Monroe County, Missouri, had run away and made it over to Sny Island on his way across the river to the free state of Illinois. He was discovered by Bence (also called Ben) Blankenship, the older brother of Tom Blankenship (Tom was Twain's inspiration for the character of Huckleberry Finn). At this time, anyone finding a runaway slave was considered heroic if they returned the slave to his/her owner; as a matter of fact, it was a crime not to do so. In addition, the Blankenship family was one of the poorest in the community, and along with the accolades Bence might receive, returning the slave would also fetch Bence a hefty reward.

Twain would recall Bence Blankenship's moral dilemma decades later as he began to work on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Just as did the fictional character of Huck, Bence Blankenship chose to help the runaway slave rather than to selfishly turn him in for the reward. Bence began to make the dangerous journey across the river to Sny Island daily on his raft to bring food and supplies to Neriam, and he would continue to do so for several weeks.

Eventually, however, word circulated that the runaway slave might be hiding on the island. A group of woodchoppers went across the river and over to Sny Island with the intent to capture Neriam and return him for the reward. The group soon discovered the runaway, and while he was being chased toward an area of the island called Bird Slough, Neriam Todd was killed.

Sammy and his friends had no thoughts of Neriam Todd on the hot day in August as they splashed and played at the water's edge on Sny Island. Soon, however, the boys' fun turned to sheer horror when, slowly rising from underneath the surface of the murky brown water, a face appeared. Neriam Todd's mutilated body had been trapped by mud and debris in the river, and the boys' swimming had dislodged the corpse. As the boys swam away in terror, their churning of the river water actually caused the runaway's body to float along with them, and the boys all believed that the corpse was chasing them as they tried to make their escape back across the Mississippi to Hannibal.

* * *

Yet another incident occurred while young Sammy and his friends were swimming. This time, the boys were not on the Mississippi; they were bathing at their favorite swimming hole in Bear Creek, a small tributary on the south side of Hannibal that wound its way away from the river.

Village coopers, who constructed items such as burial caskets and wooden barrels, would submerge hickory branches in Bear Creek to soak them and make them pliable. The boys had created a game with the hickory branches whereby they were to dive underwater, hold on to the poles and see who could stay under the longest.

One of the boys — Dutchy, a German immigrant's son who was widely known for having recited three thousand verses of Scripture one Sunday school morning without missing a word — was having trouble staying under water very long. The other boys began to taunt him and would intentionally miscount how many seconds Dutchy was able to stay under water. Dutchy pleaded with the boys to give him an honest count, and when they agreed to do so, he dove under water to give it his best effort.

The other boys quickly hid behind a patch of blackberry bushes so that when Dutchy arose from the water triumphant, no one would be there to congratulate him. They waited, but Dutchy never emerged from under water. Sensing trouble, the boys drew straws to see who would go in after Dutchy. Sammy, naturally, drew the short straw.

As Twain later explained, "The lot fell to me and I went down." He went under and found that Dutchy had become trapped among the hickory poles and had drowned.

I fled to the surface and told the awful news ... Some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated but we never thought of that. We did not think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing.

Eventually, the boys ran into town for help, and Dutchy's body was pulled from the creek.

This was yet another tragedy that Twain added to his growing list of unforgivable incidents for which he felt personally responsible. "All heart and hope went out of me," Twain would lament in his recollection of the incident in Life on the Mississippi, "and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, 'If a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else?'"

* * *

Then there was the heartbreaking outcome of another of Twain's boyhood escapades during the winter of 1849. Sammy and his friend Tom Nash, the son of the town's postmaster and part of Sammy's gang, decided to sneak away from home late one night and go ice-skating on the Mississippi. Twain would make light of the boys' caper in his ghostwritten autobiography, saying, "I cannot see why we should go skating in the night unless without permission, for there could be no considerable amusement to be gotten out of skating at midnight if nobody was going to object to it."

Sammy and Tom skated about by moonlight, eventually reaching as far out as half a mile on the frozen river. Suddenly, they began to hear pops and cracks and realized that the ice was beginning to break up. The two boys, now seriously afraid of the mighty Mississippi, carefully began to make their way back to shore:

We started for home, pretty badly scared. We flew along at full speed whenever the moonlight sifting down between the clouds enabled us to tell which was ice and which was water. In the pauses we waited, started again whenever there was a good bridge of ice, paused again when we came to naked water, and waited in distress until a floating vast cake should bridge that place. It took us an hour to make the trip — a trip which we made in misery of apprehension all the time. But at last we arrived within a very brief difference of the shore.

Now near the banks of the river, the boys leapt toward the Missouri shore. Sammy made it; Tom did not. "He got a bitter bath," Twain wrote,

but he was so close to shore that he only had to swim a stroke or two — then his feet struck hard bottom and he crawled out ... He [Tom] took to his bed, sick, and had a procession of diseases. The closing one was scarlet fever and he came out of it stone deaf.

Twain could never forgive himself, believing all his life that he was responsible for Tom's disability.

* * *

But the tragedy that was the hardest for Mark Twain to overcome happened during his grand adventure to become a riverboat pilot in the summer of 1858.

Sammy Clemens had a younger brother named Henry, two years his junior and the youngest of John Marshall and Jane's children. Although Sammy loved Henry, he must have also slightly resented the attention Henry inevitably received as the baby of the family, particularly from their mother, Jane. In addition, Henry was notoriously good, exemplifying the very antithesis of Sammy's daily mischief.

"My mother had a good deal of trouble with me but I think she enjoyed it," Twain explained in his autobiography.

She had none at all with my brother Henry ... and I think that unbroken monotony of his goodness and truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction.

I never knew Henry to do a vicious thing toward me or toward anyone else — but he frequently did righteous ones that cost me as heavily.

Some people asked Twain if his brother Henry was the model for Tom Sawyer's half brother Sid. Twain's response was that "Henry was a very much finer and better boy than Sid ever was."

In the spring of 1858, Sam Clemens was training as a riverboat pilot aboard the steamboat Pennsylvania, being mentored by a man named William Brown. Meanwhile, Henry was nineteen years old, living in a boardinghouse in St. Louis and working odd jobs. During his free hours, Henry was content to haunt the local library.