Mark Twain, A Biography - Volume I, Part 1: 1835-1866 | Page 7

time occupied a log house built by John Clemens
himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank
of the river. He no longer practised law. In The Gilded Age we have
Mark Twain's picture of Squire Hawkins and Obedstown, written from
descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother Orion;
and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an exaggerated
presentation of east Tennessee conditions at that time. The chapter is
too long and too depressing to be set down here. The reader may look it
up for himself, if he chooses. If he does he will not wonder that Jane
Clemens's handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and her
manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or that
John Clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his
environment-- was rapidly getting out of heart. After all the bright
promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope
seemed dwindling away.
A tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older
than his years. Every spring he was prostrated with what was called
"sunpain," an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to
all persistent effort. Yet he did not retreat from his moral and

intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community.
He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of
a kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten. Gray and deep-set
under bushy brows, they literally looked you through. Absolutely
fearless, he permitted none to trample on his rights. It is told of John
Clemens, at Jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed
the minister on Sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the
pulpit, according to the custom of that community. For some reason,
the minister put the document aside and neglected it. At the close of the
service Clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement
himself to the congregation. Those who knew Mark Twain best will not
fail to recall in him certain of his father's legacies.
The arrival of a letter from "Colonel Sellers" inviting the Hawkins
family to come to Missouri is told in The Gilded Age. In reality the
letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens's sister,
Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. It
was a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for
it shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to
do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose
memory is likely to last as long as American history.

III
A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE
Florida, Missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller than
it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if less
celebrity. The West was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively
unknown. Two States, Louisiana and Missouri, with less than half a
million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river. St. Louis,
with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade with the
South, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted region. There
was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines of any
consequence--scarcely any maps. For all that one could see or guess,
one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement like

Florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, Salt River, which those
early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry the
merchandise of that region down to the mighty Mississippi, thence to
the world outside.
In those days came John A. Quarles, of Kentucky, with his wife, who
had been Patsey Ann Lampton; also, later, Benjamin Lampton, her
father, and others of the Lampton race. It was natural that they should
want Jane Clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east
Tennessee venture and join them in this new and promising land. It was
natural, too, for John Quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and
optimistic--to write the letter. There were only twenty-one houses in
Florida, but Quarles counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a
roof on it--and set down the number at fifty-four.
Florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just the
kind of a place that John Clemens with unerring instinct would be
certain to select, and the Quarles letter could have but one answer. Yet
there would be the longing for companionship, too, and Jane Clemens
must have hungered for her people. In The Gilded Age, the Sellers
letter ends:
"Come!--rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!"
The Clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting
away. The store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of
produce