via Elijah or Benjamin Hawkins
6? February 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (Fielder, 11, UCCL 09533)
enclosures of wedding cards
Mrs. ——— (married name unknown to me).
(Formerly Miss Laura Hawkins, first sweetheart of one of the within named parties 29 years ago.2explanatory note Pardon the suggestive figures.)
on the flap: lc Ⓐemendation
The cards and envelope are not known to survive: see 6? Feb 70 to Barnesclick to open letter.
Clemens immortalized Anna Laura Hawkins (1837–1928) as Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In 1858 she had married James W. Frazer (1833–75), a physician in Madisonville and then in Rensselaer, Missouri, with whom she had two sons. This brief note—written on “the inner cover” of wedding cards enclosed to one of Laura Frazer’s brothers (Fielder, 11)—marks Clemens’s last known contact with her until 30 May 1902, when they met in Hannibal. On 13 October 1908 Frazer visited Clemens at Stormfield, his home in Redding, Connecticut (“Mark Twain’s Childhood Sweetheart Recalls Their Romance,” Literary Digest 56 [23 March 1918]: 75; Love, 2; “Stormfield Guest-Book,” CU-MARK). Frazer’s brother Benjamin (b. 1822?) had been Hannibal city marshal in the early 1850s. He was the prototype for Captain Haskins, the militia captain and sheriff in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” an unfinished story Clemens worked on from 1897 to about 1902 ( Inds , 134–213, 289–93). Another brother, Elijah (b. 1828?), was a Hannibal dry goods merchant. He, and perhaps Benjamin, were still living in Hannibal in 1870. For further details of Clemens’s acquaintance with the Hawkins family, see Inds , 95, 322–24.
Elizabeth Davis Fielder, “Familiar Haunts of Mark Twain,” Harper’s Weekly 43 (16 Dec 99): 11.
L4 , 59; In addition to the copy-text, “Mark Twain’s First Sweetheart,” Sunday Magazine, New York World, 15 June 1902, 2; “Laura Hawkins Frazer, Always Remembered as Idol of Boyhood,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 3C.