The "real" Tom Sawyer was a heavy-drinking firefighter and local hero whom Mark Twain befriended in the s, according to new analysis by the Smithsonian magazine. The renowned American monthly attempts in its latest issue to settle once and for all a question that has long perplexed scholars : did Twain really name his child hero Tom after his drinking partner Sawyer, a "stocky, round-faced … customs inspector, volunteer fireman, special policeman and bona fide local hero? The pair met in the steam rooms in San Francisco in , writes Robert Graysmith in the Smithsonian, where Sawyer recounted the incredible story of how he had saved dozens of people from a shipwrecked steamer off Baja California — a story close to Twain's heart as his brother had been killed by a steamboat explosion.
Sawyer swam back and forth between the ship and the shore, "a feat of amazing strength and stamina", and is credited with saving 90 lives at sea, 26 singlehandedly. And then when somebody'd buy him another drink, he'd keep up all day. Once he got started, he'd set there till morning telling yarns. In between drinks, Twain was working as a journalist and writing stories anonymously; Sawyer had plans, later fulfilled, to open a saloon.
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Sawyer, a powerful swimmer, dove into the water, caught both men by their hair and pulled them to the surface. As they clung to his back, he swam for the shore a hundred yards away, a feat of amazing strength and stamina. Depositing Collins and Freeborn on the beach, Sawyer swam back to the burning steamer. He made a number of round trips, swimming to shore with a passenger or two on his back each time. Two broken lifeboats were repaired and launched.
Sawyer returned to the flaming vessel in a long boat, rowing hard despite burned forearms to reach more passengers. He got a group into life preservers, then towed them ashore and went back for more.
An hour later, the ship was a perfect sheet of flame. Four days later, the survivors were picked up by American whaling vessels. Ultimately, Sawyer was credited with saving 90 lives at sea, among them 26 people he had rescued singlehandedly. He himself had a deathly fear of exploding steamers, and for good reason.
In , Twain had gotten his brother Henry, then 20, an unpaid post as a junior purser on the New Orleans steamer Pennsylvania. On June 13, the Pennsylvania exploded 60 miles below Memphis. Four of the eight boilers blew up the forward third of the vessel. Henry died close to dawn on June O, God! This is hard to bear. Twain blamed himself and, at the time he and Sawyer met, was still reliving the tragedy in his memory by day and in vivid dreams by night. Well, I was pretty well-heeled—had eight hundred dollars in my inside pocket—and as there was nothing much doing in Frisco, I went.
Sawyer had an exciting few nights with Sam and his friends, drinking and gambling. He moved into rooms in the new White House Hotel, and when it caught fire on July 26, most of his possessions and all his mining stocks were burned to ash. In Roughing It , he fictionalized the reason for his sudden poverty.
The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. Twain returned to San Francisco in September , a time of writing feverishly and much carousing.
Sawyer was nearly his equal in talking but often had to throw in the towel. His clothes were always ragged and he never had his hair cut or a shave in them days. The ground floor on the northwest corner housed the Bank Exchange saloon, where Twain and Sawyer had met.
The Montgomery Block was perhaps the most important literary site of the 19th- and early 20th-century American West. Sun Yat-sen wrote the first Chinese constitution there. Twain and fellow reporter Clement T. Rice were living in the Occidental, a prestigious new four-story hotel on Montgomery Street. Sawyer lived frugally while saving to buy a saloon on Mission Street.
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