Bowen family. Clemens was closely acquainted with this large family for almost two decades—during his Hannibal years (1839–53) and while he was a Mississippi River cub pilot and pilot (1857–61). He recurrently alluded to members of the family in private as well as public writings. In an 1882 notebook, for example, he observed that the “histories” of brothers “Will Bowen, [and] Sam . . . make human life appear a grisly & hideous sarcasm” (N&J2, 474–75). A year later, in chapter 4 of Life on the Mississippi, he wrote that “four sons of the chief merchant” were among the Hannibal boys who became steamboat pilots. And in an 1899 letter he recalled steering “a trip for Bart Bowen” and being “partner with Will Bowen on the A. B. Chambers (one trip), and with Sam Bowen a whole summer on a small Memphis packet” (26 Feb 99 to John B. Downing, MTL, 2:675).
Samuel Adams Bowen, Sr. (1790–1853), of Tennessee, in 1821 married his cousin, Amanda Warren Stone (1802–81), the daughter of Barton Warren Stone. The Bowens settled in Hannibal by 1836 and were the parents of seven children: John, Mary, Barton, Elizabeth, William, Samuel, and Amanda. By 1839 Captain Bowen was operating a Hannibal tobacco warehouse and was the county’s first tobacco inspector. He and his wife are mentioned in “Villagers” (97). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383, 384) indicate that Bowen was the model for Captain Harper in that story (156). He was cast as Captain Wright in the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), although that character does not appear in the story (des Cognets, 65–66, 93; Pilcher, 259; Lewis Census, 371; St. Louis Census 1850, 416:336; Marion Census 1860, 761; “Died,” Canton (Mo.) Northeast Reporter, 10 Nov 53, 2; genealogical record, MoSHi; Holcombe, 899).
John Henley Bowen (1822–91), mentioned in “Villagers” (97), was a steamboat clerk in the late 1840s and then a St. Louis forwarding and commission merchant. By 1860 he was a steamboat agent and a representative of the Hannibal and St. Joseph [begin page 304] Railroad. He was river editor of the St. Louis Globe in the mid-1870s and, a decade later, engaged in mining in Mexico (des Cognets, 65; genealogical record, MoSHi; chart of John H. Bowen family plot, Bellefontaine Cemetery Association, St. Louis; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 137; Morrison, 29; Kennedy 1860, 12, 64; Scharf, 1:927; Gould 1873, 119; Gould 1875, 139).
Mary Russell Bowen (b. 1827?), mentioned in “Villagers” (97), married Moses P. Green in the late 1840s. The Greens were strong supporters of the Union during the Civil War. During the winter of 1861/62 Mary Bowen Green was president of the Soldier’s Relief Society of Hannibal, which supplied Union troops with clothes and medicines (Marion Census 1850, 305; des Cognets, 65; Holcombe, 428).
Barton W. Stone (Bart) Bowen (1830?–68) married Sarah H. Robards, with whom he had one daughter. He was both a pilot and a captain, as Clemens states in “Villagers” (94, 97). In 1858 he piloted the Alfred T. Lacey when it conveyed Clemens to Memphis, where Henry Clemens lay dying from injuries suffered in the Pennsylvania explosion. A year later, when Clemens was Bowen’s co-pilot on the Alfred T. Lacey, Bowen encouraged him to write his burlesque of Captain Isaiah Sellers and arranged for the New Orleans Crescent to publish the sketch in its “River Intelligence” column on 17 May 1859. A steamboat clerk who worked on the Gladiator in 1864 recalled that Bowen had a quarter interest in the boat and “was the captain, a most courteous and efficient commander, and deservedly recognized as being the best dark-night pilot on the river” (Rowland 1907). In 1907 Clemens remarked that Bowen had “stepped down a grade” from pilot when he became a captain, but added: “I never lost any part of my respect & affection for him on account of that retrogression; no, he was a high-minded, large-hearted man, & I hold him in undiminished honor to this day” (SLC to John B. Downing, 25–28 Feb 1907, CU-MARK, L1, 340 n. 4). Bowen died from steam burns suffered in a boat wreck (Marion Census 1860, 761; “Death of a Steamboat Captain,” San Francisco Times, 23 June 68, 1; MTB, 1:139; Way, 176, 188; summaries of “A Card,” New Orleans True Delta, 11 Oct 57, 1, and “River Intelligence,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 7 Dec 58, 4, provided by Edgar M. Branch; ET&S1, 126–33; Branch 1982 [bib20134], 505; Morris Anderson, 91; MTLBowen, 16, 17; des Cognets, 66).
Elizabeth Campbell (Eliza) Bowen (1834?–?76) evidently was retarded, as Clemens noted in “Villagers” (97). On 25 August 1876 William Bowen wrote Clemens that Eliza had died “in the Asylum” (CU-MARK; des Cognets, 66; Lewis Census, 371; Marion Census 1860, 854).
William (Will, or Bill) Bowen (1836–93), a schoolmate, was probably young Clemens’s closest friend. During an outbreak of measles in 1844, to end the suspense of waiting to catch the disease, Clemens crawled into Bowen’s sickbed, was infected, and nearly died. He and Bowen were among the boys who pried loose a boulder atop Holliday’s Hill and watched it crash down the hillside, narrowly missing a black drayman, and making “infinitesimal mince-meat” of a cooper-shop (The Innocents Abroad, chapter 58). By the spring of 1857 Bowen was a licensed pilot. After Clemens received his license in 1859, he twice was Bowen’s co-pilot—on the steamers A. B. Chambers and Alonzo Child—during the ensuing two years. From 1861 to 1866 [begin page 305] Bowen and Clemens were estranged. Their falling-out resulted from a misunderstanding about repayment of a two-hundred-dollar loan Clemens had made to Bowen and from political differences; Jane Clemens reported that “when Sam and W B were on the Alonzo Chi they quarreled and Sam let go the wheel to whip Will for talking secesh and made Will hush” (Jane Lampton Clemens to “all in the Teritory,” 12 and 14 Oct 62, NPV, in MTBus, 73). Despite his early Southern sympathies, Bowen piloted a transport for the North during the Civil War. He left the river in 1868 to sell fire and marine insurance in St. Louis, and moved to Austin, Texas, about 1880. In 1888 he visited the Clemens family in Hartford. Bowen was married twice: in 1857 to Mary Cunningham (“Mollie” in Clemens’s “Letter to William Bowen,” 23), who died in 1873; and in 1876 to Dora Goff of St. Louis. His illness, mentioned in “Villagers” (97), remains unidentified, but evidently his health had deteriorated by the time he was thirty. Clemens recorded some of his and Bowen’s adventures in “Letter to William Bowen” (20–21) and “Villagers” (97) and used Bowen in several fictional works. He was one of the models for Tom Sawyer, who is a composite of several boys. He figures as Joe Harper in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and in the present volume appears as himself in “Boy’s Manuscript” (12–13) and as Joe Harper in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (156). (Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” explicitly identify Bowen as the model for Harper; see HH&T, 383–84.) In the working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 431), Bowen was cast as Hank Fitch, but that character does not appear in the story (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:219–21; Wecter 1952, 140; L1, 211, 213 n. 22, 338, 340 n. 1,357, 359n. 1, 389; MTLBowen, 7, 15, 25–26; MTB, 1:54, 118; Ferris, 19).
Samuel Adams (Sam) Bowen, Jr. (1838?–78), was another of Clemens’s schoolmates who became a river pilot. In the summer of 1858 he and Clemens co-piloted the John H. Dickey. In 1861 they joined the Marion Rangers, a volunteer Confederate company which disbanded after a few weeks—an experience recounted by Mark Twain twenty-four years later in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). Bowen later was arrested by Union soldiers and confined to the stockade in Hannibal. He was allowed to resume piloting after swearing allegiance to the Union, but he continued to assist the Southern cause by secretly carrying Confederate army mail between St. Louis and Memphis. In 1878, while piloting the Molly Moore, Bowen contracted yellow fever, died, and was buried at the head of an island in the Mississippi River. When floodwaters later exposed the gravesite, Clemens reportedly made arrangements to have the coffin reinterred. Bowen is included in “Villagers” (97), with emphasis on the details of his irregular marriage. Clemens had previously given an account of that marriage in chapter 49 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), calling Bowen “George Johnson” and characterizing him as a “shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, good-hearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing.” In his autobiography he again discussed Bowen’s marriage, describing it as a “curious adventure” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:185–86). Clemens’s working notes show that he considered casting Bowen in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” as Joe [begin page 306] Harper’s brother Jack and in “Schoolhouse Hill” as Hank Fitch’s brother Sam (HH&T, 384; MSM, 431), but neither character appears in the stories (Lewis Census, 371; Branch 1982 [bib21035], 195–96; Grimes, 18–19; N&J2, 527, 561–62).
