Gaines. In his autobiography Clemens remembered “General” Gaines as “our first town-drunkard” (SLC 1897–98, 54, in MTA, 1:105). He recorded Gaines’s boast— [begin page 320] “Whoop! Bow your neck & spread!”—in his “Letter to William Bowen” (20) and in 1876 used the phrase in the speech of a tall-talking raftsman in the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn (1885), a passage he published in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and later removed, at his publisher’s suggestion, from Huckleberry Finn (HF, 110). Jim’s remarks about “ole Gin’l Gaines” in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (35) led Dixon Wecter to speculate that Gaines was an “ancient and disreputable relic of the Indian Wars” (Wecter 1952, 150). Working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” mention “Genl. Gaines (new town drunkard)” and suggest that he was to be the model for a “Genℓ Haines” (HH&T, 383); the character who appears in the story is called Cap. Haines (180–81, 186, 188, 193, 209).
