A Burlesque Biography

Mark Twain

Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I would write an

autobiography they would read it when they got leisure, I yield at last to this frenzied public

demand and herewith tender my history.

Ours is a noble house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity. The earliest ancestor the

Twains have any record of was a friend of the family by the name of Higgins. This was in

the eleventh century, when our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England.

Why it is that our long line has ever since borne the maternal name (except when one of

them now and then took a playful refuge in an alias to avert foolishness), instead of

Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the year 1160. He was as

full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old saber and sharpen it up, and get in a

convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them

jump. He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it; and the first time he was

found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up

on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have a good

time. He never liked any situation so much or stuck to it so long.

Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows a succession of soldiers--noble,

high-spirited fellows, who always went into battle singing, right behind the army, and

always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.

and by he took a contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness of the work spoiled

his hand. Still, he enjoyed life all the time he was in the stone business, which, with

inconsiderable intervals, was some forty-two years. In fact, he died in harness. During all

those long years he gave such satisfaction that he never was through with one contract a

week till the government gave him another. He was a perfect pet. And he was always a

favorite with his fellow-artists, and was a conspicuous member of their benevolent secret

society, called the Chain Gang. He always wore his hair short, had a preference for striped

clothes, and died lamented by the government. He was a sore loss to his country. For he was

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so regular.

Some years later we have the illustrious John Morgan Twain. He came over to this country

with Columbus in 1492 as a passenger. He appears to have been of a crusty, uncomfortable

disposition. He complained of the food all the way over, and was always threatening to go

ashore unless there was a change. He wanted fresh shad. Hardly a day passed over his head

that he did not go idling about the ship with his nose in the air, sneering about the

W. C.," one woolen one marked "D. F.," and a night-shirt marked "O. M. R." And yet

during the voyage he worried more about his "trunk," and gave himself more airs about it,

than all the rest of the passengers put together. If the ship was "down by the head," and

would not steer, he would go and move his "trunk" further aft, and then watch the effect. If

the ship was "by the stern," he would suggest to Columbus to detail some men to "shift that

baggage." In storms he had to be gagged, because his wailings about his "trunk" made it

impossible for the men to hear the orders. The man does not appear to have been openly

charged with any gravely unbecoming thing, but it is noted in the ship's log as a "curious

circumstance" that albeit he brought his baggage on board the ship in a newspaper, he took

it ashore in four trunks, a queensware crate, and a couple of champagne baskets. But when

Then in the ship's dimmed and ancient log we find this quaint note:

"In time it was discouvered yt ye troblesome passenger hadde gone downe and got ye

anchor, and toke ye same and solde it to ye dam sauvages from ye interior, saying yt he

hadde founde it, ye sonne of a ghun!"

Yet this ancestor had good and noble instincts, and it is with pride that we call to mind the

fact that he was the first white person who ever interested himself in the work of elevating

and civilizing our Indians. He built a commodious jail and put up a gallows, and to his

dying day he claimed with satisfaction that he had had a more restraining and elevating

influence on the Indians than any other reformer that ever labored among them. At this

point the chronicle becomes less frank and chatty, and closes abruptly by saying that the old

made good fair time across the ocean. But if a ship still loitered in spite of all he could do,

his indignation would grow till he could contain himself no longer-- and then he would take

that ship home where he lived and keep it there carefully, expecting the owners to come for

it, but they never did. And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out of the sailors of

that ship by compelling them to take invigorating exercise and a bath. He called it "walking

a plank." All the pupils liked it. At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying it.

When the owners were late coming for their ships, the Admiral always burned them, so that

Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter part of the seventeenth century, and was a

to come to divine service in. His poor flock loved him very, very dearly; and when his

funeral was over, they got up in a body (and came out of the restaurant) with tears in their

eyes, and saying, one to another, that he was a good tender missionary, and they wished

they had some more of him.

Pah-go-to-wah-wah-pukketekeewis (Mighty-Hunter-with-a-Hog-Eye-Twain) adorned the

middle of the eighteenth century, and aided General Braddock with all his heart to resist the

oppressor Washington. It was this ancestor who fired seventeen times at our Washington

from behind a tree. So far the beautiful romantic narrative in the moral story-books is

correct; but when that narrative goes on to say that at the seventeenth round the awe-

That was why he stopped at the seventeenth round, and it was a good, plain, matter-of-fact

reason, too, and one that easily commends itself to us by the eloquent, persuasive flavor of

probability there is about it.

I also enjoyed the story-book narrative, but I felt a marring misgiving that every Indian at

Braddock's Defeat who fired at a soldier a couple of times (two easily grows to seventeen in

a century), and missed him, jumped to the conclusion that the Great Spirit was reserving

that soldier for some grand mission; and so I somehow feared that the only reason why

Washington's case is remembered and the others forgotten is, that in his the prophecy came

true, and in that of the others it didn't. There are not books enough on earth to contain the

record of the prophecies Indians and other unauthorized parties have made; but one may

I will remark here, in passing, that certain ancestors of mine are so thoroughly well-known

John George Twain, alias Captain Kydd; and then there are George Francis Twain, Tom

Pepper, Nebuchadnezzar, and Baalam's Ass--they all belong to our family, but to a branch

of it somewhat distinctly removed from the honorable direct line--in fact, a collateral

branch, whose members chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in order to acquire the

notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for, they have got into a low way of going

to jail instead of getting hanged.

I was born without teeth--and there Richard III. had the advantage of me; but I was born

But now a thought occurs to me. My own history would really seem so tame contrasted

with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave it unwritten until I am hanged. If

some other biographies I have read had stopped with the ancestry until a like event

occurred, it would have been a felicitous thing for the reading public. How does it strike

you?

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