From 1868, elections in Louisiana were marked by violence, as white insurgents tried to suppress black voting and disrupt Republican Party gatherings. The disputed 1872 gubernatorial election resulted in conflicts that ran for years.

Sam Clemens arrived in Cincinnati from Keokuk, Iowa in October of 1856.  He worked as a printer for T. Wrightson & Co. at 167 Walnut St.  He stayed at a boardinghouse at 76 Walnut St.  He wrote two letters to the Keokuk Post using the name Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.  On February 16, 1857, he boarded the Paul Jones and left the city for New Orleans, where he became Bixby's cub.

He returned to the city as part of the Twain-Cable Tour, January 1885.

Saint Louis, Missouri was well known to Samuel Clemens.

According to Rasmussen, while working as a river boat pilot "he landed at St. Louis perhaps 60 times."

St Louis was Sam's destination when he first left home in Hannibal, arriving May 27, 1853. He was 17 1/2 years old and aiming for New York City.

Sam returned to St. Louis in 1854.  He contributed a letter to the Muscatine Tri-Weekly Journal, 16 Feb 1855 that remarked on efforts to enlarge the size of St. Louis as well as railroad developments.  

Orion Clemens and his wife had settled there in June of 1855,  Sam, and younger brother Henry, helped Orion publish the Keokuk Journal out of a building at 202 Main Street.  Sam lived at First and Johnson Streets.  By late 1855 Sam was across the river in Warsaw, Illinois working a for another newspaper. By the fall of 1856, Sam had left for Cincinnati.  Orion departed Keokuk for Nevada  but eventually returned to stay in 1872.

In 1882:

The city of Warsaw began in 1814, when young Major Zachary Taylor founded Fort Johnson on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River across from the mouth of the Des Moines River. Fort Johnson was occupied only for a few weeks before it was burned. In 1815 another military camp, Fort Edwards, was built nearby at a different location. Warsaw became an important fur trading post and one of the earliest American settlements in northern Illinois.

The Clemens family moved to Hannibal in November of 1839,  

Hannibal by 1844 took pride in four general stores, three sawmills, two planing mills, three blacksmith shops, two hotels, three saloons, two churches, two schools, a tobacco factory, a hemp factory, and a tan yard, as well as a flourishing distillery up at the still house branch. West of the village lay “Stringtown,” so called because its cabins and stock pens were strung out along the road. Small industry was the lifeblood of the town [Wecter 60].