The river may make an occasional spasmodic effort at a flood, but the time is approaching when it will cease to rise altogether.
In conclusion, sir, I will condescend to hint at the foundation of these arguments: When me and DeSoto discovered the Mississippi, I could stand at Bolivar Landing (several miles above “Roaring Waters Bar”) and pitch a biscuit to the main shore on the other side, and in low water we waded across at Donaldsonville. The gradual widening and deepening of the river is the whole secret of the matter.
Yours, &c. SERGEANT FATHOM.
As soon as the New Orleans exchanges for May 17 arrived in St. Louis a week later, T. E. Garrett, river editor of the Missouri Republican, reprinted Sam’s parody. It earned “the gratitude of all the other veterans” on the river “& Capt. Sellers’s undying animosity.” It became something of a legend on the lower Mississippi and was occasionally copied by papers across the country, including the Chicago Tribune, for the next twenty years.38
In short, Sellers became a laughingstock among pilots on the lower Mississippi and, according to Sam, “did me the honor to profoundly detest me” after the piece appeared. “It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him.” Not everyone was amused, however. John Bofinger—the captain of the Morrison and thus Sellers’s employer, a neighbor of the Moffetts in St. Louis and, significantly enough, like Sellers an antiunion riverman—chastised Sam for the prank. Sam expressed regrets for it in Life on the Mississippi: “It did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man’s heart. There was no malice in my rubbish” but “it laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful.” But his remorse was not entirely sincere. As Branch has noted, the self-important Sellers “was the very model of the kind of person” Sam relished attacking throughout his career. In effect, moreover, he recanted his expression of regret for the article in an interview in 1895: “It was a crude effort, but it served its purpose. It played sad havoc with some of old Sellers’ pet islands and channels, fairly knocking them galley-west, and telling how some century or so ago they used to occupy places in the far interior of the country. The old man never wrote another report.”39
After a monthlong layoff in St. Louis, Sam steered the J. C. Swon on two round-trips to New Orleans and back between June 25 and July 28. He again partnered with Bart Bowen, this time aboard the Edward J. Gay, on three round-trips between August 2 and October 1. It wasn’t that Sam couldn’t hold a job; on the contrary, his services were in constant demand. On one of the downstream runs, according to the pilot Jack Downing, Sam was holding court in the pilothouse as the Gay crossed from Goose Island below St. Louis to the Missouri shore at “a very shoal place.” Jesse K. Bell, a famous riverman, was steering and
ran the boat out of the channel 25 or 30 yards and grounded her. She was aground for 30 minutes, and Bell made the air blue with all the swear words in his vocabulary in declaring that, if it hadn’t been for Sam Clemens’s story, he would have kept the boat in good water. I could repeat the story, but it’s entirely too long. However we were all convulsed with laughter, particularly as we did not see the point nor the real gist of it until it had been told for quite a few minutes.”40
During his two months at the helm of the Gay, Sam nearly witnessed a shootout between the Darnell and Watson clans—something he would mention in chapter 26 of Life on the Mississippi and on which he would model the long-standing Grangerford-Shepherdson feud in chapters 17–18 of Huck Finn and the Griswold-Morgan feud in the posthumously published Simon Wheeler, Detective (ca. 1877). The Darnells and the Watsons attended the same church, though they sat “on opposite sides, shotguns within reach,” exactly like the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons in Huck Finn. On the morning of Sunday, September 4, 1859, near Compromise, Kentucky, north of Memphis (a landing on the Kentucky-Tennessee border that has since washed away), members of the two extended families met in a fatal gunfight, witnessed by passengers and crew aboard the John H. Dickey. Sam passed through Compromise aboard the northbound Gay three days later and doubtless heard about the affray, and when he arrived in St. Louis he doubtless read about it. “He transformed the fatal encounter,” Branch concludes, “into the fictional event climaxing his tale of Grangerford-Shepherdson violence” in Huck Finn.41 But the transformation of fact into fiction raises a related and unanswered question: Why did Sam christen the character of Miss Watson in Huck Finn with the surname of one of the feuding families?
In late October 1859 Sam joined the crew of the A. B. Chambers for the winter, completing four round-trips between St. Louis and New Orleans by late February 1860. George W. Bowman, the captain of the Chambers, a 410-ton side-wheeler, remembered him later as “a smooth-faced yellow fellow whose quiet and retiring manner did not prevent his being very popular with all his associates.” Grant Marsh, the first mate, reminisced about Sam’s courage in a crisis. When Sam ran the Chambers aground at Power’s Island below St. Louis in late December, he braved ice floes to lead a party scavenging for fuel. As Marsh remembered,
He was not a great pilot, but he was a brave fellow. He didn’t know what fear was. He never smiled, but was joking whenever he got a good chance. I believe he once saved my life, his own, and six others. Our steamer was lying above Cairo on a sandbar. We were out of wood and the captain ordered Sam, me, and the six roustabouts to get in a yawl and row up the river and bring down a flatboat loaded with wood. The river was full of floating lee. We rowed up on the opposite bank from the flatboat. The ice was running almost solid, with an occasional opening by the ice blocking up. We took advantage of these openings to shoot across the river. When we got into the channel a short distance I saw the danger we were encountering. The ice was liable to close in on us and drown the whole outfit. I appealed to Sam to row back. There was an opening in the rear. Sam resolutely: “No.” In another minute the ice broke in the path behind the boat and crushed by with terrific force. Had we turned back when I suggested it, we would have been “goners,” every mother’s son of us. Sam’s judgment was not questioned again on that trip.
On his part, Sam remembered the occasion much differently. “When we were taking that wood flat down to the Chambers, which was aground,” he recalled in 1888, “I soon saw that I was a perfect lubber at piloting such a thing. I saw that I could never hit the Chambers with it, so I resigned in Marsh’s favor, and he accomplished the task to my admiration. We should all have gone to the mischief if I had remained in authority.”42
In any case, it was the first of three accidents in which Sam was involved during his four years on the river, though all three occurred after he received his license and the last one no doubt cost the insurance underwriter some serious money. As he later put it, he had been “a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot,” as competent a steersman at the helm as he had been careful a printer at the case. As a pilot he routinely erred on the side of caution. He scrawled in his notebook his repeated reticence to run risks with the boats he piloted: “Was probably 6 or 7 ft at Glasscocks—night—didn’t try.” “Afraid of 82—had 3 fath[oms] in Gaines [Mill].” “Night—didn’t run either 77 or 76 towheads.” “Could have run Montezuma (either side,) . . . didn’t.”43
Meanwhile, he “left the pen strictly alone.” He could not simultaneously practice two professions, both piloting and writing. “I cannot correspond with a newspaper,” he wrote Orion and Mollie, “because when one is learning the river, he is not allowed to do or think of anything else.” After another month-long layoff in St. Louis, he joined the crew of the City of Memphis—at 865 tons, one of the largest steamboats, if not the very largest, ever to ply the waters of the Mississippi—and made five round-trips to New Orleans and back between late March and early July. He reunited with Ed Montgomery, with whom he had served previously on the D. A. January and New Falls City. These months aboard the most prestigious and luxurious steamboat of the era were arguably the highlight of Sam’s piloting career. Despite his c
laim that he left the pen alone, he sent occasional paragraphs of river news to the St. Louis Missouri Republican between May and December 1860. A decade later, long after Sam left the river, one of the Republican editors remembered that he had once been “a river character about this port” and “continued for some time to contribute to the columns of this paper.”44
For over a year after he earned his license, Sam’s future seemed rosy. “I can ‘bank’ in the neighborhood of $100 [per month]” steering the City of Memphis, he bragged to Orion in late June 1860, and he could earn a reputation, “which is a thing I never could accomplish on a transient boat.” But he also conceded that “the largest boat in the trade” was “the hardest to pilot.” A few days later, as he maneuvered the City of Memphis to the dock in New Orleans, Sam awaited orders from Montgomery, according to the routine protocol, but he “received none.” In his notebook, he averred that he had mistaken “Montgomery’s coat hanging on the big bell for the Capt[ain] himself” as he waited “for him to tell me to back.” His duty, after all, “was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves.” The result was a minor collision, though the “captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances.” Montgomery “never went back on me—shouldered the responsibility like a man,”45 Sam remembered, but they both may have lost their jobs as a result of the accident. The City of Memphis was captained by William J. Kountz, who—along with Bofinger and Kleinfelter—was one of the most prominent antiunion rivermen. Sam’s next berth, at any rate, was a decided demotion.
He piloted the Arago—at 268 tons, less than one-third the size of the City of Memphis—on a pair of round-trips between July 28 and August 31. He seems to have compensated with a burlesque pilots’ column written with his partner J. W. Hood and printed over their signatures in the Missouri Republican the day before he left the boat. The piece was obviously written tongue in cheek. The pair invented steamboat names (e.g., the Grand Duke of Kiho, the Kangaroo Belle, and the Tommy-Whack) and mentioned fictitious landmarks (Dead Mare, Mud Bar, Wood Pile). They criticized the practice of some rivermen of running “pilot factories” to train more men than needed in the profession. Sam saluted some of the other boats he had piloted, including the City of Memphis, the John H. Dickey, the Edward J. Gay, the D. A. January, the William M. Morrison, and the J. C. Swon. Aboard the Gay they saw “our distinguished fellow-citizen” and Sam’s old friend Beck Jolly, who was “on his way to Japan”—a private joke. (Sam would describe Jolly as “the brilliant Chinese linguist & the dreaded scourge of the nations of the Orient” in a letter to Will Bowen in August 1866.) They even bragged about the speed of their little boat and mentioned by name vessels they passed on the river. But in a couple of references to boats run aground, Sam took apparent revenge on Kountz. On Sam’s first trip aboard the Arago, the boat assisted the City of Memphis, stuck on a sandbar near Greenville, Mississippi, by helping to off-load part of its cargo so it would float free. The owners of the Arago were paid $1,300 for this aid. Sam and his copilot Wesley Jacobs obliquely alluded to the incident in the Missouri Republican when they reported finding a ship named the Tycoon beached with its captain, a moss-bound old relic like Isaiah Sellers, confidentially predicting “that in his opinion if he did not stay there long, he would probably get off shortly.” They punctuated the satire with some sexually suggestive, even risqué, humor when they reported that the mythological Saltpetre, named for a reputed anaphrodisiac, was “hard aground at Seven-Up” with the North Wester “pulling at her.” But the headstrong Sam lasted barely a month on the Arago. He bickered with George Sloan, the captain and part owner of the boat. “I have disobeyed the Captain’s orders over and over again,” he wrote Belle Stotts, “and I am ready now to quarrel with anybody in the world that can’t whip me.”46 He may have cost the company time and money by his refusal to take risks so Sloan replaced him with a pilot more amenable to instruction.
Sam’s last berth was probably aboard the 493-ton Alonzo Child, again copiloting with Bixby and the Bowen brothers, on nine round-trips plus a final leg from St. Louis to New Orleans between September 19, 1860, and May 8, 1861. The Child was, according to the French-language newspaper L’Abeille of New Orleans, “a fine and fleet steamer” and “a universally favorite packet,” partly for the cuisine served in its dining room. The pantry on the boat apparently whetted Sam’s taste for fine foods. On September 28, during his first layover in New Orleans as Bixby’s partner on the Child, they splurged with two other pilots on a ten-dollar, four-hour meal at a French restaurant where they enjoyed “sheep-head-fish with mushrooms, shrimps and oysters—birds” and sipped “coffee with brandy burnt in it, &c &c.” Sam begged Orion to “breathe it not unto Ma!”47 It was a far cry from his fare in Ament’s kitchen a dozen years earlier—and a foretaste of the lavish dinners he would enjoy years later at Delmonico’s in New York City.
The Child was the only boat Sam piloted in partnership with Bixby after he earned his license, a salient detail because Sam still owed Bixby four hundred of the five hundred dollars he had promised to pay him to learn the river. Bixby remembered later that “he was my partner, although I was in charge,” and his salary “was two hundred a month.” To erase the debt, Bixby apparently collected two hundred dollars of Sam’s salary aboard the Child and gave Sam a receipt for the money.48 Rather than acknowledge payment on Sam’s debt, however, Bixby’s note seemed to suggest that he had borrowed the money, and it soon became a bone of contention.
In November, perhaps to compensate for the wages Bixby had appropriated from him, Sam tried to exploit the speed of the Child to his advantage. He invested in 3,600 dozen eggs, which he bought in St. Louis for fifteen cents per dozen and planned to resell in New Orleans for upwards of thirty-five cents per dozen, but he lost $150 on the gamble—another of the wildcat schemes to sour in his hands. The same month he suffered an even more serious misfortune: on November 11, the day after leaving New Orleans on the return leg of a round-trip, while running in dense fog and smoke and racing another boat some seventy miles, he grounded the Child near Baton Rouge so badly that it did not float free on the rising tide for an entire day. The accident also warped its hull. The Child was towed to dry-dock for repairs and was out of service until November 23. Sam was not punished for the accident, and he remained an officer aboard the Child, though to judge from circumstantial evidence, including a paragraph signed “Sam” that he may have contributed to the Missouri Democrat, he was apparently loaned to another owner to pilot the Sunshine on a single trip between St. Louis and Cairo.49
During a layover in New Orleans from January 24 to 29, 1861, he seems to have trolled the docks for female companionship. He reported to Orion, in a line charged with sexual double entendre, that he had been searching “among the shipping” for “beautiful figure-heads or paragons of nautical architecture.” During the week in the Crescent City he also visited the rooms of the psychic Madame Caprell in the French Quarter at the suggestion of his Hannibal friend Melicent Holliday. He wrote Orion afterward with the details of her reading. She advised him that he “should have been a lawyer”—the same profession Judge Thatcher recommends to Tom Sawyer. “You have written a great deal” and “you write well,” she added, “but you are rather out of practice; no matter—you will be in practice someday.” The tone of her predictions anticipates Jim’s hairball prophesies in Huck Finn. No doubt Sam smelled of cigar smoke, because she admonished him that he used “entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop it.” She “had the impudence to say” that he was “eternally falling in love” but would always think of his femme idéale “before I thought of my last new flame” and, “drat the woman, she did tell the truth, and I won’t deny it.” Sam “paid her and left—under the decided impression that going to the fortune-teller’s was just as good as going to the Opera, and cost scar
cely a trifle more.” He considered her an entertaining fraud—or, as he wrote Orion, “I’ve caught her up a played-out chute in a falling river.” He could not have known, though the Widow Holliday should have, the extent to which Madame Caprell was a deadbeat. Two years earlier, in late October 1858, she had visited Hannibal and held séances in the Planter’s House, one of the newest and nicest hotels in town, and prepared individualized horoscopes for some paying customers. “Many of our most eminent and respectable citizens” called on her, according to the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger. She even ran advertisements in the local papers. Then she skipped town without paying her hotel bill.50
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