May 3 Wednesday – 24-year-old Joseph Ament purchased the Hannibal Gazette and moved his Missouri Courier to Hannibal. He established his newspaper in the second-floor Gazette offices on Main Street, over Brittingham’s Drugstore [Dempsey 155]. The merged papers went under the name of the Hannibal Gazette [Benson 2].
February 19 Saturday – Orion made a temperance speech in Hannibal [Wecter 294n5].
November 30 Tuesday – Sam’s twelfth birthday.
September – Sam’s memory wasn’t always accurate. He recalled being “taken from school at once upon my father’s death and placed in the office of the Hannibal Courier,” working for Joseph P. Ament. The Courier, however, was not established in Hannibal until 1848. Wecter says Sam no doubt delivered extras for Henry La Cossitt, owner of the Gazette, in particular after the victorious battle of Chapultepec in the Mexican War, in Sept. 1847 [Wecter 122-3].
August 19 Thursday – Reported in the Hannibal Journal: While exploring on Sny Island and Bird Slough with pals John Briggs and Will Bowen, the boys went wading. Tom Blankenship’s older brother “Bence” Blankenship had discovered a runaway slave, Neriam Todd, hiding on the island weeks before, and had secreted food to him until a group of men chased the slave into the water and lost him. When the boys waded, “suddenly the negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half the length out of the water.” Thinking the corpse was after them, the boys fled in terror [Wecter 148].
August 13 Friday – One of Sam’s playmates, Clint Levering, age ten, drowned after falling out of an empty flatboat while playing with “a number of his playmates.” Sam was no doubt among these boys, as he remembered the tragedy in his notebook and wrote of it in Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 54, where Sam called him “Lem Hackett.” (See May 13, 1882 entry.)
May 21 Friday – An appraisal of John Marshall Clemens’ property was filed in Marion County. The most valuable item was “6 volumes Nicholsons Encyclopedia.” Orion inherited the volumes, which went to Sam’s library after Orion and Mollie’s deaths [Gribben 507].
May 6 Thursday – The Hannibal Gazette reported that Sparhawk & Layton were giving nightly lectures and demonstrations at Hawkins’ saloon on “human magnetism” (hypnosis). Such subjects as mesmerizing and phrenology excited the town when “experts” arrived. In a few years Sam would engage in outdoing another boy who’d been put in a trance. See AMT 2: 589.
April 23 Friday – The Marion County Court appointed Orion administrator of John Marshall Clemens’ estate [Wecter 120].
April 14 Wednesday – The doors of J.D. Dawson’s school, later immortalized in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, opened in Hannibal. Dawson’s son, like Henry Clemens and Sid Sawyer, was a model boy, except that the Dawson boy added priggishness. It was in this school that Sam experienced many of the pranks and games that would fill the novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn [Wecter 132; Powers, D. Waters 93]. Note: John D. Dawson (b.1812?).
From Sam’s 1906 recollection of his schoolmates: