Harris declared that without a cannon the best thing to do would be retreat and he dismissed his men. His troops declined his offer, and when their cannon arrived the battle resumed. The cannon was a nine-pounder, but the soldiers only had a few nine-pound balls, which they used up with great inefficiency. They then filled their cannon with six-pound balls, which fired so erratically that it dispersed both picnickers and Confederate soldiers who said they didn’t like being fired on by their own side. By the end of the attack, the pro-South soldiers claimed that the only safe place to be was in front of the cannon.

Federal reinforcements soon arrived to aid Colonel Smith and with one blast of grapeshot from the Union cannon, the secessionists retreated, hiding in buggies and wagons and mingling with the picnickers.

In the meantime, wild rumors of the battle spread and a day after the conflict had ended, Colonel Ulysses S. Grant arrived on the scene with more than two thousand troops. Learning the battle was over, he moved on to Mexico. Thus ended the battle of Monroe.

I passed the Rainbow Motel with a sign outside that read, “Look inside, then decide.” I looked inside. I felt as if I’d stepped back into the fifties. An old Pepsi vending machine stood next to the office door and a poster of the Ten Commandments.

I booked a room for the night. The next day I reached Hannibal.

Chapter Twenty-four

C H A P T E R

Twenty-four

Life is not to be found in a cemetery.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

Aside from Disneyland, historic Hannibal was about as magical a town as I could hope to walk through—a storybook hamlet still blessed by its patron saint Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

Twain once wrote of his beloved hometown:

After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall … the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun….

Walking into Hannibal it is possible to still imagine it as Twain saw it. The city is picturesque, with carefully preserved historic architecture, its eastern panorama framed by the “magnificent” river. It was the kind of place I desperately wanted to share with McKale and wondered why I hadn’t.

I checked into the Best Western Plus On the River, which wasn’t really on the river, although, as a former adman, I could see how they could fudge this—since in 1993 the Mississippi overflowed its banks and flooded the town. So one could claim, in good conscience, that the hotel was, at the time, on the river. Or, more accurately, in it.