A Wide Awake Orion Clemens and Confederate Samuel Langhorne Clemens
When Union troops close the Mississippi River to commercial traffic, an unemployed riverboat pilot named Sam Clemens is apprehended by Union soldiers and drafted into service. But Sam had voted for John Bell, a Tennessee slaveholder. On his way to enlistment, Clemens and two other boat pilots escape. On the lam, Sam bands together with 14 other Southerners to answer Missouri’s secessionist Governor’s call for more Minute Men cells to fight against the Union. Sam becomes 2nd Lieutenant of his Confederate militia, but after a few weeks, he deserts. He hides in his sister’s basement from the gallows or a firing squad – depending on who catches him. Needing rescue, Sam’s liberal older brother Orion parlayed his own work as a Wide Awake organizer along the Iowa-Missouri border to get himself and Sam government jobs out west, helping run the new Nevada Territory. There, Sam takes a newspaper job and an alias: Mark Twain.