This skirmish leaves most of the male Grangerfords dead.

When Huck assists in the elopement of two members of the rival families, violence erupts. The Grangerfords are in a mortal rivalry with the Shepardsons. Huck becomes fast friends with the family, especially with Buck, a boy his own age. Thrown onshore, Huck is adopted by the Grangerford family. Continuing south, they deftly avoid a pack of slavecatchers, only to get upended and separated by a riverboat. They plan to meet the Ohio riverhead and to purchase riverboat fare into the Northeastern free states, but they lose the crossing in a dense fog. They discover a criminal conspiracy in a wrecked riverboat and learn to adapt to various assumed identities when negotiating with the people they meet. Later, when they discover that Jim is wanted for Huck’s murder, they assemble a raft and float south with the current.Īs they travel, they learn more about each other and marvel at the passing lights of St. They discover a dead body in a collapsed house, and Jim hides its identity from Huck. They spend a few leisurely weeks on the island, exploring the nearby surroundings. On Jackson Island, Huck discovers Jim, who ran away from Miss Watson upon learning he was to be sold to a crueler master down the river. Huck finds uncivilized life rewarding but hates and fears his father, so he fakes his own death and escapes on a canoe down the river. Petersburg fend Huck’s father off and attempt to win sole guardianship of Huck from the widow, and so pap kidnaps Huck, keeping him under lock and key several miles outside town. Huck stands to inherit $6,000, a fortune in 1840s America, and pap wants all the money. Soon after, the father in question appears, upending Huck’s life. Jim, a slave belonging to the widow’s sister Miss Watson, predicts that Tom’s missing father is alive and that both father and son stand upon a perilous moral edge. Huck is now in danger of being “civilized” by his adoptive caretaker, the widow Douglas. Huckleberry Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer continue their adventures from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is set in the Mississippi Valley in the 1840s.

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