April 20 Thursday – From Ch. 22, LM:
Next Morning we drove around town in the rain. The city seemed but little changed. It was greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can’t persuade a thing to look new; the coal-smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of four hundred thousand inhabitants.
April 19 Wednesday – “This morning struck into the region of full goatees—sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally” [Ch. 22, LM].
Noon: Sam changed trains in Indianapolis.
Afternoon: “—At the railway-stations the loafers carry both hands in their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore, that one hand was sometimes out-of-doors—here, never. This is an important fact for geography.”
April 18 Tuesday – At 8 AM, Sam, Osgood, and Phelps left New York on the Pennsylvania Railroad. They would travel through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, then St. Louis. Sam noted in the evening:
“Speaking of dress. Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from New York” [Ch. 22, LM].
April 17 Monday – Sam left Hartford with 37-year-old Hartford schoolteacher Roswell Phelps, hired stenographer. Phelps was to take down Sam’s impressions of the trip, and also letters of Sam’s ongoing business matters [Kaplan 244]. The men were bound for St. Louis and the Mississippi River, where Sam’s decade-old dream (since at least Jan.
April – Sam’s notebook has an entry “Gillette ask Chas W Butler about Mrs. Bruner’s play—‘A Mad World’.” Butler was an actor [Gribben 107]. Sam also jotted notes about Mike Fink [229]. Also in his notebook: “War Diary of Gen. Geo. H. Gordon,” referring to A War Diary of Events in the War of the Great Rebellion (1882) [268]. Another entry reads, “Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—Max Muller’s translation. Macmillan, N.Y.” [363].
March 10 Thursday – Sam gave a reading at the “African Church” (A.M.E. Zion Church, Pearl St., Hfd.) in Hartford. He included Uncle Remus’s “Tar Baby” (see Feb. 27 entry to Howells). Paine on Sam’s interactions with black folks:
The war years contributed to additional dramatic changes in city population. The Union Army's presence attracted many fugitive slaves who had escaped from surrounding rural plantations. So many sought protection behind Union lines that the Army set up contraband camps to accommodate them.
We reached St. Louis at ten o'clock at night. At the counter of the hotel I tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name, with a miserable attempt at careless ease. The clerk paused, and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspects a respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances; then he said—
'It's all right; I know what sort of a room you want. Used to clerk at the St. James, in New York.'
March 9 Wednesday – Sam wrote from Hartford to A.V.S. Anthony.
“Please let the artist always picture the Prince & Tom Canty as lads of 13 or 14 years old. I knew I was making them too wise & knowing for their real age, so I studiously avoided mentioning any dates which would remind the reader that they were under 10 years old” [MTP].
March 8 Tuesday – Saloman & DeLeeuw, Hartford tobacco dealers, billed Sam $2.50 for corn cob pipes and Blackwell’s Durham tobacco; marked paid [MTP]
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