Mark Twain might be amused at his pairing in Muscatine with Norman Baker on a Mark Twain Overlook historic site sign

If Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) were to return to Muscatine, Iowa, where he helped brother Orion put out the Journal in the early 1850s, he would find reminders of three fascinating economies in the Mississippi River town’s history.

The Laura Musser Mansion, now part of the Muscatine Arts Center, recalls the mid-1860s when the Musser and other families grew wealthy by harvesting nearby forests and making Muscatine into a significant lumber city.

The H. J. Heinz plant, the first Heinz plant built outside Pittsburgh, was completed in 1892 at a cost of $4,000. Today’s plant employs about 400 workers and still takes advantage of the local soil, ideal for growing tomatoes, watermelons and other fruits and vegetables.

The Button Factory Woodfire Grille, housed in an 1890 riverfront building, represents an industry launched by John Frederick Boepple in 1891 when he discovered that the Mississippi’s mussel shells could be cut into mother-of-pearl buttons. By 1905 nearly half of Muscatine’s workforce produced 37% of the globe’s buttons, earning the city the title of “Pearl Button Capital of the World.”

But Twain would be most intrigued perhaps by how Muscatine chooses to celebrate him. At the site of an early Muscatine Journal building—now the MVP Lounge, which advertises $10 All-U-Can-Drink beer nights–there’s the usual Twain-was-here plaque.

At the Mark Twain Overlook for viewing the Mississippi, however, a historic site sign pairs Twain with Norman G. Baker (1882-1958), a self-proclaimed doctor who operated a local “hospital” and high-wattage radio station KTNT (“Know the Naked Truth”), claimed a cure for cancer and served time at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary for mail fraud.

Twain might also smile at his quote that Muscatine chooses to celebrate on that sign—about the community having world-best sunsets—not his statement in an 1855 travel piece he wrote from St. Louis for the Muscatine Journal that local sunsets were second best, behind a Chinese sunset in a St. Louis painting.

Twain might laugh, too, at a two-story-tall Twain puppet in the lobby of Pearl Plaza, a downtown shopping center. The giant Twain was made by dozens of volunteers from chicken wire, cotton batting, sheep wool, plastic tubing and recycled paper from the Muscatine Journal, where Twain had his early travel writings—eight letters from Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis—published in 1853-55.

This two-story Mark Twain puppet fills the lobby of Pearl Plaza, a downtown Muscatine shopping arcade

The letters remind me of the worst and best of Twain and of our 14,063-mile van trip around the United States. Twain’s Muscatine Journal letters represent his ignorant, racist youth. The letters disparage Jews, Native Americans, Catholics and abolitionist U.S. senators; they celebrate three senators—Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster—who helped pass the Fugitive Slave Act.

Though Twain never accepted Native Americans, his faith in slavery as “right, righteous, sacred” and his nativist criticism of immigrants changed dramatically. He evolved over decades into a progressive writer on the right side of history, into the “Lincoln of our literature.”

During our three-month Twain trip around America we heard about the worst of America. In Idaho, a state that has attracted white Californians running away from diversity, Margie Laughlin described conversations with whites who wanted a president who looked like them and wished President Obama dead.

But the Muscatine area, said Rusty Schrader, the 42-year-old news editor of the Muscatine Journal, sees diversity “more as an opportunity than a challenge.” Muscatine (in the 2000 census, 20% Hispanic) and neighboring small towns with chicken and turkey processing plants, Columbus Junction (39% Hispanic) and West Liberty (40% Hispanic), have embraced diversity, Schrader said.

That, however, has not freed these communities from a problem faced today by much of America. “Poverty has become a big issue,” said Mary L. Wildermuth, 60, executive director of the Muscatine History and Industry Center.

“The community is changing,’ Wildermuth explained. “Over 50% of the students in our schools today are receiving free or reduced lunch.” She worries that many families will not be able to earn enough to provide their children with the post-secondary education required for employment in the highly technical Muscatine manufacturing workplace.

Loren

Twain insisted that a visitor always found Chicago a novelty, completely unlike the Chicago from a prior visit: “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago—she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them.” The small town of Chicago (1850 census: 29,963) morphed into a major metropolis in less than two generations (1890 census: 1,099,850).

Despite Chicago’s rapid growth, the city remained an inconsequential place to Twain. In August 1853, Chicago was a train-stop town for Twain on the way to someplace else. After a 26-hour layover in Chicago he hopped a train for the next leg of his trip east to New York.

Chicago’s population boomed later in the century; the city started in 1890 its 94-year run as the nation’s second city, to be overtaken finally by Los Angeles in 1984. But even as an immigrant-rich (40 percent immigrant by 1890), meatpacking and manufacturing industrial powerhouse, Chicago left Twain unimpressed. It remained for him little more than a train-stop town.

Writing as Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass in 1856, he dismissed the city as high-priced hell: “When you feel like tellin a feller to go to the devil—tell him to go to Chicago—it’ll answer every purpose, and is perhaps, a leetle more expensive.” Almost four decades later Twain used a Pudd’nhead Wilson maxim to again deflate the city and its citizens: Satan says, “The trouble with you Chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous.”

Twain’s equal as Chicago’s censurer came a century later in the unlikely form of New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling, a disheveled monument to gluttony. His navel peeking through unbuttoned shirts, his gout-ridden walk reduced to a hobble, he proved that a bowling-ball bald, spectacles-wearing, 246-lb. sumo wrestler-shaped man could write like the most celestial of angels about almost anything—the press, war, boxing, food, politics, even Chicago.

Liebling was the first writer, after Twain, whose complete writings I felt I had to collect and read in college. His scarce Second City (I paid $15 in 1962 for a book originally priced at $2) reveled in cataloguing Chicago’s second-class status, based on almost a year in 1949-50 he lived there and a return visit in May 1951. Physically, Chicago struck Liebling not as a great city but as an endless succession of dingy mill-town main streets.

Those who see themselves as Chicago’s leaders flee the city after work to aseptic suburbs like Oak Park to the west and Evanston to the north, he wrote. They leave behind them each evening “the exiguous skyscraper core and the vast, anonymous pulp of the city, plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses.”

Liebling echoed Twain as to Chicago’s status as a train-stop town. After World War II, when Robert R. Young, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway chairman, started a campaign of newspaper ads calling for through passenger trains (“A hog can cross America without changing trains—but YOU can’t”), Liebling interviewed Ernest L. Byfield, a worried partner in several Chicago hotels. “If they ever have through trains, nobody will stop here,” Byfield said.

Chicago lacked excellent newspapers, restaurants, sports teams, and theater. “As a theatrical center, it is outclassed by Oslo, which has a population of four hundred thousand [vs. Chicago’s 3,620,962 in 1950],” Liebling wrote. “It is not considered smart to admit having seen any play in Chicago, because this implies either (a) that you haven’t seen the real play or (b) that you haven’t the airplane fare [for New York] or (c) and possibly worst of all, that you are indifferent to nuances and might, therefore, just as well go back to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where you went to high school.”

Liebling admitted that Chicago was first in several categories, but those were its strip-tease joints, gang killings, segregation (immigrant groups as well as races tended “to coagulate geographically”), and corruption. Bob Merriam, an honest, good-government alderman, told Liebling almost proudly, “Chicago is unique. It is the only completely corrupt city in America.” When Liebling responded that he had heard other cities so described, Merriam said defensively, “But they aren’t nearly as big.”

Liebling mocked the University of Chicago as “the only large university that awards a liberal-arts degree for an undergraduate course that starts after the second year of high school and ends after what would anywhere else be the second year of college. As a result of this generous stand, the University of Chicago’s undergraduate college acts as the greatest magnet for neurotic juveniles since the Children’s Crusade.”

A student told Liebling that “the strong point about Chicago is it’s the only university where you can hold a full-time daytime job and still get your B.A. You don’t have to go to class at all. Just read the Great Books and work up a line for the comprehensive examination at the end of the year.” If the university’s next chancellor after Robert Maynard Hutchins should decide to accept candidates out of the third grade instead of the tenth, Liebling says, “he will probably be hailed on the Midway as an even greater educational innovator.”

Liebling’s biographer Raymond Sokolov said Liebling’s outrageousness—his “aggressively classless, democratic style” of writing “that preened itself on its lack of respect for distinctions of high and low”—recalled Twain’s mixing of “sophisticated thoughts and skills with a wisecracking country manner.”

Sokolov described Liebling as “Twain’s mirror image.” Liebling was “a city slicker plunked down in the boondocks…who affected the speech and outlook of an urban street person,” Sokolov wrote. If only Twain and Liebling were present today to take on Chicagoans’ depiction of their hometown as not only a great American city but also a great global city. A 2012 Global Cities Index developed by A. T. Kearney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs ranks Chicago seventh in the world, ahead of Beijing (14th) and Brussels (9th), Singapore (10th) and Shanghai (21st).

It’s not hard to imagine Liebling and Twain delighting in Chicago’s current status as the U.S. city with the most corruption, the third highest taxes, long commutes and lousy weather—qualities that caused Forbes to feature Chicago in an annual report titled “America’s Most Miserable Cities.” Global city? Liebling and Twain might prefer to label the Windy City a world-class windbag.

Loren Ghiglione

Alyssa Karas, Dan Tham and I piled into the backseat of John Ghiglione’s white, 2002 Saturn for the drive to the Seattle home and famous-for-a-day garage of his father, Dr. August J. Ghiglione, who served as Italian consul in the Pacific Northwest during World War I and doctor to Seattle’s Italian-Americans from 1905 to his death in 1949.

The garage became famous in 1910. When the Mafia-style Black Hand tried to shake down members of Seattle’s Italian community, Dr. Ghiglione aided police in breaking up the plot. For a time, Dr. Ghiglione traveled with a body guard and carried a gun in his car.

On this night, he put his Pope-Hartford in the garage at his home, 333 30th Avenue South, and retired for the evening. Normally he would have made house calls after dinner, but his wife, recently discharged from a hospital, felt ill. So he stayed home.

Shortly after midnight the garage exploded. The house’s kitchen door blew open, the house’s windows&mdas;and the windows of houses four blocks away—shattered. Footprints near the garage indicated two men had placed the dynamite, but bloodhounds were unable to follow their trail beyond 29th Avenue. An investigation by Joe Bianchi, an Italian-American detective, went nowhere.

Dr. Ghiglione later told the press that he did not believe the dynamiting pointed to the Blank Hand. “There never was any notification or warning of any impending danger,” he said. He concluded that the bombing was the work of relatives of a Seattle man who was killed by a local police officer. The relatives thought Dr. Ghiglione, as the Italian consul, had been bribed to block the prosecution of the slayer.

When John Ghiglione, Dan, Alyssa and I arrived at the doctor’s address, we were disappointed to see that his garage, rebuilt after the dynamiting, no longer existed and that his three-story house had been carved into five apartments. The building’s front door was locked, but luckily one of the tenants, Carly Reiter, 37, a teacher at Seattle Girls’ School, was walking her 10-year-old cat, Coyote George the River Pig.

A decade earlier, Reiter, a fan of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, had taken a 2,500-mile, 121-day solo canoe trip down the Mississippi, from Bemidji, Minnesota, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Along the way, she happened to stop at a bar. A five-week-old kitten climbed out of a farmer’s milk crate into her lap. Reiter took the cat aboard her canoe where it promptly walked into the water.

But Reiter and Coyote George the River Pig survived the Mississippi and the lecher who told Reiter, “I really like redheads. Their boobs make me perky.” Virtually all of the other people Reiter met along the Mississippi, she said, treated her with respect. Many offered her a free meal and a place to shower and sleep overnight.

Reiter showed us her two-room, $900-a-month apartment in space that once had been second-floor bedrooms in Dr. Ghiglione’s home. She brought out a book of photos from her Mississippi River trip. (Some of the photos are part of Dan Tham’s video interview of Reiter.)

Reiter also introduced us to next-door neighbor Casey Meehan, 27, a fundraiser for nonprofits who shared a four-bedroom, two-bath, $1,700-a-month, second- and third-floor apartment with three other young people.

Reiter described the apartment as a communal house: “We’re using what we need to use—need, not want” to use. The members of the commune did not heat common areas; each person used a small heater in his or her bedroom. They also were composting and starting a garden on the back porch.

August J. Ghiglione during his student days in New York City

Meehan’s description of her community made me think of a different kind of community associated with the building—Dr. Ghiglione’s world from a century earlier. As a student at Columbia University’s medical school he took his bicycle from his home in an Italian-American section of Staten Island aboard the ferry to Manhattan.

There he rode his bicycle to Columbia’s medical school or Columbus Hospital on East 20th Street. He interned at Columbus, run by Mother Supervisor Francesca Xavier Cabrini, the first American canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Columbus served New York’s Italian-American immigrants.

Estelle "Stella" M. Skinner, who married Dr. August J. Ghiglione in 1905

Dr. Ghiglione’s parents had taken into their Staten Island home Estelle “Stella” M. Skinner, following the early death in an accident of her parents. Skinner and her brother had inherited, Dr. Ghiglione’s children recalled, a piece of property that later turned out to be Coney Island. Dr. Ghiglione graduated from medical school in 1904 and his old-world mother, Maria, arranged his marriage to Stella on Nov. 8, 1905.

Dr. Ghiglione and his new wife moved later that year to Seattle where he established a private practice that served the city’s small Italian community—3,454 residents by 1910—primarily truck gardeners and laborers from southern and central Italy. They lived in neighborhoods with nicknames like “Garlic Gulch.”

They dug sewer and water-main ditches and drove garbage wagons for the city. They also worked at construction sites and in railroad yards and mills. Orly Alia recalled an uncle who stacked 95-pound bags of cement from a rapidly moving line, 10 hours a day, seven days a week. “They were machines,” Alia said. “They wore themselves out and they were gone by the time they were 60.”

Dr. Ghiglione spoke the patients’ Italian dialects, wrote out prescriptions in English or Italian, depending of the patients’ first language, and conveniently forgot to charge patients who lacked the money to pay.

Daughter-in-law Hazel Rispoli recalled: “The old family doctor. He came to your house and never got half the money owed him. The Italians all went for him. They were all poor. You didn’t ask for payment [from them]. It always was, ‘Pay when you can.’”

Dr. Ghiglione developed a reputation as a surgeon who succeeded where others had failed. Ten-year-old Jim Dijulio was brought to him deathly ill. Dr. Ghiglione’s surgery saved his life.

PHOTO

Dr. Ghiglione was elected staff president at Providence Hospital and Columbus Hospitals and president of the Seattle Academy of Surgeons. Despite his success, he operated reluctantly, especially when the diagnosis called for amputation, said niece Marie J. Wilham. “I remember his telling me that if I ever was told an operation was necessary to check with three doctors first.”

Dr. Ghiglione’s father, despite his success in business, had one regret: He never had obtained an education. He spoke English with a Ligurian accent. He saw the clubs that other Seattle businessmen joined as beyond his reach. Dr. Ghiglione more than compensated for what his father perceived as his own failings.

Dr. Ghiglione assumed leadership positions in a variety of civic organizations. He was especially active in the Italian-American community. Maybelle Lucas, his daughter, recalled, “There couldn’t be an Italian picnic that he wasn’t invited to.” He was a member of the Knights of Columbus and the only honorary life member in Seattle of both the Sons of Italy and the Italian Club.

During World War I, while carrying on his medical practice, he served as Italian consul for a region that eventually included Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. He was active in sending 3,000 Italian subjects—who were required to enlist at age 20 for three years of service—to join Italian forces against Austria-Hungary before the United States entered the war. He was decorated twice by Victor Emanuel, Italy’s king, for his war work. He was knighted Cavaliere, and later Cavaliere Ufficiale della Corona d’Italia.

When George E. Ralston disparaged Italian, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the Seattle Times in 1912, Dr. Ghiglione attacked Ralston’s “ignorance” and “misinformation.” He dismissed Ralston’s call for restrictions in foreign immigration as amounting to “air bubbles” and defended immigrants’ patriotism. He dreamed of an America enriched and enlivened for generations to come by its immigrants.

The excerpt from Dan Tham’s video of our interview of John Ghiglione focuses on his father, Dr. Ghiglione. The excerpt reminds me of lines from a Maya Angelou poem: “Know that history holds more than it seems/We are here alive today because our ancestors dared to dream.”

Loren Ghiglione

The Mormon temple in South Jordan, Utah

Of all the cities and towns on Mark Twain’s route west that we visited, Salt Lake City honors him least.

The city’s magnificent main library, a 240,000-sq.-ft., five-story-tall curved wedge-shaped beauty by Moshe Safdie and other distinguished architects, celebrates a variety of authors. Its café is named for Hemingway, its bookstore features Poe, its newsletter carries Shakespeare on its front page. But Twain is nowhere to be seen.

Am I surprised? No. In a city that invites humor (a local beer, Wasatch Polygamy Porter, advertises “Why have just one!”), Twain took aim at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormons. He questioned the Mormon Bible (“half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity”) and “valley tan,” a whiskey-like invention of Mormons, who were not supposed to drink.

Though he praised the industriousness of Latter-day Saints (“no loafers perceptible”) and their extraordinary health (the town’s lone doctor had few customers), Twain joked about planning to lead a great reform to end polygamy, until he saw Mormon women.

“The man who marries sixty of them,” Twain wrote, “has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nation should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”

Twain also observed that Utah locals, not just Mormons, despised outsider “emigrants” such as Twain—“low and inferior sort of creatures.” As attractive as Salt Lake City is today, even a white Protestant male feels he is an outsider amidst all of the suit-and-tied, fresh-faced, wrinkle-challenged Mormons (in 2007, Forbes ranked Salt Lake the most vain U.S. city, based on cosmetics sales and number of plastic surgeons per 100,000).

In fairness, though, while Utah is 62 percent Mormon, Salt Lake is minority Mormon, with Hispanics (22 percent), Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans African Americans and gays a presence (Salt Lake ranks third nationally among mid-size cities for gay and lesbian couples).

But the Salt Lake area does not feel like it’s the tolerant New York or New Orleans of the West, as I am reminded during an interview with Natalie P. Sheppard, 54, a black Mormon whom Twain would have enjoyed had he lived into the 21st century.

Mormon Natalie Sheppard

Twain’s memorable “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” captures the voice of a feisty, Sheppard-like black woman, introduced as 60-year-old Aunt Rachel. The tale reportedly reproduces the dialect of Mary Ann “Auntie” Cord, born a slave in 1798, who became a cook at the Elmira, New York, farm where Twain wrote many of his most important books.

Making kitchen small talk, Twain asks, “How is it that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any trouble?” The black woman answers by recalling her husband and seven children being taken from her by slave owners, her years of loneliness and longing for them, and her reconciliation with her youngest child 13 years later. She ends with bitingly ironic words: “I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!”

Twain’s “True Story” comes to mind as I interview Sheppard, a black Mormon family therapist for Utah’s Department of Human Services and mother of six children (including three from a 23-year-long second marriage). Sheppard has her own true-story tales of trouble.

Long before Sheppard became a Mormon, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discriminated against blacks. A few African-American men were ordained as Mormon priests in the 1830s and 1840s (ordination normally occurs as a matter of course when boys reach age 12, as long as they meet “worthiness” standards). But the teachings of Brigham Young kept African-American men out of the priesthood from the mid-19th century until 1978. Sheppard’s troubles, however, have gone beyond the church’s history of discrimination.

Not long after moving from Cincinnati to Salt Lake City, she drove with Ronnie, her seven-year-old son, to a gas station. While he stayed in the car she prepared to pump gas. A car filled with young white men in tuxedos arrived on the other side of the pump. One of the men, Sheppard recalls, “tried to take the pump out of my hand and I said, ‘Really? Seriously?’”

“He said, ‘You dumb little black nigger, give me the pump,’” Sheppard recalls. “And so I took the pump and I squirted him. I squirted the gasoline all over him. And his friend started getting out of his car—and I squirted him too. And they just kept using the N-word.”

Sheppard returned the nozzle and hose to the pump stand, got back into her car and, as she was about to drive away, shouted, “You just better be glad I don’t have a match.”

Other tales of trouble involve her children. Natalie J. Sheppard, her daughter, “a straight A student,” experienced racism at Utah State University. As a black Mormon, Natalie J. “is struggling with the church,” her mother says. “People treated her bad.”

Natalie P. Sheppard’s son Ronnie was told by a seminary teacher that, as a black Mormon, he would “never be anything in this church.” His mother consulted leaders in Genesis, an organization of black Latter-day Saints, who helped her confront the seminary’s leadership. The teacher was fired. Sheppard says her son has abandoned the church. “And his family isn’t LDS,” she adds.

But Sheppard remains a committed Mormon. And she has adopted less confrontational ways of dealing with racism. She came to the church, she says, as an angry black woman from the ‘hood. “I was ghetto. I recognized that I needed to learn and that there were changes that needed to occur in my life.” She earned a university degree and became a licensed clinical social worker.

She remembers, as a therapist for Child and Family Services, calling on a dysfunctional white family for a court-ordered family therapy session. The husband told her, as she stood without an umbrella in heavy rain at his front door, “I don’t let your kind in my house.” Sheppard quietly talked herself inside and, over time, helped the husband and his wife regain their children from foster care.

Destinae, a younger Sheppard daughter who was 4 or 5 at the time, was playing with a girlfriend when a girl new to the neighborhood joined them and said to Destinae’s friend, “If you’re going to play with her I can’t play with you because she’s just a little black nigger.” A neighbor suggested that Sheppard visit the new girl’s parents to confront them.

“I’m not going to do that,” Sheppard said. The next Sunday she spoke at the local Mormon church’s testimony meeting: “I talked about what had happened to my daughter and how sad it was to me because I had a son who was very inactive in this church due to the same behaviors that happened 20 years ago. If you’re all who you say you are and you’re walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, none of my children should ever have to experience that again.”

After the meeting, a man came up to Sheppard with his daughter. Sheppard recalls: “He said, ‘This is my daughter Izzie and she is the one who offended your daughter and she really doesn’t know what that means. And we really wanted to come to your house to talk to you and Destinae and straighten it out.” The father and daughter did visit, Sheppard says. “She and Destinae are friends off and on now.”

Racism is alive everywhere, though more subtle among Utahns, Sheppard says. “They will smile and grin at you, and you may learn later that they called you some kind of name. But you have to be a better person. In order for that mindset to change, in order for things to be better for your children, you have to learn how to act in a situation instead of reacting to it. And that’s the reality.”

Loren Ghiglione

• Previous
• Next

The road to Unionville

Unionville

Mitzi and David Jones, owners of Old Pioneer Garden

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Unionville

Old Pioneer Garden, our bed and breakfast

A dead cow next to the road

To get to Unionville, Nevada, where Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) tried prospecting for silver and gold, we drive south for 17 miles from Interstate 80 along desert-like, brush land marked by yellow “Open Range” road signs, illustrated with the image of a bull, each sign topped by two fluttering red warning flags. After three miles, I see a dead black cow, with a dead coyote nestled next to it, lying along the road.

Eventually we turn right on a gravel road to head three miles up into a canyon that becomes the ghost town of Unionville, where animals now far outnumber people. Mitzi Jones, 87, and her son, David, 62, who have three dogs, four cats (two indoor, two outdoor), 25 chickens and a gaggle of goats and lambs, put us up in a charmingly restored circa 1861 guesthouse. The front two rooms (Twain reportedly ate dinner in the rear one) have two-foot-thick adobe walls.

Twain’s Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole, five cabins on one side of the mountain crevice, and six on the other. A state historic sign marks “the remains of Mark Twain’s cabin.” But the Joneses say he actually lived in a nearby dugout.

He built it, as he writes in Roughing It, “in the side of the crevice and roofed it with canvas leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture and interrupt our sleep.”

Twain tried shoveling, scratching with a pick and sinking a shaft but soon quit prospecting, having learned that what glittered was quartz and other ordinary metals—“that nothing that glitters is gold.” A stranger to Unionville, Twain wrote, “would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires.” But life in Unionville really was “a beggars’ revel.”

We eat dinner with the Joneses, two out-of-town friends and a neighbor, Frank McCuskey, 69, a transplanted Texan who retired in his 50s from teaching shop in the nearby Winnemucca, Nevada, school system.

McCuskey describes the danger of driving at night in the valley below, where people test the road’s 70 mph speed limit and, in the process, kill or maim not only cattle but also bears, antelope and deer. The Joneses, with a rifle standing near their front door, recall a cougar’s attack on a half dozen of their lambs and goats. After the cougar killed the goats and lambs, he was treed and shot to death.

The conversation reminds me of a time I would rather forget—of living with my mother, uncle and aunt in the California desert for three years in the late 1940s. Rattlesnakes coiled in the shade next to our back door, a coyote killed my wired-hair dachshund, Suzie, and my aunt later shot my uncle to death.

Despite remembrances of death, the next morning, in the quiet of dawn, it’s hard not to be mesmerized by the golden light of the rising sun, the elegance of the tall, thin poplar trees, the delicate dance of strolling quail and the glisten of the icicles hanging from tree branches.

Items the Joneses have collected also remind us of a fascinating past. They have copies of local newspapers from the 1860s and 1870s and of the 1870 census, which lists dozens of Chinese working as laborers, cooks and house servants, and a 26-year-old Irish woman, Elisabeth Lee, working as a prostitute.

After serving a gargantuan breakfast of scrambled eggs, baked apple, French toast and oatmeal with walnuts and raisins, the Joneses show us two boxes filled with an opium tin; a hard block of opium embossed with a Chinese character; old marbles, some beautifully decorated; arrowheads; a rusted nineteenth-century pistol, a small, painted children’s iron figurine; and rock-hard ammonites, sea creatures from 200 million years ago.

Loren Ghiglione

Dan posing in front of the sign welcoming us to Colorado

With hours to drive before reaching the night’s Not-So-Super-8 Motel, we stopped in Julesburg, Colorado, for only one hour, the time Mark Twain spent there on his 1,700-mile stagecoach ride west in 1861 to Carson City, Nevada. I was prepared, as an oh-so-serious, glass-half-empty journalist, to write off Julesburg as yet another dying small town (2010 population 1,225, down 16.5% from 2000), bypassed by industry and focused more on its past than its future.

After all, the town sports two, not one, history museums; a monument to its days as a Pony Express station; a municipal light building that commemorates Julesburg’s century-old, community-owned electric utility, and a lyrical sign about the town’s role in Colorado’s history—as gateway on the route west for travelers by foot and wagon, then rail and auto.

But the gloriously restored Hippodrome Theatre at 215 Cedar Street offers a message of hope, not despair, about Julesburg today. Built in 1919 at a cost of $10,000, the Hippodrome failed as a 500-seat movie theater and closed 2 ½ years later. The theater survived a name change and a variety of owners until 1996 when it was reborn as the Hippodrome Arts Centre, a nonprofit intended to serve as a multicultural center as well as a 162-seat theater showing newly released films each weekend for $5 (free if you’re 4 or under).

The theater’s restoration has not been completed, but the Hippodrome Community Players envision performing there several times a year. Next month the theater will host the Missoula Children’s Theatre for live performances. An annual fund-raiser helps subsidize such events.

The Hippodrome Theatre in Julesburg

One hundred and twenty volunteers—high school students, farmers, sorority sisters and bankers called “Hipp Helpers”—staff the movie theater, usually one night a month. Their pay for the night is free popcorn, soda and a ticket to the show.

Sherri Hinde, volunteer coordinator as well as bookkeeper for her husband’s machine and welding shop, says, “If it were not for the volunteers the Hippodrome would not exist.” But it does exist as a wonderful example of what a community can do to help itself.

Loren Ghiglione

Loren H. Haskin as a young man in Hiawatha, Kan., circa. 1890.

After our visit to St. Joseph’s Pony Express Museum, we head west on the Pony Express Highway (Rte. 36) for northeastern Kansas to learn about my mother’s Methodist, farm-family parents, Loren Haskin (I was named for him) and Hettie Fletcher. They, like Twain, would travel west, but by railroad four decades later, in 1901.

Hiawatha, Kansas, where my grandfather had this picture of him taken and where Hettie and he married in 1897, claims three distinctions. Until the 2010 census, it could say it was the largest city on Rte. 36 between St. Joseph and Denver, 600 miles to the east. But then Marysville, Kansas (Black Squirrel City, reportedly named for rare specimens that escaped from a traveling circus), achieved a population of 122 more people (squirrels not counted) than Hiawatha.

Second, Hiawatha’s location amidst Indian reservations (many of its streets are named for Indian tribes) encouraged its school district to question the names of its high school, middle school and elementary school mascots. In 2000, the school nicknames changed from Redskins, Warriors and Braves to Red Hawks, Hawks and Junior Hawks.

Third, the town’s Mount Hope Cemetery features a tomb so wonderfully weird that it has become a tourist attraction. In 1930, when Sarah H. Davis, the wife of John M. Davis, died he began erecting a massive memorial to her. The memorial’s 52-ton marble canopy and 11 life-sized statues took seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete.

The Davis memorial

Townspeople were dismayed that Davis spent the money on the memorial, not the town. But, ironically, the bizarre memorial’s empty overstuffed chair, winged-angel Sarah and four statues of Davis without his left hand benefit the town by attracting curious visitors who spend their tourist dollars locally.

In nearby Morrill, where my great-grandparents and grandparents lived, we interview Robert Herbster, 75, whose family for three generations worked the 160 acres that made up my great-grandfather John Fletcher’s farm. I show Herbster a photo I had taken of his family in 1980, when I first visited the farm to interview him as we drank lemonade and home-made apple cake.

On Morrill, Kan., land once farmed by a great-grandfather of Loren Ghiglione from his mother's side of the family, generations of the Herbster family farmed in 1979: Left to right, George and Nellie Herbster; Robert and Mary Herbster; front row, left to right, Mike and Marty Herbster.

The photo, in a way, tells the story of American farming. In the generation of Robert’s parents, George and Nellie Herbster, independent-minded local farmers could make a decent living on crops from hundreds, not thousands, of acres. By Robert’s generation, large agribusinesses began to dominate farming and Robert struggled to keep working his small farm, eventually moving into downtown Morrill and taking a job with Wenger Manufacturing in Sabetha, Kansas, before retiring in 2009 (his wife continues to work at the grain elevator in Morrill).

Their two sons, Marty and Mike, born in 1969 and 1971, also live in Morrill and do not farm, instead choosing engineering work at air filtrator and seed treater manufacturing plants in Sabetha and Wetmore, Kansas.

Meyers Hy-Klas Grocery and two other stores, Morrill, Kan., 1979.

Perhaps anticipating the fate of farmers around Morrill, my grandparents took the railroad west in 1901 and settled in Pomona, California, where my grandfather, Loren Haskin, sold furniture for—and eventually became an owner of—Wright Bros. & Rice.

But the Morrill farm life survived in their souls and stories, such as their account of Grandmother Fletcher being kidnapped by Indians while playing and returned the next day unharmed.

Loren Ghiglione

A mural at the Pony Express Museum shows St. Joseph as the beginning of the Pony Express

We begin our trip west by van across the Kansas plains from St. Joseph, Missouri, just as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his brother Orion did 150 years ago.

They had paid $200 each in 1861 for overland stagecoach tickets to Carson City, Nevada Territory (Orion had been named the Territory’s secretary). The name of the stagecoach firm—Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express—was almost as long as its 1,700-mile route to Carson City.

If we occasionally feel cramped in Allegro III, our Dodge Grand Caravan, the tight quarters are self-inflicted. Five suitcases, ten large cartons of files and books, assorted cameras and computers, a box of Twain-trip T-shirts for our road hosts and a collection of Baton Rouge, La., pomegranates and gourds that a family friend has ordered Dan to deliver to his mother in Salt Lake City create the crush.

But Twain and his brother, limited to 25 pounds of baggage each, squeezed into a “swinging and swaying” six-horse stagecoach crammed with 2,700 pounds of mail. The two sat on the backseat faced by a perpendicular wall of mail that rose to the roof.

The ride up and down steep stream banks caused mailbags, canteens, coins, pistols and the Clemens to fly. “First we would all lie down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture,” Twain wrote in Roughing It, “and in a second we would shoot to the other end and stand on our heads.”

The sighting of a Pony Express rider racing at up to 25 mph to deliver the mail from St. Joseph to Sacramento, almost 2,000 miles, in about 10 days caused necks to stretch and eyes to strain, Twain wrote: “Man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!”

So we visit the Pony Express Museum in St. Joseph to learn about the daring riders—some as young as 11, all about 125 pounds or less—who, armed with rifle, revolver and bible, rode like the devil.

Cindy Sue Daffron, the museum’s enthusiastic development director acts as tour guide, showing us lightweight leather mochilas, elegant in their streamlined simplicity. Equipped with four mail pouches, the mochila was thrown over the saddle of the rider—whom Twain called the “swift phantom of the desert.” The mochila could be quickly moved, after 10 miles or so, to a fresh horse’s saddle at the next relay station.

Daffron describes the oath that the Pony Express riders were sworn to uphold: “I agree not to use profane language, not to get drunk, not to gamble, not to treat animals cruelly and not to do anything else that is incompatible with the conduct of a gentleman.” But, as Dan Tham’s video indicates, Daffron also tells us about the real riders, not only the pious, profanity-free Boy Scouts of oath and myth.

Loren Ghiglione

The mural along the flood wall in Cape Girardeau, Missouri

On the drive to Keokuk, Iowa, where a young Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) worked as a printer in the mid-1850s, we stop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, for lunch.

We have Twain as an appetizer. A building wall mural and two Mississippi River flood-wall murals depict a larger-than-life Twain. A Missouri Hall of Fame recalls Twain’s description of himself as a “border ruffian” with Missouri morals.

A plaque carries a Twain quote of special meaning to oft-flooded Cape Girardeau: “The Mississippi River will always have its way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.”

A three-story, riverfront brick building from Twain’s time—with a huge exterior wall sign for 3- and 5-cent Coca Cola that “relieves fatigue”—houses the antique-adorned Port Girardeau Restaurant and Lounge and a $10.95 all-you-can-eat Sunday buffet. We eat all we can, and continue to Keokuk, where we pass our trip’s 8,000-mile mark.

Keokuk, a tired Mississippi River town that has lost almost 40 percent of its population of 16,000-plus from the 1960s, derives its name from the chief of the Sac Indians, whose remains are buried beneath a striking statue of him that overlooks the Mississippi.

All of the town (and half the county), called the “Half Breed Tract,” was deeded by an 1834 act of Congress to the offspring of fur traders and Sac and Fox Indians. Those owners in turn sold their plots of land, primarily to white settlers.

Sam Clemens came to town to help his brother Orion operate a print shop that produced, among other works, the 1856 city directory. Sam listed himself as “antiquarian.” When asked why, he said, “Well, I thought the town ought to have one antiquarian, and as nobody else claimed to be one, I volunteered.”

Loren with Keokuk's Christmas Twain in Rand Park

Rand Park features a painted billboard for the Christmas season of Mark Twain as author of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (I cannot resist posing with it and later getting a haircut at a barbershop named Mark’s). The Keokuk Public Library displays a painting of young, red-haired Clemens in 1859 and sells a book of three travel letters from Cincinnati and St. Louis by him.

The letters, first published in the Keokuk Daily Post in 1856-57, earned Clemens $5-7.50 each, his first payments for writing. The book, The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, was printed for the library on an old Heidelberg Windmill press by the Working Linotype Museum in 2007 and sells for $49.95 (no discount for geezers).

Jane Clemens' house in Keokuk, Iowa

Clemens’ mother, Jane, bought an attractive two-story home at the corner of 7th and High Streets (reflecting the current economy, a bank has reduced its price to $49,000). Sam regularly wrote candid letters to her. Upon her death the letters, several trunks full, were passed to Orion’s family but later destroyed by John Carpenter, Keokuk’s ex-mayor and a Clemens cousin, in accordance with Sam’s wish.

Sam Clemens returned to Keokuk in 1886 for a family reunion and gave a brief Fourth of July speech in which he joked about the town 30 years earlier: “There were 3,000 people here and they drank 3,000 barrels of whiskey a day, and they drank it in public then.” Though Clemens regretted that he could not deliver the last word—the benediction was to follow—he promised “I will do the next best thing I can and that is to sit down.”

Loren Ghiglione

The French Quarter, after a rainstorm

We spend another day driving south, today through three Mississippi river towns famous in part for their connection to the life of Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) as a steamboat pilot—what he called “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on earth.”

I especially enjoy Greenville, not for its plantation-era Twain history but for a charmingly strange shrine made from a discarded school bus, cinderblocks, stray lumber and a country-store-turned-home, all painted pink, yellow, red, white and blue. The Rev. H. D. Dennis, a Baptist preacher who is closing in on 100, created this “House of Prayer for All People.” “Respect and love one another,” he says. “We’re all the same in God’s eyes.”

The aroma inside my head from the culinary carnival that awaits us in New Orleans focuses me on food. In Greenville, I walk through the kitchen (that’s the entrance) to eat a heaping portion of shrimp at dilapidated Doe’s Eat Place; in Vicksburg, at Rusty’s, seated under a 15-ft. photo mural of the city’s waterfront in 1910, I lunch on fried green tomatoes with hollandaise and crab sauce; in Natchez, I just buy a can of peanut brittle and lead-foot it in the direction of New Orleans’s beignets, Bananas Foster, and red beans and rice.

Trencherman Twain wrote of a $10, four-hour, French-restaurant luncheon—sheepshead fish, oysters, shrimp, game birds—that he had consumed in New Orleans with his riverboat pilot buddies. My dream is to dine on the same kind of fish, sheepshead, that he had eaten in New Orleans more than 150 years ago. So I head for Antoine’s, a French Quarter institution operated by the fifth generation of the family that opened the restaurant in 1841.

But the woman behind the reservation desk makes clear that I’m not going to be served such trash fish at Antoine’s. Fortunately, Michael Kavanaugh, manager of the Hermes Bar at Antoine’s, overhears the conversation. A Twain enthusiast, he points in the direction of the nearby Hermann-Grima House, an 1831 mansion where classes in 19th-century cooking are offered in the courtyard.

He sends us off with a paraphrase of a Twain quote about the local Mississippi River’s muddy, mulatto complexion: “If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink.”

We find the Hermann-Grima House closed for the weekend. Luck intervenes. A woman, who later identifies herself as Dr. Arwen Podesta, a psychiatrist on the Tulane University faculty, stops in front of the house and whips out her cellphone. Suddenly, like magic, another woman appears from behind the Hermann-Grima courtyard door. She is the woman of my foodie dreams, Elizabeth Pearce, whose business card reads “Culinary Historian, Consultant & Guide.”

We strike a deal. The three of us—Twain trippers Alyssa, Dan and Loren—will play attentive listeners during a two-hour photo shoot designed to promote Pearce’s Cocktail Walking Tour in the French Quarter. In return, she will buy the food—and help us cook—a Twain fish feast the way it was prepared in his era. But where, Pearce asks, are the fish recipes I want her to use?

I recall Andrew Beahrs’ book, Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens. It includes a chapter on the preparation of his favorite New Orleans fish. I scour Kitchen Witch and other French Quarter bookshops. No success. Joe Clark, a 40-year librarian behind the information desk at the city’s main library, says none of the city’s libraries has a copy.

Clark and I spend 20 minutes trying to find Beahrs’ New Orleans chapter online. A library customer interrupts our search to tell Clark the library’s first-floor men’s urinal is overflowing. Clark insists that my PP syndrome will lead to success. He is not talking about urine but his slogan: Persistence pays. Sure enough, I find a copy of Beahrs’ book at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum gift shop.

Pearce says it will take us two hours to prepare and cook two Twain fish dishes over an oak fire. It takes us closer to three hours. Observing the speed at which I’m peeling and pulling the heads off of the fresh shrimp Pearce helps and tells me to leave the shrimp deveining to her.

The sheepsheads of Twain’s day are unavailable and not especially coveted. Only 20 percent of the bony sheepshead is usable meat. So Pearce has bought a drum, a kind of fish that we saw being caught the previous day in Bayou Bienvenue.

Elizabeth Pearce

For the baked drum fish, Pearce adapts a recipe for sheepshead from The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book that requires one large onion, thyme, cracker crumbs, a half bottle of white wine, flour, butter, six fresh tomatoes, a mound of mushrooms, two dozen Lake Shrimp and salt and pepper.

But my favorite is the boiled drum, also from a The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book recipe for sheepshead. I suspect the secret is in the quart of cream, the yolks of four eggs and butter, a mixture that would make even a rubber tire edible.

While we cook, eat, wash dishes and say farewells, Pearce answers our endless questions, despite her sore throat. She grew up in nearby Covington, attended Louisiana State University and has always lived in the New Orleans area, except for going to university in Italy and teaching English in Spain. She has no favorite comfort-food dish that she cooks at home: “I clean out the refrigerator a lot.”

The hearth at the Hermann-Grima House

But she has a favorite place, New Orleans, especially at Mardi Gras: “Mardi Gras is my high holy day. I can’t stand Christmas.” For Pearce, Carnival is about the costuming and the hospitality,as well as the fact that there’s not obligation to buy gifts. She doesn’t see New Orleans as a den of booze, beads and bordellos, but as a city of art and food and drink and music and, yes, the kind of fun that exists everywhere but is usually hidden. “Life,” she says, “is about pleasure, not anger.” She describes another favorite time in New Orleans, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, when the Black Men of Labor, who promote traditional New Orleans jazz, and participants in “Southern Decadence,” the gay Mardi Gras, both parade. The different parades intersect, and thousands of different people mingle. “We’re all here and everybody is having a good time,” Pearce says. “There is a tolerance. You can’t be a total bigot.”

Loren Ghiglione

Today is Samuel Clemens’ 176th birthday. And, consequently, another reason for us to order dessert.

Alyssa

• Previous
• Next

Graceland

Graceland

Graceland

Graceland’s basement

Graceland’s basement

Graceland’s billiard room

The jungle room

Graceland

The Graceland cemetary

Elvis’ headstone: TCB for Taking Care of Business

Blame it on the music madness of Memphis—see Dan Tham’s videos of the marching-to-music ducks at the Peabody Hotel below—but a visit to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s mansion, has me thinking that Mark Twain and Elvis the Pelvis were, at minimum, soul brothers.

The homes of Twain and Presley, who both came from the small-town South, feature rooms devoted to pool tables. Both Twain and Presley loved Hawaii; Elvis’s “jungle room” celebrates the waterfalls and other wonders of Hawaii.

Of course Presley is famous for his hip movement, but take a close look at the only film of Twain. You’ll see he also knew how to move that thing. And both loved spirituals and other music a lot more risqué than gospels.

Right after he was married and traveling with his new wife from Elmira to Buffalo, Twain spent much of the trip belting out these lyrics: “There was an old woman in our town, In our town did well, She loved her husband clearly, But another man twice as well…”

Both Twain and Presley were their era’s superstars. They dressed the part, with heads of hair and tailored suits that commanded awe and imitation. So, remember, you heard it here first, don’t be surprised when DNA testing proves that Twain and Presley were blood brothers.

Loren Ghiglione

Skidmore Garrett, attorney and owner of the Mark Twain Inn

While Mark Twain never visited or lived in Jamestown, Tennessee, the town makes the most of its claim that Mark Twain was conceived somewhere, sometime within its borders.

Skidmore Garrett, attorney and owner of the Mark Twain Inn, 104 South Main St., tells us a bit of history about race in Jamestown (its population of 2,000 is 98.3 percent white), while outside uniformed representatives of the Mark Twain American Legion Post 137, stationed in the middle of Main Street, collect money from the drivers of passing cars and pickups.

Across the street, in front of town hall, the Mark Twain Post erected a monument in 1931 to “fallen comrades” killed in World War I. Down the street, next to Mark Twain Avenue, and across from Mark Twain Apparel, sits Mark Twain Park with a Mark Twain spring and a carved wooden statue of Mark Twain.

Dan Tham’s video captures our interview of Garrett on the connection of Mark Twain’s family to Jamestown and a geography-challenged local sheriff.

Loren Ghiglione

• Previous
• Next

Stormfield, Twain’s last home, in Redding, Connecticut

The garden wall at Stormfield is one of the only original portions of the house that remains intact

Stormfield

Stormfield

Stormfield

Books from Mark Twain’s personal collection in the Mark Twain Library

Mark Twain’s writing tablet, made from a cigar box

The Mark Twain Library dresses up Twain for Halloween

Mark Twain’s traveling cigar case from the Mark Twain Library collection

One of our favorite quotes: “There ain’t no surer way to figure out if you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” Has a bit of personal resonance.

Beth Dominianni, director of the Mark Twain Library

One of Twain’s billiard balls from the Mark Twain Library collection

Mark Twain lived his last years at Stormfield, an isolated Italianate villa in Redding, Conn. Twain bought the expansive property sight unseen and asked not to be saddled with the construction plans. All he wanted was space for an orchestrelle and a red billiard room, and the rest he left up to his daughter, Clara, and his secretary, Isabel Lyon. Twain lived at Stormfield from 1908 until his death in 1910. The home is privately owned these days, but we were lucky enough to have a look at the first floor and the grounds of the house. In 1923 the house burned down, and a smaller version of Stormfield was rebuilt shortly after. It’s difficult to say if anything remains from Twain’s era. However, the garden wall is thought to be original.

While living at Stormfield, Twain decided the town needed a library. He placed a collection sign on his mantel and pressed Stormfield male visitors to donate a dollar to his cause. The library opened in late 1910, after Twain’s death, and still operates today. Before his death, Twain donated a collection of about 1,000 books as a core collection to a temporary library; some remain at the present library, many of those with interesting Twain marginalia. Library Director Beth Dominianni and former library director Heather Morgan showed us a few Twain artifacts, including his billiard balls, traveling cigar case and a homemade writing table.

Alyssa

One can imagine what he might have said about the Paul Revere Memorial Association that restored the Paul Revere House at 19 North Square in Boston and opened it to the public in 1908.

The house was restored not to resemble the house the way it was during the period of Revere ownership, 1770-1800, but to resemble the house from a century earlier. The partial third floor where Revere’s five children may have slept was reduced to an attic and 18th-century windows replaced with 17th-century windows.

Dan Tham’s video of Patrick M. Leehey, research director of the Paul Revere House, captures the controversy surrounding the Paul Revere Memorial Association’s restoration of the house.

Loren