When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades
in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was to be
a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were
only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to
become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that ever came to our
section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we
had a hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be
pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition
to be a steamboatman always remained.
My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed the
power of life and death over all men, and could hang anybody that
offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but
the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. I first
wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come out with a white apron on
and shake a tablecloth over the side, where all my old comrades could
see me; later I thought I would rather be the deckhand who stood on the
end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was
particularly conspicuous. But these were only day-dreams—they were too
heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities. By and by one of our
boys went away. He was not heard of for a long time. At last he turned
up as apprentice engineer or “striker” on a steamboat. This thing shook
the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been
notoriously worldly, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this
eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery.
This creature’s career could produce but one result, and it speedily
followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister’s son
became an engineer. The doctor’s and the postmaster’s sons became “mud
clerks”; the wholesale liquor dealer’s son became a barkeeper on a boat;
four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge,
became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even
in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary—from a hundred and
fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two
months of his wages would pay a preacher’s salary for a year. Now some
of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river—at least our
parents would not let us.
So, by and by, I ran away. I said I would never come home again till I
was a pilot and could come in glory.