The Life of Mark Twain Read online

  He accompanied his brother’s body to St. Louis on June 22 and, joined there by his mother and the Moffetts, to Hannibal on June 24. The funeral was conducted on June 25 at the First Presbyterian Church in Hannibal before Henry’s body was interred beside his father’s grave in the Old Baptist Cemetery, probably at the expense of James Clemens. Orion, still in Tennessee, likely did not learn about his brother’s death until after the funeral. Three months later, he reminisced about his brothers. “If a cat was to be drowned or shot, Sam, (though unwilling, yet firm), was selected for the work,” he declared. But if “a stray kitten was to be fed and taken care of Henry was expected to attend to it. . . . [T]he boys grew up—Sam a rugged, brave, quick-tempered, generous-hearted fellow—Henry quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on Sam for protection,—Sam & I too leaning on him for knowledge picked up from conversation or books, for Henry seemed never to forget anything, and devoted much of his leisure hours to reading.” Sam’s “capacity of enjoyment and his capacity of suffering are greater than mine,” Orion conceded, so he could “appreciate Sam’s sufferings at Henry’s bedside.”27

  Sam remained off the river and with his family for the next two weeks. As a result, ironically, he escaped exposure to a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. The catastrophe lingered in his imagination, however. In the fourth chapter of The Gilded Age, Sam imagined the explosion of the Pennsylvania (“the ruined steamer went drifting down the stream an island of wreathing and climbing flame that vomited clouds of smoke”). In chapter 27 of A Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan annihilates a pair of knights on horseback with a dynamite bomb—the blast resembles “a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi,” and for fifteen minutes Hank and King Arthur stand “under a steady drizzle of microscopic fragments of knights and hardware and horseflesh.” And in chapter 32 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Huck explains to Aunt Sally that his arrival at the Phelps farm was delayed because his steamboat “blowed out a cylinder-head.” When Huck tells her that no one was hurt, though the accident “killed a nigger,” she replies, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt”—an exchange that proves both that Sam in later life sometimes employed the racial epithet ironically and that he was still haunted by the death of his brother.28

  Sam embellished the story of Henry’s death over the years, gradually transforming his brother from a mediocre typesetter and mud clerk into a paragon of virtue and light. Their sibling rivalry was succeeded by a case of survivor guilt. Sam insisted in 1906 that while Henry was the model for Tom’s feckless brother Sid in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “Sid is not Henry. Henry was a very much finer and better boy than ever Sid was.” Sam eventually recollected (or imagined) a conversation with Henry the night before the Pennsylvania left New Orleans on its final cruise. In his notes for Life on the Mississippi, he mentions “the prophetic talk on the levee between Henry & me that night in N.O. before Pa. sailed on her fatal voyage.” As he recounted in chapter 20 of Life on the Mississippi,

  The subject of the chat, mainly, was one which I think we had not exploited before—steamboat disasters. . . . We doubted if persons not clothed with authority were of much use in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they might be of some use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way. Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came, and acted accordingly.

  Sam came to believe that after Henry was blown into the river he swam back to the boat to help rescue victims before succumbing to his injuries. There is no evidence except Sam’s conjecture that Henry played such a heroic role. As he retells the story in Life on the Mississippi, moreover, Sam assumed responsibility for Henry’s death at the makeshift hospital in Memphis. Though his brother had been triaged to the room set aside for terminal cases, Sam was convinced (in his version of events) that in fact he was recovering from his burns. When Henry suffered a restless night, Sam persuaded a medical student to administer morphine to help his brother sleep. But the student failed to measure the dosage accurately and as a result (again, in Sam’s version of events) Henry died of an overdose.29 No evidence, apart from Sam’s testimony over twenty years after the fact, exists to support this assertion.

  Sam also described a dream in his Autobiography that he purportedly had at the Moffett home in St. Louis just before the fatal voyage. In the dream, he imagines his brother’s body lying in a metal coffin with a bouquet of white roses on his chest. But he recounted this event only long after Henry’s death. The only independent evidence corroborating his account of this dream appears in a memoir about Sam by his niece Annie, who was not yet six at the time. In preparing to write chapter 20 of Life on the Mississippi over a dozen years later, Sam jotted a note to “leave out that wonderful dream.” He finally recorded what at least he thought he remembered about the dream while dictating his autobiography in 1906, nearly a half century after Henry’s death.30 Whatever the truth may be, Henry’s death when Sam was twenty-two ignited a perfect firestorm of conflicted emotions from which he suffered for the rest of his life. His brother’s passing seemed to be the predetermined or inexorable result of a series of unforeseen circumstances, like causal links in a chain. Had he not gotten Henry the job on the Pennsylvania, Henry would have still been alive. Had he not fought Brown in the pilothouse when Brown attacked Henry, Sam might have been the brother who died. Had he not advised Henry to exhibit courage in a crisis, Henry might have been rescued sooner after the explosion. Had he not convinced a young medical student to administer morphine the night of his death, Henry might have recovered from his injuries. In all of these scenarios, Sam was to blame.

  On July 11, 1858, Sam resumed his apprenticeship, though Bixby was still piloting on the Missouri and Brown was dead, so no one technically was charged with the task of supervising him. He joined the crew of the Lacey, piloted by his friends Bart Bowen and George Ealer, and on July 28 he completed his first round-trip to New Orleans and St. Louis since late May. A week later, he embarked on the John H. Dickey, a small (403-ton) packet piloted by Sam Bowen, Bart’s brother, and owned and captained by Dan Able, a former student at Marion College in Marion County, Missouri. It was the first of six round-trips between St. Louis and Memphis over the next three months. During this period Sam also contributed a pair of articles to the St. Louis Missouri Republican. They were his first published writings in eighteen months, since the last Snodgrass letter in the Keokuk, Iowa, Post in April 1857. Two of these pieces merit brief mention. The first, dated August 30 and written on a return trip to St. Louis, recounted a moonlight excursion on the Dickey that Able hosted for citizens of “that flourishing city,” Memphis, when “wine was passed around freely and disposed of judiciously.” In mid-October the Dickey ran aground, breaking forty of its bottom timbers—there is no evidence Sam was responsible—and was towed to St. Louis for repairs. Able leased the White Cloud, a Missouri River boat, to make the final leg of the trip back to Memphis, and Sam transferred to it with Able and Sam Bowen. In a second article for the Missouri Republican, dated October 22 and written at the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis, Sam remarked on the local cotton trade and the campaign across the river in Illinois for the U.S. Senate seat. The Know-Nothings, former Whigs, and Democrats all agreed, according to Sam, that Stephen Douglas “ought to be” elected. Immediately below this article appeared a piece quoting Douglas’s Republican opponent, Abraham Lincoln, who had declared in a speech in Logan County, Illinois, on October 16 that “a negro is as good as a white man.”31 Lincoln lost the election.

  Sam reunited with Bixby aboard the New Falls City on October 30 for two round-trips between St. Louis and New Orleans that lasted until December 8. Then they transferred to the ten-year-old, 709-ton side-wheeler Aleck Scott. Later, Sam described Bixby’s method of mentoring with a revealing metaphor in light of Henry’s death: he “would boil a while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again.” They made five
more round-trips together between St. Louis and New Orleans on the Scott between December 13, 1858, and April 8, 1859. On one of these trips, after landing in New Orleans on March 8, Sam frolicked at Mardi Gras. “An American has not seen the United States until he has seen the Mardi-Gras,” he gushed to Pamela. Near the French Quarter he “beheld an apparition!—and my first impulse was to dodge behind a lamp-post. It was a woman—a hay-stack of curtain calico, ten feet high—sweeping majestically down the middle of the street.” Next he “saw a girl of eighteen, mounted on a fine horse, and dressed as a Spanish Cavalier, with long rapier, flowing curls, blue satin doublet and half-breeches, trimmed with broad white lace.” She bowed to him and he returned the gesture in violation of mid-Victorian decorum, but during Mardi Gras, he realized, “that young lady had a perfect right to bow to, shake hands with, or speak to, me, or anybody else she pleased.” The holiday was an invitation to ignore the usual proprieties. The “‘free-and-easy’ women turned out en masse,” he reported to his sister, “and their costumes and actions were very trying to modest eyes”—one of Sam’s few surviving references to the attractions of female flesh in towns along the river. He also witnessed “a band of twenty stalwart men, splendidly arrayed as Comanche Indians, flying and yelling down the street on horses as finely decorated as themselves” and the torchlight parade down St. Charles Avenue of the Mystick Krewe of Comus. The costuming was reminiscent of the public masking of the minstrel show. “Certainly New Orleans seldom does things by halves,” he concluded.32 He had long since outgrown the provincialism of Hannibal.

  A month later, on April 11, Sam was finally awarded his pilot’s license after a rigorous examination by a pair of federal inspectors in St. Louis. J. H. McCord and Henry Singleton concluded that, after a year and a half of work and study, Sam “knew every inch of the [lower] Mississippi—thirteen hundred miles—in the dark and in the day—as well as a baby knows the way to its mother’s paps day or night. So they licensed me as a pilot—knighted me, so to speak—and I rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of the United States government.” His license was renewed in March 1860 and again in March 1861, and he earned “a princely salary” of $250 per month, the equivalent of about $6,600 in 2018 dollars, plus free room and board when he was on the river. Two months of these wages, he bragged, “would pay a preacher’s salary for a year.” “You can bet that Clemens was proud,” Bixby recalled in 1899. “He was a good pilot. He was sure of himself and a safe man for his owners. I have heard men say that Clemens never held a license, that he was a mere steersman, but I am here to say that there was no better man of his years and experience on all the great Mississippi. . . . He was bound to be great, whatever his course in life. I believe that he would have owned a line of steamboats had he kept to the river.” A decade later, Bixby reiterated his praise: “Some people infer that Clemens was not a good pilot, but he was a first-class one. He adapted himself to the river from the start and was as good a pupil as I ever had under me.”33

  With his admission to the fraternity of pilots, Sam’s social status rose overnight. “What vast respect Prosperity commands!” he wrote Orion. As a cub, he would “enter the ‘Rooms’”—probably Bogart’s Billiard Rooms in St. Louis, where the rivermen often congregated—and receive only a muted greeting, “but now they say, ‘Why, how are you, old fellow—when did you get in?’” After earning his license, Sam no longer needed to work as a night watchman on the New Orleans docks between trips to scratch out a living. He became a member of the WBBA and lodged at the Pilots’ Association Club. He was so clubbable, in fact, that he joined the Polar Star Masonic Lodge No. 79 in St. Louis, the largest Masonic lodge in Missouri, whose membership roster was a virtual who’s who of river pilots.34 Ironically, the Masons were, like the Catholics, targeted by the Know-Nothings for their secret allegiances and alleged conspiratorial bent—that is, by joining the Masons, Sam switched sides from the bullies to the bullied. His participation in the secret society may also have inspired the elaborate rituals of Tom Sawyer’s Gang.

  With his pilot’s license in hand, moreover, Sam no longer needed to defer to pompous old-timers on the river like Isaiah Sellers. “Rank on the river those days was very strict,” Sam explained to an interviewer in 1902. “The captain and the pilot had a rank of their own, at the top. Those under them never met them on terms of equality.” But on Sam’s first regular piloting assignment—a round-trip between St. Louis and New Orleans departing May 4 and returning May 21, partnering on the Lacey with Bart Bowen—he took his long-delayed revenge on Sellers. Though Sam never said it quite so explicitly, Sellers was clearly an insufferable ass. Instead, Sam tempered his criticism: Sellers was “an aggravating eyesore to a hundred river men,” he wrote. “He was the patriarch” of the profession and “his brethren held him in a sort of awe,” but “he knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state.” Worse yet, whenever Sellers “approached a body of gossiping pilots” a pall fell over the group in deference to his seniority. “Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him” by pontificating on river history. “He was always conscientiously particular about little details,” such as the names of islands that had disappeared and towns washed away in floods. Sellers occasionally contributed paragraphs of “river intelligence” to the New Orleans True Delta specifying conditions at various crossings—valuable information for pilots. But he was also apt in these columns “to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island So-and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as ‘disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.’ In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots.”35 It was precisely at this point that Sam chose to satirize Sellers and his pretentions to authority.

  Sam jumped at the first chance offered him. The True Delta for May 7, 1859, when Sam was still three days above New Orleans on the Lacey, printed these two paragraphs of river intelligence:

  Our friend, Capt. Sellers, one of the oldest pilots on the river and now on the Wm. M. Morrison, sends us a rather bad account concerning the state of the river. Capt. Sellers is a man of experience, and though we do not coincide in his view of the matter, we give his note a place in our columns, only hoping that his prophecy will not be verified in the instance.

  Steamer Wm. M. Morrison

  Vicksburg, May 4, 1859

  The river from your city up to this port is higher than it has been since the high water of 1815, and my opinion is that the water will be in Canal Street before the 1st day of June. Mrs. Turner’s plantation, which has not been affected by the river since 1815, is now under water.

  Yours, &c.,

  Isaiah Sellers.36

  After Sam arrived in New Orleans on May 10, he drafted a parody of Sellers’s report from the point of view of a guileless stooge, Sergeant Fathom, and accompanied it with a headnote. He showed the manuscript to some other pilots in New Orleans, including Bart Bowen, who thought the parody was “brilliant” and passed it to Virginius Dentzel, river editor of the Crescent. Lest readers miss the target of Sam’s satire, the Crescent printed a version of Sellers’s May 4 report in its edition for May 17, three days after Sam had left on the return trip to St. Louis aboard the Lacey:

  Vicksburg, May 4, 1859.

  My opinion for the benefit of New Orleans: The water is higher this far up than it has been since 1815. My opinion is that the water will be four feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June. Mrs. Turner’s plantation at the head of the Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not been since 1815. I. Sellers.37

  The stage was set with props in place for Sam’s parody. It appeared in the same issue of the Crescent and mercilessly ridiculed Sellers’s a
ffectations. “I antedated him about sixty years,” Sam noted, and “recalled high water & low water which ‘laid over’ his most marvelous recollections, introduced islands which had joined the mainland & become States & Territories before he was born.” Sergeant Fathom, “one of the oldest cub pilots on the river” according to the headnote,

  sends us a rather bad account concerning the state of the river. Sergeant Fathom is a “cub” of much experience, and although we are loath to coincide in his view of the matter, we give his note a place in our columns, only hoping that his prophecy will not be verified in this instance. . . . It is a well-known fact that he has made fourteen hundred and fifty trips in the New Orleans and St. Louis trade without causing serious damage to a steamboat. This astonishing success is attributed to the fact that he seldom runs his boat after early candle-light. . . .

  R. R. STEAMER TROMBONE, Vicksburg, May 8, 1859.

  The river from New Orleans up to Natchez is higher than it has been since the niggers were executed, (which was in the fall of 1813) and my opinion is, that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be on the roof of the St. Charles Hotel before the middle of January. The point at Cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since 1813, is now entirely under water. However, Mr. Editor, the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley should not act precipitately and sell their plantations at a sacrifice on account of this prophesy of mine, for I shall proceed to convince them of a great fact in regard to this matter, viz: That the tendency of the Mississippi is to rise less and less higher every year (with an occasional variation of the rule), that such has been the case for many centuries, and finally that it will cease to rise at all. . . . In the summer of 1763 I came down the river on the old first “Jubilee.” She was new, then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew, forecastle on her stern, wheels in the center, and the jackstaff “nowhere,” for I steered her with a window shutter, and when we wanted to land we sent a line ashore and “rounded her to” with a yoke of oxen. Well, sir, we wooded off the top of the big bluff above Selma [Missouri]—the only dry land visible—and waited there three weeks, swapping knives and playing “seven up” with the Indians, waiting for the river to fall. Finally, it fell about a hundred feet, and we went on. One day we rounded to, and I got in a horse-trough, which my partner borrowed from the Indians up there at Selma while they were at prayers, and went down to sound around No. 8, and while I was gone my partner got aground on the hills at Hickman. After three days labor we finally succeeded in sparring her off with a capstan bar, and went on to Memphis. By the time we got there the river had subsided to such an extent that we were able to land where the Gayoso House now stands. We finished loading at Memphis, and engaged part of the stone for the present St. Louis Court-House, (which was then in process of erection) to be taken up on our return trip. You can form some conception by these memoranda of how high the water was in 1763. In 1775 it did not rise so high by thirty feet; in 1790 it missed the original mark at least sixty-five feet; in 1797, one hundred and fifty feet; and in 1806, nearly two hundred and fifty feet. These were “high-water” years. The “high waters” since then have been so insignificant that I have scarcely taken the trouble to notice them. Thus, you will perceive that the planters need not feel uneasy.