Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Afterword
Bibliography
CHAPTER I - The River and Its History
CHAPTER II - The River and Its Explorers
CHAPTER III - Frescoes from the Past
CHAPTER IV - The Boys’ Ambition
CHAPTER V - I Want to Be a Cub Pilot
CHAPTER VI - A Cub Pilot’s Experience
CHAPTER VII - A Daring Deed
CHAPTER VIII - Perplexing Lessons
CHAPTER IX - Continued Perplexities
CHAPTER X - Completing My Education
CHAPTER XI - The River Rises
CHAPTER XII - Sounding
CHAPTER XIII - A Pilot’s Needs
CHAPTER XIV - Rank and Dignity of Piloting
CHAPTER XV - The Pilots’ Monopoly
CHAPTER XVI - Racing Days
CHAPTER XVII - Cutoffs and Stephen
CHAPTER XVIII - I Take a Few Extra Lessons
CHAPTER XIX - Brown and I Exchange Compliments
CHAPTER XX - A Catastrophe
CHAPTER XXI - A Section in My Biography
CHAPTER XXII - I Return to My Muttons
CHAPTER XXIII - Traveling Incognito
CHAPTER XXIV - My Incognito Is Exploded
CHAPTER XXV - From Cairo to Hickman
CHAPTER XXVI - Under Fire
CHAPTER XXVII - Some Imported Articles
CHAPTER XXVIII - Uncle Mumford Unloads
CHAPTER XXIX - A Few Specimen Bricks
CHAPTER XXX - Sketches by the Way
CHAPTER XXXI - A Thumbprint and What Came of It
CHAPTER XXXII - The Disposal of a Bonanza
CHAPTER XXXIII - Refreshments and Ethics
CHAPTER XXXIV - Tough Yarns
CHAPTER XXXV - Vicksburg During the Trouble
CHAPTER XXXVI - The Professor’s Yarn
CHAPTER XXXVII - The End of the Gold Dust
CHAPTER XXXVIII - The House Beautiful
CHAPTER XXXIX - Manufactures and Miscreants
CHAPTER XL - Castles and Culture
CHAPTER XLI - The Metropolis of the South
CHAPTER XLII - Hygiene and Sentiment
CHAPTER XLIII - The Art of Inhumation
CHAPTER XLIV - City Sights
CHAPTER XLV - Southern Sports
CHAPTER XLVI - Enchantments and Enchanters
CHAPTER XLVII - Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable
CHAPTER XLVIII - Sugar and Postage
CHAPTER XLIX - Episodes in Pilot Life
CHAPTER L - The “Original Jacobs”
CHAPTER LI - Reminiscences
CHAPTER LII - A Burning Brand
CHAPTER LIII - My Boyhood’s Home
CHAPTER LIV - Past and Present
CHAPTER LV - A Vendetta and Other Things
CHAPTER LVI - A Question of Law
CHAPTER LVII - An Archangel
CHAPTER LVIII - On the Upper River
CHAPTER LIX - Legends and Scenery
CHAPTER LX - Speculations and Conclusions
APPENDIX
In his person and in his pursuits, Mark Twain (1835–1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts.
Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees
from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed
such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher.
He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to
pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and
tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in
American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our
literature.”
Justin Kaplan is the author of numerous books, including Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, winner of
the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mark Twain and His World; Walt Whitman: A Life;
and with his wife, Anne Bernays, Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York. In 1985, he was elected to
the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
John Seelye is a leading American Studies scholar and Graduate Research Professor Emeritus of
American Literature at the University of Florida. His books include The True Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies: A Meditation with Pictures, and Beautiful Machine:
Rivers and the Republic Plan, 1755–1825.
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Introduction
For four of his seventy-five years, Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) worked at the wheel of a
Mississippi River steamboat, first as a “cub” (or apprentice) training for his pilot’s license. He had
fulfilled an early dream that never lost its hold. Boys growing up along the river had “transient
ambitions of other sorts,” he recalled, to be a circus clown or a pirate, “but they were only transient. . .
. The ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.” Looking back on his apprenticeship, the
mature writer Mark Twain—by then famous in Europe as well as at home—still felt the joy and
solitary splendor of having reached the pinnacle of his first profession. The steamboat pilot, he said,
was “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.”
But such freedom and authority—by law, once at the wheel, the pilot answered to no one, not even
the ship’s captain—came with a chastening responsibility: steamboating on the Mississippi was
hazardous. “My nightmares to this day,” Mark Twain was to write, “take the form of running into an
overshadowing bluff with a steamboat—showing that my earliest dread made the strongest impression
on me.” His brother, Henry, a clerk on the Pennsylvania, had been among the hundred or so passengers
and crew who died in June 1858 when the ship’s boilers blew up sixty miles downriver from
Memphis. “My darling, my pride, my glory, my all,” the twenty-twoy-ear-old Sam Clemens mourned,
praying to be struck dead if this would bring the boy back to life: he had arranged Henry’s job on the
Pennsylvania and held himself responsible for the boy’s death. Gaudy, smoke-plumed floating palaces
that were among the glories of nineteenth-century invention and elaboration, Mississippi steamboats
could also be “black clouds” of destruction with “red-hot teeth,” as Huck Finn says: THEY devoured
themselves, passengers, cargo, rafts and scows, and anything else in the way. Traveling on these boats,
especially when they raced one another, could be like riding a volcano.
In April 1882, after twenty-one years’ absence from the pilothouse, Mark Twain came back to the
river to gather material for Life on the Mississippi. “I felt a very strong desire to see the river again,
and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there.” He brought
with him on the westward journey from Hartford, Connecticut, his Boston publisher, James R.
Osgood, for companionship; a Hartford stenographer, Roswell Phelps, for practical reasons; and
supplies of tobacco and whiskey for his hourly needs. By the time of his return, most of the
steamboats that had plied the Mississippi before the Civil War were gone—wrecked, burned,
abandoned to rot and rust, killed off by the railroad. During Mark Twin’s lifetime (1835–1910),
steamboating on the Mississippi passed into history and legend along with the overland stage, the
Pony Express, and the Western frontier. He outlasted all of them to become their chronicler and living
symbol.
The mighty river itself—the young Sam Clemens claimed to have known stretches of it as well as
he knew the hallway of his own house in the dark—was familiar no longer. He recognized this soon
after he began his trip downriver from St. Louis: the Mississippi was “as brand-new as if it had been
built yesterday.” All that remained of his meticulously acquired knowledge of the river was a
landsman’s skill in remembering names and addresses. He saw new islands, new landings, new towns
taking the place of once-thriving settlements now landlocked. At the St. Louis levee, in his piloting
days packed solid with steamboats, he found only half a dozen, their fires banked or dead. Tied up
inside the wooded mouth of a tributary, the Obion River, he saw a lone steamboat. “The spyglass
revealed the fact that she was named for me—or he was named for me, whichever you prefer.” Even
this tribute to his fame did not relieve the feeling of strangeness and desolation—he saw no other
steamboat that day.
Along with the departed glories of steamboating, there was a larger gamut of change that Mark
Twin memorialized in Life on the Mississippi. The Civil War had closed the river to commercial
traffic and destroyed the pilot’s occupation. To Mark Twain’s understanding, the war also destroyed
something precious, redeeming, and innocent in American life. Moralist and social critic, he noted in
its stead the hardness, cynicism, lust for money, and epidemic political corruption that shaped what he
called the Gilded Age, “An era of incredible rottenness.”
His friend and literary confidant William Dean Howells called him “the most desouthernized
Southerner I ever knew. . . . No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery.” He
married into an abolitionist family, and his next-door neighbor in liberal-minded Hartford was the
author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel that awakened the nation’s conscience to the sin of slavery.
And so in middle age, he returned to his native region with conflicting emotions: nostalgia and
hostility, affection and outrage. Even before leaving on his trip South in 1882, he had begun to tell
himself what he expected to find: a region barren of progress, he wrote in his notebook, expert only in
the arts of war, murder, and massacre, given to “flowery and gushy” speech and pretentious
architecture. For all its vaunted graciousness and refinement, the culture of the antebellum South, he
said, had been an anachronism borrowed from the novels of Sit Walter Scott. It was “a pathetic sham,”
like “The House Beautiful” (Chapter XXXVIII): the town or village’s finest dwelling, a two-story
frame building fronted with fluted columns and Corinthian capitals made of pine painted white to look
like marble and evoke the bygone glory of Greece, a civilization and economy, like that of the prewar
Cotton Kingdom, founded on human bondage. “In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere. They
date from it,” he writes. “All day long you hear things ‘placed’ as having happened since the waw; or
duin’ the waw . . . ‘Bless yo’ heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo’ de waw!’ ” The Old
South still hadn’t grown up.
Mark Twain’s acerb, profoundly felt, and hilarious chronicle of old times and present times on the
Mississippi is social history and personal history, an alloy of anecdote, statistics, and river lore, true
story, tall story, and dubious story, including the unverifiable claim that he borrowed his pseudonym
from Captain Isaiah Sellers, the supposed Methuselah of the piloting profession. Like The Innocents
Abroad and Roughing It, earlier books that had established Mark Twain’s reputation, Life on the
Mississippi is the work of a brilliant travel writer and incomparable humorist. It is also a fable about
the education of a literary artist as well as a pilot and the roles of imagination, memory, training, and
intuition.
Mark Twain had been planning the book that became Life on the Mississippi for nearly two decades
before he published it in 1883. In January 1866, a few months after he announced to his family that he
had had “a ‘call’ to literature”—“to excite the laughter of God’s creatures”—he planned to write a
book about the Mississippi. “I expect it to make about three hundred pages, and the last hundred will
have to be written in St. Louis, because the materials for them can only be got there. . . . I may be an
old man before I finish it,” he said then. Five years later, he told his wife, Olivia, he intended to go
back to the river and spend two months taking notes: “I bet you I will make a standard work.” Nothing
came of this plan either. Late in 1874, struggling to come up with an idea for an Atlantic Monthly
article and complaining that “my head won’t ‘go’,” he suddenly (by his own account) discovered—or
rediscovered—a perfect, untapped subject: “Old Mississippi days of steamboating glory and grandeur
as I saw them (during 5 years) from the pilothouse.” “I am the only man alive that can scribble about
the piloting of that day,” he told Howells. The subject was not only his alone but seemingly
inexhaustible. “If I were to write fifty articles they would all be about pilots and piloting.” He settled
down to work with the enthusiasm and optimism he tended to show at the beginning and middle of any
new project.
Always a storyteller favoring atmospheric over literal truth, in order to enhance the drama and
credibility of his narrative he changed some of its main circumstances. He was not, as he claims, an
untraveled boy of seventeen, when Horace Bixby signed him on as his “cub.” Instead, he had been
twenty-two years old and had already worked far from home as a printer in St. Louis, New York,
Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Until he realized that he needed both money and a ship to take him from
New Orleans to Brazil, he had even contrived a visionary scheme to go up the Amazon and perhaps
corner the market in coca, the shrub source of cocaine, an elixir reputed to have invigorating
properties. And so far from being a shore-bound innocent—“I supposed all a pilot had to do was to
keep his boat in the river”—he had rafted on the Mississippi and studied steamboats since childhood.
“ ‘Cub’ Wants to Be a Pilot”—the first of seven installments, written in rapid succession, of a series
titled “Old Times on the Mississippi”—came out in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1875. It opens
with the words “When I was a boy”—Mark Twain’s mantra for unlocking imagination and memory—
and leads to one of the classic passages in American literature: “After all those years I can picture that
old time to myself, the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning. . . . ” The cry of
“S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin!” also announces the arrival of Mark Twain, future author of Huckleberry
Finn, and declares that his surge of power and spectacle, along with a prose manner that is both
distinctively American and distinctively his own, derives not from polite or traditional literary sources
but from “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide
along, shining in the sun.”
“The piece about the Mississippi is capital,” Howells wrote. “It almost made the water in our icepitcher muddy as I read it.” From the poet and journalist, and former private secretary to Abraham
Lincoln, John Hay, born and raised in Warsaw, Illinois, fifty miles up the river from Hannibal, came
another validation and tribute. “I don’t see how you do it. I knew all that, every word of it—passed as
much time on the levee as you ever did, knew the same crowd and saw the same scenes—but I could
not have remembered one word of it. You have the two greatest gifts of the writer, memory and
imagination.”
Exhilarated by his rediscovered subject matter, Mark Twain believed at first he had enough material
in hand to make a book to be published at the end of 1875. He was off by eight years and the several
hundred additional pages that he needed to fill out his book and meet the length and bulk requirements
of the subscription publishing trade. To pad it out he borrowed extensively, perhaps 11,000 words in
all, from other writers, including the historian Francis Parkman. Chapter XXXVI (“The Professor’s
Yarn”) is freestanding material heaved in from the author’s stock of unpublished or discarded
manuscripts. Almost the whole of Chapter III is the raftsman’s chapter, 7,000 words or so, borrowed
from Huckleberry Finn, “a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past five
or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more.” Other material adapted from
the novel includes the Darnell-Watson feud (Chapter XXVI) and the period-piece description of “The
House Beautiful” (Chapter XXXVIII). Eventually he accumulated more filler material than he needed
and moved chunks of it to appendices.
His six-week trip to the river gave him material and impetus for two books he was writing more or
less simultaneously: Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, both of them narratives that flow
downriver into the deep South. The two books finished, he made preliminary notes for a third, this one
never written: with Huck Finn cast as a cabin boy on a steamboat, it was to “put the great river and its
bygone ways into history in the form of a story.”
“I never had such a fight over a book in my life before,” he told Howells as Life on the Mississippi
was about to go to press: “I will not interest myself in anything connected with this wretched Goddamned book.” His publisher insisted on some last-minute cuts (about 15,000 words in all) of material
thought likely to offend loyal Southerners and sentimental Northerners. Olivia Clemens, always Mark
Twain’s editor, was not only late in getting to the proofs but with 50,000 copies of Life on the
Mississippi already printed, ordered two illustrations deleted—one showing a chopfallen corpse with
staring eyes; another, the author being cremated, with an urn initialed “M.T.” standing in the
foreground to receive the ashes. It was to be more than sixty years from publication in 1883 that Life
on the Mississippi came near the 100,000 sale its author hoped for it.
In 1880, a twelve-year-old Dallas schoolboy named Wattie Bowser sent Mark Twain a fan letter
asking him for his autograph and to say whether he would be willing to change places with Wattie and
to be a boy again. The answer was yes, but with one main condition: “That I should emerge from
boyhood as a ‘cub pilot’ on a Mississippi boat, and that I should by and by become a pilot, and remain
one.... And when strangers were introduced I should have them repeat ‘Mr. Clemens?’ doubtfully, and
with the rising inflection—and when they were informed that I was the celebrated ‘Master Pilot of the
Mississippi, ’ and immediately took me by the hand and wrung it with effusion, and exclaimed, ‘O, I
know that name very well!’ I should feel a pleasurable emotion trickling down my spine and know I
had not lived in vain.” He was remembering the grandeur that surrounded the lightning pilot, the goldleaf, kidglove, diamond-breastpin sort of pilot who answered to no man and spoke in commands, not
requests.
“Master Pilot of the Mississippi” is a figure of speech for the literary achievement of Mark Twain,
a name born on the river and meaning two fathoms, or twelve feet of depth: for the moment safe
water, but not by much, for a shallow draft steamboat. It was a name so linked with the river that Mark
Twain’s young daughter, Clara, hearing the leadsman on a steamboat sing out his soundings, once
said, “Papa, I have hunted all over the boat for you. Don’t you know they are calling for you?”
“Your true pilot,” he writes, “cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in
his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.” The evolution under Horace Bixby of “cub” into licensed
pilot is also the story of Sam Clemens’s evolution from novice writer to the literary master Mark
Twain. The lessons he learned on the river have the resonance of lessons learned about writing and put
into practice year after year. “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 thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it. . . . 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!’ ” Along with memory, intuition, and trust in instinct, “he must have good and
quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.” The great river itself
had been an alphabet, a language, a primer, and a book with “a new story to tell every day. Throughout
the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one you could
leave unread without loss.” The next such story, after Life on the Mississippi, was to be Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn.
—Justin Kaplan
The “Body of the Nation”
But the basin of the Mississippi is the BODY OF THE NATION. All the other parts are but members,
important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and
of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin
contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley of the world, being
exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of the
La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about of its area; then
comes that of the Yenisei, with about ; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tsekiang, and Nile, ; the
Ganges, less than ½; the Indus, less than ⅓; the Euphrates, ⅕; the Rhine, . It exceeds in extent the
whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. It would contain Austria four times,
Germany or Spain five times. France six times, the British Islands or Italy ten times. Conceptions
formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of
the valley of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of
Siberia, the lofty plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon more
adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part of the Mississippi Valley
capable of supporting a dense population. As a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first
upon our globe.
—EDITOR’S TABLE, Harper’s Magazine, February, 1863.
Afterword
There is, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, a symmetry to the continent of North America, a classical
proportion provided by the great river that bisects the United States. The Mississippi provides a
diagonal that stretches from the southernmost to the northernmost continental extremities, pointing
toward Canada at one end and the Gulf of Mexico at the other. Toward the east, the contributory Ohio
River stretches into the foothills of the Allegheny range; toward the west, there is the Missouri, whose
tributaries flow out of the Rocky Mountains. This east-west configuration was viewed by Colonial
geopoliticians like Thomas Jefferson as a riverine corridor for expanding empire, and in fact the three
great rivers served for nearly a century as the route for westering Americans. By 1825 it was abetted
by the Erie Canal and in 1832 by the Ohio system of canals, connecting the Hudson River with its
western counterparts.
Although the Mississippi contributed a relatively short length along this great diagram, from the
start it was seen as the single most important river on the American continent, serving as a vital
commercial waterway joining the North to the South. As an adjunct to an expanding empire, however,
the Mississippi seemed an often unwilling ally, thanks in large part to the muddy might of the
Missouri, which drew a turbulent flood from the far-western regions. This fierce current restrained
ambitions for the commercial exploitation of the great central valley, for navigation of the Mississippi
was at first limited to raft, keel, and flatboat, slow-moving vessels whose passage was hampered by
attacks from Indians, river pirates, and the ever-present hazards provided by snags and shifting
sandbars.
We associate the invention of the steamboat with Robert Fulton and the Hudson River, but both
Fulton and his unfortunate predecessor, “Poor” John Fitch, had the Mississippi in mind as they went
about perfecting steam-powered navigation. Indeed, Fitch might have been more successful in
promoting his invention, which made a number of voyages along the Delaware River, had the
navigation of the Mississippi not been controlled at the time by the Spanish and then the French
governments. President Jefferson sent Robert Livingston to France to bargain with Napoleon for
navigation rights to the great river and his representative returned with what became known as the
Louisiana Purchase, a vast territory that greatly increased not only the United States but the
importance to the new nation of the Mississippi and its western tributaries. By 1812, one of Fulton’s
steamboats had made the trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, only five years after the Clermont was
first launched on the Hudson.
It was not long before Fulton’s boat made regular trips between New Orleans and Natchez, and it
was soon followed by other steam-powered craft eventually connecting towns on the Ohio with
Southern regions. The importance of riverboat navigation to the economy of the West is suggested by
the image the Kentuckian Henry Clay used in an 1824 speech as a metaphor to express the welfare of
the United States as a whole:
The difference between a nation with, and without, the [manufacturing] arts may be conceived, by the
difference between a keel-boat and a steam-boat, combatting the rapid torrent of the Mississippi. How
slow does the former ascend, hugging the sinuosities of the shore, pushed on by her hardy and exposed
crew, now throwing themselves in vigorus concert on their oars, and then seizing the pendant boughs
of over-hanging trees: she seems hardly to move; and her scanty cargo is scarcely worth the
transportation! With what ease is she not passed by the steam-boat, laden with the riches of all
quarters of the world, with a crowd of gay, cheerful, and protected passengers, now dashing into the
midst of the current, or gliding through the eddies near the shore? Nature herself seems to survey, with
astonishment, the passing wonder, and, in silent submission, reluctantly to own the magnificent
triumphs, in her own vast dominion, of Fulton’s immortal genius!
A similar contrast between keelboat and steamboat travel on the Mississippi was drawn in 1825 by
the New England-born preacher Timothy Flint, in a retrospective account of the ten years he had spent
on Western rivers, during which time the number of steamboats there had multiplied dramatically:
“Justly to appreciate the value of steamboats on these waters, one must have moved up them, as long,
as dangerously, and as laboriously, as I have done,” he wrote, recalling his travels in keelboats before
moving on to a panegyric on the ease and luxuriousness of travel on “one of the better steamboats,”
with
its splendid cabin, richly carpeted, its bar-room and sliding-tables, to which eighty passengers can sit
down with comfort. The fare is sumptuous, and every thing in a style of splendor, order, quiet, and
regularity. . . . You read, you converse, you walk, you sleep, as you choose . . . [while] the varied and
verdant scenery shifts around you. The trees, the green islands, have an appearance, as by enchantment
of moving by you.
By the time Flint’s book was published, the keelboat man was an endangered species on the
Mississippi, his livelihood obliterated by the steamboat, and Flint tended to imbue him with romantic
qualities as a figure associated with a rapidly disappearing scene. Thus he noted that the
stories, told by boatmen stretched at the foot of a tree, just below which was the boat, and the wave of
the Mississippi, and interlarded with the jargon of their peculiar phrase, or perhaps interrupted by the
droll comment, or the incredulous questioning of the rest, had often to me no small degree of interest;
and tricked out in the dress of modern description, would have made very tolerable romances.
This hint was soon picked up by Westerners with literary ambitions, who celebrated the exploits of the
most famous of Western boatmen, the boasting, vainglorious, and violent Mike Fink, who by 1825 had
already retreated westward up the Missouri and been shot dead in an argument, to be made a legend in
increasingly improbable tales.
Within a decade, however, Fink had become overshadowed by another figure associated with the
wildest aspects of Mississippi River life, Davy Crockett. A Tennessee politician who encouraged the
public perception of himself as incarnating the rambunctious spirit of the Western frontier, Crockett
gained literary fame in the last five years of his life through his efforts and those of others. His death
at the Alamo in 1836 considerably liberated the association, allowing Eastern hack writers to invent
improbable deeds and widen Crockett’s comic range, transplanting him from the wilds of Tennessee
to the great river, and imposing upon him the fabulous outlines of that folkloric amphibian combining
the features of horse and alligator. This was the Davy Crockett of yearly comic almanacs, virtually all
of which were published in Eastern cities during the fifteen years following the death of the historical
Crockett.
Where Fink was associated with keelboat life, Crockett became a virtual incarnation of the
steamboat, a transformation licensed by his famous political slogan, “Go Ahead!”—the steamboat
pilot’s order once the paddlewheels had reached open water. Crockett and his cry were exploited by
Whig politicians eager to convert him into a folk hero with which to do battle against Andrew
Jackson, for “Go Ahead!” perfectly expressed the buoyant optimism of the Whigs, who were
champions of progress in its many commercial forms, including internal improvements like the
building of canals, the widening of natural waterways, and the removal of impediments to navigation.
In 1835, the year that Crockett headed west for his apotheosis at the Alamo, there was born in
Florida, Missouri, an infant who would emerge as the spiritual child of the famous Tennessean,
becoming for the last third of the nineteenth century what Crockett became soon after he died: the
premier riverman of the United States. Born of parents with Southern (Virginia and Kentucky) origins,
young Samuel Langhorne Clemens was also born a Whig, a political patrimony that links him not only
to Henry Clay but to Abraham Lincoln, with whom he has often been compared. Both men, in quite
different ways, inherited the mantle of Davy Crockett, sharing the Whig faith in American progress
while leavening it by means of humor, the rough backwoods variety that comes with leaves, branches,
and bark still attached and plenty of earthiness stuck to its roots.
Both men are associated with life on the Mississippi, Lincoln early on having built a flatboat and
guided it down to New Orleans. In this, however, it is Clemens who enjoys the preminence, not so
much because of his actual experience—he spent a scant five years as a steamboat pilot on the river—
but because he so successfully exploited the association, commenting with his pen name taken from
the leadsman’s cry, “Mark Twain!” (indicating safe water, it somewhat resembles Crockett’s “Go
Ahead!” in implication). However, not only did Lincoln become a lawyer and politician, but even
before Sam Clemens began his apprenticeship as a river pilot, Lincoln was representing railroads in
decisive court cases that would signal the doom of the riverboat as the primary mode of transportation
in the great central valley. Whigs may have championed the removal of obstructions to navigation, but
Lincoln made sure that railroad bridges were not counted as such.
By the time Sam Clemens had set up shop as Mark Twain, the steamboat man had followed the
keelboat man down the stream of time and the paddlewheel steamboat had become a symbol of past
glories, not modern triumphs of technology. In Mark Twain’s famous novels featuring the
Mississippi, the great river serves chiefly as a dramatic backdrop for scenes depicting Midwestern
American life prior to the Civil War. During that time—roughly the 1840s—the river was enjoying its
hegemony as the chief agent of transportation and the dominant symbol of progress in Western
regions. But his most extended account of his river experiences, Life on the Mississippi, differs from
his fiction, starting with the fact that it is a mixture of autobiography and travel narrative and ending
with the fact that it is overwhelmingly what its title advertises. Published the year before Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn and containing an episode that was cut from that narrative, Life on the
Mississippi presents a contrasting picture of the river experience—a different perspective from that
found in his greatest novel.
As a passenger on a raft floating down the Mississippi, Huck is a passive spectator of the passing
scene, whose movements are keyed to the motions of his craft, which in turn are caught in the power
of the river’s currents. His is a vessel at all times at the mercy of the river’s whims, whether flood,
fog, or thunderstorms, and which passes through vistas of unsurpassed beauty and permits moments of
tranquillity undisturbed. Set in an extended moment of the past, some forty years before the book’s
publication, Huck’s raft is a pastoral asylum surrounded by a world in which barbarism is rampant,
violence and crime are daily facts of life, and slavery is protected by the laws of the land. It is,
moreover, a world seldom disturbed by steamboat or other traffic, this in a time when the river would
have been crowded with all manner of vessels. The steamboat, when it does appear, is either a distant
prospect or a fearful apparition, whether the ghostly Gothic wreck of the Walter Scott or the
dragonlike craft that tears apart the floating idyll of Huck and Jim.
Admittedly, this anachronistic emphasis has a rhetorical purpose, for Mark Twain beheld the 1840s
as through Reconstructionist spectacles—darkly—but the result is a book that seems antithetical to
Life on the Mississippi, which not only limits that “life” to Mark Twain’s own experiences aboard
riverboats, past and present, but concentrates on the dramatic differences between steamboat life on
the river before and after the Civil War. Technology is the dominant subject matter, whether it is the
detailed knowledge that the antebellum pilot had to master in order to master the river or the
improvements in navigational aids made since the war, which have acted to diminish the pilot’s
former heroism and grandeur. How different from the drowsing Huck floating down the river on his
prelapsarian raft!
There is also detectable in Life on the Mississippi a materialistic emphasis virtually absent from
Huckleberry Finn. Money for Huck is at best a necessary evil and those characters in the novel who
pursue it are characterized as fools and knaves. But in Life it is an essential quantity, not only
supporting the pilot’s luxurious habits but permeating all aspects of riverboating, most often
personified as Progress, seen mainly as speed, that glamourous and exciting manifestation of the cash
nexus. The steamboat is the vehicle of acceleration, the pilot its most prominent agent, and drifting
rafts and raftsmen figure as anachronisms and impediments to steam-powered craft: the pilots of the
latter are not averse to “borrowing an oar” from a hapless raftsman or flatboat man in order to cut a
tight corner for the sake of greater speed.
The desire for speed manifested itself in every boat owner and captain, a desire that enriched those
pilots like Horace Bixby who could develop the skills necessary to perform great feats of navigational
daring, and who were assigned the fastest and fanciest boats on the river, but that also led to disastrous
maneuvers, resulting in burst boilers and collisions. We are never told, however, why it was that such
speed was desirable, nor are we ever—despite all the statistics—told just what it was that those boats
were carrying at such great risk. Cotton, of course, was one of the main commodities, but human
beings—slaves—were another. Commerce it was that dictated such daring and often destructive feats
of navigation, as it was commerce that gave the railroad eventual precedence over the riverboat.
Perhaps Twain made no mention of commercial considerations for the sake of avoiding the obvious,
but the result was also to avoid a few painful facts concerning the specifics of commerce on the
Mississippi before the war.
Thus, in Twain’s account of his education as a pilot, a massive blank space is concealed, suggesting
that the pilothouse was indeed located at a remove from the steamboat, perched high on the
superstructure called the “Texas” because of its being a detached part of the whole—a situation
evoking the status of the independent republic of Texas before it jointed the Union. The pilothouse
was constructed to give great visibility of the river ahead but it also acted to shut off those who
worked there from certain realities of life along and on that river, the commerce to which Twain in the
second half of the book (the postbellum half, as it were) is so very much alive. Only when he leaves
the pilothouse for the world of commercial exchange, a world now sanitized of slavery and its
attendant sins, does Mark Twain bring himself (and us) into direct confrontation with the realities of
river life. The situation evoked in the first part of the book, in which the young Sam Clemens seeks to
become part of that brotherhood who possessed the “right stuff,” gives a contemporary validity to the
title of “pilot,” being those warriors who fly so high as to be strategically removed from the targets on
which their bombs fall.
It needs to be said that the emphasis on commerce that distinguishes the second part of Twain’s
river book is undoubtedly a subtexual counterpart to the autobiographical element of the first part. By
1885, Sam Clemens was often overextended in his business dealings, leading to his eventual financial
ruin, but for whatever reason Life is fairly afloat on the facts of finance, extending even to figures of
speech. Thus we read that the shifting channel of the river has caused entire islands to “retire from
business” and towns and plantations to “retire to the country”; Mark Twain, drawing humorous and
exaggerated conclusions from scientific data, “gets wholesale returns of conjecture out of . . . trifling
investments of fact”; the steamboat he boards upon his return to the river is so dirty it is “taxable as
real estate”; the Mississippi when about to erode away an island is said to have “a mortgage” on which
it is about to “foreclose”; and an anonymous author is said to have published a book with “no brand
given.” The consistent parade of commercial figures of speech reveals the author’s attitude toward his
materials, that “trifling investment of fact” from which he hopes to receive a “wholesale return.”
Uniting these commercial elements is the underlying theme of loss, not only of the steamboat’s
hegemony but the heroic status of the river pilots after the war. In effect, Twain’s book is about a
“Mississippi Bubble” unimagined by John Law, in which the profitability of steamboat commerce is
deflated by the rise in importance of the railroad. Here is another theme painfully relevant to modern
Americans, for what Twain expresses in this book is the kind of commercial spirit, enterprise floated
by debt, that Americans continue to espouse at great risk. Life on the Mississippi is an important
cultural artifact, anachronistic perhaps, but, like the Mississippi steamboat itself, it presents a palatial,
gilded exterior that hides a few grim and grimy facts, standing as Henry Clay early noted for the most
optimistic aspects of nineteenth-century life as well as for a number of those aspects that Clay’s
analogy did not accommodate. And if Davy Crockett was celebrated as a hero, it was as a champion of
Western expansion, with the concomitant extension of chattel slavery in the same direction, which is
the shadowy part of that great diagram to which the Mississippi River was central.
—John Seelye
Selected Bibliography
WORKS BY MARK TWAIN
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867)
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869)
Eye Openers (1871)
Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871) Roughing It (1872)
Screamers (1872)
Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1873)
The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day [with Charles Dudley Warner] (1873)
Mark Twain’s Sketches (1874)
Sketches, Old and New (1875)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Ah Sin [with Bret Harte] (1877)
A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (1877)
Punch, Brothers, Punch! And Other Sketches (1878)
A Tramp Aboard (1880)
“1601” or Conversation at the Social Fireside as It Was in the Time of the Tudors (1880)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882)
The Stolen White Elephant, Etc. (1882)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1890)
The American Claimant (1892)
Merry Tales (1892)
The £1,000,000 Bank-note and Other New Stories (1893)
The Niagra Book (1893)
Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)
Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer Detective, and Other Stories (1896)
How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897)
Following the Equator (1897)
More Tramps Abroad (1898)
The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches (1899)
Literary Essays (1899)
English as She Is Taught (1900)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900)
To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)
A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902)
My Debut as a Literary Person with Other Essays and Stories (1903)
The Jumping Frog in English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once
More by Patient Unremunerated Toil (1903)
Extracts from Adam’s Diary, Translated from the Original MS. (1904)
A Dog’s Tale (1904)
King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Cargo Rule (1905)
Eve’s Diary, Translated from the Original MS. (1906)
What Is Man? (1906)
The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906)
Christian Science (1907)
Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909)
Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography (1909)
Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924)
Letters from the Earth (1962)
BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Brooks, Van Wyck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain. New York: Dutton, 1920. Revised edition, 1933.
Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1910.
Kaplan, Fred. The Singular Mark Twain. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966.
Kar, Prafulla C., ed. Mark Twain: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. Delhi: Pencraft, 1992.
de Koster, Katie, ed. Readings on Mark Twain. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996.
Lauber, John. The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: American Heritage Press, 1985.
LeMaster, J. R. and James D. Wilson, eds. The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1993.
Michelson, Bruce. Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography. The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel
Langhorne Clemens. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912.
Powers, Ron. Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain. New York: Da
Capo, 2001.
——. Mark Twain: A Life. New York: Free Press, 2006
Rasmussen, R. Kent. Mark Twain A to Z: the Essential Reference to His Life and Writings. New York:
Facts on File, Inc., 1995.
Robinson, Forrest G., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain. Cambridge, UK, and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1994.
Ward, Geoffrey C., Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns. Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography. New York: