Mark Twain's Mississippi steamboat stories by Stanley Nelson - posted Wednesday, March 20th, 2013 @ 1:18 pm  E-mail Story |  Print Story  In the days of the steamboat in the 19th century, no man possessed more absolute power or was held in higher esteem than the steamboat pilot. True, the captain made the whole operation hum, but it was the pilot who knew the Mighty Mississippi like his own backyard. A steamboat pilot's memory had to be perfect. The river in his mind had to be as familiar as the face of his wife or the voice of his child. Samuel Longhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, was the author of many heralded novels, including "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer." Twain apprenticed as a riverboat pilot beginning in the late 1850s and earned his pilot license in 1859 when he was 23. One of his brothers worked on the river, too, and lost his life in a steamboat explosion. In Twain's book, "Life on the Mississippi," published in 1882, he tells river stories and writes many words in praise of the steamboat pilot. It was the dream of every Missouri boy like him, Twain wrote, to be a steamboatman. "I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it," he said. "The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on the earth." STEAMBOAT PILOT A steamboat pilot, Twain wrote, "must have a good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot, he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must start with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot. "The moment that boat was under way in the river, she was in the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions... "It will easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. I think the pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes..." For the full story, subscribe to the The Concordia Sentinel's NEW E-Edition!