“Every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through that tangled
place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do you reckon I
can remember such a mess as that?”
“My boy, you’ve got to remember it. You’ve got to remember the exact
spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest
water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis
and New Orleans; and you mustn’t get the shoal soundings and marks of
one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another,
either, for they’re not often twice alike. You must keep them
separate.”
When I came to myself again, I said:
“When I get so that I can do that, I’ll be able to raise the dead, and
then I won’t have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to
retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I’m only
fit for a roustabout. I haven’t got brains enough to be a pilot; and if
I had I wouldn’t have strength enough to carry them around, unless I
went on crutches.”
“Now drop that! When I say I’ll learn a man the river I mean it. And
you can depend on it, I’ll learn him or kill him.”
We have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very
positive importance here. It is one of the most luminous in the book so
far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows
better than could any other combination of words something of what is
required of the learner. It does not cover the whole problem, by any
means—Mark Twain himself could not present that; and even considering
his old-time love of the river and the pilot’s trade, it is still
incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he
did, against such obstacles.
XXIV
THE RIVER CURRICULUM
He acquired other kinds of knowledge. As the streets of Hannibal in
those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had
taught him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river
furnished an added course to that vigorous education. Morally, its
atmosphere could not be said to be an improvement on the others.
Navigation in the West had begun with crafts of the flat-boat
type—their navigators rude, hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless
fighters, barbaric in their sports, coarse in their wit, profane in
everything. Steam-boatmen were the natural successors of these
pioneers—a shade less coarse, a thought less profane, a veneer less
barbaric. But these things were mainly “above stairs.” You had but to
scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to find the old keel-boatman
savagery. Captains were overlords, and pilots kings in this estate; but
they were not angels. In Life on the Mississippi Clemens refers to his
chief’s explosive vocabulary and tells us how he envied the mate’s
manner of giving an order. It was easier to acquire those things than
piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. One could improve upon them, too,
with imagination and wit and a natural gift for terms. That Samuel
Clemens maintained his promise as to drink and cards during those
apprentice days is something worth remembering; and if he did not
always restrict his profanity to moments of severe pressure or sift the
quality of his wit, we may also remember that he was an extreme example
of a human being, in that formative stage which gathers all as grist,
later to refine it for the uses and delights of men.
He acquired a vast knowledge of human character. He says:
In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly
acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be
found in fiction, biography, or history. 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.
Undoubtedly the river was a great school for the study of life’s
broader philosophies and humors: philosophies that avoid vague
circumlocution and aim at direct and sure results; humors of the rugged
and vigorous sort that in Europe are known as “American” and in America
are known as “Western.” Let us be thankful that Mark Twain’s school was
no less than it was—and no more.
The demands of the Missouri River trade took Horace Bixby away from the
Mississippi, somewhat later, and he consigned his pupil, according to
custom, to another pilot—it is not certain, now, to just which pilot,
but probably to Zeb Leavenworth or Beck Jolly, of the John J. Roe. The
Roe was a freight-boat, “as slow as an island and as comfortable as a
farm.” In fact, the Roe was owned and conducted by farmers, and Sam
Clemens thought if John Quarles’s farm could be set afloat it would
greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship,
hospitality, and speed. It was said of her that up-stream she could
even beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake
the current, but was a “love of a steamboat” nevertheless. The Roe was
not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen “family
guests” aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and
moonlight frolics, also a piano in the cabin. The young pilot sometimes
played on the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the
“grasshopper on the sweet-potato vine,” or to an old horse by the name
of Methusalem:
Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,
A long time ago.
There were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty
much alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical,
and his efforts won him laurels. He had a heavenly time on the John J.
Roe, and then came what seemed inferno by contrast. Bixby returned,
made a trip or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a
man named Brown. Brown had a berth on the fine new steamer
Pennsylvania, one of the handsomest boats on the river, and young
Clemens had become a fine steersman, so it is not unlikely that both
men at first were gratified by the arrangement.
But Brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and
malicious. In the Mississippi book the author gives his first interview
with Brown, also his last one. For good reasons these occasions were
burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially
correct. Brown had an offensive manner. His first greeting was a surly
question.
“Are you Horace Bigsby’s cub?”
“Bixby” was usually pronounced “Bigsby” on the river, but Brown made it
especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and
orders still more odious. His subordinate soon learned to detest him
thoroughly. It was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable
deportment—custom, discipline, even the law, required that—but it must
have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during
those early months of 1858, restraining himself from the gratification
of slaying Brown. Time would bring revenge—a tragic revenge and at a
fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time
planning punishments of his own.
I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that,
and that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed.
Instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw
business aside for pleasure and killed Brown. I killed Brown every
night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and
picturesque ones—ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of
design and ghastly for situation and environment.
Once when Brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went
to bed and killed him in “seventeen different ways—all of them new.”
He had made an effort at first to please Brown, but it was no use.
Brown was the sort of a man that refused to be pleased; no matter how
carefully his subordinate steered, he as always at him.
“Here,” he would shout, “where are you going now? Pull her down! Pull
her down! Don’t you hear me? Dod-derned mud-cat!”
His assistant lost all desire to be obliging to such a person and even
took occasion now and then to stir him up. One day they were steaming
up the river when Brown noticed that the boat seemed to be heading
toward some unusual point.
“Here, where are you heading for now?” he yelled. “What in nation are
you steerin’ at, anyway? Deyned numskull!”
“Why,” said Sam, in unruffled deliberation, “I didn’t see much else I
could steer for, and I was heading for that white heifer on the bank.”
“Get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilothouse!” yelled
Brown. “You ain’t fit to become no pilot!”
Which was what Sam wanted. Any temporary relief from the carping
tyranny of Brown was welcome.
He had been on the river nearly a year now, and, though universally
liked and accounted a fine steersman, he was receiving no wages. There
had been small need of money for a while, for he had no board to pay;
but clothes wear out at last, and there were certain incidentals. The
Pennsylvania made a round trip in about thirty-five days, with a day or
two of idle time at either end. The young pilot found that he could get
night employment, watching freight on the New Orleans levee, and thus
earn from two and a half to three dollars for each night’s watch.
Sometimes there would be two nights, and with a capital of five or six
dollars he accounted himself rich.
“It was a desolate experience,” he said, long afterward, “watching
there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a
living creature astir. But it was not a profitless one: I used to have
inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all
sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things got into my books
by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effect
of those nights through most of my books in one way and another.”
Many of the curious tales in the latter half of the Mississippi book
came out of those long night-watches. It was a good time to think of
such things.
XXV
LOVE-MAKING AND ADVENTURE
Of course, life with Brown was not all sorrow. At either end of the
trip there was respite and recreation. In St. Louis, at Pamela’s there
was likely to be company: Hannibal friends mostly, schoolmates—girls,
of course. At New Orleans he visited friendly boats, especially the
John J. Roe, where he was generously welcomed. One such visit on the
Roe he never forgot. A young girl was among the boat’s guests that trip
—another Laura, fifteen, winning, delightful. They met, and were
mutually attracted; in the life of each it was one of those bright
spots which are likely to come in youth: one of those sudden, brief
periods of romance, love—call it what you will the thing that leads to
marriage, if pursued.
“I was not four inches from that girl’s elbow during our waking hours
for the next three days.”
Then came a sudden interruption: Zeb Leavenworth came flying aft
shouting:
“The Pennsylvania is backing out.”
A flutter of emotion, a fleeting good-by, a flight across the decks, a
flying leap from romance back to reality, and it was all over. He wrote
her, but received no reply. He never saw her again, never heard from
her for forty-eight years, when both were married, widowed, and old.
She had not received his letter.
Even on the Pennsylvania life had its interests. A letter dated March
9, 1858, recounts a delightfully dangerous night-adventure in the
steamer’s yawl, hunting for soundings in the running ice.
Then the fun commenced. We made fast a line 20 fathoms long, to the bow
of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses on the
shore. Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep her
head out, and I took the tiller. We would start the men, and all would
go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of ice, and then
the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brown assumed the
horizontal in the bottom of the boat. After an hour’s hard work we got
back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars. Sent back and warped up
the other yawl, and then George (George Ealer, the other pilot) and
myself took a double crew of fresh men and tried it again. This time we
found the channel in less than half an hour, and landed on an island
till the Pennsylvania came along and took us off. The next day was
colder still. I was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but
the infernal steamboat came near running over us…. We sounded Hat
Island, warped up around a bar, and sounded again—but in order to
understand our situation you will have to read Dr. Kane. It would have
been impossible to get back to the boat. But the Maria Denning was
aground at the head of the island—they hailed us—we ran alongside, and
they hoisted us in and thawed us out. We had then been out in the yawl
from four o’clock in the morning till half past nine without being near
a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over men, and yawl, ropes and
everything else, and we looked like rock-candy statuary.
This was the sort of thing he loved in those days. We feel the writer’s
evident joy and pride in it. In the same letter he says: “I can’t
correspond with the paper, because when one is learning the river he is
not allowed to do or think about anything else.” Then he mentions his
brother Henry, and we get the beginning of that tragic episode for
which, though blameless, Samuel Clemens always held himself
responsible.
Henry was doing little or nothing here (St. Louis), and I sent him to
our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles, counting
coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which he performed
satisfactorily. He may go down with us again.
Henry Clemens was about twenty at this time, a handsome, attractive boy
of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud. He did go on the next
trip and continued to go regularly after that, as third clerk in line
of promotion. It was a bright spot in those hard days with Brown to
have Henry along. The boys spent a good deal of their leisure with the
other pilot, George Ealer, who “was as kindhearted as Brown wasn’t,”
and quoted Shakespeare and Goldsmith, and played the flute to his
fascinated and inspiring audience. These were things worth while. The
young steersman could not guess that the shadow of a long sorrow was
even then stretching across the path ahead.
Yet in due time he received a warning, a remarkable and impressive
warning, though of a kind seldom heeded. One night, when the
Pennsylvania lay in St. Louis, he slept at his sister’s house and had
this vivid dream:
He saw Henry, a corpse, lying in a metallic burial case in the
sitting-room, supported on two chairs. On his breast lay a bouquet of
flowers, white, with a single crimson bloom in the center.
When he awoke, it was morning, but the dream was so vivid that he
believed it real. Perhaps something of the old hypnotic condition was
upon him, for he rose and dressed, thinking he would go in and look at
his dead brother. Instead, he went out on the street in the early
morning and had walked to the middle of the block before it suddenly
flashed upon him that it was only a dream. He bounded back, rushed to
the sitting-room, and felt a great trembling revulsion of joy when he
found it really empty. He told Pamela the dream, then put it out of his
mind as quickly as he could. The Pennsylvania sailed from St. Louis as
usual, and made a safe trip to New Orleans.
A safe trip, but an eventful one; on it occurred that last interview
with Brown, already mentioned. It is recorded in the Mississippi book,
but cannot be omitted here. Somewhere down the river (it was in Eagle
Bend) Henry appeared on the hurricane deck to bring an order from the
captain for a landing to be made a little lower down. Brown was
somewhat deaf, but would never confess it. He may not have understood
the order; at all events he gave no sign of having heard it, and went
straight ahead. He disliked Henry as he disliked everybody of finer
grain than himself, and in any case was too arrogant to ask for a
repetition. They were passing the landing when Captain Klinefelter
appeared on deck and called to him to let the boat come around, adding:
“Didn’t Henry tell you to land here?”
“No, sir.”
Captain. Klinefelter turned to Sam:
“Didn’t you hear him?”
“Yes, sir.”
Brown said: “Shut your mouth! You never heard anything of the kind.”
By and by Henry came into the pilot-house, unaware of any trouble.
Brown set upon him in his ugliest manner.
“Here, why didn’t you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?”
he demanded.
Henry was always polite, always gentle.
“I did tell you, Mr. Brown.”
“It’s a lie.”
Sam Clemens could stand Brown’s abuse of himself, but not of Henry. He
said: “You lie yourself. He did tell you.”
Brown was dazed for a moment and then he shouted:
“I’ll attend to your case in half a minute!” and ordered Henry out of
the pilot-house.
The boy had started, when Brown suddenly seized him by the collar and
struck him in the face.* Instantly Sam was upon Brown, with a heavy
stool, and stretched him on the floor. Then all the bitterness and
indignation that had been smoldering for months flamed up, and, leaping
upon Brown and holding him with his knees, he pounded him with his
fists until strength and fury gave out. Brown struggled free, then, and
with pilot instinct sprang to the wheel, for the vessel had been
drifting and might have got into trouble. Seeing there was no further
danger, he seized a spy-glass as a weapon.
* In the Mississippi book the writer states that Brown started to
strike Henry with a large piece of coal; but, in a letter written soon
after the occurrence to Mrs. Orion Clemens, he says:
“Henry started out of the pilot-house-Brown jumped up and collared
him —turned him half-way around and struck him in the face!-and him
nearly six feet high-struck my little brother. I was wild from that
moment. I left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the
insult—and the captain said I was right.”
“Get out of this here pilot-house,” he raged.
But his subordinate was not afraid of him now.
“You should leave out the ‘here,’” he drawled, critically. “It is
understood, and not considered good English form.”
“Don’t you give me none of your airs,” yelled Brown. “I ain’t going to
stand nothing more from you.”
“You should say, ‘Don’t give me any of your airs,’” Sam said, sweetly,
“and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction.”
A group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck
forward, applauded the victor.
Brown turned to the wheel, raging and growling. Clemens went below,
where he expected Captain Klinefelter to put him in irons, perhaps, for
it was thought to be felony to strike a pilot. The officer took him
into his private room and closed the door. At first he looked at the
culprit thoughtfully, then he made some inquiries:
“Did you strike him first?” Captain Klinefelter asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“What with?”
“A stool, sir.”
“Hard?”
“Middling, sir.”
“Did it knock him down?”
“He—he fell, sir.”
“Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you do?”
“Pounded him, sir.”
“Pounded him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you pound him much—that is, severely?”
“One might call it that, sir, maybe.”
“I am deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that. You
have been guilty of a great crime; and don’t ever be guilty of it again
on this boat, but—lay for him ashore! Give him a good sound thrashing;
do you hear? I’ll pay the expenses.”*
* “Life on the Mississippi.”
Captain Klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard
him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him. Brown, of course,
forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the
trip “an emancipated slave” listening to George Ealer’s flute and his
readings from Goldsmith and Shakespeare; playing chess with him
sometimes, and learning a trick which he would use himself in the long
after-years—that of taking back the last move and running out the game
differently when he saw defeat.
Brown swore that he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens
remained on it, and Captain Klinefelter told Brown to go. Then when
another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain
offered to let Clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing
his confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been
only a little more than a year at the wheel. But Clemens himself had
less confidence and advised the captain to keep Brown back to St.
Louis. He would follow up the river by another boat and resume his
place as steersman when Brown was gone. Without knowing it, he may have
saved his life by that decision.
It is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though
some foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the
Pennsylvania sailed. Henry liked to join in the night-watches on the
levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked
the round chatting together. On this particular night the elder spoke
of disaster on the river. Finally he said:
“In case of accident, whatever you do, don’t lose your head—the
passengers will do that. Rush for the hurricane deck and to the
life-boat, and obey the mate’s orders. When the boat is launched, help
the women and children into it. Don’t get in yourself. The river is
only a mile wide. You can swim ashore easily enough.”
It was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow.
XXVI
THE TRAGEDY OF THE “PENNSYLVANIA”
Captain Klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the A. T. Lacey,
which left two days behind the Pennsylvania. This was pleasant, for
Bart Bowen had become captain of that fine boat. The Lacey touched at
Greenville, Mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted:
“The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island! One
hundred and fifty lives lost!”
Nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at Napoleon a
Memphis extra reported some of the particulars. Henry Clemens’s name
was mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury. Still farther up
the river they got a later extra. Henry was again mentioned; this time
as being scalded beyond recovery. By the time they reached Memphis they
knew most of the details: At six o’clock that warm mid-June morning,
while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis,
four out of eight of the Pennsylvania’s boilers had suddenly exploded
with fearful results. All the forward end of the boat had been blown
out. Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded
and crippled and would die. It was one of those hopeless, wholesale
steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the
Mississippi a river of death and tears.
Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor
of an improvised hospital—a public hall—surrounded by more than thirty
others more or less desperately injured. He was told that Henry had
inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. His case was
considered hopeless.
Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the
explosion. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred
yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself
unhurt, he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. What
he did after that could not be clearly learned. The vessel had taken
fire; the rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still
attached to the wreck. The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all
who could be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut
adrift and landed. There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun
many hours until help could come. Henry was among those who were
insensible by that time. Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first
and had been scalded in his work of rescue; it will never be known.
His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony
and remorse. He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry’s
presence on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for
his own absence when he might have been there to help and protect the
boy. He wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come,
but the doctors persuaded him to wait—just why, he never knew. He sent
word of the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk
and was in East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all
but hopeless task of trying to bring Henry back to life. Many Memphis
ladies were acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the
boy’s youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. Some
medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these also
took special interest in Henry’s case. Dr. Peyton, an old Memphis
practitioner, declared that with such care the boy might pull through.
But on the fourth night he was considered to be dying. Half delirious
with grief and the strain of watching, Samuel Clemens wrote to his
mother and to his sister-in-law in Tennessee. The letter to Orion
Clemens’s wife has been preserved.
MEMPHIS, TENN., _Friday, June_ 18, 1858.
DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,—Long before this reaches you my poor Henry—my
darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless
career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness.
The horrors of three days have swept over me—they have blasted my youth
and left me an old man before my time. Mollie, there are gray hairs in
my head to-night. For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my
poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of
my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair. Men take me by
the hand and congratulate me, and call me “lucky” because I was not on
the Pennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they know
not what they say.
I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans, and
I must tell you the truth, Mollie—three hundred human beings perished
by that fearful disaster. But may God bless Memphis, the noblest city
on the face of the earth. She has done her duty by these poor afflicted
creatures—especially Henry, for he has had five—aye, ten, fifteen,
twenty times the care and attention that any one else has had. Dr.
Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he is exactly like the portraits
of Webster), sat by him for 36 hours. There are 32 scalded men in that
room, and you would know Dr. Peyton better than I can describe him if
you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he passes, “May
the God of Heaven bless you, Doctor!” The ladies have done well, too.
Our second mate, a handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die.
Yesterday a beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side and
handed him a pretty bouquet. The poor suffering boy’s eyes kindled, his
lips quivered out a gentle “God bless you, Miss,” and he burst into
tears. He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not
forget it.
Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.
Your unfortunate brother,
SAML. L. CLEMENS.
P. S.—I got here two days after Henry.
But, alas, this was not all, nor the worst. It would seem that Samuel
Clemens’s cup of remorse must be always overfull. The final draft that
would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident
—the night that Henry died. He could never bring himself to write it.
He was never known to speak of it but twice.
Henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and
improved slowly that day and the next: Dr. Peyton came around about
eleven o’clock on the sixth night and made careful examination. He
said:
“I believe he is out of danger and will get well. He is likely to be
restless during the night; the groans and fretting of the others will
disturb him. If he cannot rest without it, tell the physician in charge
to give him one-eighth of a grain of morphine.”
The boy did wake during the night, and was disturbed by the complaining
of the other sufferers. His brother told the young medical student in
charge what the doctor had said about the morphine. But morphine was a
new drug then; the student hesitated, saying:
“I have no way of measuring. I don’t know how much an eighth of a grain
would be.”
Henry grew rapidly worse—more and more restless. His brother was half
beside himself with the torture of it. He went to the medical student.
“If you have studied drugs,” he said, “you ought to be able to judge an
eighth of a grain of morphine.”
The young man’s courage was over-swayed. He yielded and ladled out in
the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed
to be the right amount. Henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep. He
died before morning. His chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his
death was not necessarily due to the drug, but Samuel Clemens,
unsparing in his self-blame, all his days carried the burden of it.
He saw the boy taken to the dead room, then the long strain of grief,
the days and nights without sleep, the ghastly realization of the end
overcame him. A citizen of Memphis took him away in a kind of daze and
gave him a bed in his house, where he fell into a stupor of fatigue and
surrender. It was many hours before he woke; when he did, at last, he
dressed and went to where Henry lay. The coffin provided for the dead
were of unpainted wood, but the youth and striking face of Henry
Clemens had aroused a special interest. The ladies of Memphis had made
up a fund of sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic case. Samuel
Clemens entering, saw his brother lying exactly as he had seen him in
his dream, lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson
center—a detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment
an elderly lady came in with a large white bouquet, and in the center
of it was a single red rose.
Orion arrived from Tennessee, and the brothers took their sorrowful
burden to St. Louis, subsequently to Hannibal, his old home. The death
of this lovely boy was a heavy sorrow to the community where he was
known, for he had been a favorite with all.*
* For a fine characterization of Henry Clemens the reader is referred
to a letter written by Orion Clemens to Miss Wood. See Appendix A, at
the end of the last volume.
From Hannibal the family returned to Pamela’s home in St. Louis. There
one night Orion heard his brother moaning and grieving and walking the
floor of his room. By and by Sam came in to where Orion was. He could
endure it no longer, he said; he must, “tell somebody.”
Then he poured all the story of that last tragic night. It has been set
down here because it accounts for much in his after-life. It magnified
his natural compassion for the weakness and blunders of humanity, while
it increased the poor opinion implanted by the Scotchman Macfarlane of
the human being as a divine invention. Two of Mark Twain’s chief
characteristics were—consideration for the human species, and contempt
for it.
In many ways he never overcame the tragedy of Henry’s death. He never
really looked young again. Gray hairs had come, as he said, and they
did not disappear. His face took on the serious, pathetic look which
from that time it always had in repose. At twenty-three he looked
thirty. At thirty he looked nearer forty. After that the discrepancy in
age and looks became less notable. In vigor, complexion, and
temperament he was regarded in later life as young for his years, but
never in looks.
XXVII
THE PILOT
The young pilot returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer,
whom he loved, and in September of that year obtained a full license as
Mississippi River pilot.* Bixby had returned by this time, and they
were again together, first on the Crescent City, later on a fine new
boat called the New Falls City. Clemens was still a steersman when
Bixby returned; but as soon as his license was granted (September 9,
1858) his old chief took him as full partner.
* In Life on the Mississippi he gives his period of learning at from
two to two and a half years; but documentary evidence as well as Mr.
Bixby’s testimony places the apprenticeship at eighteen months
He was a pilot at last. In eighteen months he had packed away in his
head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that
confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river
sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all
those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off
and current, every depth of water—the whole story—by night and by day.
He could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the
water as an open page. At twenty-three he had acquired a profession
which surpassed all others for absolute sovereignty and yielded an
income equal to that then earned by the Vice-President of the United
States. Boys generally finish college at about that age, but it is not
likely that any boy ever finished college with the mass of practical
information and training that was stored away in Samuel Clemens’s head,
or with his knowledge of human nature, his preparation for battle with
the world.
“Not only was he a pilot, but a good one.” These are Horace Bixby’s
words, and he added:
“It is the fashion to-day to disparage Sam’s piloting. Men who were
born since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that Sam
was never much of a pilot. Most of them will tell you that he was never
a pilot at all. As a matter of fact, Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day
when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and
skill and application than it does now. There were no signal-lights
along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels;
everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of
snags and shifting sand—bars and changing shores, a pilot’s judgment
had to be founded on absolute certainty.”
He had plenty of money now. He could help his mother with a liberal
hand, and he did it. He helped Orion, too, with money and with advice.
From a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new
conditions. Orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects, and
the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to
renewed consistent effort:
What is a government without energy?—[he says]—. And what is a man
without energy? Nothing—nothing at all. What is the grandest thing in
“Paradise Lost”—the Arch-Fiend’s terrible energy! What was the greatest
feature in Napoleon’s character? His unconquerable energy! Sum all the
gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of
admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear
a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship it!
I want a man to—I want you to—take up a line of action, and follow
it out, in spite of the very devil.
Orion and his wife had returned to Keokuk by this time, waiting for
something in the way of a business opportunity.
His pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement
and council. Here and there he refers to the tragedy of Henry’s death,
and the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was
successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant. In the exhilaration
of youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural
human outlet, self-approval. He not only exhibits this weakness, but
confesses it with characteristic freedom.
Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than
otherwise—a notion which I was slow to take up. The other night I was
about to “round to” for a storm, but concluded that I could find a
smoother bank somewhere. I landed five miles below. The storm came,
passed away and did not injure us. Coming up, day before yesterday, I
looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees on the bank were
torn to shreds. We couldn’t have lived 5 minutes in such a tornado. And
I am also lucky in having a berth, while all the other young pilots are
idle. This is the luckiest circumstance that ever befell me. Not on
account of the wages—for that is a secondary consideration-but from the
fact that the City of Memphis is the largest boat in the trade, and the
hardest to pilot, and consequently I can get a reputation on her, which
is a thing I never could accomplish on a transient boat. I can “bank”
in the neighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me
for the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking
their fingers). Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!—and what
vast respect Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago, I could enter
the “Rooms,” and receive only the customary fraternal greeting now they
say, “Why, how are you, old fellow—when did you get in?”
And the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that I could
never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their
chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to “blow my horn,”
for I derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must confess
that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d—-d rascals
get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes
of smaller dimensions whose face I do not exhibit! You will despise
this egotism, but I tell you there is a “stern joy” in it.
We are dwelling on this period of Mark Twain’s life, for it was a
period that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years. He
became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its
influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of
his days. Moreover, it was his first period of great triumph. Where
before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner—now all in
a moment he had been transformed into a high chief. The fullest
ambition of his childhood had been realized—more than realized, for in
that day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately
proportions. Of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe
pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats.
Single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of
kings.
And we may pardon his vanity. He could hardly fail to feel his glory
and revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then
in the Association Rooms. To this day he is remembered as a figure
there, though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it
was not entirely because of his success. As the boys of Hannibal had
gathered around to listen when Sam Clemens began to speak, so we may be
certain that the pilots at St. Louis and New Orleans laid aside other
things when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell.
He was much given to spinning yarns—[writes one associate of those
days]—so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time
his own face was perfectly sober. If he laughed at all, it must have
been inside. It would have killed his hearers to do that. Occasionally
some of his droll yarns would get into the papers. He may have written
them himself.
Another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard Sam
Clemens tell:
We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents—we were always
talking of such things; then he said:
“Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An old man
leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. Everybody in the
crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. The ladders weren’t
long enough. Nobody had any presence of mind—nobody but me. I came to
the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came I threw the old man the
end of it. He caught it and I told him to tie it around his waist. He
did so, and I pulled him down.”
This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far.
Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for
Horace Bixby remembers that “Sam was always scribbling when not at the
wheel.”
But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge
it later—with one exception. The exception was not intended for
publication, either. It was a burlesque written for the amusement of
his immediate friends. He has told the story himself, more than once,
but it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general
circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the
best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain.
That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an
old pilot named Isaiah Sellers—a sort of “oldest inhabitant” of the
river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of
his reminiscent knowledge. He contributed paragraphs of general
information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and
signed them “Mark Twain.” They were quaintly egotistical in tone,
usually beginning: “My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New
Orleans,” and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as
1811.
Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young
pilots, who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general
attitude of speech. But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable
length a broadly burlesque imitation signed “Sergeant Fathom,” with an
introduction which referred to the said Fathom as “one of the oldest
cub pilots on the river.” The letter that followed related a perfectly
impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer “the
old first Jubilee” with a “Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew.” It is a
gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.*
* See Appendix B, at the end of the last volume.
The burlesque delighted Bart Bowen, who was Clemens’s pilot partner on
the Edward J. Gay at the time. He insisted on showing it to others and
finally upon printing it. Clemens was reluctant, but consented. It
appeared in the True Delta (May 8 or 9, 1859), and was widely and
boisterously enjoyed.
It broke Captain Sellers’s literary heart. He never contributed another
paragraph. Mark Twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his
own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he had
thoughtlessly wounded. If Captain Sellers has knowledge of material
matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to him,
and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have
achieved —immortality.
XXVIII
PILOTING AND PROPHECY
Those who knew Samuel Clemens best in those days say that he was a
slender, fine-looking man, well dressed—even dandified—given to patent
leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts. Old for his
years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in
the atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no
one, least of all to him. The pilots regarded him as a great reader—a
student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences—a young man
whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. When not
at the wheel, he was likely to be reading or telling yarns in the
Association Rooms.
He began the study of French one day when he passed a school of
languages, where three tongues, French, German, and Italian, were
taught, one in each of three rooms. The price was twenty-five dollars
for one language, or three for fifty dollars. The student was provided
with a set of cards for each room and supposed to walk from one
apartment to another, changing tongues at each threshold. With his
unusual enthusiasm and prodigality, the young pilot decided to take all
three languages, but after the first two or three round trips concluded
that for the present French would do. He did not return to the school,
but kept his cards and bought text-books. He must have studied pretty
faithfully when he was off watch and in port, for his river note-book
contains a French exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the
Dialogues of Voltaire.
This old note-book is interesting for other things. The notes are no
longer timid, hesitating memoranda, but vigorous records made with the
dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with
the authority of one in supreme command. Under the head of “2d
high-water trip—Jan., 1861—Alonzo Child,” we have the story of a rising
river with its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs—all
the circumstance and uncertainty of change.
Good deal of water all over Coles Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft. bank —could
have gone up shore above General Taylor’s—too much drift….
Night—didn’t run either 77 or 76 towheads—8 ft. bank on main shore
Ozark Chute….
And so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda. It means little
enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the
swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in
place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers,
picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know every
foot as well as a man knows the hall of his own home. All the
qualifications must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and
the high art of steering. “Steering is a very high, art,” he says; “one
must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat’s stern if he wants to
get up the river fast.”
He had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the
Alonzo Child. Nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the
dark, he recalled it. He said:
“There was a pilot in those days by the name of Jack Leonard who was a
perfectly wonderful creature. I do not know that Jack knew anymore
about the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water
any better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability,
and I think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the
darkness.
“I had never seen Leonard steer, but I had heard a good deal about it.
I had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat—one that would
kill any other man to handle—would obey and be as docile as a child
when Jack Leonard took the wheel. I had a chance one night to verify
that for myself. We were going up the river, and it was one of the
nastiest nights I ever saw. Besides that, the boat was loaded in such a
way that she steered very hard, and I was half blind and crazy trying
to locate the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in
it. It was one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever
way you look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees
and where the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the
same height —all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to
put it—and not a thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of
the real shape of the river. Some of the boats had what they call a
‘night hawk’ on the jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was
in the right position against the sky or the water, though it seldom
was in the right position and was generally pretty useless.
“I was in a bad way that night and wondering how I could ever get
through it, when the pilot-house door opened, and Jack Leonard walked
in. He was a passenger that trip, and I had forgotten he was aboard. I
was just about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one
way, then another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing
it like a squirrel.
“‘Sam,’ he said, ‘let me take the wheel. Maybe I have been over this
place since you have.’
“I didn’t argue the question. Jack took the wheel, gave it a little
turn one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down
as quietly as a lamb—went right along as if it had been broad daylight
in a river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one
could possibly hit. I never saw anything so beautiful. He stayed my
watch out for me, and I hope I was decently grateful. I have never
forgotten it.”
The old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but
there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or when
the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of
speculative dreams. He was always speculating; the planets and the
remote suns were always a marvel to him. A love of astronomy—the
romance of it, its vast distances, and its possibilities—began with
those lonely river-watches and never waned to his last day. For a time
a great comet blazed in the heavens, a “wonderful sheaf of light” that
glorified his lonely watch. Night after night he watched it as it
developed and then grew dim, and he read eagerly all the comet
literature that came to his hand, then or afterward. He speculated of
many things: of life, death, the reason of existence, of creation, the
ways of Providence and Destiny. It was a fruitful time for such
meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger philosophies that
would find expression later, when the years had conferred the magic
gift of phrase.
Life lay all ahead of him then, and during those still watches he must
have revolved many theories of how the future should be met and
mastered. In the old notebook there still remains a well-worn clipping,
the words of some unknown writer, which he had preserved and may have
consulted as a sort of creed. It is an interesting little document—a
prophetic one, the reader may concede:
HOW TO TAKE LIFE.—Take it just as though it was—as it is—an earnest,
vital, and important affair. Take it as though you were born to the
task of performing a merry part in it—as though the world had awaited
for your coming. Take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and
achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes; to help and cheer a
suffering, weary, it may be heartbroken, brother. Now and then a man
stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly,
confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect,
skill, greatness of some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes,
and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life
with a purpose. The miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to
be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the
promptings of a brave, determined spirit.
The old note-book contains no record of disasters. Horace Bixby, who
should know, has declared:
“Sam Clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot,
except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane)
smoke, with no damage to anybody though of course there was some good
luck in that too, for the best pilots do not escape trouble, now and
then.”
Bixby and Clemens were together that winter on the Alonzo Child, and a
letter to Orion contains an account of great feasting which the two
enjoyed at a “French restaurant” in New Orleans—“dissipating on a
ten-dollar dinner—tell it not to Ma!”—where they had sheepshead fish,
oysters, birds, mushrooms, and what not, “after which the day was too
far gone to do anything.” So it appears that he was not always reading
Macaulay or studying French and astronomy, but sometimes went frivoling
with his old chief, now his chum, always his dear friend.
Another letter records a visit with Pamela to a picture-gallery in St.
Louis where was being exhibited Church’s “Heart of the Andes.” He
describes the picture in detail and with vast enthusiasm.
“I have seen it several times,” he concludes, “but it is always a new
picture—totally new—you seem to see nothing the second time that you
saw the first.”
Further along he tells of having taken his mother and the girls—his
cousin Ella Creel and another—for a trip down the river to New Orleans.
Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls
for allowing me to embrace and kiss them—and she was horrified at the
‘schottische’ as performed by Miss Castle and myself. She was perfectly
willing for me to dance until 12 o’clock at the imminent peril of my
going to sleep on the after-watch—but then she would top off with a
very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific
broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the ‘schottische’.
I took Ma and the girls in a carriage round that portion of New Orleans
where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and, although
it was a blazing hot, dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted. To use
an expression which is commonly ignored in polite society, they were
“hell-bent” on stealing some of the luscious-looking oranges from
branches which overhung the fence, but I restrained them.
In another letter of this period we get a hint of the future Mark
Twain. It was written to John T. Moore, a young clerk on the John J.
Roe.
What a fool old Adam was. Had everything his own way; had succeeded in
gaining the love of the best-looking girl in the neighborhood, but yet,
unsatisfied with his conquest, he had to eat a miserable little apple.
Ah, John, if you had been in his place you would not have eaten a
mouthful of the apple—that is, if it had required any exertion. I have
noticed that you shun exertion. There comes in the difference between
us. I court exertion. I love work. Why, sir, when I have a piece of
work to perform, I go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse
over the coming enjoyment. Sometimes I am so industrious that I muse
too long.
There remains another letter of this period—a sufficiently curious
document. There was in those days a famous New Orleans clairvoyant
known as Madame Caprell. Some of the young pilot’s friends had visited
her and obtained what seemed to be satisfying results. From time to
time they had urged him to visit the fortune-teller, and one idle day
he concluded to make the experiment. As soon as he came away he wrote
to Orion in detail.
She’s a very pleasant little lady—rather pretty—about 28—say 5 feet 2
1/4—would weigh 116—has black eyes and hair—is polite and
intelligent—used good language, and talks much faster than I do.
She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we
were alone. We sat down facing each other. Then she asked my age. Then
she put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced talking as if
she had a good deal to say and not much time to say it in. Something
after this style:
‘Madame.’ Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the
water; but you should have been a lawyer—there is where your talents
lie; you might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or as an
editor—, you have written a great deal; you write well—but you are
rather out of practice; no matter—you will be in practice some day; you
have a superb constitution, and as excellent health as any man in the
world; you have great powers of endurance; in your profession your
strength holds out against the longest sieges without flagging; still,
the upper part of your lungs, the top of them, is slightly affected—you
must take care of yourself; you do not drink, but you use entirely too
much tobacco; and you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the
use of it, totally; then I can almost promise you 86, when you will
surely die; otherwise, look out for 28, 31, 34, 47, and 65; be
careful—for you are not of a long-lived race, that is, on your father’s
side; you are the only healthy member of your family, and the only one
in it who has anything like the certainty of attaining to a great
age—so, stop using tobacco, and be careful of yourself…. In some
respects you take after your father, but you are much more like your
mother, who belongs to the long-lived, energetic side of the house….
You never brought all your energies to bear upon any subject but what
you accomplished it —for instance, you are self-made, self-educated.
‘S. L. C.’ Which proves nothing.
‘Madame.’ Don’t interrupt. When you sought your present occupation, you
found a thousand obstacles in your way—obstacles unknown—not even
suspected by any save you and me, since you keep such matter to
yourself—but you fought your way, and hid the long struggle under a
mask of cheerfulness, which saved your friends anxiety on your account.
To do all this requires the qualities which I have named.
‘S. L. C.’ You flatter well, Madame.
‘Madame.’ Don’t interrupt. Up to within a short time you had always
lived from hand to mouth—now you are in easy circumstances —for which
you need give credit to no one but yourself. The turning-point in your
life occurred in 1840-7-8.
‘S. L. C.’ Which was?
‘Madame.’ A death, perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and made
you what you are; it was always intended that you should make yourself;
therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as early as it did.
You will never die of water, although your career upon it in the future
seems well sprinkled with misfortune. You will continue upon the water
for some time yet; you will not retire finally until ten years from
now…. What is your brother’s age? 23—and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an
office? Well, he stands a better chance than the other two, and he may
get it; he is too visionary—is always flying off on a new hobby; this
will never do —tell him I said so. He is a good lawyer—a very good
lawyer—and a fine speaker—is very popular and much respected, and makes
many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their
confidence by displaying his instability of character…. The land he has
now will be very valuable after a while—— ‘S. L. C.’ Say 250 years
hence, or thereabouts, Madame—— ‘Madame.’ No—less time—but never mind
the land, that is a secondary consideration—let him drop that for the
present, and devote himself to his business and politics with all his
might, for he must hold offices under Government….
After a while you will possess a good deal of property—retire at the
end of ten years—after which your pursuits will be literary —try the
law—you will certainly succeed. I am done now. If you have any
questions to ask—ask them freely—and if it be in my power, I will
answer without reserve—without reserve.
I asked a few questions of minor importance-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 scarcely a trifle more —ergo, I will
disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other amusements
fail. Now isn’t she the devil? That is to say, isn’t she a right smart
little woman?
When you want money, let Ma know, and she will send it. She and Pamela
are always fussing about change, so I sent them a hundred and twenty
quarters yesterday—fiddler’s change enough to last till I get back, I
reckon.