Mark Twain’s Story of the Bull and the Bees

Abstract

Obedstown, in the “knobs of east tennessee, ” is the setting of the opening chapter of The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. In Mark Twain’s share of the novel fall the first eleven chapters, and in Chapter I, “Squire Hawkins’s Tennessee Land, ” he is writing about the experiences of his own parents and their older children. The parents, John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens, lived in East Tennessee from 1824 until the spring of 1835, first at Gainesboro (or Gainesborough), then at Jamestown, and later for short periods at Three Forks of Wolf and Pall Mall. Roughly, these places are half way between Nashville and Knoxville, north of a line joining the two cities. In Fentress County, about twenty miles south of Jamestown, John Marshall Clemens bought (for five hundred dollars) seventy-five thousand acres of undeveloped land, whose resources of timber, coal, iron, and farm and ranch land were exploited too late to bring the Clemens children the fortune which their father, to the day of his death, thought that he had provided for them. To Mark Twain the Tennessee Land became a symbol of the hope oft deferred that makes the heart sick, and he made it one of the chief themes of The Gilded Age.