as a young cub pilot, was his reading of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason “with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power.”17 Paine and Voltaire reinforced his penchant for skepticism.
In the late summer or early fall of 1856, following some eight years of association with printing, Clemens left Keokuk. Once again one can follow his travels from the letters he wrote for publication in the Keokuk Post, where he was initially paid $5.00, later increased to $7.50 a letter. He now adopted a pen name and a pen personality. As Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, he was an innocent ready to be amazed and victimized by his city adventures. The three letters in this series show the strong influence of another of the frontier comic writers, William Tappan Thompson, author of Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel (1847). Thompson cultivated bad grammar and an outrageous Southern dialect. Clemens’s first letter, dated October 18 from St. Louis, is a report from Snodgrass of his visit to a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This bumpkin’s visit is largely predictable, although Snodgrass’s quotation from Dickens’s Little Dorrit comes as rather a surprise.18 A month later Snodgrass reports again. Just as he had been ejected from the theater in St. Louis because of his ignorance of proper behavior, here his innocence leads to misadventures. He had traveled eastward through Chicago, of which he reports: “When you feel like tellin a feller to go to the devil, tell him to go to Chicago—it’ll anser every purpose, and is perhaps, a leetle more expensive.”19
The third and most ambitious letter, dated Cincinnati, March 14, 1847, explains that the writer had “pooty much quit scribblin” until now when he has at last a “little adventer” to report. The innocent has been taken advantage of again, this time by a young woman who asks him to hold her basket while she goes around the corner. Snodgrass obliges and uses the waiting time to daydream of marrying the woman, whom he supposes is a rich heiress. An hour and a half later, he starts after her, whereupon he hears from the basket the howls of “the ugliest, nastiest, orneriest he-baby I ever seed in all my life.” Snodgrass does not know what to do. He keeps the baby for a day, then tries to “poke the dang thing through a hole in the ice” on the river. He is arrested and fined, then released. Such is his tawdry adventure. This sketch was directly inspired by William T. Thompson, who told a similar story in Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel.20
The Snodgrass letters, the last of which was written when Clemens was twenty-one, do not yet show the author-to-be discovering his métier; they simply indicate that Clemens wished to be a humorous writer. He now left journalism for an extended period, and also not surprisingly—for one who had lived in the river towns of Hannibal, St. Louis, Keokuk, Muscatine, and Cincinnati—he was attracted to an occupation on the river. Some fifteen years later, he was to explain his decision in an unpublished autobiographical sketch:
About 1855 [actually April 15, 1857], aged 20, started to New Orleans, with about ten or twelve dollars, after paying steamboat passage, intending in good earnest to take shipping there for the port of Para [Brazil], & explore the river Amazon & open up a commerce in the marvelous herb called coca, which is the concentrated bread & meat of the tribes (when on long, tedious journeys) that inhabit the country lying about the headwaters of the Amazon. Broken-hearted to find that a vessel would not be likely to leave N[ew] O[rleans] for Para during the next generation. Got some little comfort out of the fact that I had at least not arrived too late, if I had arrived too soon, for no ship had ever yet left N. O. for Para in preceding generations.
Had made friends with the pilots & learned to steer, on the way down; so they had good-will enough to engage to make a St. Louis & N. O. pilot of me for $500, payable upon graduation. They kept their word, & for 18 months I went up & down, steering & studying the 1275 miles of river day & night, supporting myself meantime by helping the freight clerks on board & the freight watchmen on shore. Then I got my U. S. license to pilot, & a steady berth at $250 a month—which was a princely salary for a youth in those days of low wages for mechanics.21
Later he brilliantly described his experiences as apprentice pilot to Horace Bixby, though with some exaggeration, in “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875).
This piloting phase of his career lasted four years, until Clemens was twenty-five. He learned the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, then served as a steamboat pilot. Very little that he wrote during that time has survived: seventeen letters, one sketch, several pieces of journalism, all slight, and two pieces of fiction that he did not publish. A few letters do give the impression, however, that the pilot was still interested in writing. A letter to Annie Taylor in 1857 describes the French Market of New Orleans and a cemetery of vaults and tombs in the city. Clemens was to have a continuing interest in cemeteries, morgues, and death, as The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and many of his other writings show. To his sister Pamela he wrote a rather literary letter on March 11, 1859, providing a description of the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans: “The procession was led by a Mounted Knight Crusader in blazing gilt armor from head to foot, and I think one might never tire of looking at the splendid picture.”
In “Old Times,” Mark Twain described the destruction of the steamer Pennsylvania on June 13, 1858. Clemens had made several trips on that boat as an apprentice pilot, including one when it was damaged as a result of a collision with the Vicksburg, with which it was racing.22 Although he was not on the Pennsylvania at the time of the “catastrophe,” his beloved brother Henry was. After much suffering, he died from inhaled steam. Since Sam had obtained a position for Henry as clerk, the tragedy caused him to feel terrible guilt for many years.23 Throughout his lifetime Clemens repeatedly experienced guilt; perhaps as a result of this and ensuing disasters, in time he developed a deterministic philosophy that was a means of denying a painful sense of responsibility he felt then and for other events thereafter.
Sam continued to read and enhance his education. His ongoing interest in Charles Dickens is suggested by a quotation in a November 1860 letter to his brother Orion from Martin Chuzzlewit concerning Mrs. Gamp’s interest in alcohol. Indeed, Clemens regarded Dickens as one of his favorite writers for many years, though eventually he was to claim he found Dickens’s sentimentalism unattractive.
These years on the river seem to have been so deeply gratifying to Clemens that he was not tempted to try another career. He obtained his pilot’s license on April 9, 1859, and was extremely proud to be working on the City of Memphis, “the largest boat in the trade and the hardest to pilot.” He was proud, too, of his reputation as a pilot and his acceptance by fellow pilots. He told Orion, “I derive a living pleasure from these things.” Throughout his life he referred to his experiences as a pilot, frequently with pleasure but occasionally with gratitude that he had escaped from its demands. In August 1862, he wrote to his sister, “I never have once thought of returning home to go on the river again, and I never expect to do any more piloting at any price.” But, in January 1866, he wrote to his mother, “I wish I was back there piloting up & down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.”
Toward the end of his piloting years, in February 1861, Clemens made a visit to a fortune-teller that piqued his imagination. According to a detailed letter he sent to Orion, she told him, “You have written a great deal; you write well—but you are out of practice; no matter—you will be in practice some day.” She observed that he enjoyed excellent health but told him, “you use entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it totally.” This was only one of many antismoking warnings that Clemens chose to ignore, even though he noted that Madam Caprell’s ability to tell the truth about him was remarkable.
“River Intelligence,” one of the few known publications of these years, which ended with Clemens’s last piloting on the river in 1861, relates to the obscure and muddled history of his pen name. The simplest explanation of the name is the one included in an autobiographical sketch he wrote for his nephew Samuel Moffett in the early part of the twentieth century. It has been unduly neglected. Here he explains, using a third-person voice, that he became the “legislative correspondent” of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
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