40 Fun Facts About Life on the Mississippi

On Mississippi steamboats, the leadsman's cry of "mark twain" announced what depth of water beneath the boat?

Two fathoms, or twelve feet, was safe water for a steamboat, so the cry was welcome news in the pilot-house. Samuel Clemens later took the call as his pen name.

Which veteran pilot agreed to teach the young Mark Twain the Mississippi River for five hundred dollars?

Horace Bixby collected only part of the fee before the Civil War shut the river, and the two men agreed to cancel the rest. He was still working on the water when he died in 1912.

Which unfinished novel did Mark Twain borrow a whole raft chapter from to enliven Life on the Mississippi?

Huckleberry Finn was still unfinished, and Twain guessed it might need five or six more years. It turned out to be his very next book.

Which British novelist does Mark Twain hold largely responsible for the American Civil War in Life on the Mississippi?

Sir Walter Scott, Twain argued, infected the South with sham chivalry and a reverence for rank and caste. He called the condition the Sir Walter disease.

Which Missouri river town was the boyhood village where Mark Twain and his friends all dreamed of working on steamboats?

Hannibal was no longer the drowsy village he remembered when Twain returned for the book. It had become a city of fifteen thousand people, with a mayor, a council and waterworks.

Life on the Mississippi is often called the first book sent to a publisher in a form produced on which machine?

A typewriter produced the publisher's copy, though Twain did not work the keys himself. An assistant typed it up from his handwritten manuscript.

Which Louisiana word did Mark Twain say was worth travelling all the way to New Orleans to pick up?

Lagniappe, Twain explains, is the little extra a shopkeeper throws in for nothing, like the thirteenth roll in a baker's dozen. He first spotted it heading a newspaper column.

Which Spanish explorer opens Mark Twain's history of the Mississippi as the first European to glimpse the river?

Hernando de Soto merely glimpsed the river, Twain writes, then died and was buried in it by his priests and soldiers. By his count, about 130 years passed before a second European saw it.

Which river was the young Mark Twain on his way to explore when he decided to become a steamboat pilot instead?

The Amazon was his goal, and he set off with thirty dollars to reach it. In New Orleans he learned no ship was likely to sail there for ten or twelve years, so he laid siege to a pilot.

In a tall tale from Life on the Mississippi, a pilot claims government boats dredge which creatures from the channel?

Alligators, the pilot swore, once piled up into shifting reefs that no steersman could read. Twain recognised the yarn-spinner as Rob Styles, a cub in his own days on the river.

What was the first name of Mark Twain's younger brother, fatally scalded when a steamboat's boilers exploded?

Henry Clemens was working as a junior clerk on a boat his brother had just left. Twain had found him the berth, and held himself responsible for the death ever after.

Which steamboat blew up days after a quarrel with its pilot forced the young Mark Twain to leave the crew?

Pennsylvania blew up near Ship Island with heavy loss of life. Twain was following two days behind on another boat, and first heard the news shouted at a landing.

Which tyrannical pilot did the young Mark Twain knock down with a stool for attacking his younger brother?

William Brown had gone for the boy with a ten-pound lump of coal. Twain expected prison for striking a pilot on duty, but the captain was privately delighted and urged him to finish the job ashore.

Which river city won Mark Twain's praise for nursing the victims of the steamboat blast that killed his brother?

Memphis laid forty of the wounded in a great public hall, where its ladies, physicians and medical students nursed them around the clock. Twain kept watch there for six days and nights.

On which elderly steamboat did Mark Twain leave Cincinnati and first persuade a pilot to teach him the river?

Paul Jones was such an ancient tub that she took about two weeks to reach New Orleans, four days of it stuck on the rocks at Louisville. The delay gave Twain time to learn to steer.

Which profession does Mark Twain say he pities, because training ruins beauty for them as piloting did for him?

Doctors, he reasoned, must see the flush in a lovely cheek only as a symptom, just as he came to read a glowing sunset as tomorrow's wind. He doubted either trade gained more than it lost.

What was unusual about Mark Twain's pilot Mr. X when he steered a steamboat through a deadly crossing at night?

He was sleepwalking, and his partner George Ealer called it the finest piloting he had ever seen. The watchman later found Mr. X strolling along the deck railings, still fast asleep.

On a Mississippi steamboat, which US state gave its name to the officers' cabin perched beneath the pilot-house?

Texas was the biggest state when the structure appeared in the 1840s, and since steamboat cabins were named after states, the largest quarters on board took its name.

Which elderly riverboat captain, by Mark Twain's account, signed newspaper river reports "Mark Twain" before he did?

Isaiah Sellers, in Twain's telling, was so wounded by the young pilot's printed parody of his river notes that he never published again. Twain says he took the discarded signature after the captain's death.

When war closed the Mississippi to commerce, Mark Twain left piloting to become a silver miner in which territory?

Nevada was only the first stop: Twain lists himself next as a reporter, a California gold miner, a correspondent in the Sandwich Islands and a lecturer. He never piloted for a living again.

Which French explorer does Mark Twain show claiming the whole Mississippi valley for King Louis XIV?

La Salle set out in the dead of winter, his men dragging their canoes down a frozen river on sledges. Twain calls the cross-raising ceremony at the end a robbery consecrated with a hymn.

Which Illinois town does Mark Twain joke will one day share a mayor with New Orleans as the river shortens itself?

Cairo, by his deadpan arithmetic, will meet the Gulf city in 742 years, because cut-offs had trimmed 242 miles from the river in 176 years. The real target was scientific guesswork.

In which besieged Mississippi city does Mark Twain describe civilians sheltering in caves dug into clay hillsides?

Vicksburg endured six weeks of bombardment in 1863. Its caves were mere tunnels in the clay bank, used mainly by women and children, who fled to them whenever the shelling grew heavy.

At which Minnesota city, the head of navigation, does Mark Twain's long journey in Life on the Mississippi end?

St. Paul lay two thousand miles upriver from New Orleans, about ten days by steamer. Twain had left roses and magnolia blossoms falling in the South and arrived to find snow.

Which author of the Uncle Remus stories proved too shy to read them aloud when Mark Twain met him in New Orleans?

Joel Chandler Harris had never read aloud to an audience and could not be coaxed into it, so Twain read the Brer Rabbit tales himself. The waiting children were startled to find the author was white.

Which New Orleans novelist, author of The Grandissimes, guided Mark Twain through the old French Quarter?

George W. Cable is the book's choice as the South's finest literary genius. Twain says an outsider learns more about the old city from his novels than from walking its streets.

Which steamboat's three-day dash upriver from New Orleans does Mark Twain say was called the fastest trip on record?

Robert E. Lee made the run in three days and one hour in 1870. Twain argues an older boat was really faster, since cut-offs had shortened the river in between.

Which steamboat carried Mark Twain down the Mississippi on his return to the river, then blew up a few months later?

Gold Dust exploded her boilers near Hickman, Kentucky, three months after Twain left her, killing seventeen people. He broke off writing the book to record the news.

What does Mark Twain say killed the Mississippi steamboat passenger trade he had known as a young pilot?

The railroads did in two or three days what a steamboat took a week to do. Towing fleets finished the job by hauling six or seven steamer-loads of freight downriver at a time.

Which Louisiana city's turreted building does Mark Twain dismiss as a whitewashed sham castle?

Baton Rouge was restoring its fire-damaged State Capitol when Twain passed, which annoyed him more than the original. He called it an architectural falsehood, ungenuine inside and out.

Which magazine first serialized Mark Twain's piloting memories under the title Old Times on the Mississippi?

The Atlantic Monthly ran the series in 1875, and it came out as a small book the next year. Twain folded it into the 1883 volume after going back to the river for fresh material.

Which Mark Twain novel about two look-alike boys was published just before Life on the Mississippi?

The Prince and the Pauper came out in 1881 and trades a London beggar for the heir to the Tudor throne. Twain then put fiction aside to go back to the river.

What did the boy Mark Twain fetch for a drunken tramp who burned to death in the village jail that night?

Matches were all the tramp had begged for, to light his pipe. Locked up an hour or two later, he set his straw bed alight, and the boy who had supplied them carried the guilt for years.

Which practice does Mark Twain recommend after touring the above-ground burial vaults of New Orleans?

Cremation, he argues, would spare the living both disease and ruinous funeral bills. He found nothing sentimental in graveyards, only something grotesque, ghastly and horrible.

In Life on the Mississippi, a cheap product of cotton seed is doctored, relabelled and sold to Americans as what?

Olive oil was the disguise: the cheap oil sailed to Italy, was doctored and came home under a new label. The trade grew so large that Italy imposed a prohibitive duty to protect its own growers.

Which former luxury of the Southern rich did Mark Twain find pouring out of new factories in Natchez and New Orleans?

Ice had been jewelry in his day, he writes, something only the rich could wear. One Natchez factory now made thirty tons a day, and showpiece blocks came with bouquets of flowers frozen inside.

Which Arkansas river town had the current swept clean away by the time Mark Twain tried to go ashore there?

Napoleon vanished when the Arkansas River burst through it and emptied the whole town into the Mississippi. Twain had meant to recover a hoard that a dying man said was hidden there.

Which Iowa river town, where Mark Twain once lived, does he credit with the finest summer sunsets he ever saw?

Muscatine's sunsets, he writes, used the broad smooth river as a canvas and ran from opal to blinding purple and crimson. His other memory of the town is a lunatic with a butcher-knife.

Which rulers does Mark Twain call mere hampered servants beside the river pilot, the one truly independent man on Earth?

Kings, he writes, are but the hampered servants of parliament and people, while editors and clergymen answer to patrons and parishes. A pilot on watch took orders from no one aboard.

In which city did Mark Twain begin his return voyage, mourning a levee that once held a solid mile of steamboats?

St. Louis had filled up with stately public buildings, but Twain counted only half a dozen sleepy steamboats at its waterfront. A mighty bridge now carried the traffic the boats had lost.