All of the material on this page dates from 1996, the year this electronic archive was begun. By the end of Tom Sawyer, "tourists" have already started coming to McDougal's Cave, where the great attraction is "Injun Joe's Cup." At the start of the 21st century, according to the Visitors and Convention Bureau, about 400,000 tourists come to Hannibal every year. For most of them, the drawing cards are Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and "Mark Twain" himself -- none of whom, of course, every really lived there, all of whom were creations of Sam Clemens' imagination. But Tom, Huck and Mark are easy to find in Hannibal these days. If you compare the map below to the 1936 MAP, it's obvious how material are their presences have become: even a shopping center wears Huck's name.

    Hannibal now has its own website, of course, as does the "MT Boyhood Home & Museum," the "Becky Thatcher House," the "MT Cave" and so on. For up to date information on any of these places, please go to their websites. What you can learn from the brochure below is how "Mark Twain" and "the village of Hannibal" have been defined by the expectations "visitors" bring to both -- what the brochure calls "SAFE AND CONSTANT GROUND":

    THE "TOURISTS" described in Tom Sawyer did not have to pay admission to "see the wonders of the cave," but a dozen years after the novel came out it did become the region's first commercial tourist attraction. As the page from the brochure below says, McDougal's Cave (known as "Mark Twain's Cave" by the 1930s) has been "shown" since 1886. You can see the ticket booth in the 1899 HARPER'S ARTICLE, and when we digitally enlarge the PHOTO OF THE ENTRANCE in the 1935 Centennial program, you can almost read the price of a ticket during the Depression (to my eye it looks like adults got in for 40¢, children under 12 for a quarter). Strangely, "Injun Joe's Cup" is not listed among "the cavern's marvels," though "Aladdin's Palace," mentioned by that name in Tom Sawyer, is there: