League, William T. (Bill) (1832–70), was a printer’s apprentice in the Missouri Courier office, which opened in Hannibal in the spring of 1848. Clemens recalled him in a 1907 letter to the editor of the Hannibal Courier-Post: “Next spring it will be 59 years since I became an apprentice in the Courier office under Joseph P. Ament, along with William T. League, Wales McCormick & a Palmyra lad named Dick Rutter. Two of the group still survive: viz, the Courier & the undersigned” (3? Dec 1907 to W. H. Powell, MoHM). In the fall of 1851 League helped to establish the weekly Hannibal Whig Messenger and in 1852 became its sole proprietor. It was League who bought out Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Journal in September 1853. Clemens mentions League in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). In noting in “Villagers” (98) that League became proprietor of the “‘Courier’” and “made it a daily and prosperous,” Clemens was thinking of the daily Hannibal Messenger, established by League in 1858 and renamed the Hannibal Courier in the mid-1860s. League, however, had sold the paper in 1860 (Marion Census 1850, 319; Shoemaker, 254; Orion Clemens 1853; Holcombe, 988; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 10).
