Scott, I don't know if you know of any research on a side trip Clemens might have taken to Schriever, Louisiana during this trip. Local lore and some apparent evidence suggests a visit in 1882 to a riverboat friend, John T. Moore, who owned Waubun plantation in Schriver along the Southern Pacific Railroad line. The train from New Orleans still makes a brief stop when there's someone (like my now-deceased mother when she came to visit) who needs to disembark. The house Waubun still exists and is now lived in by a friend of mine who is caretaking it at the same time he is the archivist at Nicholls State University here in Thibodaux, just a few miles from the house. Here's an article in a local paper from 2010. See what you think: https://www.houmatoday.com/article/DA/20101229/Entertainment/608099735/HC Regards, Miki On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 2:03 PM Scott Holmes <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I mapped Sam's journey from Keokuk to New Orleans, via Chicago and > Cincinnati, for those of you interested in such things. Any commentary > is from the Mark Twain Project's collection of letters and editorials. > I'm still trying to sort out the history of the railroads involved. I'm > discovering just how corrupt the development of railroads was. > > http://twainsgeography.com/content/starting-out-amazon > > If anyone knows of commentary on Sam's first trip with Horace Bixby I'd > appreciate a lead on it. About all I know is Sam got aboard the Paul > Jones in Cincinnati, ran aground near Louisville, dropped of armaments > at Baton Rouge and discovered that passage to the Amazon was not > immediately available fro New Orleans. > -- Miki Pfeffer, Ph D *A** New Orlean**s Author i**n Mark Twain's Court: * *Letters from Grace King's New England Sojourns * (LSU Press, 2019) *Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women's Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World's Fair *(University Press of Mississippi, 2014)