Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 989

Obedstown

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Obedstown. Tiny village in eastern Tennessee whose few homes are so widely dispersed among trees that it is difficult for visitors to realize that they are in a “town.” The novel opens with the village postmaster, Si Hawkins, receiving a letter from his friend Colonel Sellers urging him to bring his family to Missouri because that state offers easier riches. Hawkins’s giving up on Obedstown is the first of the novel’s many relocations in search of easier wealth.

Twain modeled Obedstown on Jamestown, Tennessee, where his own parents lived before following a kinsman to Missouri. The fictional Obedstown takes its name from the real Obed (or Obeds) River, a tributary of the Tennessee River.

“Tennessee Land.”

“Tennessee Land.” Large tract of commercially worthless land in eastern Tennessee that Hawkins buys before moving west. Throughout his life, he beguiles his children with the promise of the riches to come, admonishing them, “never lose sight of the Tennessee Land.” However, the land brings his children nothing but disappointment. After the Civil War, it becomes the focus of a federal government scandal when Washington Hawkins, Colonel Sellers, and Senator Abner Dilworthy try to push a bill through Congress to get the government to buy the land for the proposed Knobs Industrial University for freed slaves. The scheme collapses when Dilworthy’s corruption in buying votes is exposed.

Like Si Hawkins, Twain’s own father, John Clemens, owned a huge parcel of land in eastern Tennessee on which his children counted for future prosperity. However, they, also like the Hawkinses, never reaped anything from their Tennessee Land but disappointment. Twain took a deep interest in the debilitating effect that land had on his family. Late in life, he was thinking of that land when he said that to begin life “poor and prospectively rich” is a “curse.” The Gilded Age reaches its climax when Washington Hawkins finally lets the family’s title to the Tennessee Land go by not paying its tax assessment, declaring, “The spell is broken, the life-long curse is ended!”

*Mississippi River

*Mississippi River. North America’s great river plays a brief but important role in the novel as a stage in the Hawkins family’s migration from Tennessee to Missouri. While the Hawkinses are riding the steamboat Boreas upriver, its pilot engages another steamboat, the Amaranth, in a race. The Amaranth’s boilers explode, killing many passengers, apparently including the parents of Laura Van Brunt, whom the Hawkinses then adopt—an action that changes all their lives. Scenes aboard the Boreas provide the fullest descriptions of a steamboat that Twain wrote in any of his novels.

*Missouri

*Missouri. Midwestern state that represented the threshold of the Western frontier during the period in which The Gilded Age opens. For the Hawkinses to migrate to Missouri in the late 1840’s was almost as daring as later pioneers’ migrations to points farther west. As a frontier region in the novel, Missouri represents a land of rich promise, but every get-rich scheme the novel’s characters undertake in Missouri eventually comes to nothing—further proof of the illusory nature of easy wealth.

Hawkeye

Hawkeye. Missouri town in which the Hawkins family settles after a brief residence in the much smaller Murpheysburg, whose limited commercial prospects disappoint Si Hawkins. Hawkeye is ten miles from Stone’s Landing, which Sellers wants to develop into a major railway and river transportation hub, but his dream is dashed when the people of Hawkeye buy enough shares in the railway to ensure that it will pass through their town instead of Stone’s Landing.

Stone’s Landing

Stone’s Landing. Missouri village that embodies all the false hopes, lies, and deceptions that the novel...