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.
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References
In Mark Twain’s Letters (New York and London, 1917), I, 390, Paine pointed out that it was Joan’s Uncle Laxart who rode a bull to a funeral.
A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York and London, 1912), II, 719.
Kenneth R. Andrews, Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), p. 260.
Ibid., pp. 191-192. See also Mark Twain’s Letters, I, 390-391.
Mark Twain’s Letters, I, 390-391.
Andrews, op. cit., pp. 191-192.
Ibid., p. 243.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 243-246.
Ibid., p. 246.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, II, 60-63 (Vol. XXVIII in the Author’s National Edition, from which I quote.)
In George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood’s Tarns (New York, 1867), pp. 86-97. The yarn may also be found in Tall Tales of the Southwest, edited by Franklin J. Meine (New York, 1946), pp. 343-350. The former is the text used here. See E. Hudson Long, “Sut Lovingood and Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc,” Modern Language Notes, 64 (January, 1949), 37-39. He says that Uncle Laxart’s bull ride was suggested by G. W. Harris’s “Sicily Burns’s Wedding.” When my article was first published, I had not read or heard of Professor Long’s article, and I am glad to acknowledge here the priority of his discovery. I am sure that Professor Long would agree that Mark Twain’s earlier bull-ride yarn had the same source.
From a letter written in New York on May 23, 1867, for the San Francisco Alta California, where it was published in the issue for July 14, 1867, and reprinted in Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, edited by Franklin Walker & G. Ezra Dane (New York, 1940), p. 221. See also p. 293.
George Washington Harris, op. cit., p. 89.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 91.
Ibid., p. 92.
Ibid., p. 93.
Ibid., pp. 93-94.
Ibid., p. 95.
Ibid., pp. 98-107.
In “Sut at a Negro Night-Meeting” occurs this description of a Negro being stung and chased by hornets (Harris, Sut Lovingood’s Tarns, p. 169): “Wun long laiged nigger busted outen the bunch what wer down in the straw … an’ tuck a rush skull fus’ agin a weatherboarded camp, busted thru hit like hit wer a aig shell, an’ out at tuther side thru a winder, a-totin the sash wif him roun his neck like a collar ….” Within a few months after Twain received from the publishers a copy of Harris’s book he went on the Quaker City excursion and contributed travel letters to the San Francisco Alta California, and the following year (1868) he wrote The Innocents Abroad. In Chapter XVIII of the first volume he told how frightened he was as a boy one night when he found himself in his father’s office with a bloody corpse. He wrote: “I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort of a hurry, but I simply went—that is sufficient. I went out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it. I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.”
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© 1958 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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McKeithan, D.M. (1958). Mark Twain’s Story of the Bull and the Bees. In: Court Trials in Mark Twain and other Essays. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8921-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8921-7_9
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