Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/405

 MARK TWAIN A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

BY SAMUEL E. MOFFETT

IN 1835 the creation of the Western empire of America had just begun. In the whole region west of the Mississippi, which now contains twenty- one million people nearly twice the entire popula tion of the United States at that time there were less than half a million white inhabitants. There were only two states beyond the great river, Lou isiana and Missouri. There were only two consider able groups of population, one about New Orleans, the other about St. Louis. If we omit New Orleans, which is east of the river, there was only one place in all that vast domain with any pretension to be called a city. That was St. Louis, and that me tropolis, the wonder and pride of all the Western country, had no more than ten thousand inhabitants. It was in this frontier region, on the extreme fringe of settlement that just divides the desert from the sown,&quot; that Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born, November 30, 1835, in the hamlet of Florida, Mis souri. His parents had come there to be in the thick of the Western boom, and by a fate for which no lack of foresight on their part was to blame, they found themselves in a place which succeeded

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