Brown, William Lee (Bill) (1831?–1903), is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). In an autobiographical dictation of 21 May 1908, Clemens called this classmate W. B. “Buck” Brown and identified him as the oldest and largest student in John D. Dawson’s one-room schoolhouse:
his age was twenty-five, and to the most of us he seemed not of our world, but a patriarch stricken with age, a relic of a hoary antiquity. He was very studious, very grave, even solemn; he had a kindly smile and a disposition in harmony with it. . . . At the noon recess he always remained at the schoolhouse to study his lessons while he ate his dinner, and Will Bowen and John Briggs and I always remained also, and sacrificed our dinner for the higher profit of pestering him and playing pranks upon him, but he never lost his temper. (CU-MARK)
Clemens perhaps confused William with his brother, James Burkett (Buck) Brown (1827–1915), who later became mayor of Hannibal. The 1850 Hannibal census (compiled in October) lists William as a cooper who attended school “within the year,” as had Clemens (Marion Census 1850, 320; Holcombe, 910; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 97; Wecter 1952, 305 n. 16).
