Dad did. After the beans and onions of his Depression-era youth, he launched into a lifetime obsession with gravy. And in between bites, he told great stories about dead people.
Like Injun Joe.
Around Dad’s home town of Hannibal, Joe Douglas is the town’s second-favorite son.
Sam Clemens, of course, is the town’s first favorite son. You know him as Mark Twain. He isn’t buried among the 15,000 headstones at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. But his mom and dad are, and most of the rest of his Hannibal family. So is Injun Joe, or, more precisely, the man Hannibalians think served as Twain’s model for Injun Joe.
Joe Douglas was a decent man, and his life was pretty good except for his reputation as the model for a raging bloody cutthroat killer. Even in his later years, bathing in the spotlight of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain never fingered Joe Douglas as the model for Injun Joe. He remained mum on the subject, carrying his thoughts to his grave a thousand miles away from Hannibal.
Joe Douglas outlived Twain by a dozen years. A century after Twain’s death, his autobiography finally sees the light of day, and Twain says that Injun Joe was patterned on somebody else.
But the folks of Hannibal hold tight to their own beliefs about Mark Twain. There were 19,000 people in Hannibal at the time Twain sat on his porch in Hartford, Connecticut and wrote about Injun Joe, and almost all of them were convinced that Joe Douglas served as Twain’s model. Through no fault of his own, Joe Douglas had the physical characteristics to play Injun Joe. If he was in a police lineup with a dozen other fellows, where folks could finger a villain, they’d point to poor Joe Douglas. He was a towering figure of Osage Indian and African descent, with deep facial scars from smallpox, and a red wig hiding a bald head.
Dad knew Joe Douglas. They met when Dad was seven years old. Joe was 102. “He used to come into the service station where I washed windshields as a kid,” Dad said. “Even as an old man, every Saturday Injun Joe would ride into Hannibal from his home outside Spalding, in the back seat of a car driven by a neighbor family. They would buy some gasoline, and sell some produce, and Injun Joe would laugh and joke with us kids. But nobody ever called him Injun Joe, or even brought up the subject. We were respectful of him, or maybe just afraid.”
I set out to find Injun Joe. Along the way, many more stories, buried by time, kept surfacing—like the story about the boys who were buried alive.
Smacking into Missouri’s east coast, I made a beeline down Highway 79 to the base of Lover’s Leap, a sheer cliff that towers over the Mississippi River. Across America, 30 dozen Lover’s Leaps stand ready to oblige the nation’s forlorn, and each tells the same story: love denied, somebody jumps. Lovers and leapers have combined to name seven such sites in Missouri alone. But behind the face of this cliff, within the mountain that forms a massive southern bookend to Hannibal, another mystery remains unsolved.
I remember when it happened. Back in 1967, three boys younger than my 15 years set out for adventure around the rugged bluffs and caves that surround Hannibal. They never came home. Right beside the Mississippi River, workers were blasting a new roadcut to straighten the twists and turns of Highway 79, and searchers believe the boys are still entombed in a man made cave-in somewhere beneath Roadcut 79.
Sounds like a Twain story. Except there’s no happy ending.
As a boy, Sam Clemens prepared for his adult career by hiding. Mark Twain Cave is where he did some of his best hiding, as anybody who was a school kid knows. Of course, when Twain was a schoolboy it wasn’t called Mark Twain Cave, because he wasn’t called Mark Twain. It was called McDowell’s Cave, named for the doctor who owned it. In his novels, Twain called it McDougal’s Cave, which later was renamed Mark Twain Cave for the obvious reasons of honor and tourism. But back in the 1840s, when the butterfly named Twain was still a caterpillar named Clemens, a real live Dr. McDowell bought the cave, walled the front entrance and used the cool cavern confines to perform research on corpses. Rumors persisted among neighbors that one of the doctor’s cadavers was his own infant daughter, kept in a glass jar in the cave. It doesn’t matter whether any of those tales are true. The stories are true in the minds of true believers. And then, as now, true believers hear ghastly cadaver stories, do their duty to spread them, and anybody who hears these dark tales never forgets them.
Mark Twain draws liberally from that cave and its gruesome reputation as a trade center, a chop shop for body snatchers. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, two cretins, Injun Joe and Muff Potter, steal dead bodies from the local cemetery to feed the research needs of Dr. Robinson. But when Injun Joe kills the doctor in a moonlit graveyard, scientific advancement screeches to a halt.
In Twain’s tale, Injun Joe dies too. Twain makes the cave dark and Devilish, and he portrays his villain’s death at a manhole-sized back entrance to the cave, where searchers find Joe’s dead eyes shining out of the darkness, the bony fingers of his corpse clutching the iron bars that blocked his escape. But that was Twain’s version of events, greatly exaggerated.
As Twain transformed his experiences along these bluffs into a collection of the world’s greatest adventures, his silence about Joe Douglas created one more tragedy. The proof lies in Mt. Olivet Cemetery. I turned onto Route T and drove two minutes to the scene.
Like most old cemeteries, Mt. Olivet hides plenty of forgotten history beneath a stonecutter’s art gallery. It sprouts plenty of character. The most noticeable sprout is a 10-foot tall tombstone chiseled in the image of a tree trunk. Less flamboyant is the simple military marker for the admiral of the Great White Fleet. Nearby lie the bones of a guy who couldn’t afford a lawyer. His Supreme Court case paved the way for suspects without money to get counsel. But I hadn’t intended to get caught up in graveyard biographies. I was seeking the tragedy that Twain had allowed to happen: the branding of the real Joe Douglas as the fictional Injun Joe.
To his dying day, Joe denied that he was the Injun Joe in Twain’s tale. But the descendants of Mark Twain’s Hannibal can’t let go. They erected a headstone on his grave a few years ago, and I found it in Mt. Olivet: “Joe Douglass [sic], known to many in Hannibal as Injun Joe, died September 29th, 1923 at age 102. He was found, an infant, in an abandoned Indian camp by a man named Douglass who raised him. He denied that he was the Injun Joe in Mark Twain’s writings, as he had always lived an honorable life....”
Joe Douglas met a tragic end of his own. He died of apparent ptomaine poisoning after eating pickled pigs’ feet. Old legends die hard.
I left Joe Douglas to rest in peace, and drove downtown to find Abe & Higgies, a scary old Hannibal tavern down by the railroad tracks. At least the tavern was scary the first time I went there as a wide-eyed child. Mom and Dad took me there to teach me a lesson. Even before we entered the tavern, the building’s exhaust fan pumped out hot air currents saturated with the aroma of stale beer and cigarette smoke and grilled onions and grease from the open grill. The tavern’s dark wood paneling absorbed the dim light offered by a hanging lamp that somehow had trapped a tiny team of Clydesdales pulling a tiny beer wagon. The little plastic Clydesdales trudged round and round inside that greasy lamp, trapped in horse Hell, pulling a beer wagon to nowhere. But nightmares in horse Hell vanished when the server set a breaded pork tenderloin in front of me. I can’t recall if there was a plate underneath it, the sandwich was so big.
“It could smother a snappin’ turtle,” said a voice from a distant table. I looked toward the voice, and saw a solitary silhouette backlit by a window that grudgingly admitted daylight through fifty years of smoky greasy film. “That sandwich is so big, ol’ pap owes property tax on it,” the silhouette chuckled. Even today I believe that silhouette was a descendant of Huck Finn. On that day I learned this lesson: The best food can be found in the dim-lit taverns and roadhouses with
