Crescent City

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Steamboat: CRESCENT CITY
Built: 1854
Tonnage: 688
Clemens' Service: 29 April - 7 July, 1857
Pilot: Horace Bixby
Co-Pilot: Strother Wiley
Captain: R. C. Young

April 29, 1857: Wednesday – Sam left St. Louis on the Crescent City (688 tons), bound for New Orleans.

May 4? Monday – The Crescent City arrived in New Orleans.

May 8–9? Saturday – The Crescent City left New Orleans bound for St. Louis.

Colonel Crossman

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Steamboat: COLONEL CROSSMAN
Built: 1857
Tonnage: 415
Clemens' Service: 4 March - 15 March 1857
Pilot: Horace Bixby
Captain: Patrick Yore

March 4, 1857 Wednesday – Commanded by Patrick Yore and piloted by Horace Bixby, the Colonel Crossman (415 tons) left New Orleans with Sam aboard bound for St. Louis.
March 15, 1857: Sunday – The Colonel Crossman arrived in St. Louis.

Return to the Mississippi River Valley

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March 1854 - April 1857:  Sam Clemens is back in Hannibal and Keokuk.

In 1906 Clemens described this return trip: “I went back to the Mississippi Valley, sitting upright in the smoking-car two or three days and nights. When I reached St. Louis I was exhausted. I went to bed on board a steamboat that was bound for Muscatine. I fell asleep at once, with my clothes on, and didnt’ wake again for thirty-six hours” .

Washington D.C.: 1854

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His visit to Washington, D.C., probably lasted only a long weekend, from 16 through 20 February (or possibly through Washington’s birthday) 1854. He himself called his stay a “flying trip,” and Paine said that it “was comparatively brief, and he did not work there” . He boarded a night train in Philadelphia and arrived at the Baltimore and Ohio station in Washington on the morning of Thursday, February 16, 1854. Having heard enough Senate oratory, Sam trudged through the mud over to the House. Fourteen years later, Mark Twain remembered “perfectly well” the House debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, recalling that the members “seemed to be a mob of empty headed whipper snappers that had only come to Congress to make incessant motions, propose eternal amendments, and rise to everlasting points of order.” He wrote, “They glanced at the galleries oftener than they looked at the Speaker, they put their feet on their desks as if they were in a beer mill; they made more racket than a rookery, and let on to know more than any body of men ever did know or ever could know by any possibility whatsoever.”

Philadelphia: 1853-54

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Philadelphia is one of the healthiest places in the Union. The air is pure and fresh—almost like the country. The city now extends from Southwark to Richmond—about five miles—and from the Delaware to the Schuylkill—something over two miles. The streets are wide and straight, and cross each other at right angles, running north and south and east and west. What is now the crooked Dock street was once a beautiful brook, running through the heart of the city. In old times vessels came up this creek as high as third [street.]

New York City: 1853-54

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I found board in a sufficiently villainous mechanics’ boarding-house in Duane Street,” Clemens said in 1906. There were, in fact, numerous boardinghouses on Duane Street. Paine reported that Clemens “did not like the board. He had been accustomed to the Southern mode of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have ‘hot-bread’ or biscuits, but ate ‘light-bread,’ which they allowed to get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way”. If Clemens made his complaint in a letter, as Paine asserts, it is not known to survive. From John A. Gray’s establishment on the East River side of lower Manhattan, it was about a ten-block walk across town to Duane Street near Broadway on the West Side, where Clemens lived and boarded. Broadway was notably wider than the typical “little, narrow street” of lower Manhattan; it was also packed with carts, hacks, coaches, and omnibuses, not to mention pedestrians.

St. Louis to New York: 1853

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It took a day, by steamboat and cars, to go from St. Louis to Bloomington, Ill; another day by railroad, from there to Chicago. From Chicago to Monroe, in Michigan, by railroad, another day; from Monroe, across Lake Erie, in the fine Lake palace, “Southern Michigan,” to Buffalo, another day; from Buffalo to Albany, by railroad, another day; and from Albany to New York, by Hudson river steamboat, another day.

St. Louis: 1853

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Sometime in May or June of 1853 seventeen year old Sam Clemens left home for the first time. He departed the small Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. Sam likely stayed with his sister Pamela and found work as a typesetter for the St. Louis Evening News. 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.

The Man in the White Suit

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Livy had died in Florence, Italy. Her funeral was held in Elmira, New York July 14 of 1904. Sam would take residence in Tyringham, Massachusetts for four months before moving into an apartment at 21 Fifth Avenue, New York, where he would keep residence until June of 1908, when his final home, known as Stormfield, was built in Redding, Connecticut. Following the death of his youngest daughter, Jean, on December 24th of 1909, Sam likely found the solitary life in this house unbearable and took his final trip to Bermuda, January 7th of 1910. He stayed there until April 12. When he came to leave the Islands, he was too weak to be dressed. Wrapped in his coat and a few rugs, Clemens was carried in a canvas chair to the SS Corona, then taken by the tender to the RMS Oceana. He died April 21st of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Stormfield, one day after Halley's comet's closest approach to Earth
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