How the Mississippi River Made Mark Twain…and vice versa

Josh. Aimless. Sun god. Sergeant Fatem. Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. W. Parapodia. Son of Adam. Related Content A World of Water

As I devoured dry-rubbed barbecue and piled napkins at a busy party in Memphis, I ran through the names in my head. The restaurant's slogan, "Adam's Ribs Were Not So Famous," reminded me of Mark Twain's fondness for alluding to Adam with an ic, so much so that he called him by an early pseudonym. But "Son of Adam" and "Josh," "Rambler," and other experiments belonged to a dilettante, a man who wrote occasionally and was also employed as a printer, a steamboat pilot, and a miner. It wasn't until he became a full-time reporter, far away from the river and in the alkali dust of Nevada, that he settled on "Mark Twain."

You could even walk halfway down the Mississippi River along a virtual version of the river without feeling hungry. I had to get to the party from the River Trail on Mud Island near downtown Memphis, a rattling scale model of the lower half of the Mississippi River from its confluence with the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico. The Riverside Trail offers an outdoor walk covering 1,000 miles on a one-mile scale. A robin kept me company as I wandered through the pale yellow concrete mosaic, watching children tumble through the elevation zones on the model river bank, rising from the trough like a stairway stacked with pancakes. What would Samuel Clemens do to the embankment? He is a mature child who readily accepts God's view of life on earth. He'll love it.

All the model was missing was the Great River Road, the Mississippi-long highway that would be my home for the next few days. My navigation star will be the one with the steering wheel logo, beckoning to anyone willing to pause time and turn off their GPS. Grand River Road is a map line drawn in multiple inks that consists of federal, state, county and town roads that sometimes even look like private driveways. In Illinois alone, there are 29 different roads and highways. Touted as a "scenic byway," it's usually not scenic and occasionally a highway. But it's a unique way to experience the country's present and past; its rich, formerly rich and everyone else; its Indian mounds and military forts; its wildlife from tundra swans to alligators; It's the ink stopper of the engine. Hannibal (the site of Mark Twain's home and museum) - his "white town dozing in the sun" - retains the charm of the author's immortal slumber. (Dave Anderson) "When I was a boy," Twain wrote, "my friends had but one permanent ambition...to be a steamboatman." (Today, a riverboat dock in Memphis.) (Dave Anderson) The Great River Road follows what Twain called a mythical waterway: "It is not a Monpras river, but quite the contrary, it is extraordinary in every way." (Dave Anderson) Hannibal Time travel is taken seriously: For children dressed in period costumes, Twain House staff organized a reading of the novelist's (Dave Anderson) Hannibal, one of the novelist's childhoods in Mississippi, at Mount Olive Cemetery. Home, “considered me a citizen,” Twain once quipped, “but I was too young to really do any harm to the place. ” (Dave Anderson) Hannibal (home of Mark Twain’s home and museum)—his “white town drowsy in the sun”—retains the author’s enduring slumbering charm. (Dave ·Anderson) Christy Zapalak, near the Underground Railroad line she discovered in Mississippi (Dave Anderson) Tom and Huck statue - at the foot of Cardiff Mountain in Hannibal, Missouri (Dave Anderson) Vicki and Terrell Dempsey, from their home in Quincy, Illinois, wrote a book about slavery in Hannibal, "Looking for Jim" (Dave Anderson) Mark Twain Home and Museum. Cindy Lovell, former executive director of the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, Missouri, brings school-age children to read by candlelight at Mount Olivet Cemetery. (Dave Anderson) Tom and Becky look like they were competing in Hannibal 2012. (Dave Anderson) View from Big River Road.

(Dave Anderson) Gr. Signpost In 1862, as Sheikh Menfian witnessed the South River Fleet’s defeat in the battle for the city, I wandered over to a bronze statue that caught my eye. It was Jefferson Davis. Engraved on the granite base is: "He was a true American patriot." A Yankee carved this tribute on his head.

The Great River Road often separated itself from the great river by miles; sometimes it sought high ground. In Kentucky, to see the river you have to go a little way, say, to Columbus-Belmont State Park, which is peaceful now but not always with some gentle hills that were the walls of the trenches. In December 1861, Ulysses S. Grant led 3,000 Union members in a harassing raid up the river from Cairo, Illinois, on a site not dug into the cliffs. Confederate Army, but in a smaller camp on the Missouri River. A long day's advance and retreat, essentially a draw, included several close-range Combined Brigade orders. Looming above the site is a Confederate cannon, which a local historian unearthed 16 years ago from 42 feet of soil.

The river has a long history of excavation and salvage. A few miles down the road, another trail takes you to Wickliffe Hills, one of the many cultural villages along the Mississippi River. The fossil, which dates from approximately 1100 to 1350, was first excavated in the 1930s by Fain King, a Kentucky lumber tycoon and amateur archaeologist who created a tourist attraction that brought America to America. Aboriginal*** bones serve as objects of curiosity. But, more importantly, they are the remains of venerable ancestors, as Congress declared in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. This would require the transfer of disposition of local skeletal remains to tribal descendants or, if unknown, to the tribe that best represents them. The skeletons of the "Ancient Buried City" were ceremonially reburied by members of the Chickasaw Nation, and the mounds were restored to their original shape.

I drove to St. Louis to meet with the energetic historian, preservationist, and debunker Kris Zapalac. Don't be surprised if her first words to you address a misunderstanding she suspects you're trying to overcome. She might warn you of your suspicions about the monument: "Just because there's a tunnel somewhere doesn't mean it was part of the Underground Railroad." Or she might tell you that slaves who escaped to freedom didn't always receive help from outsiders. , white or otherwise: "People are always looking for Harriet Tubman."

Chris singled me out outside the city's Old Courthouse, where I spent the morning studying Dre Descott's full display. Driving north on Broadway, she pointed to the 1874 Eads Bridge and found a railing design that met code requirements and closely matched the original design. James B. Eads The “B” stands for Buchanan, but it should stand for “Brainstorm”—a creative dynamo. He designed ironclad gunboats for the union, created channels for deep-water vessels at the mouth of the Mississippi, and my personal favorite, invented the diving bell. Like Henry Clemens, Eads began his career on the river as he watched steamships sink around him and saw the money that would be made from recycling their cargo and fittings. It's no wonder he invented a device that for years only he was willing to use. It's a 40-gallon whiskey barrel with one end removed and the other end connected to the boat via a support cable and an air hose. Once he is installed in the barrel, the barrel is submerged, open end first to catch the air (imagine an upside-down glass in a bathtub filled with dishes). At the bottom of the ocean, he would wander the underwater terrain, battling currents and murky darkness in search of treasure. Eads should have died many times. Instead, he positioned himself as a pioneering, if somewhat comical, engineer.

Four miles north of the St. Louis Arch, Chris and I discovered an Underground Railroad site as we arrived at our destination. Here, in 1855, a small group of slaves attempted to cross the river to Illinois, including a woman named Esther and her two children.

However, authorities were waiting for them on the banks of the Illinois River. A few slaves escaped, but most were captured, among them Esther, the master of Henry Shaw, a name known to St. Louisans because he developed a vast botanical garden and bequeathed it to this city. In an attempt to punish Esther, Shaw sold her to the river and separated her from her two children. Chris looked up newspaper accounts and slave sale receipts, put the facts together, and found the possible spot where the boat anchored. In 2001, the site was recognized as a Land of the Free by the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Network.

At the intersection, I tried to imagine the silent nightly rides on and off the bus and the bitter disappointment of crossing the river. Since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required free state citizens to assist in the capture of freedom seekers, Illinois represented not the freedom of slaves but another danger. I'm reminded of Jim in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, hiding on an island to escape his fate that was eventually handed to Esther. Meanwhile, Huck, disguised as a girl, learns from an otherwise affable Illinois woman that she suspects a runaway slave is camped on the island and that she has alerted her husband, who is about to capture him. This scene leads to one of the most famous uses of the first-person plural pronoun in literature: Huck rushes back to the island, awakens Jim, and instinctively uses the words "They're after us" to describe his struggle.

Chris and I walked into the nearby information center, housed in a square, metal former Coast Guard building, surrounded by a lively, chatty host. Chrissy hadn't been to that place in a while, and when our host learned that it was her who had discovered the time-travel, he smiled, held his chest high, and included her, even though it was totally unworthy of it. "You are a great lady," he said to her. "You are a great lady." Kris shook her head. "I'm a historian," she said.

I left Kris to her current project, researching hundreds of freedom lawsuits filed by slaves in Missouri courts, and Driving along the Missouri section of the Great River Road known as the Little Dixie Highway, I passed the small Louisiana town where young Sam Clemens was found hiding in Hannibal. on a steamer, 30 miles from Hannibal. I thought about the boy growing up in Hannibal in the 1840s and 1850s and Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn. I recently read Looking for Jim: Slavery in the World of Sam Clemens, a book by Terrell Dempsey, formerly of Hannover. Dempsey, who now lives not far from the town of Quincy, Illinois, has always wondered whether Hannibal's full slave history was being told correctly, and he and his wife, Vicki, a man like himself. The same lawyer began to spend his evenings and weekends digging through local newspaper archives.

Reading Looking for Jim is to understand the cruelty of racism in this society. , Clemens grew up as slaves' daily drudges; the beatings they endured, sometimes to the point of death; the hatred white citizens felt for abolitionists and free blacks; the racist jokes that passed from one newspaper to another The newspapers, some of which were typed by young Sam as an apprentice printer, the Clemens family kept slaves, and Sam's father sat on a jury that sent three abolitionists to trial. 12 Years in Prison. To reread Mark Twain's work with a more comprehensive view of the world is to appreciate his long moral journey to like Huck, to understand Jim's struggle.

I met Terrell and Vicki in their 1889 Queen Anne Quincy home, one of dozens of enviable Victorian homes in the town's East End historic district. A boat trip was proposed. We drove to the Quinsibe Island marina, unpacked their crude pontoon boat, and set off. We passed a tugboat pushing nine covered barges and took a closer look at its contents. His reputation was more important. Orion was a hapless man with a disastrous career record, but he was earnest and kind-hearted, and Sam displayed a level of anger toward him that always seemed to me excessive.

Now, looking at the portrait behind that overheard photo, I wonder if Sam's anger can be traced back to the fact that his father died when he was 11, and poverty forced his mother to expel him from school and place him in a local family home. Apprenticeship in a stern printing shop, if Orion, who was ten years older than him, I was not a newcomer since birth and could support my family.

I next went to my childhood home and cut one end of the house in half from front to back like a dollhouse, with three rooms on each floor protected by glass but still visible Very intimate view. A high school student behind me said to himself, "This is so wonderful!" as he rushed into the living room from the gift shop. The family was working on his magic. The wooden floor of the kitchen was covered with a thin rug with a sign stating that a slave would sleep here and get up early to light the family fire. The tray was installed at the suggestion of Tyrell Dempsey, who for years had been agitating for the museum to pay more attention to slavery. Before him, in the 1990s, Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin made a similar plea, and now the museum is really doing justice to the subject.

After my tour, I caught up with the museum’s executive director, Cindy Lowell. While I was in her office, curator Henry Sweets watched us for a long time, hearing my expressions of pleasure for the exhibits, and then he hurried off to perform his many duties, as he had done since 1978 as done. The two of them are Enceladus, even more than you would expect from their positions. Cindy would say of other curators and scholars, "He's a Twain geek," "She's got the worm," and "She got the worm," or the death sentence: "He did the wrong thing." Don't quote Mark Twain in front of her. She will complete the quote with corrections and expand it beyond your intent.

Cindy gave me a directorial view of Twain’s world—a place with at least five headquarters (besides Hannibal: Berkeley, Calif.; Hartford, Conn.; Elmira, N.Y.) ; and his birthplace near Florida, Missouri). "They're wonderful people," she said. "This is a great community." Unfortunately, Clemens' artifacts are everywhere. A 12-foot-tall mirror from his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York is in the Dubuque River Museum. "It's crazy!" she said. "It's everywhere." Florida has family carriages! "The carriage belongs entirely in Hartford, where Sam, Olivia, and their three daughters used it regularly, rather than in Fort Missouri, where Sammy left when he was 3 years old. I imagine a coordinated, multi-party exchange taking place, Like a kidney exchange, each museum received its fair share of goods

At Cindy's suggestion, we repaired in my rental car to the two-lane road to Mount Olive Cemetery. Many Clemens (father, mother, and brothers Henry and Orion; as for Sam, Olivia, and their children, they are all buried in Elmira), and then the Baptist Cemetery, where Tom Sawyer "The memory of so-and-so is sacred," painted on the board above the grave, which you can now read on the headstone that replaced them, before the horrified eyes of Tom and Huck, Injun Joe murdered Dr. Robinson. Dee told me that she loved taking school-aged writers to the cemetery at night and reading them this passage by candlelight (alas, no more), as if to prove the authenticity of Twain's world, after my visit. Soon Cindy became the executive director of the Mark Twain Museum in Hartford)

It's a big river and I've got to keep going Comedian Buddy Hackett. It was once said that words with a "k" in them are funny. By this measure, Keo-kuk moved to this small town on the Iowa River, just over the border from Missouri. A struggling newspaper editor, he succeeded in becoming an opponent of slavery, much to the chagrin of young Sam.

I stayed in a B&B on Main Street in Keokuk, which was famous for its reputation as a slave. Two bright-eyed, white-shirted couples joined me for breakfast in the morning as the wide street called for it overlooks the river. They said they were from Salt Lake City, I said I was from Vermont, and we agreed not to discuss politics. .

Each couple has a son "on mission," one in Russia and the other in New Caledonia, and the four of them make a week-long pilgrimage along the Mormon Pioneer Trail, which traces the origins of the faith. The persecuted ancestors migrated from western Missouri eastward to Illinois, then westward, and finally to Utah. They asked about my travels and I mentioned Mark Twain. One of the men, with an ambiguous smile, said that Mark Twain had written that the Book of Mormon was "a cure for insomnia" (actually "the chloroform of print," which I couldn't remember from my desk). Where is Cindy when I need her? "

I wanted to ask them about the pilgrimage, but I hung up on the wording. "Do all Mormons do this? "It sounds like I see them as a group of people. Every idea I have seems to be rooted in stereotypes. I'm the only one drinking coffee at the table, and every time I take a sip, I feel like an alcoholic. When One of the men was looking at something on his iPad and I thought, “Well, Mormons can use iPads. "We parted on the most amicable terms, but I sensed a vast gulf of difference, largely caused by my ignorance.

I drove north up Grand Avenue, past a series of stylistic Queen Anne, Dutch Colonial Revival, Gothic Revival, and Prairie School homes are all on a six-block stretch. But these piles, unlike the Quincy-style houses I admire, are not as suggestive of a former thriving independence. for a block. The road dropped down, meandered along the river, and dropped me unassumingly into the quiet village of Montrose, whose church is proportionate to its population, just to the north. One of the reasons B&B Pilgrims came here. Beginning in 1839, Mormon settlers cleared the swamps across the river in Illinois and established a community that quickly grew into the largest town in the state, surrounded by Mormons. Threatened to the faith and their success, leader Joseph Smith was murdered in 1844, and in 1846 they began to drive the Mormons out of the area. The first to escape crossed the river by ice in February, although many died. , where I stand now, survivors huddle together and look back on their lost temples and towns. During this trip, I passed several crossings where Indians were once forced to move into Indian territory. The place was also a trail of tears, I thought. I looked down and hoped my B&B pilgrims would come while I was there so we could reacquaint ourselves with them on their turf, but the timing wasn't right.

Continue. A recent HuffPost USA survey of "most beautiful road trips" beat out Hawaii's 250-mile stretch of Wisconsin's Great River Road. The Hana Highway and California's Big Sur Coast Highway I needed to see for myself The next day, I set off from Dubuque through Wisconsin, when the road seemed to take me at right angles to the river. I panicked, but the sign for the steering wheel reassured me and guided me through rolling farmland back to the river. The scenery started to feel different from anything I'd experienced so far, and I knew why: I was in a "no-drift zone." .The most recent ice age in North America, the Wisconsin Glacier, spared this part of the river basin for reasons that are "less clear" to me. The "drift" is the sediment left behind by the glacier (hence the name), but most What distinguishes the terrain is the series of towering bluffs it creates along the river, which begin about 50 miles north of Dubuque.

The bluffs are one of the other two surprises in the Driftless area. One is that rivers sometimes flood lakes, and locks and dams are often responsible for flooding in the upper Slo River

In Dubuque, where I visited an old dugout named the William M. Blake. Mudboats, affable guide Robert Carroll told me, grew up on Wisconsin's Duchin prairie with the crunching roar of dredgers clearing river channels. He spoke so authoritatively about William. Blake, so much so that I thought of him as an ex-sailor. But he didn't spend his adult life working as a court reporter in landlocked Cedar Rapids. He retired to Dubuque. “I missed the river,” he said, even though he didn’t have to say that—I knew it was flowing. Carroll now spends his days happily explaining every rivet on the ship to visitors, just like he heard as a child