You can get a sense of contemporary usage in respectable journals by
doing a search for the word in the Making of America site at Cornell:

http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/

It includes prominent magazines such as Century, Harper's, New
England Magazine, North American Review, Putnam's, Scribner's, etc. A
search for the word there returns 57 matches in 36 books, and 2,600
matches in 1,262 journal articles. The journal articles include Twain's
serial publications of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Some of the other titles listed are interesting to browse through. When
you click on a title it brings you to a page with the publication
information
and match counts for specific pages. At least in terms of density of
usage, William W. Archer had Twain beat hands down with his 1888
dialect story in Harper's, "Sosrus Dismal." There are 24 matches on one
page alone!

You can narrow the search to specific years if you want to get a sense of
how commonly it was used in the years Twain was writing the book or
when it was published and receiving its first reviews.

Jim Zwick