Smith, Elizabeth W. (Betsy, or Betsey) (b. 1795?), a native of Virginia, was a good friend of Jane Lampton Clemens’s. Mark Twain described “Aunt Betsy” in his autobiography: “She wasn’t anybody’s aunt, in particular; she was aunt to the whole town of Hannibal; this was because of her sweet and generous and benevolent nature, and the winning simplicity of her character.” He remembered taking his mother, aged sixty or so, and Aunt Betsy to their first minstrel show in St. Louis: the two women “were very much alive; their age counted for nothing; they were fond of excitement, fond of novelties, fond of anything going that was of a sort proper for members of the church to indulge in” (AD, 30 Nov 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 115). Betsy Smith was evidently the model for Aunt Betsy Davis in “Hellfire [begin page 349] Hotchkiss” (130–33); working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) indicate that Widow Dawson (230, 231, 235, 237) was modeled after her (Marion Census 1850, 318; Marion Census 1860, 762).
