Moss family.
Russell W. Moss (b. 1810?), a native of Kentucky, entered the meat packing business in 1850 with William Samuel, and their firm, situated on Hannibal’s levee, reputedly was the second largest pork and beef packing house in the United States. Moss is described as “rich” in “Villagers” (94; see also the note at 100.18). He and his wife, Mary (b. 1816), also from Kentucky, had six children; the two oldest are mentioned in “Villagers” (Marion Census 1850, 312; “Mammoth Packing House,” Hannibal Western Union, 14 Nov 50; Holcombe, 903).
Mary Jane Moss (b. 1832?) was “the ‘belle of Hannibal’” (Anna Laura Hawkins Frazer to SLC, 16 Mar 1909, CU-MARK). She was friendly with Pamela Clemens and frequently visited the Clemens home. “It was not deemed proper in Hannibal in the 40’s for a young woman to go down Main street unaccompanied by an older person,” and Mary Moss used “to stop at the Clemens house at the head of the street to beg Jane Clemens, always good company for both old and young, to go along with her shopping” (Brashear 1935). In 1854 she married lawyer Robert F. Lakenan—“to please her parents, not herself,” Mark Twain recalled in his autobiography (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:182). In “Villagers” (93, 94) Clemens also comments on Mary Moss’s unhappy marriage (Marion Census 1850, 312; Holcombe, 609, 610).
Cornelius (Neil) Moss (b. 1836) attended Sunday School with Clemens at the Old Ship of Zion Methodist Church and later was a classmate at Dawson’s school. According to “Villagers” (94), by age thirty, after studying at Yale, Moss was “a graceless tramp in Nevada.” He evidently was the destitute schoolmate whom Clemens met in Virginia City and wrote about in chapter 55 of Roughing It (1872):
[He] came tramping in on foot from Reese River, a very allegory of Poverty. The son of wealthy parents, here he was, in a strange land, hungry, bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket, roofed with a brimless hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated that he could have “taken the shine out of the Prodigal Son himself,” as he pleasantly remarked. He wanted to borrow forty-six dollars—twenty-six to take him to San Francisco, and twenty for something else; to buy some soap with, maybe, for he needed it.
In an 1863 letter to his family, Clemens wrote that Moss had recently left San Francisco to work a mining claim in Coso, California: “He says he has had a very hard [begin page 337] time ever since he has been in California—has done pretty much all kinds of work to make a living—keeping school in the country among other things” (18? May 63, L1, 252). In chapter 5 of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain assigned some of Neil Moss’s experiences to Tom Driscoll, who is ridiculed when he returns home from Yale flaunting Eastern fashions (Marion Census 1850, 312).
