McDermid (or McDavid), Dennis (d. 1853), was “that poor fellow in the calaboose” recalled in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). He died in the fire that destroyed Hannibal’s small jail in the early hours of 23 January 1853. Writing in the Hannibal Journal on 27 January, Orion Clemens reported that Dennis McDermid (called McDavid in the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger of 25 January) had been made “insane by liquor” and was imprisoned for “breaking down the door of a negro cabin with an ax, and chasing out the inmates.” He had started the blaze when he “set his bed clothes on fire with matches, as he usually carried them in his pocket to light his pipe” (Wecter 1952, 254–55). In 1883, in chapter 56 of Life on the Mississippi, Clemens remembered giving the matches to the “whiskey-sodden tramp.” Claiming to have been only ten years old at the time (in fact, he was seventeen), he confessed to having felt “as guilty of the man’s death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them.” In an autobiographical sketch written in 1900, he explained that it was his “trained Presbyterian conscience” that made him feel guilty even though he had meant the tramp “no harm, but only good, when I let him have the matches” (SLC 1900, 6, in MTA, 1:131).
