Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 132, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 June 1916 — HUCKLEBERRY FINN STILL IN REAL LIFE [ARTICLE]

HUCKLEBERRY FINN STILL IN REAL LIFE

He Recalls His Days With Tom Sawyer and the Great American Humorist—Llvea In Oregon Eugene, Ore.—Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s famous character is 90 years old. And even with 90 years behind him, this robust old man, toughened to the fiber of old hickory, his eyes still bright and with the full rigor of a man 30 years his junior recalls vividly his steamboat days spent with Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer on the Gray Eagle the fastest steamboat on the Mississippi in its day. He tells with a thrill of the great boat race as it really occurred with Samuel L. Clemens, himself as pilot. For forty years Huckleberry Finn has been a character of the McKenzie river in Lane county Oregon. The entire McKenzie Valley has known him as long as he can remember, and the thousands of fishermen who annuallv cast for redside trout in its swift waters know Huckleberry. They have listened to his stories, and many have wondered if this character, P. F. Finn, is the same “Huck Finn” of whom Clemens wrote.

To his intimate friends he tells of his boyhood days on the Missouri farm, near that of Clemens of his rough life on the Mississippi before and during the war, and how he finally crossed the plains and the Rockies to find himself on the McKenzie river without money and looking for a place to pass the winter. He tells how he lived by his rifle, sold hides in Eugene and came out at the end of the winter with money ahead. Since then be has erected the largest turpentine factory in the state of Oregon and sells the turpentine, rosin and a linament of his own pre paration. He was first mate under Captain Hall on the steamboat?-Shotwell, at that time the fastest on the Mississippi. “Clemens —we called him Charley-y was one of the Shotwell’s Pilots. He got in with Tom Sawyer and bought the Gray Eagje,” the old man explains, “How did I get my name? You see I was first mate, and if anything did n’t go right I was the ‘huckleberry.’ That’s what we called a man who gets in between a fight. My duty was to jump down from the quarter deck and knock ’em apart, and I guess I knocked some of ’em good and plenty.”