AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle of April.
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 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 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 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 21 Friday – The Gold Dust finally got underway at 2 AM and at 6 AM paused at Menard, Ill. to let off passengers near St. Genevieve. Sam enjoyed the scenery, passing Chester, Ill., Grand Tower, Ill., and Cape Girareau, Mo., stopping at Cairo, Ill., some 200 miles from St. Louis.
April 22 Saturday – The Gold Dust left Cairo early in the morning. When Sam “turned out” the packet had passed Columbus, Ky. and was approaching Hickman. Sam noted the damage that the “flood of 1882” had caused to New Madrid, Mo. and the unprotected lowlands from Cairo south.
April 23 Sunday – Sam and party toured Memphis in the morning.
“A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi: has a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops, and manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil; and is shortly to have cotton-mills and elevators” [Ch 29 LM].
From Sam’s notebook:
April 24 Monday – At about noon, the Gold Dust passed Napoleon, Ark., which used to be a thriving town but now was all but gone due to the shifting Big Muddy.
April 25 Tuesday – Sam wrote aboard the Gold Dust to Livy. He’d been on deck at 4 AM and watched the sun come up, complete with “cluttering” bullfrogs, aromas of dead fish on the ground, and “marvels of shifting light & shade & color & dappled reflections…bewitching to see” [Powers, MT A Life 460]. The writing would find itself in Huckleberry Finn.
April 26 Wednesday – The Gold Dust arrived at Vicksburg, Miss., where Sam, Osgood and Phelps boarded the Charles Morgan [MTNJ 2: 436]. A notebook entry for the date at 11 AM may be the time of the Morgan’s departure [462]. Before boarding, the party took a ride to the National Cemetery, where Sam jotted the motto over the gateway:
April 27 Thursday – The Charles Morgan stopped a half an hour at Baton Rouge, La. [MTNJ 2: 546].
“Baton Rouge was clothed in flowers, like a bride—no, much more so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now—no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant…” [Ch.40 LM].
April 28 Friday – At 8 AM, the Charles Morgan arrived at New Orleans. Sam stayed at the St. Charles Hotel [MTNJ 2: 458n84]. While in the city, he met up with George W. Cable. From Sam’s notebook:
April 29 Saturday –Sam’s notebook records a mule race staged to benefit the Southern Art Union, a group promoting New Orleans artists:
Mule race with Burke & Houston. Later mentioned the Voudoo superstitions. Among old creoles if one meets a funeral he removes his hat & walks back with procession one block.
April 30 Sunday – 7 AM at the train depot, Sam met Joel Chandler Harris, who’d traveled from Atlanta. Harris registered at the St. Charles Hotel, where Sam was staying; the two then met George Cable and attended church services of the Prytania Street Presbyterian Church, Rev. J.H.
May – Sam’s notebook carries an entry to “see Dickens for a note on Cairo [Illinois]” [Gribben 187]. In LM Sam focused on the improvements in Cairo, no longer the place Dickens had described, a:
“…hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise.”
May 1 Monday – Sam, Cable and Harris spent the afternoon “at Cable’s red-and-olive cottage, surrounded by orange trees and a garden, on Eighth Street, on the lip of the Garden District” [Kaplan 245]. The crowd of children who’d come to Cable’s house to see their beloved Uncle Remus were shocked to find the red-haired man was white and too shy to read to an audience.
May 2 Tuesday – Dr. John Brown of Scotland, favored friend of the Clemens family died. Sam would learn of the death before he left New Orleans, in a “damp newspaper.”
Sam wrote from New Orleans to Livy:
May 3 Wednesday – Sam “lay abed till toward noon…& made Osgood go out & meet the appointments.” After Osgood returned they began a game of billiards, but Horace Bixby came by. Sam went and dined with his old mentor [May 4 to Livy, MTP]. In Ch. 48 of Life on the Mississippi, Sam wrote he encountered Bixby on the street and the two men embraced, but the May 4 account is probably the correct one.
May 4 Thursday – Sam wrote that he and Bixby “joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug” [Ch 48 LM].
From Sam’s notebook:
May 5 Friday – Sam was quite fascinated by an ice factory he visited and described it the next day in a letter to Livy. “They make 60 tons a day in summer & 100 in winter, & sell it at a cent a pound.”
In the evening Sam received a letter from Susy and Clara and Livy [May 6 letter to Livy, MTP].
May 6 Saturday – From Sam’s notebook:
Visited Armory of the “Washington Artillery”. Hanging there is an equestrian portrait of “Stonewall” Jackson & Lee (by Julio.) Also an original portrait—full length—of Andrew Jackson.
Flags of the Wash. Artillery with names 60 noted engagements embroidered thereon. Also flag of the Cross and Stars—the first one made after adoption of change from Stars & Bars.
In another room were portraits of Gen. Beauregard & Gen Owens—our chaperone [MTNJ 2: 557]
May 7 Sunday – The CBR arrived at Baton Rouge at 4:10 AM, Bayou Sara at 7:30 AM, and Natchez, Miss. at 4:15 PM [MTNJ 2: 560].
“We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half—much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water” [Ch 51 LM].
May 8 Monday – Sam’s room was over the boilers and “some idiot had closed the transoms,” the heat waking him at 4 AM. He “went on watch”; it was foggy. He noted that George Ritchie steered by compass until the watch was over, using “his & Bixby’s patented chart for crossings & occasionally blowing the whistle” [MTNJ 2: 471]. The CBR arrived in Vicksburg, Miss at 8 AM [560].
May 9 Tuesday – From Sam’s notebook:
“30 miles below Memphis tied up to the bank while they washed out the boilers and let a hurricane, thunder & hail storm pass over. The wind snapped off several forest trees near by making sounds like reports of a rifle” [MTNJ 2: 563].
Joseph P. Smyth, customs agent wrote from NYC to bill Clemens 22.30 for a case of books [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “About books from Tauchnitz”