Samuel Clemens was born and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. This was the home of

his later characters Tom Sawer and Huck Finn. In these books he incorporated such

features that really existed in Hannibal; features such as Holidays Hill, Bear Creek

and L In his late teens, Clemens left Hannibal on a riverboat to become a printer in St.

Louis. He moved up in the ranks of printing and moved to New York and eventually to

Washington D.C. Clemens remembered how much fun he had had on the riverboat

and how g Mark Twain stopped piloting the riverboat in 1861, at the start of the Civil

War, to join the Union. He went to war for two weeks and left immediately after being

involved in the shooting of a civilian. He said he knew retreating better than it's inven

He soon decided to travel 1,700 miles from the Missouri Territory , to the Nevada

Territory. He passed through Overland City, Horseshoe City, and many large and

small cities in between.

Clemens commented that Salt Lake City was healthy. He said that the city had one

doctor who was arrested once a week for lack of work. Virginia City was very lively

from all of the gold and silver found near. He commented that the saloons, courts and

Inspired by the vein of silver as wide as a New York City street under Virginia City,

Twain decided to go prospecting. Many people went prospecting crazy but Twain

thought it must have skipped over him. After not finding any silver, he wrote a book cal

Clemens soon went to San Francisco and took a job at the San Francisco Times.

From them he got the title of "The Most Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope". He

wanted to travel, so he boarded a ship to Hawaii, also known as the Sandwich

Islands. From t Twain soon felt he was in a strange world that had developed so

much from his small town of Hannibal. "My heart is in my own century," Twain

said,"but I wish the twentieth well." There were other great phrases that he said, such

as: "I was young and fo Clemens eventually bought a house on Long Island which he

named Stormfield and stayed there through his final days. Samuel Clemens was born

in 1835, the night of the Haley's Comet. He always said that he thought he would go

out with the comet just as h