by Ron Powers
* The nickname hung on the nativist American party by Horace Greeley, in reference to members’ penchant for saying, “I know nothing,” in response to all questions about their organization. Greeley intended the label as an indictment, but party members grew to like it.
8
The Language of Water
(1856–58)
Cincinnati was hardly a tourist mecca. Frances Trollope had been obliged to spend two years there in the 1830s, and found it boring. (“I never saw any people who appeared to live so much without amusement as the Cincinnatians. Billboards are forbidden by law, so are cards.”) Nevertheless, Sam spent a few months there, setting type for T. Wrightson and Company. Aside from a couple of Snodgrass letters to the Post and a sketch about life in a boardinghouse, he found little to write about. Henry wrote to him from Keokuk on January 23, 1857. The letter is the last of only three letters by him, and our only example of his mature “voice.” The diction reveals a literate (he’s read Henry IV), faintly ironic, and somewhat formal young man of eighteen.
My Dear Brother:
Your letters seem to be very strongly afflicted with a lying-in-the-pocket propensity; for no sooner had I read your last, but one, than it was consigned to one of the pockets of my overcoat, from whose “vasty depths” I have but this moment fished it up, to answer it. But I never did a wrong thing, for which I could not give at least a passable excuse, and this time I have even a better than usual. Several letters were at hand before yours, to which replies were long overdue, that I really feared to delay them longer; and you know enough about my “peculiar writing disposition,” as one of my Muscatine correspondents terms it, to know that it is a moral impossibility for me to write more than one letter in one day…
You seem to think Keokuk property is so good to speculate in, you’d better invest all your spare change in it, instead of going to South America.
Write soon
Your Brother
Henry.1
Sam had let Henry in on his plans the previous August. He had told Jane earlier, but had, as usual, kept Orion in the dark.
About two weeks later, on February 16, Sam resumed his southbound odyssey. He boarded a 353-ton packet, the Paul Jones, piloted by one Horace Bixby, and headed south and westward on the Ohio to Cairo, Illinois, and from there down the Mississippi to New Orleans, arriving on February 28.2 He expected to book passage for Brazil on some vessel leaving the Crescent City.
Just a few days later, on March 4, when Bixby’s upriver craft, the Colonel Crossman, eased its way off the levee at New Orleans for the return trip to St. Louis, it was steered by a new crew member: Sam Clemens. He had set aside his Amazon dreams and signed on as an apprentice to Bixby.
What is not so certain is exactly how Sam worked this transition. Biographer Albert Bigelow Paine gives it a kind of “creation story” twist that has remained among the most popular of Mark Twain myths: the gruff, grizzled pilot pulling his boat away from Cincinnati, being startled by an unfamiliar drawl, turning around to behold “a rather slender, loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great tangle of auburn hair,”3 who overcomes the veteran’s wary aloofness and charms his way into a “cub-pilot” arrangement: “Do you drink?” “No.” “Do you gamble?” “No, sir.” “Do you swear?” “Not for amusement; only under pressure.” “Do you chew?” “No, sir, never; but I must smoke.” “Did you ever do any steering?” “I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess.” “Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. Keep her as she is—toward that lower cottonwood snag.”4
Mark Twain recalled that his negotiations with Bixby were gradual—“at the end of three hard days he surrendered”5—that his mind was still fixed on getting to the Amazon until reality set in at New Orleans—“I couldn’t get to the Amazon…I went to Horace Bixby and asked him to make a pilot out of me”6—and, lastly, that he didn’t think to approach Bixby in the Crescent City until he was broke and a policeman threatened to run him in for vagrancy.7 What is clear is that he negotiated a two-year apprenticeship with Bixby, on the financial terms the pilot had stipulated: five hundred dollars payable over time, with a down payment of one hundred.
When the Colonel Crossman docked at St. Louis on March 15, Sam returned “with an air” to the city where he had labored just two years earlier as a low-rung printer. Along the way, he’d made sure that his silhouette, slouching nonchalantly about the pilothouse up on the third deck, was in clear view of any small boys who might be loitering on any passing levee. Sometime in the next six weeks, he borrowed the hundred dollars for the down payment from William Moffett, who was doing quite well as a commission merchant. Sam and Bixby headed onto the river again, this time on the Crescent City, which departed St. Louis on April 29. Sam was now embarked on the second of some 120 professional trips up and down the lower Mississippi River in almost four years, aboard fifteen and perhaps as many as nineteen different steamboats.* He served as a “cub pilot,” or steersman, for the first two years. His pilot’s license would be signed on April 9, 1859, and on May 4 he would make his inaugural run as a fully licensed pilot. He quit the river only after a Union cannonball whistled into the smokestack of the Nebraska (on which he was a passenger), the last boat to enjoy free passage upriver through the Union blockade at Memphis, in May 1861.
During this time Sam Clemens added a new field of information to the growing inventory stored in his mind. He learned the lower Mississippi River, all 1,200 miles of it, quite literally backward and forward. Admonished by his mentor Bixby to “get a little memorandum-book” after it became clear that Sam was not bothering to absorb the various navigation points as they passed,8 he got a series of them (only two of which survive), and filled them densely with semiencrypted notations that described the river, fathom by fathom, towhead by towhead, hill by hill, sycamore by sycamore, bayou by bayou, snag by snag, from north to south and—a different set of challenges entirely—from south to north. The small boy who had absorbed language like a rushing river had grown into a young man who was learning to absorb the minutiae of river navigation as a kind of language. In an exquisite aria that forever enshrined his passion for the life of a Mississippi steamboat pilot, Mark Twain wedded water and words.
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day…There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing…9
Sam Clemens’s piloting tenure was brief. Yet, as with his small-town newspapering period, he participated in a defining moment of 19th-century America—the Golden Age of riverboating. During these final antebellum years, nearly a thousand paddle-wheel steamers, owned by wealthy individuals, small business partnerships, and companies with interlinking interests in the railroads, crowded the Mississippi southward from St. Louis and formed a glittering universe. The steamboat was the first man-made apparatus to radically interrupt the arcadian wilderness, collapse vast distance, and discharge the artifacts of distant cultures into remote places. It was also the most awe-inspiring. “Floating palaces,” people called steamboats, and “moving mountains of light and flame.” To villagers and backwoods farmers whose daily prospect differed little from that of the aboriginals they had displaced, steamboats cracked through from some brilliant parallel universe: they subjugated the natural world under a spreading curtain of smoke, sparks, sound, and light. Steamboats reshaped much of America, economically and structurally. New Orleans was but the most dramatic creation. On the western rivers alone, steamboat commerce and steamboat-related industry galvanized and connected such outposts as Shreveport, Vicksburg, Natchez, Alton, St. Louis, Hannibal, Quincy, Cincinnati, Paducah, Galena, Nashville, Knoxville, Peoria, Omaha, St. Joseph, and Ro
ck Island.
The steamboat had a strong rival in the steam-driven locomotive. Trains were well on the way toward displacing the paddle wheelers by the time Sam began piloting. But the train lagged behind the boat in its initial impact. Railroad tracks took years to lay down. The steamboat arrived with its roadbed ready-made and open for business—albeit in constant change, which made pilots a necessity. If the river was, as T. S. Eliot later wrote, “a strong brown god,” the steamboat was the godhead.
MARK TWAIN’S steamboat years remained the most hallowed period of his life, and formed the epoch most often associated with him in American design and folklore: Mark Twain at the pilot wheel, Mark Twain under the belching twin smokestacks, Mark Twain in a riverman’s watch cap. “I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days,” he remembered, “and die at the wheel when my mission was ended.”10 The Mississippi River dominates two of his greatest books and infuses their prose with unforgettable imagery and narrative tension. Steamboats figure in more than half a dozen of his novels. Squire Hawkins takes his family aboard the Boreas on their journey to a new life, in The Gilded Age. On the first day, Squire Hawkins and his family experience the river’s wonders as an “ecstasy of enjoyment”:
When the sun went down it turned all the broad river to a national banner laid in gleaming bars of gold and purple and crimson; and in time these glories faded out in the twilight and left the fairy archipelagoes reflecting their fringing foliage in the steely mirror of the stream.11
Later, their boat engages another in a race; a boiler explodes on the rival Amaranth, and the conflagration spreads out of control.
Young Sam understood such hazards but, as with most river people, the attractions outweighed them. “A pilot, in those days,” Mark Twain wrote, “was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth…a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words.”12 Two of these titans in particular grabbed his fancy: Horace Bixby and, later on, an eloquent pilot named Isaiah Sellers.
Bixby towered over most of the river personalities of his era. Just thirty-one years old when Sam, aged twenty-one, stepped aboard his boat, he was already a legend in the trade. Born in Geneseo, New York, he’d run away as a boy to Cincinnati, where he worked in a tailor’s shop until he could find his way onto a steamboat. At eighteen, he broke into the trade as a lowly “mud clerk” for a packet on the Cincinnati–Kanawha River line. Within a few months he had become its pilot, an unusually rapid rise in status. The packet bore the interesting name Olivia.
Bixby was a compact tornado, a born overlord with tremendous willpower and icy courage, whose temper was offset by charm and wit. He was a small, sturdy man with heavy-lidded, appraising eyes set wide apart under bushy brows. He dressed for work in the elegant tradition of the piloting elite, those farmboys and peddlers’ sons turned regal on the river, in high starched collars, silk neckties, and stickpins. His piloting days didn’t end until two years after Mark Twain’s death in 1910.
Sam idolized Bixby. Bixby rousted Sam out of his bunk for midnight shifts; mimicked Sam’s drawl when the young man could not identify a point on the river; and once humiliated his apprentice with a hoax designed to test Sam’s presence of mind. The veteran pilot arranged with the “leadsman,” the deckhand who took constant soundings of the channel depth with a lead-weighted rope, to falsely cry out smaller and smaller depths as Sam manned the pilot wheel across a passage that he knew to be safe and deep. Sam gave into panic that overrode his judgment, and begged his engineer: “Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal soul out of her!”13 As the deck crew doubled over in laughter, Bixby materialized behind Sam to drive home the point about maintaining confidence in one’s knowledge.
Mid-19th-century Mississippi riverboats were dangerous paradoxes: they combined luxurious ornamentation and fragile construction; they offered sumptuous comfort side by side with constant peril. Some were bloated, unwieldy monsters, often more than 300 feet long and weighing more than 350 tons, with the occasional behemoth tipping the scales at twice that. Passengers and crew could number at least two hundred. The boats were designed not for minimal safety but for maximum profit: flat-bottomed, wooden-structured, and usually weighted down with cargo and people. Teaching a youthful ex-typesetter and humorous-sketch writer to maintain control of one was quite unambiguously a matter of life and death.
The Mississippi was not deep. Twenty feet was a good average channel depth, but that could rapidly decrease to four feet or less. Most big boats drew at least nine feet and therefore needed about twelve feet—two fathoms—“mark twain”—to float safely. Any lapse of judgment could ground the boat on a submerged sandbar or rip open the ship’s thin hull by a submerged tree branch, rock, or sunken steamboat. Underwater obstructions caused most riverboat disasters, followed by fires, collisions, and exploding boilers. Between 1811 and 1851, before owners began paying (a little) attention to safety measures, nearly a thousand boats snagged, caught fire, exploded, or collided on the western rivers, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The average lifespan of a Mississippi riverboat in the pre–Civil War era was less than five years. Ten of the fifteen riverboats known to be part of Sam Clemens’s steersman/piloting career were snagged, burned, destroyed by explosion, or disabled by collision on the river, although none while he was aboard. (Two more were sunk or burned by the Confederate military to prevent their capture during the Civil War.)
“When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography,” Mark Twain wrote, “I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.”14 Yet his writing doesn’t suggest much interest in life on the lower deck. He mimicked the hauteur of the steamboat ruling class, even as he satirized its members in memoir and fiction. His respectful descriptions of pilots and mates stand as the only authoritative portraiture of these fascinating American archetypes. He pays some attention to the folks who could afford cabin berths and the elegant meals in the brass-and-crystal dining rooms. The paying customers, many of them disreputable, or the menials, predominantly Negro, who served them, are with one exception absent.
Cargo, not passengers, was the profit center of steamboat companies. These boats hauled cotton and tobacco, flour, farm machinery, the U.S. mail, and livestock. The vessels, many of which could carry more than a thousand tons, were routinely loaded to the point where the lower decks were nearly flush with the surface of the river.
Prostitutes swarmed the river and the riverfronts of the 1850s. Prostitution was an inevitable by-product of the society that limited women’s careers outside marriage to laundress, domestic servant, or slave; a society in which the preferred approach to the marital act was in the dark, eyes averted; a society that enforced a rigid code of chastity in part by questioning the morals of women who looked into a gentleman’s eyes, glanced at themselves in the mirror, fussed with their hair or clothing, laughed immoderately, touched their conversational partner, rolled their eyes, took snuff, beat time with their feet or hands, shrugged, stamped their feet, or, God forbid, folded their shawl carefully upon entering a room “instead of throwing it with graceful negligence upon a table.”15
If he ever enjoyed the company of any Daughters of Desire on a boat, or along the seamy levees of river towns, Sam kept mum about it. In the chronicle of his middle-aged return to the Mississippi, he noted one of the river’s most notorious hellholes, the enclave of vice and violence known as Natchez-Under-the-Hill. He recalled its “desperate reputation” in the steamboating days of his youth—“plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days.”16 Not a mention of its main attraction.
On the “texas,” where the pilot wheel faced the oncoming river, Sam surrendered himself to the current. The never-ending glide ushered him past cities where whole neighborhoods of steamboats gently knocked against
one another in their slips on the levees, and then on into the infinite shoreline that unfolded bend by bend, island by island, the river giving up its literature to him at every turn. He cussed like the older men, smoked his cigars, and put on airs. A community formed around him, and it included members of his old Hannibal boyhood gang, the Bowen brothers. He filled his notebooks with the Mississippi’s secrets, writing in precise, encoded pencil notes. He hobnobbed with the freeloading off-duty pilots who often clustered in the pilot house under the pretense of “inspecting the river.” He read books, boned up on his French, and probably strummed a guitar.* He bought himself a blue serge jacket and white trousers.
On the first of June, 1857, the day he was to depart New Orleans for his fourth trip under Bixby, aboard the Crescent City, he wrote to “My Dear Friend Annie” Taylor with a brimming discharge of his recent experiences. He wrote about a stroll he took around the French market, wishing that he could meet some Keokuk girls, “as I used to meet them at market in the Gate City. But it could not be.”17 He did spot a couple of pretty girls he knew with their beaux, sipping coffee in a “stall,” the Starbucks of its day. The plentitude of the market overwhelmed him. “Everything was arranged in such beautiful order, and had such an air of cleanliness and neatness that it was a pleasure to wander among the stalls.”18 He inventoried it for Annie, and one can sense his ardency to make it all real and permanent on the page, as he tried to do with every sight, sound, and episode that fascinated him; to add them to “the multitudinous photographs one’s mind takes.”
Out on the pavement were groups of 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…anything you could possibly want—and keeping up a terrible din with their various cries.19