Higgins was “the one legged mulatto, who belonged to Mr. Garth,” according to Hedrick Smith, a Hannibal contemporary of Clemens’s (Smith 1889). An 1851 article in Orion Clemens’s newspaper, possibly written by Samuel Clemens (see Wecter 1952, 238–39), reported Higgins’s reaction when a Miss Jemima walked through town in the first bloomer costume seen there:
Higgins (everybody knows Higgins,) plied his single leg with amazing industry and perseverance, keeping up a running fire of comment not calculated to initiate him in the good graces of the person addressed. When the leg became tired, its owner would seat himself and recover a little breath, after which, the indomitable leg would drag off the persevering Higgins at an accelerated pace. (“The New Costume,” Hannibal Western Union, 10 July 51)
[begin page 325] Higgins is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). In chapter 8 of Huckleberry Finn, Jim tells a story about “dat one-laigged nigger dat b’longs to ole Misto Bradish” (HF, 55). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 384) list “One-legged Higgins (Bradish’s nigger),” but in the story itself he has become “Higgins’s Bill, the one-legged nigger” (184).
