August 29 Monday – Sam got “a permanent situation…in a book and job office and went to work.” He was paid 23 cents per 1000 ems, the lowest rate. He worked in the fifth floor office of John A. Gray, 95-97 Cliff Street [MTL 1: 9; Powers, MT A Life 65]. His earnings were four dollars a week; he managed to save as much as fifty cents a week [MTB 96].
August 24 Wednesday – “…and from Albany to New York, by Hudson river steamboat [Isaac Newton], another day—an awful trip, taking five days, where it should have been only three” [MTL 1: 3]. Sam arrived in New York City at 5 AM with “two or three dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of his coat” [MTB 95; MTL 1: 5n2; Powers, MT A Life 64]. (See letter of this date for a more exacting suggested itinerary.)
August 23 Tuesday – 7 AM “from Buffalo to Albany, on the “Lightning Express” railroad, another day” [MTL 1: 3; Powers, MT A Life 64]. Dempsey gives this train trip as beginning at 8 A.M. [232].
August 22 Monday – 8 AM “from Monroe, across Lake Erie, in the fine Lake palace, ‘Southern Michigan,’ to Buffalo, another day. Sam would revisit Buffalo and Niagara Falls in 1869 [MTL 1: 3; Reigstad 59]. Dempsey: “He traveled to Buffalo, New York, aboard the steamer Southern Michigan” [Dempsey 232].
August 21 Sunday – Sam took the 9 PM Michigan Central to Toledo, Ohio, then to Monroe, Michigan on the Northern Indiana and Michigan Southern railroads [Dempsey 232]. In his letter he wrote he traveled from Chicago to Monroe, Michigan “by railroad, another day” [MTL 1: 3].
August 20 Saturday – Sam took the Illinois Central line to LaSalle, then the Chicago and Rock Island into Chicago, arriving at 7 PM [MTL 1: 5n2; Dempsey 232]. He “laid over all day Sunday” [MTL 1: 3].
August 19 Friday – At 8 AM Sam boarded a boat and started a journey by train and boat to New York. He did not tell his mother about the trip, which took about five days. From St. Louis to Alton, Ill by the sidewheeler steamer Cornelia, 11:00 AM, from Alton to Springfield on the partly completed Chicago and Mississippi Railroad; by Frink’s stage to Bloomington, Ind. [MTL 1: 5n2]. Dempsey notes that the train station was “just a few blocks” from the law office of Abraham Lincoln [232].
Summer – St. Louis in the summer of 1853 was a burgeoning city of 100,000 souls, the largest city of the West. The city offered Western freedom together with many of the luxuries and affectations of the East. For a young man from Hannibal, such a city must have been dazzling. Sam had kept plans secret from his family, to work in St. Louis long enough to make fare to New York City. Sam had read stories about the World’s Fair there, The Crystal Palace Fair, and he’d included them in his Journal column. He probably stayed with the Moffetts and set type for the St. Louis Evening News.
June 11 Saturday – Orion failed to get out the Hannibal Daily Journal for a whole month, beginning on this date. In one sense, Sam never truly left Hannibal—he carried it in his heart and memory and poured it out into The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Hannibal in those pages would become a universal boyhood home, an icon like the man himself. Sam would visit again in 1882 to gather material for Life on the Mississippi, and the last time in 1902. In many ways Sam Clemens would always be the boy of Hannibal—his wife Livy would call him “youth.”
June 2 Thursday – Four unsigned news articles appeared in the Journal attributed to Sam days after he left town: “Friday Evening, May 27, 1853,” “Saturday Evening, May 28, 1853,” “Monday Evening, May 30, 1853. Small Pox Gone,” and “Tuesday Evening, May 31, 1853” [Camfield, bibliog.]. It is likely that Sam had left these, either complete or for Orion to finish and use as he saw fit. Sam’s only other items in the Journal were two letters home that ran in September.