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Ralls, John (1807–82), mentioned in “Villagers” (96), was a Mexican War veteran and lawyer who lived in New London, Missouri. In 1861, when Clemens and a few [begin page 343] friends flirted with the Confederacy by forming the Marion Rangers, they had Colonel Ralls swear them in as private soldiers. In “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885), Clemens recalled Ralls’s “old-fashioned speech . . . full of gunpowder and glory, full of that adjective-piling, mixed metaphor, and windy declamation which was regarded as eloquence in that ancient time and that remote region” (Conard, 5:292; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20417], 2:29–30).
