June 30 Wednesday – The Clemens family boarded a Mississippi steamboat for the final leg of their journey to Keokuk, about 500 miles [Scharnhorst, Interviews 88]. (Sam had estimated it “a 7 or 8-day journey” from Elmira to Keokuk; it took eight days).
Willis writes:
At St. Paul they took a steamboat down the Mississippi to Keokuk where they heard the leadsman call out “Mark Twain!” Clara reacted by telling her father, “Papa, I have hunted all over the boat for you. Don’t you know they are calling for you?” [171]. Note, Paine puts this to “that first evening on the river. Soon after nightfall” [MTB 3: 843].
In Keokuk, the Clemens children and Rosa stayed nearby at the McElroys, due to lack of room at Orion and Mollie’s [Salsbury 230]. In a letter on Aug. 7, Sam wrote to his mother that it was so hot that “Jean & Clara sat up in bed at Mrs. McElroy’s & cried about it & so did I.”
The St. Paul and Minneapolis Daily Pioneer Press printed a brief interview with Sam on p.7 titled, “Mark Twain Abroad”; Sam commented on modern journalism. The Minneapolis Tribune also ran a brief interview with Sam, “Mark Twain in St. Paul” on page 3. The Clemens family was on its way to Keokuk; Sam noted his habit of working on several manuscripts intermittently [Budd, “Interviews” 5; Scharnhorst, Interviews 87-8].
White plug hat, gray, bushy hair, gray moustache, gray suit of clothes and an Arkansas corn cob pipe in his mouth, from which came the wreathing curls of smoke — that was Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) as he stood in the Ryan hotel office last evening, asking to have a cot placed in one of the suite of rooms that he and his family occupied. Said Mr. Clemens to a Pioneer Press reporter:
“Glad to meet you (puff). I and my family are on their way to Keokuk (puff), Iowa, to visit my mother, and we have chose the lake route as the most pleasant by which to reach there (puff). The benefit of coming by the lakes was that I got no news. I was (puff) five days in the heart of the United States, and did not see a newspaper. It was refreshing. That’s what people take seas (puff) voyages for. To get away from the news; and when the New York Herald (puff) proposed to establish ocean life and news bureaus a thrill (puff) of horror went through the minds of many people, because the (puff) news would then go with them on their voyage.” Commenting on modern journalism, and its rapid progress, he said: “The metropolitan journalism of my day is the village journalism of today.”
Edith Anna Somerville wrote from Drishane, Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland and sent Sam a copy of her Mark Twain Birthday Book (London: Remington and Co., 1885). The book was a selection of his quotes in a calendar format. Her note was forwarded from Hartford to Elmira and was waiting for Sam on his return from Keokuk [MTNJ 3: 244n64].