[begin page 327] Hyde family. Clemens mentions Eliza Hyde and her “tough and dissipated” brothers, Ed and Dick, in “Villagers” (96). They were the children of Edmund Hyde, who died in the late 1840s, and his wife, Mary (Marion Census 1850, 315; “Final Settlement,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 11 Oct 49).
Eliza Hyde, on 27 April 1848, married Robert Graham, the “stranger” Clemens mentions in “Villagers” (96). See the note at 96.15 for a discussion of “The Last Link is Broken,” the song Clemens associated with her (Hannibal Journal, 4 May 48, cited in Wecter 1950, 5).
Ed Hyde appears to have left Hannibal by October 1850, since his name is not listed in the census.
Richard E. (Dick) Hyde (b. 1830?), a native of Missouri, had no occupation in 1850 and resided with his wife in his mother’s home. In his autobiography Clemens recalled the “rowdy young Hyde brothers” who tried to murder their “harmless old uncle: one of them held the old man down with his knees on his breast while the other one tried repeatedly to kill him with an Allen revolver which wouldn’t go off” (SLC 1900, 7, in MTA, 1:132). An entry in Clemens’s 1897 notebook suggests that Shad and Hal Stover in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (127, 130, 132, 133) were modeled after Ed and a Henry Hyde (NB 40, CU-MARK, TS p. 24, in S&B, 173). Henry might be another brother not listed in the census, but Clemens may have meant Richard (Marion Census 1850, 315; Hannibal Journal, 17 May 49, cited in Wecter 1950, 4).
