Riverboat Pilot Samuel Clemens

Mark Twain's Mississippi River Days - Monument in Hannibal, Missouri

Nov 14, 2009

Mark Twain's books are filled with descriptions of river currents, shoals, jagged bluffs, and boats along the Mississippi.

Before Mark Twain became one of the world’s best-known authors for books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), he was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River.

Samuel Clemens was a licensed steamboat, or riverboat, pilot from 1859 until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. His job was to steer the boat on the mighty Mississippi, keeping her away from sandbars and jagged rocks, while paying attention to the swiftness of the currents and other boat traffic.

His pen name, Mark Twain, came from the depth of water indicating the boat was in deep water for safe passage. The depth was measured in fathoms by a sounding line. One fathom was equal to six feet. “Twain” means "two" so when the call went out to “mark twain,” it meant that they had cleared two fathoms, or twelve feet, and that the boat was in water deep enough for safe passage.

Training as a Riverboat Pilot

His book, Life on the Mississippi (1883), contains detailed accounts of the training a pilot went through before he was issued a license. One such example appears in the opening sentences of Chapter 8 “Perplexing Lessons” from Life on the Mississippi:

“At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, “points,” and bends, and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps.”

Respect for the Profession of Piloting

Later on in the same book, he describes his feelings about the profession of piloting. Chapter 14 “Rank and Dignity of Piloting” from Life on the Mississippi:

“If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing,… The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.”

The Lighthouse on Cardiff Hill

He used his knowledge of the Mississippi throughout Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In the books, the town of Hannibal, Missouri was given a fictitious name of St. Petersburg. In Tom Sawyer, the “widow Douglas” kept a lamp burning in her window atop a bluff, Cardiff Hill, to guide steamboat pilots. A lighthouse stands in Hannibal today, on top of Cardiff Hill, overlooking the Mississippi River but wasn’t erected until 1935 as a memorial to Mark Twain. It was never used for navigation.

The copyright of the article Riverboat Pilot Samuel Clemens in American History is owned by Cynthia Collins. Permission to republish Riverboat Pilot Samuel Clemens in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.