Otherwise, Cincinnati is a biographical blind spot. It was from here that he wrote the Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass letters to the Keokuk Daily Post. As Paine remarks, the comedic effort was crude and seemed to echo in both its vernacular and dramatic situations the work of Petroleum V. Nasby and Artemus Ward. But it was more than a start. In two short years he had taken two important steps. He had made his first public speech. And for the first time since his early efforts in Hannibal, he was trying his hand again directly at writing humorous journalism. In Cincinnati he worked for the T. Wrightson Printing Company. He may have met a Scot by the name of Macfarlane, who was eccentric enough in this Ohio river town to be well read and an agnostic. According to Paine, this individual gave Sam Clemens his first glimpse of the philosophical determinism that would gain ascendancy in his final years.14 But soon—by February 1857—another mentor would change his immediate plans, though not his philosophy. He would be the most important man that Mark Twain would ever meet on the Mississippi River.
6 Cub Pilot
The name of Horace E. Bixby is one of the more notable landmarks in the life of Mark Twain. Bixby was a New Yorker who had spent more than a third of his life in the South on the Mississippi River. Yet he would have no qualms about serving as a Union pilot when the war broke out almost exactly four years after first meeting Clemens. Bixby may well be the “pilot mate” in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” who was “strong for the Union” when the war brought steamboat traffic to a virtual halt in the spring of 1861. Thirty-one in 1857 when he met Clemens, who was then supposedly on his way to the Amazon, this Bixby would not allow the younger pilot, already divided in his allegiances to North and South, to declare himself a Unionist. In the senior pilot’s eyes, Mark Twain’s loyalty “was smirched . . . because my father had owned slaves.” It did not matter that Sam’s father, according to his “Private History,” had thought slavery wrong and would have freed his slaves if it had been economically feasible.
The Bixby Mark Twain recalled in his “war story,” or tall tale, became for a brief time a rebel sympathizer when “the secession atmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi.” Yet he also objected to Clemens’s doing his share of rebel shouting, because he had come “of bad stock—of a father who had been willing to set slaves free.”1 Bixby is never named in “The Private History,” in which he is depicted as something of a hypocrite. The essay appeared in the May 1885 issue of Century magazine, in its “Battles and Leaders” series. In his river essays in “Old Times on the Mississippi” in the Atlantic and in Life on the Mississippi, Twain had already memorialized Bixby by name as an irascible but lovable mentor who diverted him from a voyage to the Amazon, where he would get rich on coca, to a career on the river. (This was before the discovery of the process of isolating cocaine from coca leaves, which were at the time chewed or otherwise consumed for medicinal purposes.)
With these particular Mississippi chapters, Twain preempted his master, who never wrote his own memoirs of his sixty-six years on the river, and who was still active in 1882 as a skipper even after that commerce had been almost completely replaced by the railroad. He was literally hijacked by his protégé’s fame as Mark Twain, who nevertheless insisted that if he had his choice in life (even after the advent of his world fame), he would have remained on the river as a steamboat pilot. When Twain, then famous for The Innocents Abroad and “Old Times on the Mississippi,” returned to the river in the spring of 1882 with the idea of expanding the Atlantic chapters into a book, Horace Bixby was in New Orleans to greet him and to testify to his piloting talent. He reconfirmed this positive judgment in 1907 or 1908 to Albert Bigelow Paine. Clemens was not merely a pilot on the Mississippi, he told Paine, “but a good one.” Paine adds that Bixby acknowledged, “It is the fashion to-day to disparage Sam’s piloting.”2
In fact, there was indeed in that day a tradition among pilots and river men in the Lower Mississippi Valley to denigrate Mark Twain’s ability as a pilot. In his 1968 dissertation on Twain’s river days, Allan Bates quotes several pilots who challenged Twain’s record on the river. “ ‘Mark Twain hell!’ they bark sharply when questioned,” according to Marquis Childs in 1926. “ ‘He didn’t know anything about the river.’ ” This dissenting consensus even goes so far as to suggest that Twain was never trusted to take the wheel of a steamboat alone. In fact, he is known to have done so on more than one boat. The best that can be safely said is that Clemens was an average pilot who thought he was better than average. As late as the 1960s, one river man rhetorically asked Bates, “He could write, all right, but he sure didn’t know much about the river, did he?”3 Even Bixby himself, who had grown tired of living in Mark Twain’s shadow, recanted once his “cub” was dead. Shortly before the writer’s death, in 1908, Bixby had exclaimed to a reporter, “I wish Clemens was dead, then maybe you fellows would leave me alone.” When Twain did die, Bixby told the river editor for the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the spring of 1912: “Sam was never a good pilot. He knew the Mississippi River like a book, but he lacked confidence. This developed soon after he came on my boat. It never left him. . . . No sir, Sam Clemens knew the river, but being a coward he was a failure as a pilot.”4
Bixby died a couple of months later at age eighty-six while still actively working on the river. After so many years as Mark Twain’s false witness, he seemingly freed himself before going to his grave. This judgment ought to ring true to anyone reading Twain’s description of his piloting days in Life on the Mississippi. Before the war there were no official nautical charts of the thousand-mile stretch between St. Louis and New Orleans, the route that Clemens traveled for four years. Safe navigation depended on a crude form of what is still called “piloting” in the United States Navy: the establishment of two or more angular fixes upon land sites in order to determine latitude and longitude of a vessel at sea. In Bixby and Clemens’s day (and night) on the river, one had to depend on the location of woodpiles and farmhouses on a constantly shifting river, and it took nerve that Clemens, who ran the Alonzo Child aground in 1860, evidently lacked to some degree.5
Twain himself confesses his lack of nerve while a cub pilot in chapter 13 of Life on the Mississippi, material that came from the original “Old Times” pieces of 1875. One day during his two-year training, Bixby pretended to have gone below decks after turning over the helm to Clemens at Island 66, somewhere between Cairo and New Orleans. It was at a deepwater crossing that posed no danger whatever of hitting a shoal. Sam knew the depth, but his confidence was shaken when he heard—as part of Bixby’s prank and test of his apprentice—“the leadsman’s sepulchral cry” of “mark twain!” This indicated a depth of twelve feet or two fathoms—water barely safe for even a shallow-draft steamboat. “I was helpless,” Twain later wrote in Life. “I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking from head to foot.” When confronted by his teacher, who suddenly reappeared from behind a smokestack, Clemens admitted that he had known the real depth of the water, that it had “no bottom” at that particular crossing, but he had simply lost his nerve. Steamboats regularly ran aground, and it therefore took more than simply skill to make a pilot successful. In fact, Bixby himself was one of the pilots on the Colonel Crossman in 1858 that blew a boiler in an explosion that killed fourteen people.6
During his four-year career as an apprentice and licensed pilot, Sam Clemens served on nineteen or twenty different steamboats, mostly packets that followed regular routes and worked in conjunction with the encroaching railroad. His professional life on the river started on one or two tramp vessels, which roved wherever there was cargo to transport.7 He initially boarded the Paul Jones at Cincinnati on February 16, 1857. The boat was from Pittsburgh, and it made only occasional trips to the Crescent City, at least until Sam’s time on the river. Though he was headed for New Orleans to sail to South America, once aboard the Paul Jones, Clemens’s boyhood love of the river was stirred, and he asked Bixby if he would train him as a pilot.
They purportedly agreed on a total tuition of $500, $100 of which was to be paid at the outset of his training, $150 over the next twelve months, and the balance out of his early wages as a pilot.8
Just when the two men made this agreement is not completely clear. In his autobiography Twain recalled that he had gotten to know Bixby on the way down to New Orleans and had even done some steering for him because the pilot had a sore foot. When he got to New Orleans and discovered that no ships were scheduled to leave for South America—that “there probably wouldn’t be any during that century”—he went to Bixby and asked him to make him a cub pilot. Whatever the case, Clemens left New Orleans on the Colonel Crossman sometime between March 4 and 15 as a new cub. Arriving at St. Louis on May 9, he borrowed the down payment of $100 from his brother-in-law. Ultimately, Twain probably did not pay Bixby more than $350, because the senior pilot placed him in the care of other pilots several times during his two-year training period, while he worked on the Missouri River for slightly higher wages than on the Mississippi.9
In St. Louis, Sam and Horace shifted over to the Crescent City, which left St. Louis on April 29 and arrived in New Orleans five days later. While there, Sam wrote a letter to Annie Taylor, an acquaintance from Keokuk. Nothing is known of the degree of intimacy he enjoyed with this young woman, who was now attending Iowa Wesleyan College in nearby Mount Pleasant, but the two must have enjoyed a certain level of intellectual exchange.10 No doubt the twenty-one-year-old Clemens was lonely for something other than the company of the prostitutes who frequented the ballrooms of steamboats and the streets of New Orleans.
He scolded Annie lightly for not writing him in Cincinnati, saying that her one letter to him since leaving Keokuk had “rather ‘set me up.’ ” He told her enthusiastically about the French Market, comparing it with the one in Keokuk. “The place,” he told her, “was crowded (as most places in New Orleans are) with men, women and children of every age, color and nation. . . . Italians, French, Dutch, Irish, Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Americans, English, and the Lord knows how many more different kinds of people, selling all kinds of articles.” He had also visited one of the cemeteries, where the dead were buried above ground. As he had back in Philadelphia while writing to Orion’s Muscatine Journal, he poked fun at the sentimental verse he now found in the inscriptions on the tombstones. One was in French, a language he had been studying on his own off and on for the past two years. “The inscription . . .” Sam wrote, “said the occupant was a girl of 17, and finished by a wish from the mother that the stranger would drop a tear there. . . . They say that the flowers upon many of these tombs are replaced every day by fresh ones. These were fresh, and the poor girl had been dead five years.” Such sentimentality would become the subject of humor in Huckleberry Finn with Emmeline Grangerford’s obituary verse, but by the time of “The Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts, it would turn to pathos. In that later story, when young Satan, or “No. 44,” runs the world backwards, the narrator encounters a young mother who has lost her child and subsequently “cried her life away.” Even though this tragedy occurred five thousand years ago, it still moves him to pity because “such things never grow old, but remain always new.”11
As another Mississippi Valley writer, Tennessee Williams, would say, life—or death in this case—depended on “the kindness of strangers.” The narrator of “The Mysterious Stranger” variations is never a stranger to tragedy, and neither was Mark Twain. Yet in his world, there were other kinds of strangers—all from the river—who furnished prototypes for every kind of personality he would meet. “When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography,” he tells us in chapter 18 of Life on the Mississippi, “I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.” Clemens may not have been the best pilot, but he knew the river intimately, not only its geography but also its innumerable types. After Bixby took his cub to the Rufus J. Lackland in July, he left Clemens there in order to pilot temporarily on the Missouri River. In August and September of 1857 Clemens studied his profession on the John J. Roe under pilots Zeb Leavenworth and Sobiesky “Beck” Jolly. The majority of the steamboats carried passengers housed in large cabins and staterooms. The Roe, however, carried mainly freight and as a result was less formal and had a less hierarchical crew. As Allan Bates has remarked, this was the steamboat that Twain remembered most fondly. In 1906 he recalled the intimacy of the boat’s crew with relatively few passengers to care for—and he thought the boat itself more resembled a farm than a steamboat, where all mixed freely with the captain and participated in “moonlight dancing and daylight frolics.” The Roe was also one of the slowest boats on the river: “Up-stream she couldn’t even beat an island; down-stream she was never able to overtake the current.”12
After a brief turn again under Bixby on the William M. Morrison in October, Clemens was assigned to the Pennsylvania under pilot William Brown. This boat was much more passenger-oriented and formal in its relationships. In this environment, a young apprentice was expected not to mingle with the passengers or his superiors in the ship’s crew. This was especially true in the case of Brown, whom Twain described in chapter 18 of Life on the Mississippi as a “horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault-hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant.” This relationship unfortunately involved one of the three or four great tragedies in Mark Twain’s life and will be discussed in the following chapter. Twain served twice under Brown on the Pennsylvania— in November and part of December 1857 and from the following February until June 1858.
That summer, following a month off the river, he teamed up with one and then another of the Bowen brothers, all childhood friends, on the Alfred T. Lacy and the John H. Dickey. In October he followed pilot Sam Bowen on the White Cloud for a week, and then was back again under Bixby on the New Falls City until almost Christmas. Clemens finished up his pilot training under Bixby on the Aleck Scott in the winter and spring. He earned his pilot’s license in St. Louis on April 9, 1859, and began steering for other pilots at a princely salary of approximately $250 a month, supposedly more than the vice president of the United States earned.13 He enjoyed these wages off and on for two years.
Once out from under the tyrannous eye of Bixby or the other master pilots he had trained under, Twain found time to contribute at least one satirical letter to the New Orleans Crescent. Dated from Vicksburg on May 8, 1859, it was probably written a few days later in New Orleans, where it was hand delivered to the editor of the Crescent’s “River Intelligence” column, shortly before publication on May 17. It burlesqued the river letters of Captain Isaiah Sellers, from whom he later claimed, in chapter 50 of Life on the Mississippi, to have stolen his pen name “Mark Twain.” There is, however, some question as to just how many river letters Sellers actually wrote. One of the oldest and most experienced pilots on the river, he annoyed younger pilots with reminiscences that belittled any newly made records by implying that they were somehow inferior to feats of earlier days. Under “River Intelligence” published in the New Orleans Daily Crescent of May 17, Clemens burlesqued the old pilot by redubbing him the oldest cub pilot on the river and by making fun of a piece from Sellers that had appeared in the True Delta of March 22.
There also remains considerable doubt that Sellers ever used the pseudonym “Mark Twain” or that Clemens stole it from him in 1863, though he repeated this claim at least once more, in an interview in the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin of January 29, 1885. Twain signed his lampoon “Sergeant Fathom,” and Ernest Leisy was probably correct long ago in guessing that Clemens’s “choice of the name ‘Fathom’ gave rise in his mind to the term used for the water sounding, Mark Twain, and that only in this remote, indirect way was he indebted to the redoubtable Isaiah Sellers.” The idea of Sellers as the oldest “cub” pilot may have also stemmed from or reinforced Sam’s own sense of professional immaturity even as a licensed pilot.14
He was on the Alfred T. Lacey with Bart Bowen when h
e wrote this letter. He shifted to the J. C. Swon on June 25, 1859, and a month or so later he was back with Bart (now as captain) on the Edward J. Gay, where he remained until October 1859. He worked on the A. B. Chambers from then until February 1860. He appears to have sought out the company of friends who were more accomplished pilots or captains, either Bixby or one of the three Bowen brothers from Hannibal. The next month (March 1860) he was a pilot on the City of Memphis, possibly the most glamorous job he enjoyed during his four years on the river. The St. Louis Evening News of April 24, 1857, described the boat as “the largest and finest steamer ever at the St. Louis wharf.” Unlike some of the tramp boats he had worked on, service on the City of Memphis, as he told Orion, would give him a reputation on the river that would ensure continuous and profitable employment.15 For really the first time, he was on his own as a pilot of a major steamboat.
This assignment lasted only for three months, however, or until the beginning of July. We don’t know the circumstances of his departure, but the next month the best he could do was the Arago, a tramp steamer hardly a third the size of the City of Memphis. The Arago sank on September 9, but Clemens had already left the ship. Ten days later he boarded the last boat on which he would ever serve. It was the Alonzo Child, and he was steaming again with old friends—not only his mentor Bixby but Will Bowen, who with Sam Brown were copilots of the boat. The future of the Alonzo Child, however, was as threatened as Clemens’s piloting career by the coming war. Built primarily for the Missouri River trade, the boat was destroyed by Confederate forces in 1863 to prevent its capture by the Union army. Its engines were refitted for the Confederate ironclad Tennessee. When Louisiana seceded from the Union in January 1861, Sam Clemens, after having his prospects first boosted by a position on the magnificent City of Memphis and then dampened by his demotion to the Arago, faced not only the end of his piloting career but also one of the most serious dilemmas of his lifetime and career as a writer. His initial softness on the matter of slavery and his ultimate avoidance of the Civil War would have an abiding influence upon his literary achievement.
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