Hicks, Urban East (1828–1905), a journeyman printer, came to Hannibal in the mid-1840s and apparently worked for the Hannibal Gazette until May 1848, then for the Hannibal Journal. Probably beginning in the fall of 1850 he worked on Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Western Union where, by January 1851, Samuel Clemens and Jim Wolf were apprentices. Hicks was a member of the Sons of Temperance. He appears to have been fond of public entertainments and was expelled from the Methodist Episcopal Church South for going to a circus. As Clemens notes in “Villagers” (98), Hicks “saw Jenny Lind,” suggesting that he was the unnamed Hannibal villager who declared, in a letter published by Orion, that seeing Jenny Lind perform in St. Louis had been worth every cent of the ten-dollar cost (see Wecter 1952, 193–94). In his autobiography Clemens wrote that it might have been in May 1850 (he was sure of the month, but not the year) that he and Hicks attended performances by an itinerant mesmerist, at which Hicks won brief local celebrity by proving to be an apt subject. Spurred by envy, Clemens pretended that he, too, was mesmerized and outdid Hicks with faked feats of telepathy (AD, 1 Dec 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 118–25). In the spring of 1851 Hicks emigrated to the Pacific Northwest, where he worked on newspapers and served as a volunteer in the Yakima and Klikitat Indian wars. He remained in the region for the rest of his life, working as a newspaper editor, publisher, and compositor in Oregon and Washington. In 1886, upon receiving news of Hicks’s whereabouts, Clemens wrote: “I remember Urban E. vividly & pleasantly; & also the fencing-matches with column-rules & quack-medicine stereotypes. . . . if I could see Hicks here I would receive him with a barbecue & a torchlight procession, & put the entire house at his disposal” (SLC to George H. Himes, 17 Jan 86, MoPeS). An entry in Clemens’s notebook for 1897 shows that he considered using his and Hicks’s experience with the hypnotist in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy”: “The mesmerizer—Tom gets no pay, yet was superior to Hicks, who got $3 a week” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 58). The incident was not included, however (“Remarks of Mr. U. E. Hicks . . .,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 13 Jan 49; Hicks, 20; Hicks to SLC, 30 Mar 86, CU-MARK; George H. Himes to SLC, 30 Jan 86, 23 Jan 1907, CU-MARK; Wecter 1952, 205).
