From The Twainian, Volume 10 Number 5 (1951), Editor not listed
The Characters Mark Used In His Writings
(The First of a Series)
We have been supplied with a torn sheet from an old issue of the newspaper “Grit,” and like most tearings, is minus the date. The account is of sufficient interest to be reprinted as a preliminary to certain further research we have started on the characters Mark used in his stories.
“Injun Joe’s Alibi”
“Joe Douglas, good-humoredly called “Injun Joe,” out at Hannibal, Mo., for one of the sinister characters in Mark Twain’s book, Tom Sawyer, resents the nickname, declaring his life has not warranted such a character as that given to Injun Joe in the book. And his friends in Hannibal indorse the statement.
Douglas is about 73, and he is supposed to have been born in Callaway County, Mo., at a place where a tribe of Indians had been camping. Some alarm sent the Indians scurrying upstate and they left little Joe behind. He was found and reared by a white family, and in time moved over to Marion County, locating in the heart of Mark Twain’s playground on the Mississippi. Joe worked hard, and saved his money and prospered. The people about Hannibal like him, and when they refer to him as “Injun Joe” it is ‘with no thought of anything bad about him.
You remember it was Injun Joe who killed the young doctor in the graveyard, and tried to lay the blame on his pal, Muff Potter. Muff was jailed and in all probability would have been hanged (because juries were sterner in those days) if Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn who saw the murder, hadn’t appeared at the trial, and described so vividly what they saw that Injun Joe smashed a window at the court house and escaped. It was the big dramatic scene in the book.
But to further entangle the situation as regards Injun Joe, Doc Buck Brown, of Hannibal, who was a boyhood chum of the creator of Tom Sawyer, declares that the real Injun Joe, whom he knew well, was anything but a bad man.
“But didn’t he kill young Doc Robinson?—that’s what it says in the book.”
“Tut, tut,” returned Doc Brown, “Injun Joe never killed anybody. He was as peaceable as a kitten—showed the boys the good swimming holes and helped 'em to find clam shells, and cooked fish for ’em. In the last years of his life Injun Joe was a roustabout on the ferryboat that ran over to the Illinois side, and one winter he died on the boat—caught cold and it went into pneumonia.”
But as the characters die off others appear to take their place. Some half a score of Huck Finns have been reported in various parts of the country, but no one has arisen to give Huck’s dad a good bill of health, so his character will probably stand as Clemens has described it. Until recently the Huck Finn home at Han- nibal stood as it did in the days of the Tom Sawyer gang, and the looks of it bore out all the great humorist had written about Huck and his sire.”