Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Down the Mississippi

The book opens in St. Petersburg, where the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in and "allowed she would sivilize me." Huck has already run off once, in his old rags and sugar-hogshead, until Tom Sawyer hunts him up and lures him back with a band of robbers. St. Petersburg is Twain's name for Hannibal, Missouri. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum on Hill Street holds the house where Twain lived from 1844 to 1853, a replica of the home of Tom Blankenship, the boy Huck was based on, and exhibits on Hannibal's history of slavery.

Location precision: The novel's St. Petersburg is invented; the pin marks the Hannibal boyhood home that inspired it.

Visitor guidance: The museum complex in Hannibal includes the Huck Finn House and, at the foot of Cardiff Hill, the Tom and Huck statue of 1926.

Having faked his death, Huck hides on Jackson's Island, three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide. From the head of the island he can see the lights of the town, three miles away. There he finds Jim, who ran away after overhearing Miss Watson plan to sell him down to Orleans. They set up house in a big cavern near the top of the ridge, on the side towards Illinois. Pearl Island, also called Glasscock Island, a river island in Illinois, is named as the real setting.

Location precision: Jackson's Island is invented; Pearl Island (Glasscock Island) is the traditional real counterpart, not a proven match.

On the fifth night of drifting the raft passes St. Louis, "like the whole world lit up." In St. Petersburg they used to say there were twenty or thirty thousand people there, and Huck never believed it until he saw that wonderful spread of lights at two o'clock that still night. Not a sound came from the sleeping city. The pin marks the riverfront at the Gateway Arch, on the site where St. Louis was founded in 1764.

Location precision: Huck sees the city only as lights from the river; the pin marks the riverfront at the Gateway Arch.

Visitor guidance: The Gateway Arch grounds sit on the west bank of the Mississippi.

Everything hinges on Cairo, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi. Huck fears they will not know a town of about a dozen houses; Jim says the joining of the two rivers would show. Huck paddles off all in a sweat to tell on Jim, but when two men with guns ask whether his man is white or black, he answers, "He's white." They had already slipped past in the fog. By daylight the clear Ohio water runs beside the muddy Mississippi, and it is all up with Cairo, the lowest point in Illinois.

Location precision: The raft passes Cairo unseen in the fog; the pin marks the town at the meeting of the two rivers.

Visitor guidance: Cairo is the southernmost city in Illinois, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi.

After a steamship strikes the raft, Huck meets the Grangerfords, an aristocratic Kentucky family, and gives his name as George Jackson, a boy who fell overboard off a steamboat. They are in a 30-year feud with the Shepherdsons, though the two families use the same steamboat landing, two miles above the house. Buck explains the feud started "thirty year ago, or som'ers along there." When a Grangerford daughter elopes with a Shepherdson, it ends in an ambush that kills the Grangerford men, and Huck escapes to Jim and the repaired raft.

Location precision: The novel never says where the Grangerfords live and the place is invented, so there is no pin.

Well down in Arkansas, the raft ties up above a little one-horse town in a big bend. The duke draws handbills for The King's Camelopard or The Royal Nonesuch: three nights only, fifty cents, ladies and children not admitted. The king prances out on all fours, painted in rainbow stripes, and the audience shouts "Sold!" before deciding to send the rest of the town to the same show. By the third night the crowd has brought rotten eggs and cabbages, but the duke and Huck are already running for the raft, with four hundred and sixty-five dollars. The book later names the town Bricksville.

Location precision: Bricksville is invented and the book gives no more than "Arkansaw", so there is no pin.

The King and the Duke sell Jim to the Phelpses, and Huck vows to free him. At "one of these little one-horse cotton plantations" Aunt Sally takes him for her nephew Tom, and the real Tom Sawyer arrives with a theatrical plan to free Jim. Jim stays to tend the wounded Tom and is recaptured. Miss Watson has died and freed Jim in her will, and Pap was the dead man in the floating house. Huck lights out for the Territory rather than be adopted. Twain summered on his uncle John Quarles's farm near Florida, Missouri, memories that fed his novels.

Location precision: The book places the Phelps farm in Arkansas and it is invented; the pin marks the Missouri village near Twain's uncle's farm.

Visitor guidance: The Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site is in the village; the Quarles farmhouse is an archaeological project open to the public nearby.