The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Sam delivered his first public speech on January 17, 1856, at a printers’ banquet at the Ivins House, the best hotel in Keokuk, to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the birth of Benjamin Franklin. Unfortunately, no transcript of the address survives, though Orion described it in the next issue of the Keokuk Gate City as “replete with wit and humor,” adding that it had been “interrupted by long and continuous bursts of applause.” One of Sam’s coworkers also remembered the occasion: “Blushing and slowly getting upon his feet, stammering in the start, he finally rallied his powers, and when he sat down, his speech was pronounced by all present a remarkable production of pathos and wit, the latter, however, predominating, convulsing his hearers with round after round of applause.” Sam was soon recruited to join a local debating society. Meanwhile, the printing of the city directory that he supervised, issued in June 1856, “did not pay largely,” according to Paine, because Orion “was always too eager for the work; too low in his bid for it.” Sam listed his own occupation in it as an “antiquarian.” The term is significant because, in one of his columns in the Hannibal Journal in May 1853, he had mentioned the recent discovery of “ruins of ancient cities” in Mexico—no doubt the allegedly lost Aztec city of Iximaya—that was the subject of Pedro Velasquez’s fanciful Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America (published in English in 1850). He added that the news would interest an “antiquarian,” his word for a type of explorer or anthropologist.29

  Predictably, then, when Sam came across a copy of William Herndon’s Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (1854) in Keokuk, he was excited and intrigued. A passage about coca, an unregulated drug sometimes used in patent medicines, galvanized his interest. In particular, Herndon related a story about a native who

  worked hard for five nights and days without intermission, except for two hours each night—and this without food. Immediately after the work the Indian accompanied him on a two-day journey of twenty-three leagues on foot, and then declared that he was ready to engage in the same amount of work, and go through it without food, if he were allowed an abundance of coca. This man was sixty-two years of age, and had never been sick in his life.

  According to Herndon, coca was “a powerful stimulant to the nervous system, and, like strong coffee or tea, to take away sleep; but, unlike tobacco and other stimulants, no one has known it to be injurious to the health.” To Sam it seemed a “marvelous herb” without any negative side effects, so he decided to emigrate to Brazil and become a coca farmer. “I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon” and “to open up a trade in coca with all the world,” he remembered. He nursed an ambition to explore the headwaters of the Amazon—or, more accurately, to exploit the narcotic effects of the coca plant for profit.30 He conspired in the scheme with a pair of potential partners, one of them Joseph S. Martin, a local Keokuk doctor and faculty member at Iowa Medical College. He also tried to entice his nineteen-year-old brother Henry to join the expedition, but Henry first asked his mother’s permission and approval. “If I have an opportunity to go, I am afraid it will not be easy to obtain Ma’s consent,” he advised Sam, and then he offered his own scrap of advice: “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.” In the end, Sam left Keokuk alone.31

  He embarked on his quixotic journey sometime before mid-October 1856. Later, in a characteristic embroidery of the facts, he claimed that he discovered a fifty-dollar banknote blowing in the wind that financed his excursion—“I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day,” lest the owner claim the note—but no evidence corroborates this story.32 Instead, Sam seems to have agreed to contribute a series of essays to the Keokuk Saturday Post for which he would be paid five dollars apiece. They were the first articles for which he was ever compensated. He boated south to St. Louis and, on October 13, he walked through the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association Fair and wrote up his observations of the “happily spent day” for the paper. Three of the next four pieces he sent the Saturday Post were published under the Dickensian pseudonym “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”—the nom de plume may allude to Jefferson’s auburn hair, the same color as Sam’s. Thomas Rees, son of George Rees, editor of the Saturday Post, boasted years later that his father had “discovered” Mark Twain. According to the son, “The firm of Rees & Son arranged with the young man to write some articles for publication in the Keokuk Post, which they mutually agreed would be worth five dollars each.” After submitting one or two from St. Louis, Sam demanded an increase in pay and Rees met his demand. He then submitted three more columns from Cincinnati and upped the ante by demanding ten or fifteen dollars for any additional columns. George Rees refused to meet his price and, as Thomas Rees put it, “the series of articles ended at that point.” Sam had overpriced his wares. It was his first clash with a publisher, but hardly his last. In his autobiographical dictation, Sam protested his innocence: “Did I write the rubbish with which Mr. Rees charges me? I suppose not. I have no reason to suppose that I wrote it, but I can’t say, and I don’t say that I didn’t write it.” He never denied categorically that he was the author of the Snodgrass letters, however, and he elsewhere reported that early in his career he had contributed to the Saturday Evening Post, an apparent misremembering of the Keokuk Saturday Post.33

  The Snodgrass letters are written in the voice of an unsophisticated rube, a backwoods bumpkin, a distant and intellectually stunted cousin of Huck Finn. The first of the three letters, written on October 18 after Sam attended a performance of Julius Caesar in St. Louis, burlesques Shakespeare. Snodgrass belonged to the cacographical “school of bad spelling” and dialect humor founded by such regional literary comedians as Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Josh Billings. Much of this comedy consists of mangled syntax and eye dialect (e.g., “dierrea” for “diary,” “Cashus” for “Cassius,” “wimmim” for “women,” “laffin” for “laughing,” etc.), a convention of Southwestern humor that Sam rarely (ab)used in the years to come. The second Snodgrass letter recounts his “voyage” from St. Louis to Cincinnati. Rather than rail directly from St. Louis to Cincinnati or catch a steamboat downstream to Cairo and up the Ohio River, however, Snodgrass (that is, Sam) took a much more circuitous route—from St. Louis to Keokuk in mid-October to see Rees and negotiate payment for the Snodgrass letters, back downstream to Quincy, then by rail to Chicago and Indianapolis, finally arriving in Cincinnati about October 24. He found work in the print shop of T. Wrightson & Co. on Walnut Street and a room in a boardinghouse three blocks away on Third Street. With five daily and fifteen weekly newspapers and a population of about 150,000, the Queen City was a publishing center for the western United States, with a lucrative job market for printers. Ironically, twenty-year-old W. D. Howells worked for a time a block away from Sam, though the two men would not meet formally for thirteen more years. Sam’s fellow boarders were, he remembered, “commonplace people of various ages and both sexes. They were full of bustle, frivolity, chatter and the joy of life and were good-natured, clean-minded and well-meaning; but they were oppressively uninteresting, for all that—with one exception.”34

  He soon befriended the exception, a Scot whom he later called Macfarlane—in fact, probably John J. McFarland, who was not only Sam’s fellow boarder but his coworker at Wrightson & Co. Macfarlane was a “diligent talker” about “forty years old—just double my age—but we were opposites in most ways and comrades from the start.” The winter of 1856–57, Sam reported in his third Snodgrass letter, was one of the harshest on record. (The coldest winter he ever spent was a winter in Cincinnati?) First the snow fell “tell you actilly couldn’t see the mud in the streets,” Snodgrass reported. “Next it kivered up and blotted out the sines, and continued on tell all the brick houses looked like the frame ones, and visy versy,” and eventually the “Ohio river was friz to the bottom.” Sam spent his evenings “by the wood fire in [Macfarlane’s] room, listening
in comfort to his tireless talk and to the dulled complainings of the winter storms until the clock struck ten.” While Macfarlane “had no humor, nor any comprehension of it,” he owned “two or three dozen weighty books—philosophies, histories, and scientific works.” Like Sam’s friend Jacob Burrough in St. Louis, Macfarlane was an autodidact and religious skeptic, and he espoused a primitive evolutionary theory:

  Macfarlane considered that the animal life in the world was developed in the course of aeons of time from a few microscopic seed germs, or perhaps one microscopic seed germ deposited upon the globe by the Creator in the dawn of time, and that this development was progressive upon an ascending scale toward ultimate perfection until man was reached; and that then the progressive scheme broke pitifully down and went to wreck and ruin! He said that man’s heart was the only bad heart in the animal kingdom; that man was the only animal capable of feeling malice, envy, vindictiveness, revengefulness, hatred, selfishness, the only animal that loved drunkenness, almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness and a filthy habitation, the sole animal in whom was fully developed the base instinct called patriotism, the sole animal that robs, persecutes, oppresses, and kills members of his own immediate tribe, the sole animal that steals and enslaves the members of any tribe.35

  Whether or not Sam accurately characterizes Macfarlane’s theory, he remembered it in a way that clearly resonated with his own subsequent reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and his convictions late in life about the “damned human race.”

  Sam paid a sixteen-dollar fare and on February 16, 1857, he finally left Cincinnati aboard the Paul Jones, a 353-ton side-wheeler traveling from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. From there he planned to embark on the next ship sailing for Para, Brazil, and the Amazon. He described the steamboat in “Old Times on the Mississippi” as an “ancient tub,” and, following his lead, Paine described it as an “ancient little craft” and Samuel Charles Webster mocked it as the “ramshackle Paul Jones.” But Sam’s description of the ship was another example of his creative (mis)remembering. The ship had been built only two years earlier; it was piloted by one of the most respected officers on the river; and contemporary newspapers praised it as a “magnificent,” “first class,” and a “very staunch and pretty packet” with “finely furnished cabins” and “superb” dining.36

  During the twelve-day voyage from the Queen City to the Crescent City, including four days when the boat was aground on the rocks near Louisville, Sam ingratiated himself with one of the so-called knights of the tiller. Horace Bixby, only thirty at the time, “taught me how to steer the boat” during the trip, or so Sam claimed. He told Bixby that he was traveling to South America for his health, not to seek his fortune. Upon arriving in New Orleans on February 28, he quickly discovered that there was no passenger service to Brazil. In fact, he never would travel to South America. Most likely Sam did not ask Bixby to take him under his wing as a cub pilot until he had no other option. A day or two later, he found Bixby on the docks and “begged him to teach me the river.” He even invoked the name of his Hannibal friend Will Bowen, who had become a pilot, as a reference. Still, Bixby was initially reluctant. Sam struck him as “a big, shaggy-haired youth with a slow, drawling speech that was provoking to anyone that happened to be in a hurry,” Bixby remembered. “I told him that I did not want any assistant, as they were generally more in the way than anything else, and that the only way I would accept him would be for a money consideration.” Bixby finally agreed to “instruct him till he became a competent pilot” on the lower Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans for $500, “not to include his expenses, except for meals on board. In port he was to look out for himself.” Sam, who had no ready money except the $30 in his pocket, counteroffered Bixby his building lots in Keokuk or two thousand acres of the Tennessee land. Bixby “didn’t want the real estate,” as he put it, so Sam “planned a siege” before Bixby left New Orleans to pilot the Colonel Crossman, a 415-ton steamer, north to St. Louis. At the end of three days of onshore negotiations they compromised: $100 down, an additional $75 in six months, $75 more at the end of a year, and the balance of $250 after he earned his pilot’s license and began to collect a salary. “I liked him,” Bixby admitted, “and the more he talked the more anxious I got for him to try his hand.” Bixby drew up a contract to formalize their agreement, which he locked away, “and neither [Sam] nor I have seen it to this day,” he conceded in 1902. Sam was aboard the Crossman as an apprentice or cub pilot when it cast off on March 4. After it docked in St. Louis on March 15, Sam borrowed the down payment from Will Moffett and, at the age of twenty-one, launched a new career.37

  When Sam reported to his friends and family that he planned to become a pilot on the lower Mississippi, their responses were mixed. Annie Taylor broke off their relationship, perhaps because there was no telling when he would next be in Keokuk, or perhaps because she no longer considered a boatman her social or intellectual equal, though she saved a pair of his letters to the end of her life. His niece Annie Moffett remembered that in St. Louis “everyone was running up and down stairs and sitting on the steps to talk over the news. Piloting in those days was a dramatic and well-paid profession, and in a river town it was a great honor to have a pilot in the family.” His mother, on the other hand, was dismayed. “I gave him up then,” she told an interviewer, “for I always thought steamboating was a wicked business and was sure he would meet bad associates.”38 According to a joke at the time, rivermen were like the river: shallowest and dirtiest at the mouth. Still, there is no evidence that Jane released Sam from his oaths to avoid gambling and drinking hard liquor—nor, for that matter, that he began to violate either oath.

  CHAPTER 5

  The River

  When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.

  —Life on the Mississippi

  “I PUT SAM TO work right away,” Horace Bixby boasted. “In all my time I never knew a man who took to the labor of piloting with so little effort. He was born for it, just as some men are born to make poetry and some to paint pictures.” On his part, Samuel Clemens was hardly so sanguine:

  I entered upon the small enterprise of “learning” twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide.

  Sam was capable of prodigious feats of memory even while harboring an appalling ignorance. “Every pilot had to carry in his head thousands of details of that great river—details, moreover, that were always changing,” he argued on the one hand. Or, as he explained in Life on the Mississippi (1883),

  I think a pilot’s memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart, and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot’s massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvellous facility in the handling of it.

  On the other hand, Sam was never familiar with the technical details about the operation of a steamboat. He conceded years later that he “never learned all the parts of a boat,” rather like a race car driver who could not repair his own vehicle but could keep it in a groove around the track: “Names of parts were . . . in my ear daily whose office & locality I was ignorant of, & I never inquired the meaning of those names.” Neither Bixby nor Sam mentioned in retrospect that the so-called lightning pilot began to teach the river to Sam in the spring, the season of high water, when dangers to boat, cargo, passengers, and crew were negligible.1

  In fact, piloting a steamboat
at most times of the year was an extremely hazardous occupation. The boats were hardly the “floating palaces” of legend, but mostly cheaply constructed, wooden, rickety tinderboxes. As Robert Sattelmeyer explains, “Boats were profitable to the extent that they ran risks: carrying too much steam, overloading freight or passengers, running dangerous chutes to save time, venturing into rivers at marginal water levels, and so forth. . . . Not surprisingly, the life expectancy of a Mississippi steamboat was four to five years.” Flimsily built with flat bottoms to glide over sandbars, steamboats might sink in as little as three or four feet of water. About a thousand steamboat accidents—on average, one every two weeks—were reported on western rivers between 1811 and 1851, and the remains of some two hundred wrecked steamboats were submerged between St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois, a distance of only about two hundred miles. As Bernard DeVoto notes, of the thousand boats that plied the Mississippi when Sam worked the river, “the soundly built boat was the exception, a product of occasional pride or responsibility; the average boat was assembled from inferior timber and machinery, thrown together with the least possible expense, and hurried out to snare her portion of the unimaginable profits before her seams opened or her boiler heads blew off. Once launched, she entered a competition ruthless and inconceivably corrupt.” Captains and pilots were personally liable to criminal and civil penalties in the event of accidents, including explosions, and unless they owned part of the boat they enjoyed “minimal job security, berths that were usually transient, [and] wages that fluctuated greatly.” For two years after he earned his pilot’s license, Sam earned a salary equal to that of the vice president of the United States or an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court while at work, but his periods of employment were punctuated by unpaid layoffs and layovers. His workday was divided into six four-hour shifts—three shifts on duty, the other three devoted to sleep and a little leisure. Riverboat officers were also liable to be punished for their support of unionization, and while in port pilots were subject to the orders of their captains. Gambling and prostitution flourished on the boats and in the towns along the river, and Sam was complicit in “this trade in greed and corruption” during a formative era of his life. Yet he omitted “the squalid venery” of the boating profession, as DeVoto called it, from both his extant private letters of the period and from Life on the Mississippi, his most complete public account of his piloting career.2