We are staying two nights in the Mark Twain Cave Campground. We arrived, got the RV setup and then went on a tour of the Mark Twain Cave. Yes, the cave is real Samuel Clemens, AKA Mark Twain, and his boyhood friends did explore and play in the caves. Even though Mark Twain wrote fiction, the places and people were real.
Our guide in front of the new entrance. The cave was discovered in the 1800's when John East's dog chased a cougar and it ran into the small cave entrance directly above and in front of us. The State of Missouri has the 2nd most number of caves in the nation, the 1st is Tennessee. Mark Twain's cave has over 200 passages, most of them narrow formed out of the limestone bluffs along the Mississippi. It is much smaller than Carlsbad Caverns but is on the Natural Historic Landmark.
Inside the cave, notice the narrow passages, this is how the whole cave system is. There are some larger rooms but they are few and not very large.
Many people that explored the cave in the early days, left their names written on the walls in soot, or carved into the wall. Some of the notable people to visit the cave, in addition to Clemens, were Norman Rockwell, Jesse James. Norman Rockwell came to paint a picture of Becky Thatcher and Tom Sawyer. Jesse James use this as a place to hideout and avoid the law. It is now illegal to tamper with the walls or the names that have already been put on the walls.
The cave system is indeed home to a colony of bats. This is the mark they leave on the cielings where they choose to hibernate and roost. The darkening is caused by the oils in their bodies and winds. The bat population has diminished due to the tours but they have just relocated to other caves in the Hannibal area or moved to passages that are off limits.
During the Winter and Spring, surface water drips down into the cave, gathering minerals as it moves through the ground. In places, it is deposited in calcite formations such as the "waterfall."
No cave in Missouri, especially in the the Mark Twain Cave, is complete without a ghost story. Pioneering Hannibal physician Dr. McDowell purchased the cave in the late 1840s and used it for several years as a laboratory for medical research on human corpses. His belief that traditional burial 'stifled the soul of the dead', and a different type of interment would aid communication between living and dead, led to one of the cave's more notorious episodes, and inspiration for Twain, when McDowell placed his recently deceased child Amanda in a preserving coffin inside the cave work space. Twain's book Life on the Mississippi offered a description of the activities: "In my time the person who owned it [the cave] turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, age fourteen. The body of this poor child was put in a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave."
However in 1849, when McDowell learned that locals had been daring each other to break into the cave and open the cylinder, disrespecting his child’s remains, he had the body removed for a more traditional, and safer, burial in the family vault behind the newly-built Missouri Medical College, where he worked.
Huckleberry Finn's House Becky Thatcher's house
The famous white fence and the drugstore the Clemens family moved to when hard times hit.
Sam Clemens was a master storyteller. It was while the family lived in the upstairs of the drugstore that he got his start as an apprentice at the local newspaper across the street. He received his clothes, meals, lodging but no pay while he was an apprentice. The constant traffic of steamboats just kept calling his name. "Mark Twain" was the call that was used when the sounding rope being used to determine the depth of the river was enough to let the steamboat pass. Mark Twain used his childhood experiences to weave the wonderful stories told for generations. Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, Jim, Indian Joe were all based on his neighbors and friends while growing up in Hannibal. It was fun to think we were walking and seeing the same houses, river and things that Samuel Clemens did.
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