In St. Louis:
...Sam found work in the shop of the St. Louis Evening News and in the composing room of Thomas Ustick, Orion's former employer. With a population of about ninety thousand, including about two thousand slaves and about fifteen hundred free men and women of color, soon to become the eighth-largest metropolis in the nation, the Mound City at the time boasted twenty-one daily and weekly newspapers; twelve magazines; a half-dozen lithographic, printing, and engraving establishments; “four steel and copper plate engraving and three wood engraving” businesses; and “six book binderies and eight book and job offices.” In all, these businesses employed over 850 printers—that is, about 1 percent of the population of the city worked in the printing industry. Ustick was responsible for producing the Western Watchman; the St. Louis Presbyterian; Anzeiger des Westens, an antislavery German-language daily; and other local publications. Sam no doubt learned some rudimentary German in Ustick’s shop and, as soon as he was settled, began to save his money. He was a competent though not a skilled compositor, fully able to set around ten thousand ems during an eight-hour shift, but when he increased his speed to boost his income he multiplied his mistakes. “While the rest of us were drawing our $12 a week, it was all Sam Clemens could do to make $8 or $9,” a coworker at the Evening News remembered, “He always had so many errors marked in his proofs that it took most of his time correcting them.” Nor could he “have set up an advertisement in acceptable form to save his life.” Sam likely lived with his sister Pamela and her husband Will on Pine Street to save the cost of renting a room. In a vain effort to make a little extra money, or so he recalled, he wrote several pieces he thought worthy of publication and carried them to the door of the editor of the St. Louis Missouri Republican, though he fled in trepidation before he submitted them for examination. While employed by the Evening News, he joined the St. Louis Typographical Union—his first but not last expression of solidarity with the cause of organized labor and craft guilds.”
(page 76)
In Philadelphia:
Meanwhile, he played the tourist and sent Orion a pair of letters for publication in the Muscatine Journal. In them Sam described his visits to the graves of Benjamin and Deborah Franklin in Germantown; Carpenters Hall, where the first U.S. Congress assembled; the campus of Girard College; and the original Fairmont Park. On the “sacred ground” of Independence Hall, where the declaration was signed, he experienced “an unaccountable feeling of awe and reverence.” He reclined on a pine bench where Franklin and George Washington had once sat and, in a letter to his mother and sister, admitted that he had repressed the temptation to whittle off a chip. He crisscrossed the city by horsecar, citing without credit R. A. Smith’s Philadelphia as It Is in 1852 in his correspondence with the Journal. Sam's tendency to paraphrase or plagiarize from guidebooks eventually became almost routine, especially in his travel writings. He may have acquired the habit—and thought nothing of it—while copying from newspaper exchanges at the typecase.
In the first flush of his pleasure in Philadelphia, Sam admitted to his sister that it had been “as hard on my conscience to leave New York, as it was easy to leave Hannibal.” But he soon adjusted to the rhythms of the Quaker City. “Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly,” he wrote on October 26. But succumbing to the xenophobia common at the time, he was put off by the number of “abominable foreigners” he encountered. He complained when he visited the shop of the Philadelphia North American that “there was at least one foreighner [sic] for every American at work there,” He was particularly offended by the Irish immigrants who worked beside him at the Inquirer and “hate everything American.” He had never seen before “so many whisky-swilling, God-despising heathens as I find in this part of the country. I believe I am the only person in the Inquirer office that does not drink.” He was still honoring his oath to his mother. He soon adapted to the local custom, however, including what the printers called “a ‘free-and-easy saloons” on Saturday nights, when “a chairman is appointed, who calls on any of the assembled company for a song or recitation.” As he wrote home, “It is hard to get tired of Philadelphia, for amusements are not scarce.
(page 80-0)
In Washington D.C.:
He did not apparently look for work, though he wrote an account of the trip for the Muscatine Journal. The city as a whole he thought “a wide stretch of cheap little brick houses, with here and there a noble architectural pile lifting itself out of the midst—government buildings, these.” ...
The Treasury building, he thought, would command respect in any capital” and the redbrick Smithsonian Institution seemed “half-church and half-castle.” The White House reminded him of “a fine large white barn, with wide unhandsome grounds about it. . . . It is ugly enough outside, but that is nothing to what it is inside. Dreariness, flimsiness, bad taste reduced to mathematical completeness is what the inside offers to the eye. He was more impressed by Clark Mills’s statue of Andrew Jackson commemorating the Battle of New Orleans, recently unveiled in Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Executive Mansion. Construction on the Washington Monument, begun in 1848, had stalled at only about 150 feet, a mere stub of what had been planned and less than a third of its final height of 555 feet,
But the U.S. Capitol was the public building that most impressed Sam. Standing on “the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position, with its white marble facade and “great rotunda,” the “temple of liberty was, he thought, “a very noble and a very beautiful building, both within and without.” During his visit to the public galleries there he watched as the Senate and the House of Representatives debated the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. On the Senate side he heard speeches by Lewis Cass of Michigan, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, and William Seward of New York. Seward struck him as “a slim, dark, bony individual” who looked “like a respectable wind would blow him out of the country. On the House side he observed Thomas Hart Benton, the former senator from Missouri, sitting “silent and gloomy in the midst of the din, like a lion imprisoned in a cage of monkeys, who, feeling his superiority, disdains to notice their chattering.” As in New York, Sam complained about the racial diversity of the city, comparing Washington to “a Hottentot village.” According to the 1850 census, nearly one-third of the more than fifty thousand residents of the District of Columbia were black, over ten thousand of them free men and women of color. A decade before the abolition of slavery in the district in 1862—and well before the Great Migration from the South of the early twentieth century—it had become a destination for free blacks.”
(page 81-2)
Back in St. Louis:
Sam resided in a boardinghouse at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Washington Street owned by the Pavey family, relatives of Hannibalians. “It was a large, cheap place & had in it a good many young fellows who were students at a Commercial College,” he remembered. His roommate, Jacob Burrough, was a journeyman chairmaker, a rabid republican and autodidact “fond of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott & Disraeli” and the model for the character of Barrow in The American Claimant (1892), “a short man about forty years old, with sandy hair, no beard, and a pleasant face badly freckled but alive and intelligent, and he wore slop-shop clothing which was neat but showed wear.” Sam and Burrough seem to have bonded over books, Sam remembered that his roommate was the only other lover of literature in the house. Twenty-two years later Sam conceded that at the time he had been “a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right. . . . Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense & pitiful chuckle-headedness—& an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, That is what I was at 19-20,”
...
He returned to work for the Evening News, though he lasted there only a few months. “He was a good printer,” his coworker William Waite remembered, “but mighty independent.” After all, he had earned a living at his craft in busier shops and bigger cities. But he was occasionally tardy for work and Charles G. Ramsey, owner and editor of the News, badgered him. According to Waite, Ramsey “would say: ‘Here's that —— boy late again,’” the type of rebuke Sam resented his whole life. “One morning he turned on Ramsey and replied: “Take your dashed situation, and go to (a warm country)!" — or words to that effect. “He left the office and we heard nothing of him for several years.” After burning his bridges in St. Louis, Sam again fled upriver to rejoin Orion, who had recently resettled in Keokuk, Iowa.”
(pages 86-87)
Sam's first public speech and the Amazon captures his imagination:
Sam delivered his first public speech on January 17, 1856, at a printers’ banquet at the Ivins House, the best hotel in Keokuk, to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the birth of Benjamin Franklin. Unfortunately, no transcript of the address survives, though Orion described it in the next issue of the Keokuk Gate City as “replete with wit and humor,” adding that it had been “interrupted by long and continuous bursts of applause.” One of Sam's coworkers also remembered the occasion: “Blushing and slowly getting upon his feet, stammering in the start, he finally rallied his powers, and when he sat down, his speech was pronounced by all present a remarkable production of pathos and wit, the latter, however, predominating, convulsing his hearers with round after round of applause.” Sam was soon recruited to join a local debating society. Meanwhile, the printing of the city directory that he supervised, issued in June 1856, “did not pay largely,” according to Paine, because Orion “was always too eager for the work; too low in his bid for it.” Sam listed his own occupation in it as an “antiquarian.” The term is significant because, in one of his columns in the Hannibal Journal in May 1853, he had mentioned the recent discovery of “ruins of ancient cities” in Mexico—no doubt the allegedly lost Aztec city of Iximaya—that was the subject of Pedro Velasquez's fanciful Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America (published in English in 1850). He added that the news would interest an “antiquarian,” his word for a type of explorer or anthropologist.”
Predictably, then, when Sam came across a copy of William Herndon’s Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (1854) in Keokuk, he was excited and intrigued. A passage about coca, an unregulated drug sometimes used in patent medicines, galvanized his interest.
(page 90)
Starting for the Amazon but landing in Cincinnati:
“I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon” and “to open up a trade in coca with all the world,” he remembered. He nursed an ambition to explore the headwaters of the Amazon—or, more accurately, to exploit the narcotic effects of the coca plant for profit.” He conspired in the scheme with a pair of potential partners, one of them Joseph S. Martin, a local Keokuk doctor and faculty member at Iowa Medical College. He also tried to entice his nineteen-year-old brother Henry to join the expedition, but Henry first asked his mother's permission and approval. “If I have an opportunity to go, I am afraid it will not be easy to obtain Ma's consent,” he advised Sam, and then he offered his own scrap of advice: “You seem to think Keokuk property is so good to speculate in, you'd better invest all your spare change in it, instead of going to South America.” In the end, Sam left Keokuk alone.”
He embarked on his quixotic journey sometime before mid-October 1856. Later, in a characteristic embroidery of the facts, he claimed that he discovered a fifty-dollar banknote blowing in the wind that financed his excursion—“I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day,” lest the owner claim the note—but no evidence corroborates this story.” Instead, Sam seems to have agreed to contribute a series of essays to the Keokuk Saturday Post for which he would be paid five dollars apiece. They were the first articles for which he was ever compensated. He boated south to St. Louis and, on October 13, he walked through the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association Fair and wrote up his observations of the “happily spent day” for the paper. Three of the next four pieces he sent the Saturday Post were published under the Dickensian pseudonym “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”—the nom de plume may allude to Jefferson's auburn hair, the same color as Sam's. Thomas Rees, son of George Rees, editor of the Saturday Post, boasted years later that his father had “discovered” Mark Twain. According to the son, “The firm of Kees & Son arranged with the young man to write some articles for publication in the Keokuk Post, which they mutually agreed would be worth five dollars each.” After submitting one or two from St. Louis, Sam demanded an increase in pay and Rees met his demand. He then submitted three more columns from Cincinnati and upped the ante by demanding ten or fifteen dollars for any additional columns. George Rees refused to meet his price and, as Thomas Rees put it, “the series of articles ended at that point.” Sam had overpriced his wares.
...
The second Snodgrass letter recounts his “voyage” from St. Louis to Cincinnati, Rather than rail directly from St. Louis to Cincinnati or catch a steamboat downstream to Cairo and up the Ohio River, however, Snodgrass (that is, Sam) took a much more circuitous route—from St. Louis to Keokuk in mid-October to see Rees and negotiate payment for the Snodgrass letters, back downstream to Quincy, then by rail to Chicago and Indianapolis, finally arriving in Cincinnati about October 24. He found work in the print shop of T. Wrightson & Co. on Walnut Street and a room in a boardinghouse three blocks away on Third Street. With five daily and fifteen weekly news- papers and a population of about 150,000, the Queen City was a publishing -enter for the western United States, with a lucrative job market for printers, Ironically, twenty-year-old W. D. Howells worked for a time a block away from Sam, though the two men would not meet formally for thirteen more years. Sam's fellow boarders were, he remembered, “commonplace people of various ages and both sexes. They were full of bustle, frivolity, chatter and the joy of life and were good-natured, clean-minded and well-meaning; but they were oppressively uninteresting, for all that—with one exception.”** He soon befriended the exception, a Scot whom he later called Macfarlane—in fact, probably John J. McFarland, who was not only Sam's fellow boarder but his coworker at Wrightson & Co, Macfarlane was a “diligent talker” about “forty years old—just double my age—but we were opposites in most ways and comrades from the start.’ ‘The winter of 1856-57, Sam reported in his third Snodgrass letter, was one of the harshest on record. (The coldest winter he ever spent was a winter in Cincinnati?)
(page 91-92)
Sam has decided to be a riverboat pilot:
When Sam reported to his friends and family that he planned to become a pilot on the lower Mississippi, their responses were mixed. Annie Taylor broke off their relationship, perhaps because there was no telling when he would next be in Keokuk, or perhaps because she no longer considered a boatman her social or intellectual equal, though she saved a pair of his letters to the end of her life. His niece Annie Moffett remembered that in St. Louis “everyone was running up and down stairs and sitting on the steps to talk over the news. Piloting in those days was a dramatic and well-paid profession, and in a river town it was a great honor to have a pilot in the family.” His mother, on the other hand, was dismayed. “I gave him up then,” she told an interviewer, “for I always thought steamboating was a wicked business and was sure he would meet bad associates.” According to a joke at the time, rivermen were like the river: shallowest and dirtiest at the mouth. Still, there is no evidence that Jane released Sam from his oaths to avoid gambling and drinking hard liquor—nor, for that matter, that he began to violate either oath.
(page 94-5)