The title page for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn described the book’s setting as the Mississippi Valley “forty to fifty years ago,” that is, between about 1835 and 1845 (counting back from the book’s American publication date in 1885). An earlier version of the title page set the story “forty years ago” or about 1845 (see the explanatory note to xxix.6). This was the period of Clemens’s childhood in Missouri: the family moved to Hannibal in 1839 when Samuel Clemens was four years old. He left in 1853 at the age of seventeen, and made only a few brief return visits. The geography of the fictional St. Petersburg and Jackson’s Island, which correspond to Hannibal and Glasscock’s Island, borrows from his boyhood memory of the area. His firsthand knowledge of the rest of the river valley dates primarily from the years 1857 to 1861, when he worked as a pilot on steamboats plying between St. Louis and New Orleans. During these years he probably consulted the standard piloting guides of the 1840s and 1850s by George Conclin, Samuel Cummings, and U. P. James. The only river guide he is known to have owned, however, was a much earlier one, Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator, which went through twelve editions between 1801 and 1824 (Gribben 1980, 2:914).

In 1882, during a three-year gap of work on Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain began work on Life on the Mississippi. He revisited the river in April and May. He made copious notes, but he found the river and the towns along its banks transformed since his piloting days. “The river is so thoroughly changed that I can’t bring it back to mind even when the changes have been pointed out to me,” he noted. “It is like a man pointing out to me a place in the sky where a cloud has been” (N&J2 , 530). He ordered up-to-date, detailed maps from the Mississippi River Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and he read a number of travel accounts written in the first half of the century. They proved disappointing. “I drudged through all those old books, mainly to find out what the procession of foreign tourists thought of the river towns of the Mississippi. But as a general thing, they forgot to say” (SLC 1944, 411; Kruse 1981, 48–53, 165–66; Blair 1960a, 294–99; Branch and Hirst, 37–38).

When in 1883 he returned to Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain still had the bulk of Huck’s adventures on the river below Cairo to write. Despite his stock of memories, his recent river trip, and the research he had done [begin page 366] for Life on the Mississippi, he made no attempt to further particularize the locations in his early manuscript pages or to include in the later episodes more specific geographic information. He gives us only a few actual place names and unambiguous markers along the raft’s route: the raft passes St. Louis and Cairo; the fictional Bricksville is in Arkansas; the Wilkses’ village is on the lefthand (east) bank of the river, across from Arkansas and below Memphis, Tennessee; the Phelps farm is below the White River in the region of cotton plantations and Spanish moss, which places it south of Columbia, Arkansas (79.3, 99.1–9, 129.14–24, 180.8–9, 203.1–5, 204.15–16, 234.25–26, 265.6–10, 282.14). The only other specific geographic references are in Clemens’s working notes or later statements (see Mark Twain’s Working Notes, working notes 2-2, 2-7, 3-4, and 3-6; see also the explanatory notes to 266.9–267.7 and 358.33–34). He did, however, make specific reference to the speed of the river current and the approximate duration of the raft’s nightly travel, in chapters 12 and 15 of the book (78.30–31 and 100.35). This information has encouraged scholars to attempt to calculate the raft’s daily mileage, so as to assign actual place names to the deliberately generic Pokeville, Bricksville, and Pikesville. In the early chapters, the raft’s journey conforms well to a mathematical model based on an average river current of 4½ miles per hour and a travel time of 7½ hours per night. The model breaks down, however, soon after Cairo is passed; thenceforth the raft’s journey can only be traced in broad terms (see Miller, 193–95, 198–200). By the time the raft reaches Pikesville and the Phelps farm, which Mark Twain in several statements firmly located in Arkansas, the disjunction between daily mileage and the passage of time is so great that some scholars argue for a location much further south, deep in Louisiana (see the explanatory notes to 266.9–267.7 and 274.15–16).

Throughout the novel, Mark Twain appropriates aspects of real places in his descriptions, without intending a specific identification. His uncle’s Missouri farm, for instance, contributes to the descriptions of both the Grangerford house and the Phelps plantation (see the explanatory notes to 136.15–17 and 276.18). Similarly, the two towns that Huck and Jim encounter below Cairo recall Columbus and Hickman, Kentucky, in their basic topography and relative positions, but not their distance from Cairo (see the explanatory note to 129.23). Bricksville, where the “Royal Nonesuch” is performed, owes something of its character to Napoleon, Arkansas, although new evidence from the manuscript shows that Mark Twain originally located Bricksville in Council Bend, over one hundred miles upriver of Napoleon (see the explanatory note to 180.8–9). He eventually deleted the reference to Council Bend, perhaps in accordance with his decision to avoid such specifics. As some scholars have pointed out, this deliberate lack of geographic detail, coupled with the “extraordinary lyrical intensity” of Huck’s descriptions of the natural world (Marx 1957, 138), give the raft trip a dream-like dimension: it becomes an “unfettered voyage [begin page 367] into an eternal landscape” (Miller, 206; Henry Nash Smith 1958b, x–xii, xvi; Beaver, 62–64, 96–98).

The five maps that follow here are intended to represent some of the real geography on which Mark Twain relied in writing his story. When he used a fictional name for a real place, it appears within parentheses and in capitals and small capitals below the real name: for example, “Hannibal | (St. Petersburg)”. Not every fictional place is so readily equated with a real one. When the link is more tentative, the fictional name is preceded by “Vicinity of,” still within parentheses, and the rationale for the identification is discussed in the explanatory notes.