mark twain riverboat pilot

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This Day In History : April 9

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Mark Twain receives steamboat pilot’s license

On April 9, 1859, a 23-year-old Missouri youth named Samuel Langhorne Clemens receives his steamboat pilot’s license .

Clemens had signed on as a pilot’s apprentice in 1857 while on his way to Mississippi. He had been commissioned to write a series of comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post, but after writing five, decided he’d rather be a pilot than a writer. He piloted his own boats for two years, until the Civil War halted steamboat traffic. During his time as a pilot, he picked up the term “ Mark Twain ,” a boatman’s call noting that the river was only two fathoms deep, the minimum depth for safe navigation. When Clemens returned to writing in 1861, working for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he wrote a humorous travel letter signed by “Mark Twain” and continued to use the pseudonym for nearly 50 years.

Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, and was apprenticed to a printer at age 13. He later worked for his older brother, who established the Hannibal Journal . In 1864, he moved to San Francisco to work as a reporter. There he wrote the story that made him famous, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

In 1866, he traveled to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union. Next, he traveled the world writing accounts for papers in California and New York, which he later published as the popular book The Innocents Abroad (1869). In 1870, Clemens married the daughter of a wealthy New York coal merchant and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he continued to write travel accounts and lecture. In 1875, his novel Tom Sawyer was published, followed by Life on the Mississippi (1883) and his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn (1885). Bad investments left Clemens bankrupt after the publication of Huckleberry Finn , but he won back his financial standing with his next three books. In 1903, he and his family moved to Italy, where his wife died. Her death left him sad and bitter, and his work, while still humorous, grew distinctly darker. He died in 1910.

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On March 20, 1880, Clemens replied to a letter asking if he would ever like to "Be a boy again" and live a part of his life over. He responded:

Would I live it over again under certain conditions? Certainly I would! The main condition would be that I should emerge from boyhood as a "cub pilot" on a Mississippi boat, & that I should by & by become a pilot, & remain one. The minor conditions would be these: Summer always; the magnolias at Rifle Point always in bloom, so that the dreamy twilight should have the added charm of their perfume; the oleanders on the "coast" always in bloom, likewise; the sugar cane always green -- never any “bagasse” burnings; the river always bank-full, so we could run all the chutes -- how heavenly that would be! -- then in the foot of 63, & in a thousand other places, we should see the thick banks of young willows dipping their leaves into the currentless water, & we could thrash right along against them without any danger of hurting anything; & I would require a new "cut-off" to experiment on, every season -- we tried one about a dozen times, one rainy night, & then had to go around, after all -- but it was a noble circus while we had it; I should require that there be a dog-watch in the evening, but none in the morning -- for a dog-watch in the morning is pure foolishness; I would rule out the middle watch in the night, except on moonlight nights, because it makes one feel so dreary & low-spirited & forlorn to rouse out of a pleasant sleep at dead midnight & go & perch away up there in the pilot house in the midst of the wide darkness, with apparently nobody alive in the deserted world but him; but the middle watch in so summer moonlit nights is a gracious time, especially if the boat steers like a duck, & friends have staid up to keep one company, & sing, & smoke, & spin yarns, and blow the whistle when other boats are met (though I remember that the unpracticed friend from the mainland never blew it right, & consequently always made a little trouble;) & I would have the trips long, & the stays in port short; & my boat should be a big dignified freight boat, with a stately contempt for passenger-hails & a tranquil willingness to 'lay up" for fog -- being never in a hurry; & her crew should never change, nor ever die; -- one such crew I have in mind, & can call their names & see their faces, now: but two decades have done their work upon them, & half are dead, the rest scattered, & the boat’s bones are rotting five fathom deep in Madrid Bend. That is the way I would have it all. And in addition, I should require to be notorious among speakers of the English tongue -- because I should want to be invited around, a little, you know, & have nice little kindly attentions in cars & ships & other places where such things help out, you see, & keep a body from feeling homesick. And when strangers were introduced I should have them repeat “Mr. Clemens?” doubtfully, & with the rising inflection -- & when they were informed that I was the celebrated “Master Pilot of the Mississippi,” & immediately took me by the hand & wrung it with effusion, & exclaimed, “O, I know that name very well!” I should feel a pleasurable emotion trickling down my spine & know I had not lived in vain. - letter to David Watt Bowser, 20 March 1880

Steamboat MISSOURI, (known as "The Big Missouri") the boat Ben Rogers impersonates as he approaches Tom Sawyer during the fence whitewashing episode. Original engraving for the Family Magazine 1850 was lithographed by Klaupreck & Menzel in Cincinnati. The MISSOURI ran in the St. Louis-New Orleans trade and was lost by fire in St. Louis on July 8, 1851. - Photo and history of the steamer MISSOURI courtesy of Dave Thomson.

American South

A Smithsonian magazine special report

How the Mississippi River Made Mark Twain… And Vice Versa

No novelist captured the muddy waterway and its people like the creator of Huckleberry Finn, as a journey along the river makes clear

David Carkeet

Josh. Rambler. Soleather. Sergeant Fathom. Thomas Jefferson Snod­grass. W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab. A Son of Adam.

I ran through the names in my head as I devoured dry-rub barbecue and piled up napkins at Memphis’ bustling Rendezvous. The restaurant’s slogan—“Not since Adam has a rib been this famous”—had reminded me of Mark Twain’s fondness for comic allusions to Adam, to the extent that he based an early pen name on him. But “A Son of Adam,” along with “Josh” and “Rambler” and his other experiments, belonged to an amateur, a man who occasionally wrote while otherwise employed as a printer, steamboat pilot and miner. Not until he became a full-time journalist, far from the river, in the alkali dust of the Nevada Territory, did he settle on “Mark Twain.”

You work up a hunger walking half the length of the Mississippi—even along a virtual version of the river. I had come to the Rendezvous from the Riverwalk on Mud Island near downtown Memphis—a gurgling scale model of the lower half of the Mississippi from its confluence with the Ohio all the way to the Gulf. The Riverwalk affords an outdoor stroll that covers 1,000 miles on a scale of one step to the mile. A mockingbird kept me company as I sauntered on the buff-colored concrete mosaic and watched kids tumble over the elevation intervals layered on the model’s riverbank, rising from the channel like a stairway of stacked pancakes. What would Samuel Clemens have made of the Riverwalk? He was a grown child who readily took a God’s-eye view of life on earth. He would have loved it.

All that the model lacked was the highway running the Mississippi’s length—the Great River Road, my home for the next several days. My guiding star would be the signs with the pilot-wheel logo that beckons all who are willing to suspend time and turn off the GPS. The Great River Road is a map line drawn in many inks, consisting of federal, state, county and town roads, and even, it sometimes seems, private drives. In Illinois alone, it comprises 29 different roads and highways. Touted as a “scenic byway,” it is often not scenic and occasionally a thruway. But it is a unique way to sample this country’s present and past; its rich, its formerly rich and everyone else; its Indian mounds and Army forts; its wildlife from tundra swans to alligators; and its ceaseless engines of commerce.

One of which was the steamboat—indigenous, glorious and preposterous.

Indigenous. Europe had nothing like it. Charles Dickens, who in 1842 rode three different steamboats down the Ohio and up to St. Louis and back again, had the vocabulary knocked out of him when he first saw one. In American Notes , he writes that they were “foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats. I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.” Lacking any “boat-like gear,” they looked as if they were built “to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountaintop.”

Glorious. They were “floating palaces,” and their tiers and filigrees made them “as beautiful as a wedding cake but without the complications,” as Mark Twain did not say. And they transformed the movement of people and goods on the river, formerly limited to flatboats and keelboats borne by the current, which were destroyed for scrap wood at the river’s mouth or laboriously pulled and poled back upriver. Nicholas Roosevelt (great-grand-uncle of Teddy) introduced the steamboat to the Mississippi when he steered the New Orleans into the river from the Ohio in 1811. During his journey, when he had occasion to turn the boat around and steam upriver, onlookers gaped and cheered.

Preposterous. You can heat an average New England house for an entire winter on four or five cords of wood; the larger steamboats in mid-century burned 50 to 75 cords of wood in one day. And thanks to commercial greed, frontier recklessness and the lust for showboating speed, steamboats were mayflies of mortality. In 1849, of the 572 steamboats operating on the Western rivers, only 22 were more than five years old. The others? Gone to a watery grave from snags, logs, bars, collisions, fires and boiler explosions. Smokestacks discharging the exhaust of open furnaces belched cinders onto wooden decks and cargoes of cotton, hay and turpentine. The most calamitous blows came from boiler explosions, which hurled boat fragments and bodies hundreds of feet into the air. When they didn’t land back on the boat or in the water, victims flew clear to shore and crashed through roofs or, in the words of one contemporary account, “shot like cannonballs through the solid walls of houses.”

Memphis saw the aftermath of many river tragedies. Mark Twain sadly chronicles one in Life on the Mississippi , his river memoir that treats his four years of steamboat piloting before the Civil War. In 1858, Sam, still a “cub” or apprentice pilot, encouraged his younger brother, Henry—sweet-tempered and cherished by the family—to take a job as an assistant clerk on the Pennsylvania , Sam’s boat at the time. On the way to New Orleans, the abusive pilot, under whom Sam had already been chafing for several trips, went too far and attacked Henry. Sam intervened, and the two pilots scuffled. Sam was forced to find a different boat for the upriver return, but Henry remained on the Pennsylvania . Two days behind his brother on the river, Sam received the awful news of a boiler explosion on the Pennsylvania . Henry, fatally injured, was taken to a makeshift hospital up the river in Memphis. When Sam reached his bedside, the sheer pathos of the meeting moved a newspaper reporter to single out the pair of brothers by name. The sympathetic citizens of Memphis—which Clemens would later call “the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi”—worried that Sam was unhinged by grief and sent a companion to accompany him when he took Henry’s body north to St. Louis.

Fortunately I had no need of the ministrations of the city, though I did find myself delighted to receive many a “sir,” “my man” and “my friend.” An encounter with a stranger on an isolated street in Memphis seemed to call for a nod or greeting, not the averted gaze of a Northern city. Such is the South. But so is this: On my way to my car to head north, I swung through Confederate Park, which sits on the bluff from which Memphians watched the Southern river fleet lose the battle for the city in 1862, and I wandered over to a bronze statue that had caught my eye. It was Jefferson Davis. Etched into the granite base: “He was a true American patriot.” A Yankee leaves a tribute like that scratching his head.

The Great River Road often hugs the river for miles; at other times it seeks high ground. In the Kentucky stretch, to see the river you must take a side trip, say, to the Columbus-Belmont State Park, peaceful now but not always—some of its gentle hills are trench walls from the war. In December of 1861, Ulysses S. Grant, based just up the river in Cairo, Illinois, led 3,000 Federals in a harassing attack here, not on the dug-in Confederate force on the bluff but against a smaller encampment on the Missouri side of the river. The long day of advance and retreat, essentially a draw, included several close calls for the Union brigade commander. Looming over the site is a Confederate cannon, unearthed by a local historian 16 years ago from under 42 feet of soil.

The river has a long history of diggers and salvagers. A few miles up the road, another side trip delivers you to Wickliffe Mounds, site of one of the many Mississippian culture villages along the river. This one dates from circa 1100 to 1350 and was first excavated in the 1930s by a Kentucky lumber magnate and devoted amateur archaeologist, Fain King, who created a tourist attraction that presented the exposed bones of Native Americans as objects of curiosity. But, more important, they are the remains of venerable ancestors, as Congress declared in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. This requires that disposition of native skeletal remains be transferred to tribal descendants or, if unknown, to a tribe best representing them. The “Ancient Buried City” skeletons were ceremonially reinterred by members of the Chickasaw Nation, and the mounds were restored to their original form.

I drove on to St. Louis to meet Kris Zapalac, an energetic historian and preservationist—and debunker. Don’t be surprised if her first words to you address misconceptions she suspects you are laboring under. She might warn you to be suspicious of memorials: “Just because there’s a tunnel somewhere doesn’t mean it was part of the Underground Railroad.” Or she might tell you that slaves escaping to freedom weren’t invariably helped by outsiders, white or otherwise: “People are always looking for a Harriet Tubman.”

Kris picked me up outside the city’s Old Courthouse, where I had spent the morning studying the comprehensive Dred Scott display. Driving north on Broadway, she pointed to the 1874 Eads Bridge, for which she had managed to find a railing design that met code requirements and also closely matched the original. James B. Eads—“B” for Buchanan, but it should stand for “Brainstorm”—was a dynamo of ingenuity. He devised ironclad gunboats for the Union, created the navigation channel for deep-water ships at the mouth of the Mississippi and—my personal favorite—invented a diving bell. Like Henry Clemens, Eads began his river career as an assistant clerk, and as he watched steamboats all around him go down, he saw money to be made from reclaiming their cargo and fittings. He invented a contraption that for years only he was willing to use, and no wonder. It was a 40-gallon whiskey barrel with one end removed and the other linked to a boat by a supporting cable and an air hose. Once he was installed in it, the barrel would be submerged, open end first to capture the air (imagine an inverted glass in a full dish tub). At the bottom, he would wander the underwater terrain, fighting the current and the dismal murk in search of treasure. Eads should have died many times. Instead, he established himself as a pioneering, if somewhat zany, engineer.

Four miles north of the St. Louis Arch, Kris and I arrived at our destination—an Underground Railroad site she had discovered. Here, in 1855, a small group of slaves attempted to cross the river to Illinois, among them a woman named Esther and her two children. However, authorities lay in wait for them on the Illinois riverbank. A few slaves escaped, but most were apprehended, among them Esther, who was owned by Henry Shaw—a name known to all St. Louisans for the vast botanical garden he developed and bequeathed to the city. To punish Esther for the attempt, Shaw sold her down the river, separating her from her two children. Kris, working from newspaper accounts and receipts of slave sales, put the facts together and arrived at the likely spot on the river where the skiff had cast off. In 2001, the site was recognized by the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

At the crossing, I tried to imagine the silent nighttime boarding and departure and the bitter disappointment across the river. Because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act requiring citizens of free states to aid in the capture of freedom seekers, Illinois represented not freedom to a slave but rather a different kind of danger. I thought of Mark Twain’s Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , hiding on the island to avoid the fate ultimately dealt to Esther. Meanwhile, Huck, disguised as a girl, learns from an otherwise kindly Illinois woman that she suspects a runaway slave is camped on the island and that she has alerted her husband, who is about to head out to capture him. That scene leads to the most famous use of the first-person plural pronoun in literature: Huck dashes back to the island, awakens Jim, and instinctively signs on to his struggle with the words, “They’re after us.”

Kris and I stepped into the nearby information center housed in a square metal former Coast Guard building and were welcomed by a lively, loquacious host. Kris hadn’t been to the site in a while, and when our host learned that she was the one who had discovered the facts of the crossing, he beamed and high-fived her and included me as well, though entirely undeserving. He said to her, “You’re a great lady. You’re a great lady.” Kris shook her head. “I’m a historian,” she said.

I left Kris to her current project—researching hundreds of freedom suits filed by slaves in Missouri courts—and drove up the Missouri segment of the Great River Road known as the Little Dixie Highway. I passed through the small town of Louisiana, where young Sam Clemens was put ashore after being found stowed away on a steamboat from Hannibal, 30 miles up the river. He was 7 years old. I thought about the difference between the boy who had grown up in Hannibal in the 1840s and ’50s and the Mark Twain who had written the island scene in Huckleberry Finn . I had recently read Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World , a book by Terrell Dempsey, a former Hannibalian now living not far from that town in Quincy, Illinois. Dempsey had long doubted that Hannibal’s full slave history had been properly told, and he and his wife, Vicki—an attorney like himself—began to spend evenings and weekends spooling through the local newspaper archive.

To read Searching for Jim is to understand the racist cruelty of the society in which Clemens grew up—the grinding labor that was the slaves’ daily lot; the beatings they endured, sometimes to the point of death; the white citizens’ loathing for abolitionists and free blacks; the racist jokes passed from one newspaper to another, some of which young Sam, as an apprentice printer, set in type. The Clemens household kept slaves, and Sam’s father sat on a jury that sent three abolitionists to prison for 12 years. To reread Mark Twain with a fuller sense of that world is to appreciate the long moral journey he had to make in order to—like Huck—sign on to Jim’s struggle.

I met Terrell and Vicki in their home in Quincy—an 1889 Queen Anne, one of dozens of enviable Victorian homes in the town’s East End Historic District. Terrell proposed a boat ride despite threatening weather. We drove to the dock on Quinsippi Island, unwrapped their modest pontoon boat and headed out. We passed close by a tow pushing nine covered barges and speculated about their contents. Three of the barges rode high in the water—empties, Terrell explained to his landlubber guest.

We talked about Clemens’ early environment and what he wrote—and didn’t write—about it. I mentioned something that had struck me in my recent rereading of Life on the Mississippi , a book not just about Clemens’ piloting years but also—the bulk of it, in fact—about life on the river when he revisited it in 1882. Slaves were a constant presence on antebellum steamboats, both as forced laborers on the deck and in chained droves being taken downriver. Yet there is no mention of them on the boats in the memoir portion, nor is there reflection on their absence in 1882.

Terrell, a bluff fellow, said, “He didn’t want to remind people where he came from.”

As the hum of the outboard stirred large carp into the air (but not into the boat), we talked of other omissions and shadings in Mark Twain’s works. A memoir by a piloting colleague of Clemens’ tells of how they both avoided being drafted as Union pilots in the summer of 1861 when the general in the St. Louis office who was about to complete the paperwork became distracted by some pretty women in the hall and stepped out the door. This allowed the near-conscripts to desert via a different door. It’s a perfect Mark Twain story that Mark Twain never told.

Vicki, huddling against the wind off the river, said, “He also never wrote about defrauding the abolitionist society.”

This was a curious episode uncovered by literary scholar Robert Sattelmeyer and then skillfully sleuthed by him. The Boston Vigilance Committee was an abolitionist group that rendered financial support to fugitive slaves and occasionally put its funds to other uses. For example, if someone wrote to the society from, say, Missouri, that he needed financial help to go to, say, Boston, the committee might very well respond with cash if the circumstances were right—as they seemed to be in this case, according to a September 1854 entry in the treasurer’s ledger book: $24.50 paid to one “Samuel Clemens” for “passage from Missouri Penitentiary to Boston—he having been imprisoned there two years for aiding Fugitives to escape.” Sattelmeyer established that only one Samuel Clemens lived in Missouri in this period and that no Samuel Clemens had served in the state penitentiary. The explanation must be that young Sam, like his later creation Tom Sawyer, enjoyed a good joke at others’ expense, and what better dupes to hoodwink than those meddling abolitionists?

Why would Clemens do such a thing? Because he was an 18-year-old who had grown up in a slave state. A little over a decade later, he would woo Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, daughter of an abolitionist not just in theory but in practice: Her father, Jervis Langdon, helped fund the work of John W. Jones, a former slave and Underground Railroad conductor who aided hundreds of escaped slaves on their flight north. I wondered aloud, there on the boat, if Clemens’ anti-abolitionist prank ever made it into the Elmira dinner table conversation during his two-year courtship.

“Doubtful,” said Terrell. He revved the outboard, looked back at the carp leaping in our wake, and grinned. “That really pisses them off,” he said.

The next day I visited Hannibal, a town that will always feel as small as it was when Clemens grew up, bounded as it is by a bluff on its north side, another bluff just 12 blocks to the south, and the river to the east. I was curious about changes in the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, which I hadn’t visited for two decades. The concise narrative in the museum’s “interpretive center” (completed in 2005) presented Clemens’ early life without overload. Mercifully free of the looping banjo and fiddle music that had dogged me through other river museums, the room was silent save for a single whispered comment I heard from one museumgoer to another, “I didn’t know he was so poor.”

I was happy to see a large photograph of Sam’s older brother Orion in the interpretive center, looking more distinguished than his reputation. Orion was a bumbler with a disastrous career record, but he was earnest and good-hearted. Sam, in adulthood, showed an anger toward him that had always seemed excessive to me. Now, looking at the portrait on the heels of that one overheard comment, I wondered if Sam’s anger could have gone back to the fact that when he was just 11 and his father died, poverty forced his mother to remove him from school and apprentice him to a stern local printer, and this would not have been the case if Orion, ten years his senior, hadn’t been an incompetent from birth and had been able to provide for the family.

I next went to the boyhood home, sliced down one side from front to back like a dollhouse, its three rooms on each of its two levels protected by glass but still allowing an intimate view. A high-school boy behind me, upon bursting into the parlor from the gift shop, said to himself, with feeling, “This is sweet!” The home was working its magic on him. On the wooden floor of the kitchen lay a thin rug with a sign explaining that a slave would have slept here, rising early to light the fire for the household. This pallet was installed at the suggestion of Terrell Dempsey, who has agitated over the years for the museum to give more attention to slavery. Before him, in the 1990s, Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin made a similar appeal, and the museum indeed now does the subject justice.

After my tour, I sought out the museum’s executive director, Cindy Lovell. While I was in her office, curator Henry Sweets looked in on us long enough to hear me express delight in the exhibits before he hurried off to attend to his many duties, as he has done since 1978. The two of them are Twainiacs even beyond what you would expect from their positions. Cindy, speaking of other curators and scholars, will say, “He’s a geek for Twain,” and “She’s got the bug” and “She gets it.” Or the death sentence: “He gets things wrong.” Don’t try to quote Mark Twain in her presence. She will finish the quotation—with corrections—and extend it beyond your intentions.

Cindy gave me a director’s-eye view of Twain World—a place with at least five headquarters (in addition to Hannibal: Berkeley, California; Hartford, Connecticut; Elmira, New York; and his birthplace in nearby Florida, Missouri). “They’re wonderful people,” she said. “It’s a great community.” Unfortunately, though, Clemens’ artifacts are spread hither and yon. A 12-foot mirror from his Fifth Avenue New York apartment is in a Dubuque river museum. “It’s crazy!” she said. “They’re all over the place. Florida has the family carriage!” The carriage properly belonged in Hartford, where it had seen regular use by Sam, Olivia and their three daughters, not in the Missouri burg Sammy had left at age 3. I imagined a coordinated multi-party swap happening, like a kidney exchange, where each museum received the goods that suited it.

At Cindy’s suggestion, we repaired in my rental car to two Twain geek haunts—the Mount Olivet Cemetery, where many Clemenses repose (father, mother and brothers Henry and Orion; as for Sam, Olivia and their children, they are all buried in Elmira), and then the Baptist cemetery, where Tom Sawyer read “Sacred to the Memory of So-and-so,” painted on the boards above the graves, and you can read it now on the tombstones that have replaced them. Here, before Tom’s and Huck’s terrified eyes, Injun Joe murdered Dr. Robinson. Cindy told me of her fondness for bringing school-age writers to the cemetery at night and reading that passage to them by candlelight. They huddle close. (Alas, no more. As if to demonstrate the comity in Twain World, not long after my visit, Cindy became executive director of the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford.)

It’s a big river, as they say, and I had to move on. Comedian Buddy Hackett once said that words with a “k” in them are funny. By this measure Keo­kuk is overqualified. Orion moved to this Iowa river town just across the border from Missouri, and although he characteristically struggled as a newspaper editor, he succeeded in becoming an opponent of slavery, much to the chagrin of young Sam.

I stayed at a B&B on Keokuk’s Grand Avenue, well named for the view of the river the broad street commands from the bluff. In the morning, two bright-eyed, white-shirted couples joined me at the breakfast table. They said they were from Salt Lake City, I said I was from Vermont, and we agreed not to discuss politics. Each couple had a son “on mission,” one in Russia, the other in New Caledonia, and the four of them were on a weeklong pilgrimage along the Mormon Pioneer Trail that traces the migration of the faith’s persecuted forebears from western Missouri east to Illinois, then west again, finally to Utah. They asked about my travels, and I mentioned Mark Twain. One of the men, with an ambiguous smile, said that Mark Twain had written that the Book of Mormon was “a cure for insomnia.” (Actually, “chloro-form in print,” which I didn’t recall at the table. Where was Cindy when I needed her?)

I wanted to ask about their pilgrimage, but I hung fire on the phrasing. “Do all Mormons do this?” would sound as if I saw them as a herd. My every thought seemed rooted in stereotype. The sole coffee drinker at the table, I felt like an alcoholic with each sip. When one of the men checked something on his iPad, I thought, “Hmm, so Mormons are allowed to use iPads.” We parted on the friendliest of terms, but I felt the gulf of a vast difference, created mainly by my ignorance.

I drove north on Grand Avenue, passing homes in a range of styles—Queen Anne, Dutch Colonial Revival, Gothic Revival and Prairie School—all in a six-block stretch. But these piles, unlike the Quincy houses I had admired, did not suggest a neighborhood as much as isolated testaments to an earlier prosperity. The road dropped down, wound along the river and then delivered me without fanfare into the tranquil village of Montrose, with churches sized to match its population. Just to the north, I happened upon one of the reasons the B&B pilgrims had come here. Across the river in Nauvoo, Illinois, beginning in 1839, Mormon settlers cleared swamps and established a town that swiftly grew into the largest in the state. The surrounding communities, threatened by the Mormons’ beliefs—and their success—murdered leader Joseph Smith in 1844, and in 1846 they began to drive the Mormons out of the area. The first to flee crossed the river on ice in February, though many perished, and, at the site where I now stood, the survivors huddled and looked back on the temple and the town they had lost. On the trip so far I had passed several crossings along routes once traveled by Native Americans being forcibly relocated to Indian Territory. This place too, I thought, is a Trail of Tears. I looked down the road, hoping that my B&B pilgrims might come while I was there so that we could become reacquainted on their turf, but the timing wasn’t right.

Onward. The 250-mile Wisconsin segment of the Great River Road recently won a “Most Beautiful Road Trip” survey conducted by the Huffington Post , beating out Hawaii’s Hana Highway and California’s Big Sur Coast Highway. I needed to see it for myself. The next day, I headed out from Dubuque before dawn, crossed into Wisconsin and panicked when the highway seemed to take me at right angles away from the river. But the pilot-wheel signs reassured me and steered me through rolling farmland back to the river. The landscape began to feel different from what I had experienced so far, and I knew why: I was in “the driftless area.” The most recent glacial period in North America, the Wisconsin Glaciation, spared this part of the river basin for reasons “that are poorly understood,” especially by me. “Drift” is the deposit left behind by a glacier (thus the name), but what most distinguishes the terrain is its unscoured range of towering bluffs along the river. These begin to appear about 50 miles north of Dubuque.

The bluffs are one of two surprises in the driftless area. The other is that the river sometimes becomes a lake. Locks and dams are often the cause, flooding upriver sloughs and bottomlands. But Lake Pepin, 21 miles long and so wide that the sight of it is initially disorienting, has a natural origin. At its southern end, Wisconsin’s Chippewa River flows on a steep gradient that delivers massive amounts of sediment into the Mississippi. Over the centuries, the encroaching deposit created a “delta dam,” backing the Mississippi up until it flooded to the bases of the confining bluffs.

Not far from Lake Pepin, I came across a sign for Maiden Rock. The “historical” marker told the tired story of the Indian maiden forcibly betrothed to a brave who was not the brave she loved, the tale climaxing in her despondent plunge to the rocks below. Winona was the maiden’s name, and the cliff looming over me was perfect for the job. Clemens passed by here in 1882—new territory for him, having plied the St. Louis-New Orleans line—and in Life on the Mississippi he tells the tale of Maiden Rock, not in his language but in the inflated style of a professional tour guide who has happened onto the steamboat. In the guide’s version, however, Winona lands on her matchmaking parents, who are gazing upward from below, wondering what their daughter is up to. The impact kills the couple while cushioning Winona’s fall, and she is now free to marry whomever she wishes. The unorthodox denouement, though ostensibly spoken by the humorless guide, is pure Mark Twain. What better way to blast a cliché to flinders?

At one point on the Wisconsin stretch I pulled over to watch a tow approach. I counted the barges: 15, three across and five long, the maximum on the upper river; south of St. Louis, up to 25 barges can be combined. Since the tow was going downriver, it was probably carrying corn or soybeans; upriver loads are more likely to be coal or steel. I watched the pilot navigate a tricky turn, although “tricky” is relative. In Clemens’ day, a pilot navigated by memory and skill at reading nuances in the river’s surface; today, buoys mark a channel 300 feet wide and nine feet deep. Still, it’s not easy. At a museum at the Alton, Illinois, lock and dam, I had entered a pretend pilothouse and bravely manned a panoramic simulator to pilot a tow along a digital St. Louis riverfront—a challenging stretch because of its many bridges with nonaligned pilings. In short order I crashed into the Eads Bridge, but mainly because I was distracted by the anachronistic Admiral I saw moored on the riverfront, a bygone restaurant boat where my wife once had some really bad fish. Later, outside the museum, I watched a northbound tow “lock through”; it rose 20 feet in just 30 minutes, thanks to massive inflow pipes that fill the lock, large enough to drive a truck through. Animals sometimes end up in the pipes—deer, pigs, cattle—and wash into the lock. No human bodies though—I asked. A nice first chapter for a mystery novel, I would think.

Satisfied that the Wisconsin Great River Road deserved its renown, I crossed to Red Wing, Minnesota, and turned around for the trip south.

“Do you love the river?” Terrell Dempsey had surprised me with this blunt question as he guided his pontoon boat toward the dock in Quincy. Before I could answer, his wife said, “We love the river” and then elaborated. As a young woman, Vicki interviewed for her first job in Louisiana, Missouri. Coming from St. Louis, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to live in such a small place until she got a view of the river from a vista above the town. “I’d never seen anything so beautiful,” she said. “I had to live there.” And they did. After a year, what seemed like a better job opportunity arose in Clinton, Missouri. “We hated it,” she said—because it was inland. They moved to Hannibal, to a house three blocks up Hill Street from the Clemens home, and they have lived on the Mississippi ever since.

I met many lovers of the river. An artist at the Applefest in Clarksville, Missouri, told me she had come there decades earlier “with a guy”—she said it in a way that foreshadowed the ending—and then she had happily stayed on “after the guy was long gone.”

In Dubuque, where I toured an old dredge boat called the William M. Black , the amiable guide, Robert Carroll, told me he grew up in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to the grinding roar of dredge boats cleaning out the river channel. He spoke so authoritatively about the William M. Black that I had taken him for a former deckhand. But no—he had spent his adult life as a court reporter in landlocked Cedar Rapids. He moved to Dubuque after he retired. “I missed the river,” he said, though he didn’t have to—I knew it was coming. Carroll now spends his days happily introducing visitors to every rivet on a boat much like the one he heard as a boy.

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Lit. Summaries

• Biographies

Uncovering the Depths of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi: A Literary Analysis

Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is a classic work of American literature that explores the author’s experiences as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. However, there is much more to this book than meets the eye. Through a literary analysis of Twain’s writing, we can uncover the deeper themes and meanings behind his work, as well as gain a better understanding of the man behind the pen. From his commentary on race and class to his reflections on the changing landscape of America, Life on the Mississippi is a rich and complex text that continues to captivate readers today.

The Mississippi River in Mark Twain’s Life and Writing

Mark Twain’s life and writing were deeply intertwined with the Mississippi River. Growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, Twain spent much of his childhood playing along the riverbanks and watching the steamboats pass by. As he grew older, he worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, gaining firsthand knowledge of the river’s twists and turns. This experience would later inform his writing, as he wrote vivid descriptions of the river and its surroundings in works such as “Life on the Mississippi” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The Mississippi River was not just a setting for Twain’s stories, but a character in its own right, representing both the freedom and danger of life on the frontier. Through his writing, Twain captured the essence of the Mississippi River and its impact on American culture and history.

Twain’s Childhood on the Mississippi

Mark Twain’s childhood on the Mississippi River was a formative experience that would shape his writing for years to come. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a small town on the banks of the Mississippi. As a boy, he spent countless hours exploring the river and its surrounding wilderness, developing a deep love and respect for the natural world.

Twain’s experiences on the Mississippi also exposed him to the harsh realities of life in the antebellum South. He witnessed the horrors of slavery firsthand, as well as the poverty and inequality that plagued many of the region’s inhabitants. These experiences would later inform his writing, as he used his platform to critique the social and political injustices of his time.

Despite the challenges he faced, Twain’s childhood on the Mississippi was also filled with adventure and excitement. He and his friends would often sneak aboard steamboats and explore the river, living out their own versions of the stories they had read in books. These experiences would later inspire some of Twain’s most beloved works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Overall, Twain’s childhood on the Mississippi was a complex and multifaceted experience that would shape his writing and worldview for years to come. By exploring the depths of this period in his life, we can gain a deeper understanding of the man behind some of America’s most iconic literary works.

Twain’s Career as a Riverboat Pilot

Mark Twain’s career as a riverboat pilot was a significant part of his life and greatly influenced his writing. Twain began his career as a pilot in 1857 and spent four years navigating the Mississippi River. He became an expert in reading the river’s currents, sandbars, and hazards, which allowed him to safely navigate the steamboats through treacherous waters. This experience provided Twain with a wealth of knowledge about life on the river, which he later incorporated into his writing. His most famous work, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is set on the Mississippi River and features vivid descriptions of the river and its surroundings. Twain’s career as a riverboat pilot not only provided him with material for his writing but also gave him a unique perspective on life in the South, which he would later use to critique the region’s social and political issues.

The Impact of the Civil War on Twain’s Life and Writing

The Civil War had a profound impact on Mark Twain’s life and writing. Twain, who was born in 1835, was in his late twenties when the war broke out in 1861. He initially sided with the Confederacy, but later changed his mind and became a staunch supporter of the Union. This change in allegiance had a significant impact on his writing, as he began to use his platform to criticize the South and slavery.

Twain’s experiences during the war also influenced his writing. He served briefly in the Confederate army before deserting and fleeing to Nevada, where he worked as a miner and journalist. These experiences gave him a firsthand understanding of the brutality and chaos of war, which he would later incorporate into his writing.

Perhaps the most significant impact of the Civil War on Twain’s writing was the way it shaped his views on race and social justice. Twain was deeply troubled by the legacy of slavery and the ongoing oppression of African Americans in the post-war South. He used his writing to challenge these injustices, often through the use of satire and humor.

Overall, the Civil War was a pivotal moment in Mark Twain’s life and career. It forced him to confront his own beliefs and values, and inspired him to use his writing as a tool for social change.

Twain’s Literary Inspiration from the Mississippi River

Mark Twain’s love for the Mississippi River is evident in his literary works. The river served as a source of inspiration for Twain, who spent his childhood near its banks. He once said, “The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.” This quote reflects Twain’s fascination with the river’s power and unpredictability.

In his most famous work, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the Mississippi River plays a central role in the story. The river serves as a symbol of freedom for the main character, Huck, who escapes from his abusive father and embarks on a journey down the river with his friend Jim, a runaway slave. The river represents a path to a better life for both characters, as they seek to escape the constraints of society and find their own way in the world.

Twain’s experiences on the Mississippi River also influenced his writing style. He was known for his use of regional dialects and colloquial language, which he picked up from the people he encountered on the river. This style of writing helped to create a sense of authenticity in his works, as he captured the unique voices and perspectives of the people who lived along the river.

Overall, the Mississippi River played a significant role in shaping Mark Twain’s literary career. His love for the river and the people who lived along its banks is evident in his works, which continue to be celebrated for their humor, insight, and authenticity.

The Role of Race in Twain’s Mississippi Writings

Mark Twain’s Mississippi writings are often praised for their vivid depictions of life on the river, but they also offer a complex exploration of race relations in the antebellum South. Twain’s own experiences as a steamboat pilot and his observations of the people and customs along the river inform his portrayal of black and white characters in works such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. While some critics have accused Twain of perpetuating racist stereotypes, others argue that his use of dialect and satire exposes the hypocrisy and cruelty of slavery and racism. Ultimately, Twain’s Mississippi writings offer a nuanced and challenging perspective on the role of race in American history and literature.

The Mississippi River as a Symbol in Twain’s Works

The Mississippi River is a recurring symbol in Mark Twain’s works, serving as a metaphor for the journey of life and the search for freedom. In “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the river represents a path to freedom for Huck and Jim, who are both seeking to escape the constraints of society. The river also serves as a symbol of the natural world, which is often contrasted with the artificiality of civilization. Twain’s use of the Mississippi River as a symbol reflects his own experiences growing up in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, and his deep connection to the river and its culture. Through his writing, Twain invites readers to explore the depths of the Mississippi River and the complexities of life on its banks.

Twain’s Critique of Society through the Mississippi River

Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is a literary masterpiece that not only captures the essence of the Mississippi River but also serves as a critique of society. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Twain exposes the flaws and injustices of the society of his time. The Mississippi River serves as a metaphor for the society, and the journey down the river represents the journey of life. Twain’s critique of society is evident in the way he portrays the characters and their actions. He exposes the hypocrisy of the upper class, the greed of the businessmen, and the ignorance of the masses. Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is a powerful commentary on the society of his time and a timeless masterpiece that continues to resonate with readers today.

Twain’s Relationship with the Mississippi River

Mark Twain’s relationship with the Mississippi River was a significant aspect of his life and literary works. Growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, Twain was exposed to the river at a young age and developed a deep connection with it. He worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi for several years, which provided him with firsthand experience and knowledge of the river’s intricacies. This experience would later serve as inspiration for his most famous novel, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which follows the journey of a young boy and a runaway slave down the Mississippi River. Twain’s love for the river is evident in his writing, as he often describes it in vivid detail and uses it as a symbol for freedom and adventure. The Mississippi River played a significant role in shaping Twain’s life and literary career, and its influence can be seen throughout his works.

The Significance of Twain’s Mississippi Writings in American Literature

Mark Twain’s Mississippi writings hold a significant place in American literature. They not only capture the essence of life on the Mississippi River but also provide a commentary on the social and political issues of the time. Twain’s works, such as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Life on the Mississippi,” have become classics and continue to be studied and analyzed by scholars and readers alike. Through his vivid descriptions and use of dialect, Twain brings to life the people and places of the Mississippi River, creating a sense of nostalgia and longing for a simpler time. Additionally, his portrayal of race relations and the hypocrisy of society in the South during the 19th century remains relevant and thought-provoking today. Twain’s Mississippi writings are a testament to his skill as a writer and his ability to capture the complexities of American life.

Twain’s Use of Humor in Depicting the Mississippi River

Mark Twain’s literary masterpiece, “Life on the Mississippi,” is a humorous and insightful portrayal of the Mississippi River and the people who lived and worked along its banks. Twain’s use of humor is particularly effective in depicting the river, as it allows him to both celebrate its beauty and expose its flaws. Through his witty observations and clever anecdotes, Twain captures the essence of life on the Mississippi and the unique culture that developed along its shores. Whether he is describing the antics of the riverboat pilots or the idiosyncrasies of the townspeople, Twain’s humor adds depth and richness to his portrayal of this iconic American waterway.

The Influence of Twain’s Mississippi Writings on Popular Culture

Mark Twain’s Mississippi writings have had a profound impact on popular culture. From literature to film, Twain’s stories have been adapted and reimagined countless times. One of the most famous adaptations is the 1949 film “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which starred child actor Mickey Rooney as Huck. The film was a box office success and helped to cement Twain’s place in American popular culture. Other adaptations include the 1993 Disney film “The Adventures of Huck Finn” and the 2013 film “The Mark Twain Prize: Celebrating the Humor of Mark Twain.” Twain’s influence can also be seen in music, with artists such as Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash drawing inspiration from his works. Overall, Twain’s Mississippi writings continue to captivate and inspire audiences across generations.

Twain’s Legacy on the Mississippi River

Mark Twain’s legacy on the Mississippi River is one that has endured for over a century. His writings, particularly his most famous work, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” have become synonymous with the river and its culture. Twain’s ability to capture the essence of life on the Mississippi has made him a literary icon, and his influence can still be felt today. From his vivid descriptions of the river and its surroundings to his portrayal of the people who lived and worked on its banks, Twain’s legacy on the Mississippi River is one that will continue to inspire and captivate readers for generations to come.

The Importance of the Mississippi River in American History and Culture

The Mississippi River has played a significant role in American history and culture. It has been a vital transportation route for goods and people, a source of inspiration for artists and writers, and a symbol of the nation’s growth and expansion. Mark Twain, one of America’s most celebrated writers, was deeply influenced by the Mississippi River. His experiences as a steamboat pilot on the river provided him with a wealth of material for his literary works, including his most famous novel, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In this article, we will explore the importance of the Mississippi River in American history and culture, and how it shaped the life and work of Mark Twain.

Twain’s Impact on Environmental Awareness through the Mississippi River

Mark Twain’s impact on environmental awareness through the Mississippi River cannot be overstated. In his literary works, Twain often depicted the river as a living entity, with its own personality and moods. He also highlighted the impact of human activities on the river and its ecosystem. Through his writing, Twain raised awareness about the importance of preserving the natural beauty and resources of the Mississippi River. His works continue to inspire environmentalists and nature lovers to this day.

The Mississippi River as a Character in Twain’s Works

The Mississippi River is not just a setting in Mark Twain’s works, but a character in its own right. Twain’s personal experiences as a steamboat pilot on the river undoubtedly influenced his writing, and he often used the river as a symbol for freedom, adventure, and the passage of time. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the river serves as a means of escape for Huck and Jim, and represents their journey towards freedom and independence. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain describes the river as a living, breathing entity that has a personality and a will of its own. The Mississippi River is a constant presence in Twain’s works, and its significance cannot be overstated.

Twain’s Exploration of the Human Condition through the Mississippi River

Mark Twain’s exploration of the human condition through the Mississippi River is a central theme in his literary works. The river serves as a metaphor for life, with its twists and turns, highs and lows, and the constant flow of change. Twain’s characters, such as Huck Finn and Jim, navigate the river and encounter various challenges and obstacles that reflect the complexities of human existence. Through their experiences, Twain highlights the themes of freedom, morality, and the search for identity. The Mississippi River becomes a symbol of the journey of life, with its unpredictable nature and the need for resilience and adaptability. Twain’s exploration of the human condition through the Mississippi River is a testament to his literary genius and his ability to capture the essence of the human experience.

The Mississippi River as a Metaphor in Twain’s Writings

Mark Twain’s writings are often associated with the Mississippi River, which serves as a metaphor for various themes and ideas in his works. The river, which runs through Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, is a symbol of freedom, adventure, and the American spirit. In his most famous work, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the river represents a journey towards freedom and self-discovery for the protagonist, Huck. As Huck and Jim float down the river, they encounter various obstacles and challenges, but ultimately find a sense of liberation from the constraints of society. The river also serves as a metaphor for the passage of time and the inevitability of change. In “Life on the Mississippi,” Twain reflects on his own experiences as a steamboat pilot and the changes he witnessed along the river over the years. Through his use of the Mississippi River as a metaphor, Twain captures the essence of American life and the complexities of the human experience.

Old Times on the Mississippi (Part V)

The fifth installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot

V. “Sounding.” Faculties Peculiarly Necessary to a Pilot.

When the river is very low, and one’s steamboat is “drawing all the water” there is in the channel, — or a few inches more, as was often the case in the old times, — one must be painfully circumspect in his piloting. We used to have to “sound” a number of particularly bad places almost every trip when the river was at a very low stage.

Sounding is done in this way. The boat ties up at the shore, just above the shoal crossing; the pilot not on watch takes his “cub” or steersman and a picked crew of men (sometimes an officer also), and goes out in the yawl provided the boat has not that rare and sumptuous luxury, a regularly-devised “sounding-boat”—and proceeds to hunt for the best water, the pilot on duty watching his movements through a spy-glass, meantime, and in some instances assisting by signals of the boat’s whistle, signifying “try higher up” or “try lower down;” for the surface of the water, like an oil-painting, is more expressive and intelligible when inspected from a little distance than very close at hand. The whistle signals are seldom necessary, however; never, perhaps, except when the wind confuses the significant ripples upon the water’s surface. When the yawl has reached the shoal place, the speed is slackened, the pilot begins to sound the depth with a pole ten or twelve feet long, and the steersman at the tiller obeys the order to “hold her up to starboard;” or “let her fall off to larboard;” 1 or “steady—steady as you go.”

When the measurements indicate that the yawl is approaching the shoalest part of the reef, the command is given to “ease all!” Then the men stop rowing and the yawl drifts with the current. The next order is, “Stand by with the buoy!” The moment the shallowest point is reached, the pilot delivers the order, “Let go the buoy!” and over she goes. If the pilot is not satisfied, he sounds the place again; if he finds better water higher up or lower down, he removes the buoy to that place. Being finally satisfied, he gives the order, and all the men stand their oars straight up in the air, in line; a blast from the boat’s whistle indicates that the signal has been seen; then the men “give way” on their oars and lay the yawl alongside the buoy; the steamer comes creeping carefully down, is pointed straight at the buoy, husbands her power for the coming struggle, and presently, at the critical moment, turns on all her steam and goes grinding and wallowing over the buoy and the sand, and gains the deep water beyond. Or maybe she doesn’t; maybe she “strikes and swings.” Then she has to while away several hours (or days) sparring herself off.

Sometimes a buoy is not laid at all, but the yawl goes ahead, hunting the best water, and the steamer follows along in its wake. Often there is a deal of fun and excitement about sounding, especially if it is a glorious summer day, or a blustering night. But in winter the cold and the peril take most of the fun out of it.

A buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long, with one end turned up; it is a reversed boot-jack. It is anchored on the shoalest part of the reef by a rope with a heavy stone made fast to the end of it. But for the resistance of the turned-up end, the current would pull the buoy under water. At night a paper lantern with a candle in it is fastened on top of the buoy, and this can be seen a mile or more, a little glimmering spark in the waste of blackness.

Nothing delights a cub so much as an opportunity to go out sounding. There is such an air of adventure about it; often there is danger; it is so gaudy and man-of-war-like to sit up in the stern-sheets and steer a swift yawl; there is something fine about the exultant spring of the boat when an experienced old sailor crew throw their souls into the oars; it is lovely to see the white foam stream away from the bows; there is music in the rush of the water; it is deliciously exhilarating, in summer, to go speeding over the breezy expanses of the river when the world of wavelets is dancing in the sun. It is such grandeur, too, to the cub, to get a chance to give an order; for often the pilot will simply say, “Let her go about!” and leave the rest to the cub, who instantly cries, in his sternest tone of command, “Ease starboard! Strong on the larboard! Starboard give way! With a will, men!” The cub enjoys sounding for the further reason that the eyes of the passengers are watching all the yawl’s movements with absorbing interest, if the time be daylight; and if it be night he knows that those same wondering eyes are fastened upon the yawl’s lantern as it glides out into the gloom and fades away in the remote distance.

One trip a pretty girl of sixteen spent her time in our pilot-house with her uncle and aunt, every day and all day long. I fell in love with her. So did Mr. T——‘s cub, Tom G——. Tom and I had been bosom friends until this time; but now a coolness began to arise. I told the girl a good many of my river adventures, and made myself out a good deal of a hero; Tom tried to make himself appear to be a hero, too, and succeeded to some extent, but then he always had a way of embroidering. However, virtue is its own reward, so I was a barely perceptible trifle ahead in the contest. About this time something happened which promised handsomely for me: the pilots decided to sound the crossing at the head of 21. This would occur about nine or ten o’clock at night, when the passengers would be still up; it would be Mr. T——’s watch, therefore my chief would have to do the sounding. We had a perfect love of a sounding-boat—long, trim, graceful, and as fleet as a greyhound; her thwarts were cushioned; she carried twelve oarsmen; one of the mates was always sent in her to transmit orders to her crew, for ours was a steamer where no end of “style” was put on.

We tied up at the shore above 21, and got ready. It was a foul night, and the river was so wide, there, that a lands-man’s uneducated eyes could discern no opposite shore through such a gloom. The passengers were alert and interested; everything was satisfactory. As I hurried through the engine-room, picturesquely gotten up in storm toggery, I met Tom, and could not forbear delivering myself of a mean speech: —

“Ain’t you glad you don’t have to go out sounding?”

Tom was passing on, but he quickly turned, and said, —

“Now just for that, you can go and get the sounding-pole yourself. I was going after it, but I’d see you in Halifax, now, before I’d do it.”

“Who wants you to get it? I don’t. It’s in the sounding-boat.”

“It ain’t, either. It’s been new-painted; and it’s been up on the lady’s-cabin guards two days, drying.”

I flew back, and shortly arrived among the crowd of watching and wondering ladies just in time to hear the command:

“Give way, men!”

I looked over, and there was the gallant sounding-boat booming away, the unprincipled Tom presiding at the tiller, and my chief sitting by him with the sounding-pole which I had been sent on a fool’s errand to fetch. Then that young girl said to me, —

“Oh, how awful to have to go out in that little boat on such a night! Do you think there is any danger?”

I would rather have been stabbed. I went off, full of venom, to help in the pilot-house. By and by the boat’s lantern disappeared, and after an interval a wee spark glimmered upon the face of the water a mile away. Mr. T—— blew the whistle, in acknowledgment, backed the steamer out, and made for it. We flew along for a while, then slackened steam and went cautiously gliding toward the spark. Presently Mr. T—— exclaimed, —

“Hello, the buoy-lantern’s out!”

He stopped the engines. A moment or two later he said, —

“Why, there it is again!”

So he came ahead on the engines once more, and rang for the leads. Gradually the water shoaled up, and then began to deepen again! Mr. T—— muttered: —

“Well, I don’t understand this. I believe that buoy has drifted off the reef. Seems to be a little too far to the left. No matter, it is safest to run over it, anyhow.”

So, in that solid world of darkness, we went creeping down on the light. Just as our bows were in the act of plowing over it, Mr. T—— seized the bell-ropes, rang a startling peal, and exclaimed, —

“My soul, it’s the sounding-boat!”

A sudden chorus of wild alarms burst out far below—a pause—and then a sound of grinding and crashing followed. Mr. T—— exclaimed, —

“There! the paddle-wheel has ground the sounding-boat to lucifer matches! Run! See who is killed!”

I was on the main deck in the twinkling of an eye. My chief and the third mate and nearly all the men were safe. They had discovered their danger when it was too late to pull out of the way; then, when the great guards overshadowed them a moment later, they were prepared and knew what to do; at my chief’s order they sprang at the right instant, seized the guard, and were hauled aboard. The next moment the sounding-yawl swept aft to the wheel and was struck and splintered to atoms. Two of the men, and the cub Tom, were missing—a fact which spread like wild-fire over the boat. The passengers came flocking to the forward gangway, ladies and all, anxious-eyed, white-faced, and talked in awed voices of the dreadful thing. And often and again I heard them say, “Poor fellows! poor boy, poor boy!”

By this time the boat’s yawl was manned and away, to search for the missing. Now a faint call was heard, off to the left. The yawl had disappeared in the other direction. Half the people rushed to one side to encourage the swimmer with their shouts; the other half rushed the other way to shriek to the yawl to turn about. By the callings, the swimmer was approaching, but some said the sound showed failing strength. The crowd massed themselves against the boiler-deck railings, leaning over and staring into the gloom; and every faint and fainter cry wrung from them such words as “Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow! is there no way to save him?”

But still the cries held out, and drew nearer, and presently the voice said pluckily, —

“I can make it I Stand by with a rope!”

What a rousing cheer they gave him! The chief mate took his stand in the glare of a torch-basket, a coil of rope in his hand, and his men grouped about him. The next moment the swimmer’s face appeared in the circle of light, and in another one the owner of it was hauled aboard, limp and drenched, while cheer on cheer went up. It was that devil Tom.

The yawl crew searched everywhere, but found no sign of the two men. They probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck by the wheel and killed. Tom had never jumped for the guard at all, but had plunged head-first into the river and dived under the wheel. It was nothing; I could have done it easy enough, and I said so; but everybody went on just the same, making a wonderful to-do over that ass, as if he had done something great. That girl couldn’t seem to have enough of that pitiful “hero” the rest of the trip; but little I cared; I loathed her, any way.

The way we came to mistake the sounding-boat’s lantern for the buoy-light was this. My chief said that after laying the buoy befell away and watched it till it seemed to be secure; then he took up a position a hundred yards below it and a little to one side of the steamers course, headed the sounding-boat up-stream, and waited. Having to wait some time, he and the officer got to talking; he looked up when he judged that the steamer was about on the reef; saw that the buoy was gone, but supposed that the steamer had already run over it; he went on with his talk; he noticed that the steamer was getting very close down on him, but that was the correct thing; it was her business to shave him closely, for convenience in taking him aboard; he was expecting her to sheer off, until the last moment; then it flashed upon him that she was trying to run him down, mistaking his lantern for the buoy-light; so he sang out, “Stand by to spring for the guard, men!” and the next instant the jump was made.

But I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is, make plainer than perhaps appears in my previous papers, some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it; for this is eminently one of the “exact” sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase “I think,” instead of the vigorous one “I know!” One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot’s knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs in that long street, and change their places once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot’s peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi.

I think a pilot’s memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart, and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot’s massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility in the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately, and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do it. Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not.

And how easily and comfortably the pilot’s memory does its work; how placidly effortless is its way! how unconsciously it lays up its vast stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or mislays a single valuable package of them all! Take an instance. Let a leadsman cry, “Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!” until it becomes as monotonous as the ticking of a clock; let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer listening to the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of half twains let a single “quarter twain!” be interjected, without emphasis, and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before: two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision the boat’s position in the river when that quarter twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and side-marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself! The cry of quarter twain did not really take his mind from his talk, but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings, noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A, for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R, thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis, you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects you were passing at the moment it was done. But you could if your memory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that sort of thing mechanically.

Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting will develop it into a very colossus of capability. But only in the matters it is daily drilled in . A time would come when the man’s faculties could not help noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could not help holding on to them with the grip of a vice; but if you asked that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast, it would be ten chances to one that he could not tell you. Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief, Mr. B——, went up there and learned more than a thousand miles of that stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing. When he had seen each division once in the daytime and once at night, his education was so nearly complete that he took out a “daylight” license; a few trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting day and night—and he ranked A1, too.

Mr. B—— placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose feats of memory were a constant marvel to me. However, his memory was born in him, I think, not built. For instance, somebody would mention a name. Instantly Mr. J—— would break in: —

“Oh, I knew him . Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with a little scar on the side of his throat like a splinter under the flesh. He was only in the Southern trade six months. That was thirteen years ago. I made a trip with him. There was five feet in the upper river then; the Henry Blake grounded at the foot of Tower Island, drawing four and a half; the George Elliott unshipped her rudder on the wreck of the Sunflower”—

“Why, the Sunflower didn’t sink until—”

“ I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2d of December; Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk; and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these things a week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the Sunflower. Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year, and died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother John died two years after, — 3d of March, — erysipelas. I never saw either of the Hardys, — they were Alleghany River men, — but people who knew them told me all these things. And they said Captain Hardy, wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same, and his first wife’s name was Jane Shook, — she was from New England, — and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It was in the blood. She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton before she was married.”

And so on, by the hour, the man’s tongue would go. He could not forget anything. It was simply impossible. The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head, after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events. His was not simply a pilot’s memory; its grasp was universal. If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory. And then, with. out observing that he was departing from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter; and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer’s relatives, one by one, and give you their biographies, too.

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject. He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way, and so is led aside. Mr. J—— would start out with the honest intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog. He would be “so full of laugh” that he could hardly begin; then his memory would start with the dog’s breed and personal appearance; drift into a history of his owner; of his owner’s family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry provoked by the same; then this memory would recollect that one of these events occurred during the celebrated “hard winter” of such and such a year, and a minute description of that winter would follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death, and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses; the latter would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course the heathen savages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or four hours’ tedious jaw, the watch would change and J—— would go out of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace. And the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog, after all this waiting and hungering.

A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time he has became a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must start with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot.

The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time, but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after the young pilot has been “standing his own watch,” alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities connected with the position. When an apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering along so fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he presently begins to imagine that it is his courage that animates him; but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his own devices he finds out it was the other man’s. He discovers that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether. The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment; he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them; all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes he is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death. Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategic tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly. A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon the candidate.

Mr. B—— served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward I used to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it. I had become a good steersman; so good, indeed, that I had all the work to do on our watch, night and day; Mr. B—— seldom made a suggestion tome; all he ever did was to take the wheel on particularly bad bights or in particularly bad crossings, land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentleman of leisure nine tenths of the watch, and collect the wages. The lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had questioned my ability to run any crossing between Cairo and New Orleans without help or instruction, I should have felt irreparably hurt. The idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot, in the day-time , was a thing too preposterous for contemplation. Well, one matchless summer’s day I was bowling down the bend above island 66, brim full of self-conceit and carrying my nose as high as a giraffe’s, when Mr. B—— said, —

“I am going below awhile. I suppose you know the next crossing?”

This was almost an affront. It was about the plainest and simplest crossing in the whole river. One couldn’t come to any harm, whether he ran it right or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom there. I knew all this, perfectly well.

“Know how to run it? Why, I can run it with my eyes shut.”

“How much water is there in it?”

“Well, that is an odd question. I couldn’t get bottom there with a church steeple.”

“You think so, do you?”

The very tone of the question shook my confidence. That was what Mr. B—— was expecting. He left, without saying anything more. I began to imagine all sorts of things. Mr. B——, unknown to me, of course, sent somebody down to the forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the leadsmen, another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers, and then Mr. B went into hiding behind a smoke-stack where he could observe results. Presently the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck; next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk. Every moment or two a straggler was added to my audience; and before I got to the head of the island I had fifteen or twenty people assembled down there under my nose. I began to wonder what the trouble was. As I started across, the captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasiness in his voice, —

“Where is Mr. B——?”

“Gone below, sir.”

But that did the business for me. My imagination began to construct dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep the run of them. All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead! The wave of coward agony that surged though me then came near dislocating every joint in me. All my confidence in that crossing vanished. I seized the bell-rope; dropped it, ashamed; seized it again; dropped it once more; clutched it tremblingly once again, and pulled it so feebly that I could hardly hear the stroke myself. Captain and mate sang out instantly, and both together, —

“Starboard lead there! and quick about it!”

This was another shock. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel; but I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new dangers on that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to find perils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again. Then came the leadsman’s sepulchral cry: —

“D-e-e-p four!”

Deep four in a bottomless crossing! The terror of it took my breath away.

“M-a-r-k three ! M-a-r-k three Quarter less three! Half twain!”

This was frightful! I seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines.

“Quarter twain! Quarter twain! Mark twain!”

I was helpless. I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking from head to foot, and I could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far.

“Quarter less twain! Nine and a half !”

We were drawing nine! My hands were in a nerveless flutter. I could not ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and shouted to the engineer, —

“Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal soul out of her!”

I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stood Mr. B——, smiling a bland, sweet smile. Then the audience on the hurricane deck sent up a shout of humiliating laughter. I saw it all, now, and I felt meaner than the meanest man in human history. I laid in the lead, set the boat in her marks, came ahead on the engines, and said, —

“It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, wasn’t it? I suppose I’ll never hear the last of how I was ass enough to heave the lead at the head of 66.”

“Well, no, you won’t, maybe. In fact I hope you won’t; for I want you to learn something by that experience. Didn’t you know there was no bottom in that crossing?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“Very well, then. You shouldn’t have allowed me or anybody else to shake your confidence in that knowledge. Try to remember that. And another thing: when you get into a dangerous place, don’t turn coward. That isn’t going to help matters any.”

It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned. Yet about the hardest part of it was that for months I so often had to hear a phrase which I had conceived a particular distaste for. It was, “Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her!”

• The term “larboard is never used at sea, now, to signify the left hand; but was always used on the river in my time. ↩

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A True Story, Word for Word as I Heard It

"Thirty Thousand Killed a Million"

(1835-1910)

Who Was Mark Twain?

Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was the celebrated author of several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor.

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people.

John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh.

His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly.

The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle — a fact that would shape the career of Twain.

Twain in Hannibal

Twain stayed in Hannibal until age 17. The town, situated on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a splendid place to grow up.

Steamboats arrived there three times a day, tooting their whistles; circuses, minstrel shows and revivalists paid visits; a decent library was available; and tradesmen such as blacksmiths and tanners practiced their entertaining crafts for all to see.

However, violence was commonplace, and young Twain witnessed much death: When he was nine years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 he watched an enslaved person die after a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron.

Hannibal inspired several of Twain's fictional locales, including "St. Petersburg" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. These imaginary river towns are complex places: sunlit and exuberant on the one hand, but also vipers' nests of cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness and soul-crushing boredom — all parts of Twain's boyhood experience.

Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when — with his father dead and the family needing a source of income — he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier , which paid him with a meager ration of food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union , a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.

Steamboat Pilot

Then, in 1857, 21-year-old Twain fulfilled a dream: He began learning the art of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi. A licensed steamboat pilot by 1859, he soon found regular employment plying the shoals and channels of the great river.

Twain loved his career — it was exciting, well-paying and high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in 1861 by the outbreak of the Civil War , which halted most civilian traffic on the river.

As the Civil War began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederate States . Twain opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army in June 1861 but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded.

Where, he wondered then, would he find his future? What venue would bring him both excitement and cash? His answer: the great American West.

Heading Out West

In July 1861, Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years.

At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of 1862, he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.

Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise . He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain — steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.

Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style — friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious.

He got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country (the story later appeared under various titles).

'Innocents Abroad'

His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip.

In 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a nationwide bestseller.

At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

Marriage to Olivia Langdon

However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston — a straight-laced, Victorian , moneyed group that cowed Twain.

"An indisputable and almost overwhelming sense of inferiority bounced around his psyche," wrote scholar Hamlin Hill, noting that these feelings were competing with his aggressiveness and vanity. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization."

In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have ... the only sweetheart I have ever loved ... she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest, and the daintiest, and she is the most perfect gem of womankind."

Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.

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Mark Twain's Books

Thankfully, Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion.

'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace."

'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn ," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935, giving short shrift to Herman Melville and others but making an interesting point.

Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature.

Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the 1881 publication of The Prince and the Pauper , a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.

'Life on the Mississippi'

In 1883 he put out Life on the Mississippi , an interesting but safe travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published in 1884, Livy gave it a chilly reception.

After that, business and writing were of equal value to Twain as he set about his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. In 1885, he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant , who had just died.

He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.

'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'

Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some ways of his father's, had serious consequences for his state of mind. They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God.

Another cause of his angst, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not giving undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered on his Missouri boyhood.

In 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , a science-fiction/historical novel about ancient England. His next major work, in 1894, was The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson , a somber novel that some observers described as "bitter."

He also wrote short stories, essays and several other books, including a study of Joan of Arc . Some of these later works have enduring merit, and his unfinished work The Chronicle of Young Satan has fervent admirers today.

Twain's last 15 years were filled with public honors, including degrees from Oxford and Yale . Probably the most famous American of the late 19th century, he was much photographed and applauded wherever he went.

Indeed, he was one of the most prominent celebrities in the world, traveling widely overseas, including a successful 'round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-96, undertaken to pay off his debts.

Family Struggles

But while those years were gilded with awards, they also brought him much anguish. Early in their marriage, he and Livy had lost their toddler son, Langdon, to diphtheria; in 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age of 24 of spinal meningitis. The loss broke his heart, and adding to his grief, he was out of the country when it happened.

His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with severe epilepsy. In 1909, when she was 29 years old, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full of quarrels.

In June 1904, while Twain traveled, Livy died after a long illness. "The full nature of his feelings toward her is puzzling," wrote scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. "If he treasured Livy's comradeship as much as he often said, why did he spend so much time away from her?"

But absent or not, throughout 34 years of marriage, Twain had indeed loved his wife. "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," he wrote in tribute to her.

Twain became somewhat bitter in his later years, even while projecting an amiable persona to his public. In private he demonstrated a stunning insensitivity to friends and loved ones.

"Much of the last decade of his life, he lived in hell," wrote Hamlin Hill. He wrote a fair amount but was unable to finish most of his projects. His memory faltered.

Twain suffered volcanic rages and nasty bouts of paranoia, and he experienced many periods of depressed indolence, which he tried to assuage by smoking cigars, reading in bed and playing endless hours of billiards and cards.

Twain died on April 21, 1910, at the age of 74. He was buried in Elmira, New York.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, is now a popular attraction and is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Twain is remembered as a great chronicler of American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Writing grand tales about Sawyer, Finn and the mighty Mississippi River, Twain explored the American soul with wit, buoyancy and a sharp eye for truth.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Mark Twain
• Birth Year: 1835
• Birth date: November 30, 1835
• Birth State: Missouri
• Birth City: Florida
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Mark Twain, the writer, adventurer and wily social critic born Samuel Clemens, wrote the novels 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• Death Year: 1910
• Death date: April 21, 1910
• Death State: Connecticut
• Death City: Redding
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Mark Twain Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/mark-twain
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 31, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364.
• Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.
• New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.
• The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
• I'd rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I've got so much more of it.
• Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
• Do not put off 'til tomorrow what can be put off 'til day-after-tomorrow just as well.
• In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
• 'Classic'—a book which people praise and don't read.
• When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.
• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
• We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but would assassinate you.
• Be good and you will be lonesome.

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From Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) became intimate with the Mississippi River while working on steamboats for about five years, first as a “cub” or apprentice, and later as a pilot until the Civil War broke out. He once said he knew stretches of the mighty river as well as he knew the hallway of his own house in the dark. Twain had planned the book that became Life on the Mississippi for nearly two decades before it was published in 1883. Enjoy contrasting some excerpts of Twain’s observations with the preceding story about kayaking the river today.

From Chapter 1, The River and Its History

The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope—a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.

It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the ‘Passes,’ above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi’s depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth. …

An article in the New Orleans ‘Times-Democrat,’ based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico—which brings to mind Captain Marryat’s rude name for the Mississippi—‘the Great Sewer.’ This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high.

The mud deposit gradually extends the land—but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific people is that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all—one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.

The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cut-off has radically changed the position, and Delta is now two miles above Vicksburg. …

The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word ‘new’ in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;—as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don’t see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture of it.

The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age. …

… When De Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo’s paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; … lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime. …

Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.

From Chapter 10, Completing My Education

The next few months showed me strange things. … We met a great rise coming down the river. The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away. It required the nicest steering to pick one’s way through this rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point; and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then; we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers. Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent. Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay right across our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we would have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction. We often hit white logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night. A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone.

Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious timber-rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi, coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere, and broad-horns from ‘Posey County,’ Indiana, freighted with ‘fruit and furniture’—the usual term for describing it, though in plain English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins. Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned with usury. The law required all such helpless traders to keep a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken. All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up, right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice, with the backwoods ‘whang’ to it, would wail out—

‘Whar’n the —— you goin’ to! Cain’t you see nothin’, you dash-dashed aig-suckin’, sheep-stealin’, one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!’ Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again. And that flatboatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sue our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time, when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck.

Once, at night, in one of those forest- bordered crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmen intensely describe with the phrase ‘as dark as the inside of a cow,’ we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, furniture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage, unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment. These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backed and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it—both sexes and various ages—and cursed us till everything turned blue. Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed a steering oar of him in a very narrow place.

From Chapter 13, A Pilot’s Needs

But I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is, make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters, some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it; for this is eminently one of the ‘exact’ sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase ‘I think,’ instead of the vigorous one ‘I know!’ One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot’s knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head.

From Chapter 14, Rank and Dignity of Piloting

By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands. It ‘gravels’ me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order. In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days, on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and everything in readiness for another voyage.

When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars a month on the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain to keep such a pilot in idleness, under full pay, three months at a time, while the river was frozen up. … When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest, and treated with exalted respect. Lying in port under wages was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated; especially if they belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday of that trade (Kansas times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip, which was equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month. Here is a conversation of that day. A chap out of the Illinois River, with a little stern-wheel tub, accosts a couple of ornate and gilded Missouri River pilots—

“Gentlemen, I’ve got a pretty good trip for the upcountry, and shall want you about a month. How much will it be?”

“Eighteen hundred dollars apiece.”

“Heavens and earth! You take my boat, let me have your wages, and I’ll divide!”

From Chapter 18, I Take a Few Extra Lessons

The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer ‘Pennsylvania’—the man referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart. …

I still remember the first time I ever entered the presence of that man. The boat had backed out from St. Louis and was ‘straightening down;’ I ascended to the pilot-house in high feather, and very proud to be semi-officially a member of the executive family of so fast and famous a boat. Brown was at the wheel. I paused in the middle of the room, all fixed to make my bow, but Brown did not look around. I thought he took a furtive glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but as not even this notice was repeated, I judged I had been mistaken. By this time he was picking his way among some dangerous ‘breaks’ abreast the woodyards; therefore it would not be proper to interrupt him; so I stepped softly to the high bench and took a seat.

There was silence for ten minutes; then my new boss turned and inspected me deliberately and painstakingly from head to heel for about—as it seemed to me—a quarter of an hour. After which he removed his countenance and I saw it no more for some seconds; then it came around once more, and this question greeted me—

‘Are you Horace Bigsby’s cub?’

‘Yes, sir.’

After this there was a pause and another inspection. Then—

‘What’s your name?’

I told him. He repeated it after me. It was probably the only thing he ever forgot; for although I was with him many months he never addressed himself to me in any other way than ‘Here!’ and then his command followed.

‘Where was you born?’

‘In Florida, Missouri.’

A pause. Then—

‘Dern sight better staid there!’ …

‘How long you been on the river?’

I told him. After a pause—

‘Where’d you get them shoes?’

I gave him the information.

‘Hold up your foot!’

I did so. He stepped back, examined the shoe minutely and contemptuously, scratching his head thoughtfully, tilting his high sugar-loaf hat well forward to facilitate the operation, then ejaculated, ‘Well, I’ll be dod derned!’ and returned to his wheel.

What occasion there was to be dod derned about it is a thing which is still as much of a mystery to me now as it was then. It must have been all of fifteen minutes—fifteen minutes of dull, homesick silence—before that long horse-face swung round upon me again—and then, what a change! It was as red as fire, and every muscle in it was working. Now came this shriek—

‘Here!—You going to set there all day?’

I lit in the middle of the floor, shot there by the electric suddenness of the surprise. As soon as I could get my voice I said, apologetically:—‘I have had no orders, sir.’

‘You’ve had no orders! My, what a fine bird we are! We must have orders! Our father was a gentleman—owned slaves—and we’ve been to school. Yes, we are a gentleman, too, and got to have orders! Orders, is it? Orders is what you want! Dod dern my skin, I’ll learn you to swell yourself up and blow around here about your dod-derned orders! G’way from the wheel!’ (I had approached it without knowing it.)

I moved back a step or two, and stood as in a dream, all my senses stupefied by this frantic assault. …

Brown was always watching for a pretext to find fault; and if he could find no plausible pretext, he would invent one. He would scold you for shaving a shore, and for not shaving it; for hugging a bar, and for not hugging it; for ‘pulling down’ when not invited, and for not pulling down when not invited; for firing up without orders, and for waiting for orders. In a word, it was his invariable rule to find fault with everything you did; and another invariable rule of his was to throw all his remarks (to you) into the form of an insult.

One day we were approaching New Madrid, bound down and heavily laden. Brown was at one side of the wheel, steering; I was at the other, standing by to ‘pull down’ or ‘shove up.’ He cast a furtive glance at me every now and then. I had long ago learned what that meant; viz., he was trying to invent a trap for me. I wondered what shape it was going to take. By and by he stepped back from the wheel and said in his usual snarly way—

‘Here!—See if you’ve got gumption enough to round her to.’

This was simply bound to be a success; nothing could prevent it; for he had never allowed me to round the boat to before; consequently, no matter how I might do the thing, he could find free fault with it. He stood back there with his greedy eye on me, and the result was what might have been foreseen: I lost my head in a quarter of a minute, and didn’t know what I was about; I started too early to bring the boat around, but detected a green gleam of joy in Brown’s eye, and corrected my mistake; I started around once more while too high up, but corrected myself again in time; I made other false moves, and still managed to save myself; but at last I grew so confused and anxious that I tumbled into the very worst blunder of all—I got too far down before beginning to fetch the boat around. Brown’s chance was come.

His face turned red with passion; he made one bound, hurled me across the house with a sweep of his arm, spun the wheel down, and began to pour out a stream of vituperation upon me which lasted till he was out of breath. In the course of this speech he called me all the different kinds of hard names he could think of, and once or twice I thought he was even going to swear—but he didn’t this time.

‘Dod dern’ was the nearest he ventured to the luxury of swearing, for he had been brought up with a wholesome respect for future fire and brimstone.

That was an uncomfortable hour; for there was a big audience on the hurricane deck. When I went to bed that night, I killed Brown in seventeen different ways—all of them new.

From Chapter 22, I Return to My Muttons

Next morning, we drove around town [ St. Louis ] in the rain. The city seemed but little changed. It was greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can’t persuade a new thing to look new; the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size, since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of 400,000 inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts, it looked about as it had looked formerly. Yet I am sure there is not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be. The smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town, and hide the sky from view. This shelter is very much thinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, I think. I heard no complaint. …

The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it. It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis, this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed that opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go by seems, of course, foolish and inexplicable today. …

But the change of changes was on the ‘levee.’ This time, a departure from the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was woeful. The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard-saloon was explained. He was absent because he is no more. …

Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.

Chapter 25, From Cairo to Hickman

The scenery, from St. Louis to Cairo—two hundred miles—is varied and beautiful. The hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now, and were a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing between. Our trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to breeze and sunshine, and our boat threw the miles out behind her with satisfactory dispatch.

We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has also a penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on. At Grand Tower, too, there was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau. The former town gets its name from a huge, squat pillar of rock, which stands up out of the water on the Missouri side of the river—a piece of nature’s fanciful handiwork—and is one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of that region. For nearer or remoter neighbors, the Tower has the Devil’s Bake Oven—so called, perhaps, because it does not powerfully resemble anybody else’s bake oven; and the Devil’s Tea Table—this latter a great smooth-surfaced mass of rock, with diminishing wine-glass stem, perched some fifty or sixty feet above the river, beside a beflowered and garlanded precipice, and sufficiently like a tea-table to answer for anybody, Devil or Christian. Away down the river we have the Devil’s Elbow and the Devil’s Race-course, and lots of other property of his which I cannot now call to mind.

The Town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it had been in old times, but it seemed to need some repairs here and there, and a new coat of whitewash all over. Still, it was pleasant to me to see the old coat once more. ‘Uncle’ Mumford,’ our second officer, said the place had been suffering from high water, and consequently was not looking its best now. But he said it was not strange that it didn’t waste white-wash on itself, for more lime was made there, and of a better quality, than anywhere in the West; and added—‘On a dairy farm you never can get any milk for your coffee, nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation; and it is against sense to go to a lime town to hunt for white-wash.’ …

Cape Girardeau is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome appearance. There is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town by the river. Uncle Mumford said it had as high a reputation for thoroughness as any similar institution in Missouri! There was another college higher up on an airy summit—a bright new edifice, picturesquely and peculiarly towered and pinnacled—a sort of gigantic casters, with the cruets all complete. Uncle Mumford said that Cape Girardeau was the Athens of Missouri, and contained several colleges besides those already mentioned; and all of them on a religious basis of one kind or another. He directed my attention to what he called the ‘strong and pervasive religious look of the town,’ but I could not see that it looked more religious than the other hill towns with the same slope and built of the same kind of bricks. Partialities often make people see more than really exists. …

No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away. I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in, except that it was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere. …

One of the islands formerly called the Two Sisters is gone entirely; the other, which used to lie close to the Illinois shore, is now on the Missouri side, a mile away; it is joined solidly to the shore, and it takes a sharp eye to see where the seam is—but it is Illinois ground yet, and the people who live on it have to ferry themselves over and work the Illinois roads and pay Illinois taxes: singular state of things! …

The Mississippi is a just and equitable river; it never tumbles one man’s farm overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man’s neighbor. This keeps down hard feelings.

Going into Cairo, we came near killing a steamboat which paid no attention to our whistle and then tried to cross our bows. By doing some strong backing, we saved him; which was a great loss, for he would have made good literature.

“Piloting on the Mississippi River was not work to me; it was play— delightful play, vigorous play, adventurous play—and I loved it.” —The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider

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