Growing up on the Mississippi River meant Mark Twain was surrounded by steamboats, and he developed a passion for piloting at a young age.  Steamboats were the transportation of choice for moving commerce up and down the Mississippi during the 19th century because of their flat-bottom design and side or rear paddle wheels.  Twain made his first trip on a steamboat at age 10, down to St. Louis.

WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village (1. Hannibal, Missouri) 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 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.

Listen to some excerpts from Twain’s memoir, Life on the Mississippi, in which he details his experiences as a steamboat pilot.

In 1857, Twain became an apprentice pilot, and over the next four years he served on at least 18 different boats.  From February 1857 through April 1859 he was a cub, and from May 1859 to May 1861 Twain was a fully licensed pilot.  During the 19th century pilots were the masters of steamboats, not their captains, so Twain took on the most powerful job in piloting steamboats.

Twain remained on the Lower Mississippi throughout his career as a pilot, going mostly between St. Louis and New Orleans.  He learned his skills from his mentor, Horace Bixby, whom Twain met on the Paul Jones steamboat and convinced to take him on as a cub.

Notebook used by Clemens as a cub pilot, April-July 1857
“My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.” Clemens received this advice from Horace Bixby, the river pilot who “learned” him the river. Ruled for use as a ledger, this notebook also contains the cargo records of a steamboat clerk, suggesting that Clemens probably acquired it in some haste from that clerk. The dense texture of navigational directions on the pages displayed includes the young pilot’s notes in the area of St. Louis.

From the UC Berkeley Library

Twain became a very successful pilot, earning a substantial salary and avoiding the disasters of the river that often killed other pilots.  Twain left piloting at the beginning of the Civil War and never fully returned to the career, though he took an occasional turn at the steamboat wheel decades later.  Steamboating remained with him, of course, evident in many of his stories (Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson) as well as his pen name.

Photo of Samuel Clemens’ Pilot’s Certificate from the Dave Thomson collection