Wolf (or Wolfe), Jim (b. 1833?), mentioned in “Villagers” (98), was an apprentice printer who lodged with the Clemens family in the early 1850s and worked with Samuel Clemens on the Hannibal Western Union, the newspaper Orion Clemens started in September 1850. Mark Twain remembered Wolf as a tall slim boy some two to three years his senior, who came from a country hamlet and “brought all his native sweetnesses and gentlenesses and simplicities with him” (SLC 1900, 10, in MTA, 1:135). He was “always tongue-tied in the presence of my sister, and when even my gentle mother spoke to him he could not answer save in frightened monosyllables” (AD, 16 Oct 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 137). Endlessly amused by Wolf’s bashfulness, Clemens delighted in making him the butt of practical jokes. “A Gallant Fireman,” Clemens’s first known venture into print, published in the Hannibal Western Union on 16 January 1851, humorously described Jim Wolf’s slow response to the threat of a fire at the newspaper office (see ET&S1, 62). In “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats,” published in 1867 and retold in 1900 in an autobiographical sketch, Clemens recounted how Wolf crawled in his nightshirt onto a slippery roof to silence noisy cats, lost his footing, and landed in the middle of a candy pull hosted by Pamela Clemens (SLC 1867 [bib21403]; SLC 1900, 11–13, in MTA, 1:135–38). In 1897, Wolf traveled from his Illinois home to attend Orion Clemens’s funeral in Keokuk, Iowa, and introduced himself to Pamela’s daughter as the “Hero of the candy pull” (Webster n.d., 5). In chapter 23 of A Tramp Abroad (1880), Clemens portrayed Wolf as bumpkin Nicodemus Dodge (SLC to Pamela A. Moffett, 8 Oct 53, L1, 17; MTBus, 265).
