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.
He wrote a weekly letter to the paper; it appeared Sundays, & on Mondays the legislative process was obstructed by the complaints of members as a result. They rose to questions of privilege & answered the criticisms of the correspondent with bitterness, customarily describing him with elaborate & uncomplimentary phrases, for lack of a briefer way. To save their time he presently began to sign the letters, using the Mississippi leadsman’s call, “Mark Twain” (2 fathoms =12 feet) for this purpose.24
A few years later, in his autobiography, he explained that while a pilot he composed a “rude and crude satire” of a steamboat man who wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain.25 In 1874 he was more specific: “Mark Twain was the nom de plume of one Capt. Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune. He died in 1863, & as he would no longer need that signature I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the prophet’s remains.”26 But Sellers did not die until a year after Clemens began to call himself “Mark Twain,” and no evidence has yet been found that Sellers actually used that pen name. Why Clemens repeatedly asserted that “borrowing” from Sellers is not known.
On the other hand, Clemens did indeed satirize Sellers, whom he called “Sergeant Fathom” in “River Intelligence,” a piece he published in the New Orleans Crescent in May 1859. He depicted Sellers as reminiscing ludicrously while offering predictions of phenomenally high water. “In the summer of 1763 [ninety-six years before the date of the report] 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.” According to the account in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (chap. 50), this satire deeply affected Sellers, to the regret of the young Clemens. Another satire that Clemens wrote was a brief “Pilot’s Memorandum,” which burlesqued the standard reports on river traffic appearing in newspapers. Its humor assumed a good deal of familiarity with the steam-boating of that day.
Four other pieces by Clemens the steamboatman were discovered and reprinted in 1982. Three are mere journalism, first published in 1858. More ambitious was “Soleleather Cultivates His Taste for Music,” which appeared in the New Orleans Crescent in 1859. In it the brash narrator told of his experiences at a St. Louis boardinghouse, where he soothed a sick fellow boarder with his attempts to play first a violin, then a trombone. Soleleather is another version of Snodgrass, but better educated.27
Of the two attempts at fiction Clemens made during his years on the river, one is a gothic tale of murder and revenge set in Germany, but with a plot borrowed from Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837). The other tells of a pilot who returns from the dead to perform an unusually difficult task of piloting. Aside from attesting to Clemens’s continuing serious interest in writing, the stories are unmemorable.
With the coming of the Civil War, Clemens left the river, since the war effectively disrupted commercial traffic. In 1899 he described the situation, using the third person: “He was in New Orleans when Louisiana went out of the Union, Jan. 26, 1861, & started North the next day. Every day on the trip a blockade was closed by the boat, & the batteries of Jefferson Barracks (below St Louis) fired two shots through her chimney the last night of her voyage.” He returned home and soon joined a group of volunteers who were taking the Confederate side in the conflict, but within two weeks he left them. “‘Incapacitated by fatigue’ through persistent retreating” is the way he described the volunteers in a statement from the source just quoted.28 This service was too informal and irregular for it to be said with any truthfulness that he was a deserter, as is sometimes reported. Nearly twenty-five years after the event, he rendered a somewhat fictionalized account of his “war” experiences in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”
Sam’s next adventure was more crucial than his gesture at combat. In July 1861, he accompanied his brother to the West, where Orion, who had identified himself strongly with the Union side as the great conflict shaped itself, was rewarded with the office of the secretaryship of the territory of Nevada. Sam was eventually hired to be a government clerk at eight dollars a day, but not as Orion’s official secretary, as Sam reported in the entertaining account in Roughing It (1872).29
The trip westward to the territory was long and slow. Leaving on July 18, 1861, they went up the Missouri River to St. Joseph, then travelled by overland stagecoach by way of Salt Lake City. They reached Carson City on August 14. Having finally arrived, Sam found himself in a world that strangely combined ugliness and beauty. He soon undertook some exploring and examined Lake Tahoe, only twenty miles or so from his headquarters in Carson City. He greatly admired the lake, but his negligence there resulted in his starting a forest fire in its tinder-dry terrain. He wrote a vivid account of the lake and the fire to his mother and sister in the early fall. A letter sent a little later, in October 1861, is one of his best early pieces. Testifying to Sam’s succumbing to the get-rich-quick fever of the silver miners, it also provides a description of the landscape:
It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand—in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, “sage brush,” is mean enough to grow. If you will take a liliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire—set them one foot apart and then try to walk through them—you will understand (provided the floor is covered twelve inches deep with sand) what it is to travel through a sagebrush desert. When crushed, sage-brush emits an odor which isn’t exactly magnolia and equally isn’t exactly polecat—but a sort of compromise between the two. It looks a good deal like greasewood, and is the ugliest plant that was ever conceived of.
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