mark twain riverboat

Mark Twain Riverboat

• Water Rides

Steam into the Past

Board an old-fashioned steam-powered vessel for a half-mile journey into the heart of the American frontier. 

During the charming, 14-minute trip around Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island , spot delightful sights along the river’s edge, including: 

• The north bank of the Columbia Gorge, complete with a beautiful waterfront and 5 sparkling waterfalls 
• A rustic frontier cabin 
• An idyllic Native American village 
• A busy beaver at work chewing on the train trestle 
• Mountain lions relaxing in the sun 
• The Disneyland Railroad steaming into the wilderness 

Along the way, hear lively narration about a time gone by.

Along the Mississippi

The Mark Twain is an authentic reproduction of the historic vessels that ferried people up and down the mighty Mississippi River. A working steam engine converts the water from the Rivers of America into steam that in turn powers the large paddle that propels the boat. 

Featuring meticulously detailed wood craftsmanship, the 28-foot tall, 105-foot-long riverboat is comprised of 4 pristine decks: 

• Pilothouse , also known as the top deck, features the wheelhouse and Captain’s Quarters 
• Promenade Deck includes a salon and a collection of vintage photos and maps 
• Texas (or Sun) Deck is the perfect place to enjoy the outdoors as you float down the river 
• Main Deck includes the boiler and pistons that run the paddlewheel 

Limited seating is available.

A Tribute to America’s Writer

Walt Disney named the Mark Twain after the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The famed author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn —and Walt’s personal hero—Clemens was also a riverboat pilot as a young man. 

That experience inspired his pen name: “mark twain” is a boating term that means a vessel is at a safe depth.

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Hannibal River Cruises on the Mark Twain Riverboat

The Mark Twain Riverboat brings the mystique of the Mississippi River and the history of Hannibal to life through one-hour sightseeing cruises, two-hour dinner cruises, and the Captain's Sunday Lunch events.

Schedule can vary, call for times.

Cruises on the Mark Twain Riverboat have been a tradition for decades

The Mark Twain Riverboat has been a unique fixture on the banks of the Mississippi for more than 30 years, offering visitors an up-close view of the Mississippi River during 1-hour narrated sightseeing cruises or 2-hour dinner cruises.

Hannibal river cruises give visitors the opportunity to explore the Mississippi just like Tom and Huck.  This Mississippi River Cruise departs from Center Street Landing three times daily between Memorial Day and Labor Day, with two departures daily during September and October.  Dinner cruises depart at 6:30 p.m; check for availability. Built in 1964, the Mark Twain Riverboat is 120 ft. long, 33 ft. wide and has a 400-passenger capacity, so there is plenty of room aboard the vessel, which is wheelchair accessible (w/ some limitations.)

1-Hour Sightseeing Mississippi River Cruise

If you have an afternoon to spare in Hannibal, the Mark Twain Riverboat is a must-stop.  One-hour sightseeing cruises on the river include commentary on river history, legends, and sights.  You will see Jackson’s Island, Lover’s Leap, and of course, the Mighty Mississippi rolling along.  Beverages and sandwiches are available on-ship for purchase during these tours.  A cruise aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat is great for family events.  Whether you are a visitor or resident of Hannibal, you can make wonderful memories aboard our unique riverboat experience!

2-Hour Dinner Cruises on the Mark Twain Riverboat

For an extended Mississippi River cruise, be sure to reserve your spot on a 2-hour dinner cruise aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat.

Guests aboard Mark Twain Riverboat dinner cruises are treated to live music, a buffet meal featuring Riverboat Roast Beef, Baked Boneless Chicken Breast, Baked Potatoes, Seasoned Green Beans, the Captain’s Favorite Pasta Salad, a Deluxe Tossed Salad, Dinner Rolls and Dessert.  Iced Tea and Coffee are included, and a cash bar is also available.

Once on board, you are escorted to your table, then you are free to roam the boat until the captain announces that dinner is ready.  After dinner, you are free to dance or sit back and enjoy the music.  Live entertainment is included on Dinner Cruises.  It may be The Rivermen playing modern jazz (Saturday night from Memorial Day thru September), or you might get to enjoy the music of Tim Hart (Mondays & Tuesdays), or Adam Ledbetter and David Damm (Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday).  Listen or dance to their favorite tunes — and they have been known to take a request or two.  And you never know when a crew member or two may step up on the stage and join in.

It’s a fun night of music for the young and the young at heart!  The dancefloor is available after dinner if you are so inclined, or you can choose to dance under the stars on the outer decks (no dancing on the tables and chairs, please).

The Captain’s Sunday Lunch

Enjoy lunch and a cruise on a lovely Sunday!  The dockside meal includes a buffet of Roast Beef, Mashed Potatoes and Gravy, Seasoned Green Beans, Deluxe Lettuce Salad with dressing, Dinner Roll, and the Captain’s Favorite Pasta Salad.  Iced tea, coffee and water accompany the meal.  Top all of this with a delicious Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Brownie.

Following lunch, enjoy a delightful one-hour sightseeing cruise on the “Mighty Mississippi” complete with river history, facts about Mark Twain, riverboat stories, and a few (or more!) tall-tales.

Lunch begins at 12:30 p.m.  Departure from the dock will be at 1:30 p.m. and returns at 2:30 p.m.

We hope you will join us for a delicious meal and casual river cruise; where you’re sure to become more like family by the time the landing whistle blows across the hills of Hannibal!

Other Attractions

American South

A Smithsonian magazine special report

How the Mississippi River Made Mark Twain… And Vice Versa

No novelist captured the muddy waterway and its people like the creator of Huckleberry Finn, as a journey along the river makes clear

David Carkeet

Josh. Rambler. Soleather. Sergeant Fathom. Thomas Jefferson Snod­grass. W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab. A Son of Adam.

I ran through the names in my head as I devoured dry-rub barbecue and piled up napkins at Memphis’ bustling Rendezvous. The restaurant’s slogan—“Not since Adam has a rib been this famous”—had reminded me of Mark Twain’s fondness for comic allusions to Adam, to the extent that he based an early pen name on him. But “A Son of Adam,” along with “Josh” and “Rambler” and his other experiments, belonged to an amateur, a man who occasionally wrote while otherwise employed as a printer, steamboat pilot and miner. Not until he became a full-time journalist, far from the river, in the alkali dust of the Nevada Territory, did he settle on “Mark Twain.”

You work up a hunger walking half the length of the Mississippi—even along a virtual version of the river. I had come to the Rendezvous from the Riverwalk on Mud Island near downtown Memphis—a gurgling scale model of the lower half of the Mississippi from its confluence with the Ohio all the way to the Gulf. The Riverwalk affords an outdoor stroll that covers 1,000 miles on a scale of one step to the mile. A mockingbird kept me company as I sauntered on the buff-colored concrete mosaic and watched kids tumble over the elevation intervals layered on the model’s riverbank, rising from the channel like a stairway of stacked pancakes. What would Samuel Clemens have made of the Riverwalk? He was a grown child who readily took a God’s-eye view of life on earth. He would have loved it.

All that the model lacked was the highway running the Mississippi’s length—the Great River Road, my home for the next several days. My guiding star would be the signs with the pilot-wheel logo that beckons all who are willing to suspend time and turn off the GPS. The Great River Road is a map line drawn in many inks, consisting of federal, state, county and town roads, and even, it sometimes seems, private drives. In Illinois alone, it comprises 29 different roads and highways. Touted as a “scenic byway,” it is often not scenic and occasionally a thruway. But it is a unique way to sample this country’s present and past; its rich, its formerly rich and everyone else; its Indian mounds and Army forts; its wildlife from tundra swans to alligators; and its ceaseless engines of commerce.

One of which was the steamboat—indigenous, glorious and preposterous.

Indigenous. Europe had nothing like it. Charles Dickens, who in 1842 rode three different steamboats down the Ohio and up to St. Louis and back again, had the vocabulary knocked out of him when he first saw one. In American Notes , he writes that they were “foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats. I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.” Lacking any “boat-like gear,” they looked as if they were built “to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountaintop.”

Glorious. They were “floating palaces,” and their tiers and filigrees made them “as beautiful as a wedding cake but without the complications,” as Mark Twain did not say. And they transformed the movement of people and goods on the river, formerly limited to flatboats and keelboats borne by the current, which were destroyed for scrap wood at the river’s mouth or laboriously pulled and poled back upriver. Nicholas Roosevelt (great-grand-uncle of Teddy) introduced the steamboat to the Mississippi when he steered the New Orleans into the river from the Ohio in 1811. During his journey, when he had occasion to turn the boat around and steam upriver, onlookers gaped and cheered.

Preposterous. You can heat an average New England house for an entire winter on four or five cords of wood; the larger steamboats in mid-century burned 50 to 75 cords of wood in one day. And thanks to commercial greed, frontier recklessness and the lust for showboating speed, steamboats were mayflies of mortality. In 1849, of the 572 steamboats operating on the Western rivers, only 22 were more than five years old. The others? Gone to a watery grave from snags, logs, bars, collisions, fires and boiler explosions. Smokestacks discharging the exhaust of open furnaces belched cinders onto wooden decks and cargoes of cotton, hay and turpentine. The most calamitous blows came from boiler explosions, which hurled boat fragments and bodies hundreds of feet into the air. When they didn’t land back on the boat or in the water, victims flew clear to shore and crashed through roofs or, in the words of one contemporary account, “shot like cannonballs through the solid walls of houses.”

Memphis saw the aftermath of many river tragedies. Mark Twain sadly chronicles one in Life on the Mississippi , his river memoir that treats his four years of steamboat piloting before the Civil War. In 1858, Sam, still a “cub” or apprentice pilot, encouraged his younger brother, Henry—sweet-tempered and cherished by the family—to take a job as an assistant clerk on the Pennsylvania , Sam’s boat at the time. On the way to New Orleans, the abusive pilot, under whom Sam had already been chafing for several trips, went too far and attacked Henry. Sam intervened, and the two pilots scuffled. Sam was forced to find a different boat for the upriver return, but Henry remained on the Pennsylvania . Two days behind his brother on the river, Sam received the awful news of a boiler explosion on the Pennsylvania . Henry, fatally injured, was taken to a makeshift hospital up the river in Memphis. When Sam reached his bedside, the sheer pathos of the meeting moved a newspaper reporter to single out the pair of brothers by name. The sympathetic citizens of Memphis—which Clemens would later call “the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi”—worried that Sam was unhinged by grief and sent a companion to accompany him when he took Henry’s body north to St. Louis.

Fortunately I had no need of the ministrations of the city, though I did find myself delighted to receive many a “sir,” “my man” and “my friend.” An encounter with a stranger on an isolated street in Memphis seemed to call for a nod or greeting, not the averted gaze of a Northern city. Such is the South. But so is this: On my way to my car to head north, I swung through Confederate Park, which sits on the bluff from which Memphians watched the Southern river fleet lose the battle for the city in 1862, and I wandered over to a bronze statue that had caught my eye. It was Jefferson Davis. Etched into the granite base: “He was a true American patriot.” A Yankee leaves a tribute like that scratching his head.

The Great River Road often hugs the river for miles; at other times it seeks high ground. In the Kentucky stretch, to see the river you must take a side trip, say, to the Columbus-Belmont State Park, peaceful now but not always—some of its gentle hills are trench walls from the war. In December of 1861, Ulysses S. Grant, based just up the river in Cairo, Illinois, led 3,000 Federals in a harassing attack here, not on the dug-in Confederate force on the bluff but against a smaller encampment on the Missouri side of the river. The long day of advance and retreat, essentially a draw, included several close calls for the Union brigade commander. Looming over the site is a Confederate cannon, unearthed by a local historian 16 years ago from under 42 feet of soil.

The river has a long history of diggers and salvagers. A few miles up the road, another side trip delivers you to Wickliffe Mounds, site of one of the many Mississippian culture villages along the river. This one dates from circa 1100 to 1350 and was first excavated in the 1930s by a Kentucky lumber magnate and devoted amateur archaeologist, Fain King, who created a tourist attraction that presented the exposed bones of Native Americans as objects of curiosity. But, more important, they are the remains of venerable ancestors, as Congress declared in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. This requires that disposition of native skeletal remains be transferred to tribal descendants or, if unknown, to a tribe best representing them. The “Ancient Buried City” skeletons were ceremonially reinterred by members of the Chickasaw Nation, and the mounds were restored to their original form.

I drove on to St. Louis to meet Kris Zapalac, an energetic historian and preservationist—and debunker. Don’t be surprised if her first words to you address misconceptions she suspects you are laboring under. She might warn you to be suspicious of memorials: “Just because there’s a tunnel somewhere doesn’t mean it was part of the Underground Railroad.” Or she might tell you that slaves escaping to freedom weren’t invariably helped by outsiders, white or otherwise: “People are always looking for a Harriet Tubman.”

Kris picked me up outside the city’s Old Courthouse, where I had spent the morning studying the comprehensive Dred Scott display. Driving north on Broadway, she pointed to the 1874 Eads Bridge, for which she had managed to find a railing design that met code requirements and also closely matched the original. James B. Eads—“B” for Buchanan, but it should stand for “Brainstorm”—was a dynamo of ingenuity. He devised ironclad gunboats for the Union, created the navigation channel for deep-water ships at the mouth of the Mississippi and—my personal favorite—invented a diving bell. Like Henry Clemens, Eads began his river career as an assistant clerk, and as he watched steamboats all around him go down, he saw money to be made from reclaiming their cargo and fittings. He invented a contraption that for years only he was willing to use, and no wonder. It was a 40-gallon whiskey barrel with one end removed and the other linked to a boat by a supporting cable and an air hose. Once he was installed in it, the barrel would be submerged, open end first to capture the air (imagine an inverted glass in a full dish tub). At the bottom, he would wander the underwater terrain, fighting the current and the dismal murk in search of treasure. Eads should have died many times. Instead, he established himself as a pioneering, if somewhat zany, engineer.

Four miles north of the St. Louis Arch, Kris and I arrived at our destination—an Underground Railroad site she had discovered. Here, in 1855, a small group of slaves attempted to cross the river to Illinois, among them a woman named Esther and her two children. However, authorities lay in wait for them on the Illinois riverbank. A few slaves escaped, but most were apprehended, among them Esther, who was owned by Henry Shaw—a name known to all St. Louisans for the vast botanical garden he developed and bequeathed to the city. To punish Esther for the attempt, Shaw sold her down the river, separating her from her two children. Kris, working from newspaper accounts and receipts of slave sales, put the facts together and arrived at the likely spot on the river where the skiff had cast off. In 2001, the site was recognized by the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

At the crossing, I tried to imagine the silent nighttime boarding and departure and the bitter disappointment across the river. Because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act requiring citizens of free states to aid in the capture of freedom seekers, Illinois represented not freedom to a slave but rather a different kind of danger. I thought of Mark Twain’s Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , hiding on the island to avoid the fate ultimately dealt to Esther. Meanwhile, Huck, disguised as a girl, learns from an otherwise kindly Illinois woman that she suspects a runaway slave is camped on the island and that she has alerted her husband, who is about to head out to capture him. That scene leads to the most famous use of the first-person plural pronoun in literature: Huck dashes back to the island, awakens Jim, and instinctively signs on to his struggle with the words, “They’re after us.”

Kris and I stepped into the nearby information center housed in a square metal former Coast Guard building and were welcomed by a lively, loquacious host. Kris hadn’t been to the site in a while, and when our host learned that she was the one who had discovered the facts of the crossing, he beamed and high-fived her and included me as well, though entirely undeserving. He said to her, “You’re a great lady. You’re a great lady.” Kris shook her head. “I’m a historian,” she said.

I left Kris to her current project—researching hundreds of freedom suits filed by slaves in Missouri courts—and drove up the Missouri segment of the Great River Road known as the Little Dixie Highway. I passed through the small town of Louisiana, where young Sam Clemens was put ashore after being found stowed away on a steamboat from Hannibal, 30 miles up the river. He was 7 years old. I thought about the difference between the boy who had grown up in Hannibal in the 1840s and ’50s and the Mark Twain who had written the island scene in Huckleberry Finn . I had recently read Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World , a book by Terrell Dempsey, a former Hannibalian now living not far from that town in Quincy, Illinois. Dempsey had long doubted that Hannibal’s full slave history had been properly told, and he and his wife, Vicki—an attorney like himself—began to spend evenings and weekends spooling through the local newspaper archive.

To read Searching for Jim is to understand the racist cruelty of the society in which Clemens grew up—the grinding labor that was the slaves’ daily lot; the beatings they endured, sometimes to the point of death; the white citizens’ loathing for abolitionists and free blacks; the racist jokes passed from one newspaper to another, some of which young Sam, as an apprentice printer, set in type. The Clemens household kept slaves, and Sam’s father sat on a jury that sent three abolitionists to prison for 12 years. To reread Mark Twain with a fuller sense of that world is to appreciate the long moral journey he had to make in order to—like Huck—sign on to Jim’s struggle.

I met Terrell and Vicki in their home in Quincy—an 1889 Queen Anne, one of dozens of enviable Victorian homes in the town’s East End Historic District. Terrell proposed a boat ride despite threatening weather. We drove to the dock on Quinsippi Island, unwrapped their modest pontoon boat and headed out. We passed close by a tow pushing nine covered barges and speculated about their contents. Three of the barges rode high in the water—empties, Terrell explained to his landlubber guest.

We talked about Clemens’ early environment and what he wrote—and didn’t write—about it. I mentioned something that had struck me in my recent rereading of Life on the Mississippi , a book not just about Clemens’ piloting years but also—the bulk of it, in fact—about life on the river when he revisited it in 1882. Slaves were a constant presence on antebellum steamboats, both as forced laborers on the deck and in chained droves being taken downriver. Yet there is no mention of them on the boats in the memoir portion, nor is there reflection on their absence in 1882.

Terrell, a bluff fellow, said, “He didn’t want to remind people where he came from.”

As the hum of the outboard stirred large carp into the air (but not into the boat), we talked of other omissions and shadings in Mark Twain’s works. A memoir by a piloting colleague of Clemens’ tells of how they both avoided being drafted as Union pilots in the summer of 1861 when the general in the St. Louis office who was about to complete the paperwork became distracted by some pretty women in the hall and stepped out the door. This allowed the near-conscripts to desert via a different door. It’s a perfect Mark Twain story that Mark Twain never told.

Vicki, huddling against the wind off the river, said, “He also never wrote about defrauding the abolitionist society.”

This was a curious episode uncovered by literary scholar Robert Sattelmeyer and then skillfully sleuthed by him. The Boston Vigilance Committee was an abolitionist group that rendered financial support to fugitive slaves and occasionally put its funds to other uses. For example, if someone wrote to the society from, say, Missouri, that he needed financial help to go to, say, Boston, the committee might very well respond with cash if the circumstances were right—as they seemed to be in this case, according to a September 1854 entry in the treasurer’s ledger book: $24.50 paid to one “Samuel Clemens” for “passage from Missouri Penitentiary to Boston—he having been imprisoned there two years for aiding Fugitives to escape.” Sattelmeyer established that only one Samuel Clemens lived in Missouri in this period and that no Samuel Clemens had served in the state penitentiary. The explanation must be that young Sam, like his later creation Tom Sawyer, enjoyed a good joke at others’ expense, and what better dupes to hoodwink than those meddling abolitionists?

Why would Clemens do such a thing? Because he was an 18-year-old who had grown up in a slave state. A little over a decade later, he would woo Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, daughter of an abolitionist not just in theory but in practice: Her father, Jervis Langdon, helped fund the work of John W. Jones, a former slave and Underground Railroad conductor who aided hundreds of escaped slaves on their flight north. I wondered aloud, there on the boat, if Clemens’ anti-abolitionist prank ever made it into the Elmira dinner table conversation during his two-year courtship.

“Doubtful,” said Terrell. He revved the outboard, looked back at the carp leaping in our wake, and grinned. “That really pisses them off,” he said.

The next day I visited Hannibal, a town that will always feel as small as it was when Clemens grew up, bounded as it is by a bluff on its north side, another bluff just 12 blocks to the south, and the river to the east. I was curious about changes in the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, which I hadn’t visited for two decades. The concise narrative in the museum’s “interpretive center” (completed in 2005) presented Clemens’ early life without overload. Mercifully free of the looping banjo and fiddle music that had dogged me through other river museums, the room was silent save for a single whispered comment I heard from one museumgoer to another, “I didn’t know he was so poor.”

I was happy to see a large photograph of Sam’s older brother Orion in the interpretive center, looking more distinguished than his reputation. Orion was a bumbler with a disastrous career record, but he was earnest and good-hearted. Sam, in adulthood, showed an anger toward him that had always seemed excessive to me. Now, looking at the portrait on the heels of that one overheard comment, I wondered if Sam’s anger could have gone back to the fact that when he was just 11 and his father died, poverty forced his mother to remove him from school and apprentice him to a stern local printer, and this would not have been the case if Orion, ten years his senior, hadn’t been an incompetent from birth and had been able to provide for the family.

I next went to the boyhood home, sliced down one side from front to back like a dollhouse, its three rooms on each of its two levels protected by glass but still allowing an intimate view. A high-school boy behind me, upon bursting into the parlor from the gift shop, said to himself, with feeling, “This is sweet!” The home was working its magic on him. On the wooden floor of the kitchen lay a thin rug with a sign explaining that a slave would have slept here, rising early to light the fire for the household. This pallet was installed at the suggestion of Terrell Dempsey, who has agitated over the years for the museum to give more attention to slavery. Before him, in the 1990s, Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin made a similar appeal, and the museum indeed now does the subject justice.

After my tour, I sought out the museum’s executive director, Cindy Lovell. While I was in her office, curator Henry Sweets looked in on us long enough to hear me express delight in the exhibits before he hurried off to attend to his many duties, as he has done since 1978. The two of them are Twainiacs even beyond what you would expect from their positions. Cindy, speaking of other curators and scholars, will say, “He’s a geek for Twain,” and “She’s got the bug” and “She gets it.” Or the death sentence: “He gets things wrong.” Don’t try to quote Mark Twain in her presence. She will finish the quotation—with corrections—and extend it beyond your intentions.

Cindy gave me a director’s-eye view of Twain World—a place with at least five headquarters (in addition to Hannibal: Berkeley, California; Hartford, Connecticut; Elmira, New York; and his birthplace in nearby Florida, Missouri). “They’re wonderful people,” she said. “It’s a great community.” Unfortunately, though, Clemens’ artifacts are spread hither and yon. A 12-foot mirror from his Fifth Avenue New York apartment is in a Dubuque river museum. “It’s crazy!” she said. “They’re all over the place. Florida has the family carriage!” The carriage properly belonged in Hartford, where it had seen regular use by Sam, Olivia and their three daughters, not in the Missouri burg Sammy had left at age 3. I imagined a coordinated multi-party swap happening, like a kidney exchange, where each museum received the goods that suited it.

At Cindy’s suggestion, we repaired in my rental car to two Twain geek haunts—the Mount Olivet Cemetery, where many Clemenses repose (father, mother and brothers Henry and Orion; as for Sam, Olivia and their children, they are all buried in Elmira), and then the Baptist cemetery, where Tom Sawyer read “Sacred to the Memory of So-and-so,” painted on the boards above the graves, and you can read it now on the tombstones that have replaced them. Here, before Tom’s and Huck’s terrified eyes, Injun Joe murdered Dr. Robinson. Cindy told me of her fondness for bringing school-age writers to the cemetery at night and reading that passage to them by candlelight. They huddle close. (Alas, no more. As if to demonstrate the comity in Twain World, not long after my visit, Cindy became executive director of the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford.)

It’s a big river, as they say, and I had to move on. Comedian Buddy Hackett once said that words with a “k” in them are funny. By this measure Keo­kuk is overqualified. Orion moved to this Iowa river town just across the border from Missouri, and although he characteristically struggled as a newspaper editor, he succeeded in becoming an opponent of slavery, much to the chagrin of young Sam.

I stayed at a B&B on Keokuk’s Grand Avenue, well named for the view of the river the broad street commands from the bluff. In the morning, two bright-eyed, white-shirted couples joined me at the breakfast table. They said they were from Salt Lake City, I said I was from Vermont, and we agreed not to discuss politics. Each couple had a son “on mission,” one in Russia, the other in New Caledonia, and the four of them were on a weeklong pilgrimage along the Mormon Pioneer Trail that traces the migration of the faith’s persecuted forebears from western Missouri east to Illinois, then west again, finally to Utah. They asked about my travels, and I mentioned Mark Twain. One of the men, with an ambiguous smile, said that Mark Twain had written that the Book of Mormon was “a cure for insomnia.” (Actually, “chloro-form in print,” which I didn’t recall at the table. Where was Cindy when I needed her?)

I wanted to ask about their pilgrimage, but I hung fire on the phrasing. “Do all Mormons do this?” would sound as if I saw them as a herd. My every thought seemed rooted in stereotype. The sole coffee drinker at the table, I felt like an alcoholic with each sip. When one of the men checked something on his iPad, I thought, “Hmm, so Mormons are allowed to use iPads.” We parted on the friendliest of terms, but I felt the gulf of a vast difference, created mainly by my ignorance.

I drove north on Grand Avenue, passing homes in a range of styles—Queen Anne, Dutch Colonial Revival, Gothic Revival and Prairie School—all in a six-block stretch. But these piles, unlike the Quincy houses I had admired, did not suggest a neighborhood as much as isolated testaments to an earlier prosperity. The road dropped down, wound along the river and then delivered me without fanfare into the tranquil village of Montrose, with churches sized to match its population. Just to the north, I happened upon one of the reasons the B&B pilgrims had come here. Across the river in Nauvoo, Illinois, beginning in 1839, Mormon settlers cleared swamps and established a town that swiftly grew into the largest in the state. The surrounding communities, threatened by the Mormons’ beliefs—and their success—murdered leader Joseph Smith in 1844, and in 1846 they began to drive the Mormons out of the area. The first to flee crossed the river on ice in February, though many perished, and, at the site where I now stood, the survivors huddled and looked back on the temple and the town they had lost. On the trip so far I had passed several crossings along routes once traveled by Native Americans being forcibly relocated to Indian Territory. This place too, I thought, is a Trail of Tears. I looked down the road, hoping that my B&B pilgrims might come while I was there so that we could become reacquainted on their turf, but the timing wasn’t right.

Onward. The 250-mile Wisconsin segment of the Great River Road recently won a “Most Beautiful Road Trip” survey conducted by the Huffington Post , beating out Hawaii’s Hana Highway and California’s Big Sur Coast Highway. I needed to see it for myself. The next day, I headed out from Dubuque before dawn, crossed into Wisconsin and panicked when the highway seemed to take me at right angles away from the river. But the pilot-wheel signs reassured me and steered me through rolling farmland back to the river. The landscape began to feel different from what I had experienced so far, and I knew why: I was in “the driftless area.” The most recent glacial period in North America, the Wisconsin Glaciation, spared this part of the river basin for reasons “that are poorly understood,” especially by me. “Drift” is the deposit left behind by a glacier (thus the name), but what most distinguishes the terrain is its unscoured range of towering bluffs along the river. These begin to appear about 50 miles north of Dubuque.

The bluffs are one of two surprises in the driftless area. The other is that the river sometimes becomes a lake. Locks and dams are often the cause, flooding upriver sloughs and bottomlands. But Lake Pepin, 21 miles long and so wide that the sight of it is initially disorienting, has a natural origin. At its southern end, Wisconsin’s Chippewa River flows on a steep gradient that delivers massive amounts of sediment into the Mississippi. Over the centuries, the encroaching deposit created a “delta dam,” backing the Mississippi up until it flooded to the bases of the confining bluffs.

Not far from Lake Pepin, I came across a sign for Maiden Rock. The “historical” marker told the tired story of the Indian maiden forcibly betrothed to a brave who was not the brave she loved, the tale climaxing in her despondent plunge to the rocks below. Winona was the maiden’s name, and the cliff looming over me was perfect for the job. Clemens passed by here in 1882—new territory for him, having plied the St. Louis-New Orleans line—and in Life on the Mississippi he tells the tale of Maiden Rock, not in his language but in the inflated style of a professional tour guide who has happened onto the steamboat. In the guide’s version, however, Winona lands on her matchmaking parents, who are gazing upward from below, wondering what their daughter is up to. The impact kills the couple while cushioning Winona’s fall, and she is now free to marry whomever she wishes. The unorthodox denouement, though ostensibly spoken by the humorless guide, is pure Mark Twain. What better way to blast a cliché to flinders?

At one point on the Wisconsin stretch I pulled over to watch a tow approach. I counted the barges: 15, three across and five long, the maximum on the upper river; south of St. Louis, up to 25 barges can be combined. Since the tow was going downriver, it was probably carrying corn or soybeans; upriver loads are more likely to be coal or steel. I watched the pilot navigate a tricky turn, although “tricky” is relative. In Clemens’ day, a pilot navigated by memory and skill at reading nuances in the river’s surface; today, buoys mark a channel 300 feet wide and nine feet deep. Still, it’s not easy. At a museum at the Alton, Illinois, lock and dam, I had entered a pretend pilothouse and bravely manned a panoramic simulator to pilot a tow along a digital St. Louis riverfront—a challenging stretch because of its many bridges with nonaligned pilings. In short order I crashed into the Eads Bridge, but mainly because I was distracted by the anachronistic Admiral I saw moored on the riverfront, a bygone restaurant boat where my wife once had some really bad fish. Later, outside the museum, I watched a northbound tow “lock through”; it rose 20 feet in just 30 minutes, thanks to massive inflow pipes that fill the lock, large enough to drive a truck through. Animals sometimes end up in the pipes—deer, pigs, cattle—and wash into the lock. No human bodies though—I asked. A nice first chapter for a mystery novel, I would think.

Satisfied that the Wisconsin Great River Road deserved its renown, I crossed to Red Wing, Minnesota, and turned around for the trip south.

“Do you love the river?” Terrell Dempsey had surprised me with this blunt question as he guided his pontoon boat toward the dock in Quincy. Before I could answer, his wife said, “We love the river” and then elaborated. As a young woman, Vicki interviewed for her first job in Louisiana, Missouri. Coming from St. Louis, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to live in such a small place until she got a view of the river from a vista above the town. “I’d never seen anything so beautiful,” she said. “I had to live there.” And they did. After a year, what seemed like a better job opportunity arose in Clinton, Missouri. “We hated it,” she said—because it was inland. They moved to Hannibal, to a house three blocks up Hill Street from the Clemens home, and they have lived on the Mississippi ever since.

I met many lovers of the river. An artist at the Applefest in Clarksville, Missouri, told me she had come there decades earlier “with a guy”—she said it in a way that foreshadowed the ending—and then she had happily stayed on “after the guy was long gone.”

In Dubuque, where I toured an old dredge boat called the William M. Black , the amiable guide, Robert Carroll, told me he grew up in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to the grinding roar of dredge boats cleaning out the river channel. He spoke so authoritatively about the William M. Black that I had taken him for a former deckhand. But no—he had spent his adult life as a court reporter in landlocked Cedar Rapids. He moved to Dubuque after he retired. “I missed the river,” he said, though he didn’t have to—I knew it was coming. Carroll now spends his days happily introducing visitors to every rivet on a boat much like the one he heard as a boy.

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(1835-1910)

Who Was Mark Twain?

Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was the celebrated author of several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor.

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people.

John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh.

His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly.

The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle — a fact that would shape the career of Twain.

Twain in Hannibal

Twain stayed in Hannibal until age 17. The town, situated on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a splendid place to grow up.

Steamboats arrived there three times a day, tooting their whistles; circuses, minstrel shows and revivalists paid visits; a decent library was available; and tradesmen such as blacksmiths and tanners practiced their entertaining crafts for all to see.

However, violence was commonplace, and young Twain witnessed much death: When he was nine years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 he watched an enslaved person die after a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron.

Hannibal inspired several of Twain's fictional locales, including "St. Petersburg" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. These imaginary river towns are complex places: sunlit and exuberant on the one hand, but also vipers' nests of cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness and soul-crushing boredom — all parts of Twain's boyhood experience.

Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when — with his father dead and the family needing a source of income — he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier , which paid him with a meager ration of food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union , a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.

Steamboat Pilot

Twain loved his career — it was exciting, well-paying and high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in 1861 by the outbreak of the Civil War , which halted most civilian traffic on the river.

As the Civil War began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederate States . Twain opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army in June 1861 but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded.

Where, he wondered then, would he find his future? What venue would bring him both excitement and cash? His answer: the great American West.

Heading Out West

In July 1861, Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years.

At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of 1862, he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.

Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise . He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain — steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.

Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style — friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious.

He got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country (the story later appeared under various titles).

'Innocents Abroad'

His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip.

In 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a nationwide bestseller.

At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

Marriage to Olivia Langdon

However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston — a straight-laced, Victorian , moneyed group that cowed Twain.

"An indisputable and almost overwhelming sense of inferiority bounced around his psyche," wrote scholar Hamlin Hill, noting that these feelings were competing with his aggressiveness and vanity. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization."

In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have ... the only sweetheart I have ever loved ... she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest, and the daintiest, and she is the most perfect gem of womankind."

Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.

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Mark Twain's Books

Thankfully, Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion.

'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace."

'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn ," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935, giving short shrift to Herman Melville and others but making an interesting point.

Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature.

Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the 1881 publication of The Prince and the Pauper , a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.

'Life on the Mississippi'

In 1883 he put out Life on the Mississippi , an interesting but safe travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published in 1884, Livy gave it a chilly reception.

After that, business and writing were of equal value to Twain as he set about his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. In 1885, he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant , who had just died.

He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.

'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'

Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some ways of his father's, had serious consequences for his state of mind. They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God.

Another cause of his angst, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not giving undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered on his Missouri boyhood.

In 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , a science-fiction/historical novel about ancient England. His next major work, in 1894, was The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson , a somber novel that some observers described as "bitter."

He also wrote short stories, essays and several other books, including a study of Joan of Arc . Some of these later works have enduring merit, and his unfinished work The Chronicle of Young Satan has fervent admirers today.

Twain's last 15 years were filled with public honors, including degrees from Oxford and Yale . Probably the most famous American of the late 19th century, he was much photographed and applauded wherever he went.

Indeed, he was one of the most prominent celebrities in the world, traveling widely overseas, including a successful 'round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-96, undertaken to pay off his debts.

Family Struggles

But while those years were gilded with awards, they also brought him much anguish. Early in their marriage, he and Livy had lost their toddler son, Langdon, to diphtheria; in 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age of 24 of spinal meningitis. The loss broke his heart, and adding to his grief, he was out of the country when it happened.

His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with severe epilepsy. In 1909, when she was 29 years old, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full of quarrels.

In June 1904, while Twain traveled, Livy died after a long illness. "The full nature of his feelings toward her is puzzling," wrote scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. "If he treasured Livy's comradeship as much as he often said, why did he spend so much time away from her?"

But absent or not, throughout 34 years of marriage, Twain had indeed loved his wife. "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," he wrote in tribute to her.

Twain became somewhat bitter in his later years, even while projecting an amiable persona to his public. In private he demonstrated a stunning insensitivity to friends and loved ones.

"Much of the last decade of his life, he lived in hell," wrote Hamlin Hill. He wrote a fair amount but was unable to finish most of his projects. His memory faltered.

Twain suffered volcanic rages and nasty bouts of paranoia, and he experienced many periods of depressed indolence, which he tried to assuage by smoking cigars, reading in bed and playing endless hours of billiards and cards.

Twain died on April 21, 1910, at the age of 74. He was buried in Elmira, New York.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, is now a popular attraction and is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Twain is remembered as a great chronicler of American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Writing grand tales about Sawyer, Finn and the mighty Mississippi River, Twain explored the American soul with wit, buoyancy and a sharp eye for truth.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Mark Twain
• Birth Year: 1835
• Birth date: November 30, 1835
• Birth State: Missouri
• Birth City: Florida
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Mark Twain, the writer, adventurer and wily social critic born Samuel Clemens, wrote the novels 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• Death Year: 1910
• Death date: April 21, 1910
• Death State: Connecticut
• Death City: Redding
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Mark Twain Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/mark-twain
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 31, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364.
• Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.
• New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.
• The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
• I'd rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I've got so much more of it.
• Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
• Do not put off 'til tomorrow what can be put off 'til day-after-tomorrow just as well.
• In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
• 'Classic'—a book which people praise and don't read.
• When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.
• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
• We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but would assassinate you.
• Be good and you will be lonesome.

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A Life Lived in a Rapidly Changing World: Samuel L. Clemens‚ 1835-1910

As twain’s books provide insight into the past‚ the events of his personal life further demonstrate his role as an eyewitness to history..

During his lifetime‚ Sam Clemens watched a young United States evolve from a nation torn apart by internal conflicts to one of international power. He experienced America’s vast growth and change – from westward expansion to industrialization‚ the end of slavery‚ advancements in technology‚ big government and foreign wars. And along the way‚ he often had something to say about the changes happening in his country.

The Early Years

Samuel Clemens was born on November 30‚ 1835 in Florida‚ Missouri‚ the sixth of seven children. At age 4‚ Sam and his family moved to the small frontier town of Hannibal‚ Missouri‚ on the banks of the Mississippi River. Missouri‚ at the time‚ was a fairly new state (it had gained statehood in 1821) and made up part of the country’s western border. It was also a state that took part in slavery. Sam’s father owned one enslaved person, and his uncle owned several. In fact‚ it was on his uncle’s farm that Sam spent many boyhood summers playing in the enslaved people’s quarters‚ listening to tall tales and the spirituals that he would enjoy throughout his life.

In 1847‚ when Sam was 11‚ his father died. Shortly thereafter he left school to work as a printer’s apprentice for a local newspaper. His job was to arrange the type for each of the newspaper’s stories‚ allowing Sam to read the news of the world while completing his work.

Twain’s Young Adult Life

At 18‚ Sam headed east to New York City and Philadelphia‚ where he worked on several different newspapers and found some success at writing articles. By 1857‚ he had returned home to embark on a new career as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861‚ however‚ all traffic along the river came to a halt‚ as did Sam’s pilot career. Inspired by the times‚ Sam joined up with a volunteer Confederate unit called the Marion Rangers‚ but he quit after just two weeks.

In search of a new career‚ Sam headed west in July 1861‚ at the invitation of his brother‚ Orion‚ who had just been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Lured by the infectious hope of striking it rich in Nevada’s silver rush‚ Sam traveled across the open frontier from Missouri to Nevada by stagecoach. Along the journey Sam encountered Native American tribes for the first time, along with a variety of unique characters‚ mishaps, and disappointments. These events would find a way into his short stories and books‚ particularly   Roughing It .

After failing as a silver prospector‚ Sam began writing for the Territorial Enterprise‚ a Virginia City‚ Nevada newspaper where he used‚ for the first time‚ his pen name‚ Mark Twain. Seeking change, by 1864 Sam headed for San Francisco where he continued to write for local papers.

In 1865 Sam’s first “big break” came with the publication of his short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog ” in papers across the country. A year later Sam was hired by the Sacramento Union to visit and report on the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). His writings were so popular that‚ upon his return‚ he embarked upon his first lecture tour‚ which established him as a successful stage performer.

Hired by the Alta California to continue his travel writing from the east‚ Sam arrived in New York City in 1867. He quickly signed up for a steamship tour of Europe and the “Holy Land.” His travel letters‚ full of vivid descriptions and tongue-in-cheek observations‚ met with such audience approval that they were later reworked into his first book‚  The Innocents Abroad , published in 1869. It was also on this trip that Clemens met his future brother-in-law‚ Charles Langdon. Langdon reportedly showed Sam a picture of his sister‚  Olivia ‚ and Sam fell in love at first sight.

Twain Starts a Family and Moves to Hartford

After courting for two years‚ Sam Clemens and Olivia (Livy) Langdon were married in 1870. They settled in Buffalo‚ New York‚ where Sam had become a partner‚ editor, and writer for the daily newspaper the  Buffalo Express . While they were living in Buffalo‚ their first child‚ Langdon Clemens‚ was born.

In 1871 Sam moved his family to Hartford‚ Connecticut‚ a city he had come to love while visiting his publisher there and where he had made friends. Livy also had family connections to the city. For the first few years the Clemenses rented a house in the heart of Nook Farm‚ a residential area that was home to numerous writers‚ publishers, and other prominent figures. In 1872 Sam’s recollections and tall tales from his frontier adventures were published in his book  Roughing It . That same year the Clemenses’ first daughter Susy was born‚ but their son‚ Langdon‚ died at age two from diphtheria.

In 1873 Sam’s focus turned toward social criticism. He and Hartford Courant publisher Charles Dudley Warner co-wrote  The Gilded Age ‚ a novel that attacked political corruption‚ big business, and the American obsession with getting rich that seemed to dominate the era. Ironically‚ a year after its publication‚ the Clemenses’ elaborate 25-room house on Farmington Avenue‚ which had cost the then-huge sum of $40‚000-$45‚000‚ was completed.

Twain Writes his Most Famous Books While Living in Hartford

For the next 17 years (1874-1891)‚ Sam‚ Livy, and their three daughters (Clara was born in 1874 and Jean in 1880) lived in the Hartford home. During those years Sam completed some of his most famous books‚ often finding a summer refuge for uninterrupted work at his sister-in-law’s farm in Elmira‚ New York. Novels such as  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer  (1876) and  Life on the Mississippi (1883) captured both his Missouri memories and depictions of the American scene. Yet his social commentary continued.  The Prince and the Pauper  (1881) explored class relations, as does  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court  (1889), which‚ going a step further‚ criticized oppression in general while examining the period’s explosion of new technologies. And‚ in perhaps his most famous work‚  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1884)‚ Clemens‚ by the way he attacked the institution of slavery‚ railed against the failures of Reconstruction and the continued poor treatment of African Americans in his own time.

Huckleberry Finn  was also the first book published by Sam’s own publishing company‚ The Charles L. Webster Company. In an attempt to gain control over publication as well as to make substantial profits‚ Sam created the company in 1884. A year later he contracted with Ulysses S. Grant to publish Grant’s memoirs; the two-volume set provided large royalties for Grant’s widow and was a financial success for the publisher as well.

Twain’s Financial Ruin and Subsequent Travels

Although Sam enjoyed financial success during his Hartford years‚ he continually made bad investments in new inventions‚ which eventually brought him to bankruptcy. In an effort to economize and pay back his debts‚ Sam and Livy moved their family to Europe in 1891. When his publishing company failed in 1894‚ Sam was forced to set out on a worldwide lecture tour to earn money. In 1896 tragedy struck when Susy Clemens‚ at age 24‚ died from meningitis while on a visit to the Hartford home. Unable to bear being in the place of her death‚ the Clemenses never returned to Hartford to live.

From 1891 until 1900‚ Sam and his family traveled throughout the world. During those years Sam witnessed the increasing exploitation of weaker governments by European powers‚ which he described in his book  Following the Equator  (1897). The Boer War in South Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China fueled his growing anger toward imperialistic countries and their actions. With the Spanish-American and Philippine wars in 1898‚ Sam’s wrath was redirected toward the American government. When he returned to the United States in 1900‚ his finances restored‚ Sam readily declared himself an anti-imperialist and‚ from 1901 until his death‚ served as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League.

Twain’s Darkest Times and Late Life

In these later years‚ Sam’s writings turned dark. They began to focus on human greed and cruelty and questioned the humanity of the human race. His public speeches followed suit and included a harshly sarcastic public introduction of Winston Churchill in 1900. Even though Sam’s lecture tour had managed to get him out of debt‚ his anti-government writings and speeches threatened his livelihood once again. As Sam was labeled by some as a traitor‚ several of his works were never published during his lifetime, either because magazines would not accept them or because of his own personal fear that his marketable reputation would be ruined.

In 1903‚ after living in New York City for three years‚ Livy became ill, and Sam and his wife returned to Italy, where she died a year later. After her death‚ Sam lived in New York until 1908, when he moved into his last house‚ “Stormfield,” in Redding‚ Connecticut. In 1909 his middle daughter Clara was married. In the same year Jean‚ the youngest daughter‚ died from an epileptic seizure. Four months later, on April 21‚ 1910‚ Sam Clemens died at age 74.

Like any good journalist‚ Sam Clemens‚ a.k.a. Mark Twain‚ spent his life observing and reporting on his surroundings. In his writings he provided images of the romantic‚ the real‚ the strengths and weaknesses of a rapidly changing world. By examining his life and his works‚ we can read into the past – piecing together various events of the era and the responses to them. We can delve into the American mindset of the late nineteenth century and make our own observations of history‚ discover new connections‚ create new inferences and gain better insights into the time period and the people who lived in it. As Sam once wrote‚ “Supposing is good‚ but finding out is better.”

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This Day In History : April 9

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Mark Twain receives steamboat pilot’s license

On April 9, 1859, a 23-year-old Missouri youth named Samuel Langhorne Clemens receives his steamboat pilot’s license .

Clemens had signed on as a pilot’s apprentice in 1857 while on his way to Mississippi. He had been commissioned to write a series of comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post, but after writing five, decided he’d rather be a pilot than a writer. He piloted his own boats for two years, until the Civil War halted steamboat traffic. During his time as a pilot, he picked up the term “ Mark Twain ,” a boatman’s call noting that the river was only two fathoms deep, the minimum depth for safe navigation. When Clemens returned to writing in 1861, working for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he wrote a humorous travel letter signed by “Mark Twain” and continued to use the pseudonym for nearly 50 years.

Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, and was apprenticed to a printer at age 13. He later worked for his older brother, who established the Hannibal Journal . In 1864, he moved to San Francisco to work as a reporter. There he wrote the story that made him famous, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

In 1866, he traveled to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union. Next, he traveled the world writing accounts for papers in California and New York, which he later published as the popular book The Innocents Abroad (1869). In 1870, Clemens married the daughter of a wealthy New York coal merchant and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he continued to write travel accounts and lecture. In 1875, his novel Tom Sawyer was published, followed by Life on the Mississippi (1883) and his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn (1885). Bad investments left Clemens bankrupt after the publication of Huckleberry Finn , but he won back his financial standing with his next three books. In 1903, he and his family moved to Italy, where his wife died. Her death left him sad and bitter, and his work, while still humorous, grew distinctly darker. He died in 1910.

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Mark Twain Riverboat

The Mark Twain Riverboat goes on a gentle cruise around Tom Sawyer Island. That's the same route that the Sailing Ship Columbia and Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes take, and I'd suggest choosing only one of these three attractions. You don't need to see that same scenery three times.

What You Need to Know About the Mark Twain Riverboat

TripSavvy / Betsy Malloy Photography

We polled 131 of our readers to find out what they think about the riverboat. 74% of them said It's a must-do or ride it if you have time, making it one of the lower-rated things to do at Disneyland.

• Location:  Mark Twain Riverboat is in Frontierland
• Rating:  ★
• Restrictions:   No height restrictions. Children under age seven years must be accompanied by a person age 14 years or older.
• Ride Time:   12 minutes
• Recommended for:   Everyone
• Fun Factor:  Low
• Wait Factor:  Low    
• Fear Factor:  Low
• Herky-Jerky Factor:  Low
• Nausea Factor:  Low
• Seating:   You just get on and ride, and you can move around while it's going
• Accessibility:   This ride is fully accessible, and you can stay in your wheelchair or ECV for the whole thing, but you'll only get onto the lower level. Go to the access gate on the right side of the turnstile or enter through the attraction exit and ask a Cast Member for help.  More about visiting Disneyland in a wheelchair or ECV

How to Have More Fun on the Mark Twain Riverboat

• If you want to  rest your feet , head for the seats in the front as soon as you get on.
• This ride  closes before dark
• Watch the kids.  They may be tempted to climb on the railings and could fall off.
• If you ask a cast member, the  pilot might let you ride inside with him . This is limited to just a couple of people per trip.

Next Disneyland Ride: Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes

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Fun Facts About Mark Twain Riverboat

Built in 1955, this was the first paddle wheeler built since shortly after 1900. It was built at the Disney Studios, except for the hull which was constructed at a shipyard in San Pedro. But don't let that fool you. It's a working reproduction of the historic vessels that ferried people up and down the mighty Mississippi, with a working steam engine that powers the large paddle, which in turn propels the boat.

The Mark Twain made its first voyage four days before Disneyland opened to the public, for Walt and Lillian Disney's 30th wedding anniversary. 

The Mark Twain was christened by actress   Irene Dunne who starred in the 1936 movie "Showboat" on Disneyland's Opening Day.

The boat is 28 feet tall and 105 feet long, with four decks.

The writer Mark Twain was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi river when he was younger, and one of Walt Disney's personal heroes, which is why Walt named the boat after him.

A riverboat ride was in the plans from the earliest days, when Walt Disney started the first plans for building an amusement park near Walt Disney Studios in Burbank.

Every Disney theme park throughout the world has their own version of the Mark Twain riverboat. 

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Old Times on the Mississippi (Part VI)

The sixth installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot

VI. Official Rank and Dignity of a Pilot. The Rise and Decadence of the Pilots’ Association.

In my preceding articles I have tried, by going into the minutiæ of the science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension of what the science consists of; and at the same time I have tried to show him that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very worthy of his attention. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two thirds of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his parish’s opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we “modify” before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none . The captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders, while the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper’s reign was over. The moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her 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. Indeed, the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words. I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere. His interference, in that particular instance, might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. 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 all the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes. But then, people in one’s own grade of life are not usually embarrassing objects.

By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands. It “gravels” me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.

In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days, on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman, up town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and everything in readiness for another voyage.

When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars a month on the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain to keep such a pilot in idleness, under full pay, three months at a time, while the river was frozen up. And one must remember that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a salary of almost inconceivable splendor. Few men on shore got such pay as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to. When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest, and treated with exalted respect. Lying in port under wages was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated; especially if they belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday of that trade (Kansas times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip, which was equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month. Here is a conversation of that day. A chap out of the Illinois River, with a little stern-wheel tub, accosts a couple of ornate and gilded Missouri River pilots: —

“Gentlemen, I’ve got a pretty good trip for the up-country, and shall want you about a month. How much will it be?”

“Eighteen hundred dollars apiece.”

“Heavens and earth! You take my boat, let me have your wages, and I’ll divide!”

I will remark, in passing, that Mississippi steamboatmen were important in landsmen’s eyes (and in their own, too, in a degree) according to the dignity of the boat they were on. For instance, it was a proud thing to be of the crew of such stately craft as the Aleck Scott or the Grand Turk. Negro firemen, deck hands, and barbers belonging to those boats were distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were well aware of that fact, too. A stalwart darkey once gave offense at a negro ball in New Orleans by putting on a good many airs. Finally one of the managers bustled up to him and said, —

“Who is you, anyway? Who is you? dat’s what I wants to know!”

The offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself up and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not putting on all those airs on a stinted capital.

“Who is l? Who is l? I let you know mighty quick who I is! I want you niggers to understan’ dat I fires de middle do’ 1 on de Aleck Scott!”

That was sufficient.

The barber of the Grand Turk was a spruce young negro, who aired his importance with balmy complacency, and was greatly courted by the circle in which he moved. The young colored population of New Orleans were much given to flirting, at twilight, on the pavements of the back streets. Somebody saw and heard something like the following, one evening, in one of those localities. A middle-aged negro woman projected her head through a broken pane and shouted (very willing that the neighbors should hear and envy), “You Mary Ann, come in de house dis minute! Stannin’ out dah foolin’ ’long wid dat low trash, an’ heah’s de barber off ’n de Gran’ Turk wants to conwerse wid you!”

My reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot’s peculiar official position placed him out of the reach of criticism or command, brings Stephen W—— naturally to my mind. He was a gifted pilot, a good fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him. He had a most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easy-going and comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most august wealth. He always had work, he never saved a penny, he was a most persuasive borrower, he was in debt to every pilot on the river, and to the majority of the captains. He could throw a sort of splendor around a bit of harum-scarum, devil-may-care piloting, that made it almost fascinating—but not to everybody. He made a trip with good old gentle-spirited Captain Y—— once, and was “relieved” from duty when the boat got to New Orleans. Somebody expressed surprise at the discharge. Captain Y—— shuddered at the mere mention of Stephen. Then his poor, thin old voice piped out something like this: —

“Why, bless me! I wouldn’t have such a wild creature on my boat for the world—not for the whole world! He swears, he sings, he whistles, he yells—I never saw such an Injun to yell. All times of the night—it never made any difference to him. He would just yell that way, not for anything in particular, but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of it. I never could get into a sound sleep but he would fetch me out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful war-whoops. A queer being, — very queer being; no respect for anything or anybody. Sometimes he called me ‘ Johnny .’ And he kept a fiddle, and a cat. He played execrably. This seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl. Nobody could sleep where that man—and his family—was. And reckless? There never was anything like it. Now you may believe it or not, but as sure as I am sitting here, he brought my boat a-tilting down through those awful snags at Chicot under a rattling head of steam, and the wind a-blowing like the very nation, at that! My officers will tell you so. They saw it. And, sir, while he was a-tearing right down through those snags, and I a-shaking in my shoes and praying, I wish I may never speak again if he didn’t pucker up his mouth and go to whistling ! Yes, sir; whistling ‘Buffalo gals, can’t you come out to-night, can’t you come out to-night, can’t you come out to-night;’ and doing it as calmly as if we were attending a funeral and weren’t related to the corpse. And when I remonstrated with him about it, he smiled down on me as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to be good, and not be meddling with my superiors!” 2

Once a pretty mean captain caught Stephen in New Orleans out of work and as usual out of money. He laid steady siege to Stephen, who was in a very “close place,” and finally persuaded him to hire with him at one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, just hail wages, the captain agreeing not to divulge the secret and so bring down the contempt of all the guild upon the poor fellow. But the boat was not more than a day out of New Orleans before Stephen discovered that the captain was boasting of his exploit, and that all the officers had been told. Stephen winced, but said nothing. About the middle of the afternoon the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck, cast his eye around, and looked a good deal surprised. He glanced inquiringly aloft at Stephen, but Stephen was whistling placidly, and attending to business. The captain stood around a while in evident discomfort, and once or twice seemed about to make a suggestion; but the etiquette of the river taught him to avoid that sort of rashness, and so he managed to hold his peace. He chafed and puzzled a few minutes longer, then retired to his apartments. But soon he was out again, and apparently more perplexed than ever. Presently he ventured to remark, with deference, —

“Pretty good stage of the river now, ain’t it, sir?”

“Well, I should say so! Bank-full is a pretty liberal stage.”

“Seems to be a good deal of current here.”

“Good deal don’t describe it! It’s worse than a mill-race.”

“Isn’t it easier in toward shore than it is out here in the middle?”

“Yes, I reckon it is; but a body can’t be too careful with a steamboat. It’s pretty safe out here; can’t strike any bottom here, you can depend on that.”

The captain departed, looking rueful enough. At this rate, he would probably die of old age before his boat got to St. Louis. Next day he appeared on deck and again found Stephen faithfully standing up the middle of the river, fighting the whole vast force of the Mississippi, and whistling the same placid tune. This thing was becoming serious. In by the shore was a slower boat clipping along in the easy water and gaining steadily; she began to make for an island chute; Stephen stuck to the middle of the river. Speech was wrung from the captain. He said, —

“Mr. W——, don’t that chute cut off a good deal of distance?”

“I think it does, but I don’t know.”

“Don’t know! Well, isn’t there water enough in it now to go through?”

“I expect there is, but I am not certain.”

“Upon my word this is odd! Why, those pilots on that boat yonder are going to try it. Do you mean to say that you don’t know as much as they do?”

“ They ! Why, they are two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots! But don’t you be uneasy; I know as much as any man can afford to know for a hundred and twenty-five!”

Five minutes later Stephen was bowling through the chute and showing the rival boat a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of heels.

One day, on board the Aleck Scott, my chief, Mr. B——, was crawling carefully through a close place at Cat Island, both leads going, and everybody holding his breath. The captain, a nervous, apprehensive man, kept still as long as he could, but finally broke down and shouted from the hurricane deck, —

“For gracious’ sake, give her steam, Mr. B——! give her steam! She’ll never raise the reef on this headway!”

For all the effect that was produced upon Mr. B——, one would have supposed that no remark had been made. But five minutes later, when the danger was past and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a consuming fury, and gave the captain the most admirable cursing I ever listened to. No bloodshed ensued; but that was because the captain’s cause was weak; for ordinarily he was not a man to take correction quietly.

Having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting, and likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the fraternity of steamboatmen, this seems a fitting place to say a few words about an organization which the pilots once formed for the protection of their guild. It was curious and noteworthy in this, that it was perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men.

For a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month; but curiously enough, as steamboats multiplied and business increased, the wages began to fall, little by little. It was easy to discover the reason of this. Too many pilots were being “made.” It was nice to have a “cub,” a steersman, to do all the hard work for a couple of years, gratis, while his master sat on a high bench and smoked; all pilots and captains had sons or brothers who wanted to be pilots. By and by it came to pass that nearly every pilot on the river had a steersman. When a steersman had made an amount of progress that was satisfactory to any two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot’s license for him by signing an application directed to the United States Inspector. Nothing further was needed; usually no questions were asked, no proofs of capacity required.

Very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to undermine the wages, in order to get berths. Too late—apparently—the knights of the tiller perceived their mistake. Plainly, something had to be done, and quickly; but what was to be the needful thing? A close organization. Nothing else would answer. To compass this seemed an impossibility; so it was talked, and talked, and then dropped. It was too likely to ruin whoever ventured to move in the matter. But at last about a dozen of the boldest—and some of them the best—pilots on the river launched themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances. They got a special charter from the legislature, with large powers, under the name of the Pilots’ Benevolent Association; elected their officers, completed their organization, contributed capital, put “association” wages up to two hundred and fifty dollars at once—and then retired to their homes, for they were promptly discharged from employment. But there were two or three unnoticed trifles in their by-laws which had the seeds of propagation in them. For instance, all idle members of the association, in good standing, were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month. This began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks of the new-fledged pilots, in the dull (summer) season. Better have twenty-five dollars than starve; the initiation fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required from the unemployed.

Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw twenty-five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their children. Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association’s expense. These things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances, — any way, so they got there. They paid in their twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month and calculate their burial bills.

By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones, were in the association, and nine tenths of the best pilots out of it and laughing at it. It was the laughing-stock of the whole river. Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent. of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached. Wages had gone up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. Some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chaffing the members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked like. However, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was “out of luck,” and added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars—the association figure—and became firmly fixed there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired. The hilarity at the association’s expense burst all bounds, now. There was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to put up with.

However, it is a long lane that has no turning. Winter approached, business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of Missouri, Illinois, and Upper Mississippi River boats came pouring down to take a chance in the New Orleans trade. All of a sudden, pilots were in great demand, and were correspondingly scarce. The time for revenge was come. It was a bitter pill to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed that there was no other way. But none of these outcasts offered! So there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed: they must be sought out and asked for their services. Captain —— was the first man who found it necessary to take the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization. He hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said, —

“Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so I’ll give in with as good a grace as I can. I’ve come to hire you; get your trunk aboard right away. I want to leave at twelve o’clock.”

“I don’t know about that. Who is your other pilot?”

“I’ve got I. S——. Why?”

“I can’t go with him. He don’t belong to the association.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you won’t turn a wheel with one of the very best and oldest pilots on the river because he don’t belong to your association?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, if this isn’t putting on airs! I supposed I was doing you a benevolence; but I begin to think that l am the party that wants a favor done. Are you acting under a law of the concern?”

“Show it to me.”

So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary soon satisfied the captain, who said, —

“Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S—— for the entire season.”

“I will provide for you,” said the secretary. “I will detail a pilot to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o’clock.”

“But if I discharge S——, he will come on me for the whole seasons wages.”

“Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S——, captain. We cannot meddle in your private affairs.”

The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge S——, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot in his place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way, now. Every day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged captain discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity, and installed a hated association man in his berth. In a very little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired. The laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably. These victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the revenge they would take when the passing business “spurt” was over.

Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and crews of boats that had two non-association pilots. But their triumph was not very long-lived. For this reason: It was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never, under any circumstances whatever, give information about the channel to any “outsider.” By this time about half the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders. At the first glance one would suppose that when it came to forbidding information about the river these two parties could play equally at that game; but this was not so. At every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other, there was a “wharf-boat” to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was stored in it for transportation, waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon each of these wharf-boats the association’s officers placed a strong box, fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but one—the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government had been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every association man carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger, — for the success of the St. Louis and New Orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighboring steamboat trades, — was the association man’s sign and diploma of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his question was politely ignored. From the associations secretary each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a bill-head, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns; a bill-head worded something like this:

STEAMER GREAT REPUBLIC JOHN SMITH, MASTER. Pilots, John Jones and Thos. Brown. Crossing. Soundings. Marks. Remarks.

These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. For instance, as soon as the first crossing, out from St. Louis, was completed, the items would be entered upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus: —

“St. Louis. Nine and a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head on dead cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up square.” Then under head of Remarks: “Go just outside the wrecks; this is important. New snag just where you straighten down; go above it.”

The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding to it the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis) took out and read half a dozen fresh reports (from upward bound steamers) concerning the river between Cairo and Memphis, posted himself thoroughly, returned them to the box, and went back aboard his boat again so armed against accident that he could not possibly get his boat into trouble without bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his aid.

Imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve or thirteen hundred miles long, whose channel was shifting every day! The pilot who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal place once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch it for him, now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to run it. His information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old. If the reports in the last box chanced to leave any misgivings on his mind concerning a treacherous crossing, he had his remedy; he blew his steam-whistle in a peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching; the signal was answered in a peculiar way if that boat’s pilots were association men; and then the two steamers ranged alongside and all uncertainties were swept away by fresh information furnished to the inquirer by word of mouth and in minute detail.

The first thing a pilot did when he reached New Orleans or St. Louis was to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlors and hang it up there, — after which he was free to visit his family. In these parlors a crowd was always gathered together, discussing changes in the channel, and the moment there was a fresh arrival, everybody stopped talking till this witness had told the newest news and settled the latest uncertainty. Other craftsmen can “sink the shop,” sometimes, and interest themselves in other matters. Not so with a pilot; he must devote himself wholly to his profession and talk of nothing else; for it would be small gain to be perfect one day and imperfect the next. He has no time or words to waste if he would keep “posted.”

But the outsiders had a hard time of it. No particular place to meet and exchange information, no wharf-boat reports, none but chance and unsatisfactory ways of getting news. The consequence was that a man sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that was a week or ten days old. At a fair stage of the river that might have answered; but when the dead low water came it was destructive.

Now came another perfectly logical result. The outsiders began to ground steamboats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble, whereas accidents seemed to keep entirely away from the association men. Wherefore even the owners and captains of boats furnished exclusively with outsiders, and previously considered to be wholly independent of the association and free to comfort themselves with brag and laughter, began to feel pretty uncomfortable. Still, they made a show of keeping up the brag, until one black day when every captain of the lot was formally ordered immediately to discharge his outsiders and take association pilots in their stead. And who was it that had the gaudy presumption to do that? Alas, it came from a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne itself. It was the underwriters!

It was no time to “swap knives.” Every outsider had to take his trunk ashore at once. Of course it was supposed that there was collusion between the association and the underwriters, but this was not so. The latter had come to comprehend the excellence of the “report” system of the association and the safety it secured, and so they had made their decision among themselves and upon plain business principles.

There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp of the outsiders now. But no matter, there was but one course for them to pursue, and they pursued it. They came forward in couples and groups, and proffered their twelve dollars and asked for membership. They were surprised to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added. For instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars; that sum must be tendered, and also ten per cent. of the wages which the applicant had received each and every month since the founding of the association. In many eases this amounted to three or four hundred dollars. Still, the association would not entertain the application until the money was present. Even then a single adverse vote killed the application. Every member had to vote yes or no in person and before witnesses; so it took weeks to decide a candidacy, because many pilots were so long absent on voyages. However, the repentant sinners scraped their savings together, and one by one, by our tedious voting process, they were added to the fold. A time came, at last, when only about ten remained outside. They said they would starve before they would apply. They remained idle a long while, because of course nobody could venture to employ them.

By and by the association published the fact that upon a certain date the wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month. All the branch associations had grown strong, now, and the Red River one had advanced wages to seven hundred dollars a month. Reluctantly the ten outsiders yielded, in view of these things, and made application. There was another new by-law, by this time, which required them to pay dues not only on all the wages they had received since the association was born, but also on what they would have received if they had continued at work up to the tune of their application, instead of going off to pout in idleness. It turned out to be a difficult matter to elect them, but it was accomplished at last. The most virulent sinner of this batch had stayed out and allowed “dues” to accumulate against him so long that he had to send in six hundred and twenty-five dollars with his application.

The association had a good bank account now, and was very strong. There was no longer an outsider. A by-law was added forbidding the reception of any more cubs or apprentices for five years; after which time a limited number would be taken, not by individuals, but by the association, upon these terms: the applicant must not be less than eighteen years old, of respectable family and good character; he must pass an examination as to education, pay a thousand dollars in advance for the privilege of becoming an apprentice, and must remain under the commands of the association until a great part of the membership (more than half, I think) should be willing to sign his application for a pilot’s license.

All previously-articled apprentices were now taken away from their masters and adopted by the association. The president and secretary detailed them for service on one boat or another, as they chose, and changed them from boat to boat according to certain rules. If a pilot could show that he was in infirm health and needed assistance, one of the cubs would be ordered to go with him.

The widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association’s financial resources. The association attended its own funerals in state, and paid for them. When occasion demanded, it sent members down the river upon searches for the bodies of brethren lost by steamboat accidents; a search of this kind sometimes cost a thousand dollars.

The association procured a charter and went into the insurance business, also. It not only insured the lives of its members, but took risks on steamboats.

The organization seemed indestructible. It was the tightest monopoly in the world. By the United States law, no man could become a pilot unless two duly licensed pilots signed his application; and now there was nobody outside of the association competent to sign. Consequently the making of pilots was at an end. Every year some would die and others become incapacitated by age and infirmity; there would be no new ones to take their places. In time, the association could put wages up to any figure it chose; and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing too far and provoke the national government into amending the licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit, since there would be no help for it.

The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed. Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it themselves. When the pilots’ association announced, months beforehand, that on the first day of September, 1861, wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established. It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it. It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to cover the new wages.

So straightway the captains and owners got up an association of their own, and proposed to put captains’ wages up to five hundred dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights. It was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been produced once could be produced again. The new association decreed (for this was before all the outsiders had been taken into the pilots’ association) that if any captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be forced to discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars. Several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains’ organization grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership; but that all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the pilots to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association captain; but this proposition was declined. The pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances.

As I have remarked, the pilots association was now the compactest monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible. And yet the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new railroad stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern railway centres, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time; then the treasurer of the St. Louis association put his hand into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights; so straight-way some genius from the Atlantic coast and behold, in the twinkling of an eye, introduced the plan of towing a dozen as it were, the association and the noble steamer cargoes down to New Orleans science of piloting were things of the at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; dead and pathetic past!

• Considering a captain’s ostentatious but hollow chieftainship, and a pilot’s real authority, there was something impudently apt and happy about that way of phrasing it. ↩

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BACKSTORY (July 17, 1955—Present): Required WED designers to conduct extensive research to recreate a steam powered riverboat from 50 years before. Decks assembled at the Burbank Studios while the 105' hull was constructed at Todd Shipyards in San Pedro, CA (where the Sailing Ship Columbia’s hull was also built). When the hull & decks were put together at Disneyland they fit perfectly. Joe Fowler, Disneyland’s construction supervisor and former navy admiral, insisted on creating a drydock for the ship along the Rivers of America. Walt, dismayed at how much land was taken up by the massive excavation, referred to the drydock as "Joe’s Ditch" and then “Fowler’s Harbor.” Disney funded its construction out of his own pocket when corporate funds fell short. On the first “fill-the-river” day, the water pumped into the Rivers of America soaked through the riverbed. Fowler found a supply of clay to replace the soil stabilizer used to line the river, and the second “fill-the-river” day was successful. The maiden voyage was July 13, four days before the park officially opened, for a private party celebrating Walt & Lillian’s 30th anniversary. Before the party, as Fowler was checking to make sure everything would be ready for the 300 invited guests, he found Lillian sweeping the decks of debris and joined in.

Irene Dunne, star of 1936’s “Showboat,” had trouble breaking a bottle of water (from many major American rivers) across the vessel’s bow for its christening on Dateline Disney. During the riverboat’s first official voyage, when the crowd moved to one side of the boat to view passing scenes, the boat would list from the side and water poured over the deck, as no one had determined the Mark Twain's maximum safe passenger capacity. This caused it to almost capsize a few days later when ride operators continued to wave more than 500 guests on board until the deck neared the water line. The ship came loose from its track and stuck in the muddy banks. The park quickly established a maximum capacity of 300, still in effect today. During its first few years of operation, passengers could buy a non-alcoholic mint julep or listen to card & checker players re-enact era dialogue. Occasionally the Disneyland band would play music on the lower deck bow. Underwent a major refurbishment Spring of 1995, during which all the decks and the boiler were replaced. When the Rivers of America was drained in 2002, the boat was noted to have considerable hull damage. It underwent a refurbishment in 2004 to repair the hull & replace the keel. For the park’s 2005 50th Anniversary a more colorful paint was applied. In Spring, 2007, the Mark Twain underwent an extensive refurbishment. Cast members have dubbed the Mark Twain “The Floating Breakroom” (due to how little has to be done to pilot it) and “The Floating Wedding Cake” (because of its color and ornamentation).

• 1955 PHOTOS
• 1956 PHOTOS
• 1957 PHOTOS
• 1958 PHOTOS
• 1959 PHOTOS
• 1950's PHOTOS
• 1960—1961 PHOTOS
• GUIDED TOUR SCRIPT 9/62
• 1966—1969 PHOTOS
• A GRIZZLED OL’ DISNEYLAND FAN
• 1970's—1990's

1950’s

1960—1961

DISNEYLANDER EMPLOYEE NEWSLETTER 9/61

TV PRODUCTION BEING FILMED AT DISNEYLAND

Late afternoon and night time visitors are getting "behind the scenes" of a television production as Walt Disney Productions technicians "roll the film" for a "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" program

The one hour program is scheduled to be telecast over the coast to coast network of the National Broadcasting Company some time next Spring, just prior to the big summer of 1962.

The production crew from the studio started filming the show on August 17th and the word from Tommy Walker is that if everything goes according to schedule they should be completed by Saturday, September 9th.

The name of the program, "Disneyland After Dark," tells the entire story of the show. It wll show Disneyland from just prior to dusk and will go through Tinker Bell's flight from the top of the Matterhorn and the "Fantasy in the Sky" spectacular fireworks display. In addition, all of the excitement that takes place in the Magic Kingdom in between dusk and total darkness will also be a part of the program.

"Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" television program will start on NBC-TV on Sunday, September 24, 1961 and will be seen on channel 4 in this area from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. each week. It will be sponsored by Eastman Kodak Co., and RCA on alternate weeks.

DISNEYLANDER EMPLOYEE NEWSLETTER 10/61

ARMSTRONG HEADS BIG DIXIE SHOW

Half a hundred of the world's great Dixieland jazzmen will come "floatin' down the river" at Disneyland this Saturday, September 30th, trumpets blowing and banjos strumming, when the Second Annual "Dixieland at Disneyland" show rocks the Magic Kingdom with the old New Orleans music and fun.

Louie Armstrong, the Yankee Doodle Grandee of jazz, heads the star-studded list of Dixieland talent that outshines even the 1960 array for sheer swinging Dixie music.

Joining the great "Satchmo" in "Dixieland at Disneyland," from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. will be:

• Teddy Buckner and His Dixieland Band. • The Firehouse Five Plus Two. • The Young Men from New Orleans. • Matty Matlock and His Dixieland All Stars. • The Disneyland Strawrhatters. • The Albert McNeil Choir.

The entire show, including the river pageantry and the evening-long Dixieland dancing and lsitening at six locations, is wrapped up in one big ticket "package" that includes admission to the Park and admission to every ride and attraction, as often as desired, throughout the night.

Advance sale tickets, are priced at $4.50 for employees any time up to 5 p.m. on Friday, September 29th. The tickets are available at Cash Control in reasonable quantities to employees of Disneyland, WED, WDP and Disneyland lessees.

Like the first "Dixieland at Disneyland" festival in the Magic Kingdom, this year's show will begin on the Rivers of America.

Each Dixieland band will come floating down the river, playing Dixieland jazz in its own distinctive style.

For the finale, all the Dixiemen will board the Mark Twain riverboat, and — as a giant diplay of fireworks explodes on the water and in the air — they'll come steamin' round the bend, playing "When the Saints Come Marching In."

But the show, which begins on the river, is only the beginning. When the riverboat docks, a torchlight parade will lead the bands to six different locations, where they'll perform for listening and dancing all night long, until 2 a.m.

Between times, ticket holders may enjoy every ride and attraction in the Park — and as often as desired.

On this Saturday, September 30th, Disneyland's regular daytime operation will terminate at 7 p.m. The Park will then close for an hour, and re-open at 8 p.m. for the "Dixieland at Disneyland" show, which will continue through 2 a.m.

INSIDE THE BERM

Overheard on the Mark Twain. During one of the season's last "runs" with the going Young Men from New Orleans, a lady guest who was thoroughly enjoing the gaiety on board, looked toward shore at the burning cabin, and said, "How can they have so much fun here when there is os much trouble over there?"

GUIDED TOUR SCRIPT, SEPT. 26, 1962

Here is the text from the Live Narration of a Guided Tour, circa 1962 (previously started on this page ):

NEAR MARK TWAIN DOCK

Across the river you see Tom Sawyer's Island…a mother's paradise. Here children may spend hours exploring old Fort Wilderess, rock caves and formations, suspension bridges and even go fishing. This island may be reached by taking one of Tom's rafts embarking from Fowler's Harbor. While we are here on the riverfront, I would like to mention that there are almost two miles of waterways in Disneyland, of which this river is a part. There are 81 vessels in the Disneyland fleet—these include the vessels you see here plus those in Adventureland, Storybookland, The Motor Boat Cruise, and the Submarine Lagoon.

(If not on Mine Train)

We are next going to take a trip on the…Mark Twain/Columbia.

Columbia…The Columbia is a three masted full-rigged sailing vessel. The ship has been copied after the original armed merchant vessel, Columbia, which we have already told you was the first United States' sailing vessel to circumnavigate the globe. This ship is 92' long and has a main mast of 84'.

Mark Twain…The Mark Twain is an authentic reproduction of the old Mark Twain paddle wheel steamer which operated on the Mississippi River. Powered by twin steam engines which operate the stern wheel, the Mark Twain is 108' long and has three decks. On weekends and holidays the Young Men from New Orleans, an authentic Dixieland Jazz Band, play for your dancing and listening pleasure as you float down the river. Inside Slue Foot Sue's Golden Horseshoe is one of the most popular attractions in Disneyland. The show has something for everyone. Plenty of good music, lots of laughs, the Can Can Girls and even that famous character—Pecos Bill. The show is one of the entertainment highlights here in the Magic Kingdom and we know you'll enjoy yourself. You should be here at least 30 minutes before show time in order to find good seats for this free show presented by Pepsi-Cola. Show times are posted on the front porch. And now, let's take a short cut through El Zocalo, the Mexican Market over to the little mining town of Rainbow Ridge.

To resume your vintage tour, please go to the Nature's Wonderland page .

1964—1965

1966—1969

INTRODUCTION TO A GRIZZLED OL’ DISNEYLAND FAN FROM WAY, WAY BACK

Taint nuthin’ more beautiful than the Ol’ Mark Twain comin’ round the riverbend…

Howdy Pards—Yep, it's true, they gathered water from many different rivers all across the country, they did. Then they put those waters in a bottle and handed that bottle to movie star Irene Dunne back on Sunday afternoon, July 17th, 1955. Then, with the whole country watchin’ on live nation-wide TV, she officially christened that genuine, authentic, real, honest-to-gosh steam-powered sternwheeler...“The Mark Twain.”

And, it's a fact that since that historic day back in 1955, more than a half century ago now, the Ol'  Mark Twain has carried more passengers than any other steamboat in the history of the world! Bar none.

Taint nuthin' more beautiful than the Ol' Mark Twain coming round the riverbend at Disneyland... nuthin' I can think of anyways...

Reckon you could say that sternwheeler represents the true spirit and history of the rivers of this great country of ours...Did you know that the Mark Twain was the very first steamboat built in well over 50 years when they opened Disneyland? It was.

You can actually feel the magic of travelin’ back in time along the Mighty Mississippi when you board that big, beautiful sternwheeler. Memories of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and even old New Orleans...come back to ya’. There is just no doubt; the Mark Twain is the shinin’ jewel of Frontierland and all of Disneyland, and a real symbol of those exciting days of yesteryear along the rivers of our great country.  

Back in the early days of Disneyland you could clearly see that big, beautiful steamboat while standing in the hub and lookin’ through the stockade entrance to Frontierland...twernt no question you were headed for the days of the wild frontier. Yessirreebob! Reckon that riverboat was kinda like a magnet to me and millions of others.

Truth is, Walt planned it that way.  Yep. He always said you had to have a landmark in the distance, a "wienie" he called it, that folks would want to walk towards. So, course, the distant Castle was that landmark drawin' folks down Main Street U.S.A. Once they reached the hub, if they looked right they would see, in the distance, the MOONLINER pointed towards the sky...a clear symbol of the world of Tomorrow. Straight ahead through the castle they could see the Carrousel in a world of fun and fantasy. And, if they looked West...through that stockade...there it was, yessir that incredibly beautiful riverboat, waiting to take take ya into the past on a magical journey down the river.

Now every kid who ever boarded the ol' Mark Twain wanted to head for the very top deck, of course. Yep, you could see everything from way up there...sometimes the Disneyland band would come on board and play tunes all the way down the river!  But it was always a voyage of discovery...and, with Indian Villages and wildlife and river pirate hideouts,  scattered all over the place, it was easy to imagine yourself travelin' a hundred or more years back in time.

Lots of grown folks these days remember fondly when their Moms and Dads, Grampas and Grammas first took 'em on that steamboat long, long years ago. A good many folks remember watchin' the ducks along the river...and really enjoyin' the gentle journey back in time... Yep a lotta warm and wonderful memories have been made on the ol' Mark Twain...memories that last a lifetime.

There have indeed been some mighty special events on that boat over the years...like its maiden voyage to celebrate Walt and Lilly's Anniversary a few days before the park opened...or the time Louis Armstrong brought his special New Orleans Dixieland magic to the second deck back in '62. Millions upon millions of pictures have been taken of the Ol' Mark Twain as it made it's way 'round the river. As Dave says, folks sometimes think of it as a "floatin' birthday cake".

I reckon you could say that boat has watched Disneyland grow up over the years...  It was there back in the days when there were hardly any trees around, back when real Indians danced around their teepees along the shore, it was there when stagecoaches and covered wagons and pack mules headed off into the backcountry, it was there when that Haunted Mansion showed up and New Orleans Square and Ol' Splash Mountain...yep it's seen all of Disneyland's history and, truth is, it has been a mighty important part of that history over the years.

To me, no visit to Disneyland is complete without a few relaxing minutes aboard this wonderful, genuine, authentic, real, honest-to-gosh, steam-powered sternwheeler.  The pride of Disneyland...and, now, a real part of American History itself...having carried more “guests” than any other steamboat in history...yep, that's the Ol' Mark Twain, a truly wonderful part of Walt Disney's legacy, in the happiest place on earth.

Adios for now. Talk to ya on’ down the trail.

Wild Ol’ Dan

1970’s–1990’s

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Sightseeing Tour

Trip Highlights

Soak in beautiful scenery along the mississippi river, listen to the narrated history, legends, and sights of the area, description.

This one-hour sightseeing cruise travels along the mighty Mississippi River, allowing you to soak up the scenery at a relaxing, rhythmic pace. Listen as the captain guides your cruise with historical commentary on the history, legends, and sights of the Mississippi River.

A cruise aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat is great for family events. Whether you are a visitor or resident of Hannibal, you can make wonderful memories aboard our unique riverboat experience! Looking forward to having you onboard!

Departure time: Varies - check calendar Yearly availability: April 1 - Nov. 4 Weekly availability: Daily

300 Riverfront Drive Hannibal MO

Things to know

Food and bevarages.

A fully stocked bar and a concession stand are available to purchase sandwiches, snacks, and beverages.

Departure Time

Varies - check calendar

All cruises depart from Center Street Landing on the waterfront in historic Hannibal, MO. Boarding begins 30 minutes before scheduled departure time.

Adults (Ages 13 and older) - $24.99

Children (Ages 5-12) - $14.99

Wee Ones (Ages 4 and under) - FREE

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Dinner Cruise

Enjoy a night of dinner and dancing on this cruise on the Mighty Mississippi. Indulge in a delicious buffet and share a wonderful dinner with your family or friends, then enjoy live music from the dance floor or the deck.

Once on board, you are escorted to your table, then you are free to roam the boat until the captain announces that dinner is ready. After dinner, you are free to dance or sit back and enjoy the music. Live entertainment is included on our Dinner Cruises. It may be The Rivermen playing modern jazz (Saturday night from Memorial Day thru September), or you might get to enjoy the music of Tim Hart (Mondays & Tuesdays), or Adam Ledbetter and David Damm (Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday). Listen or dance to their favorite tunes — and they have been known to take a request or two. And you never know when a crew member or two may step up on the stage and join in.

Departure time: 6:30 p.m. Yearly availability: May 3 - Oct 28 Weekly availability: Varies - check calendar

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Indian Creek Campground

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This campground is at the Indian Creek Recreation Area at Mark Twain Lake. It includes: public boat ramp; group camp; day-use area; and the campground. There are 190 campsites, 20 primitive hike-in campsites, showers, restrooms, playgrounds, a fish-cleaning station, a boat ramp, beach, hiking trails.

The group camp provides 25 electric campsites, 12 tent sites, a group shelter, restrooms, shower and playground. The day-use area offers a group shelter, picnic sites and playground.

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The Meaning of the Pseudonym Mark Twain

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• M.A., English Literature, California State University - Sacramento
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Samuel Clemens used several pseudonyms during his long writing career. The first was simply “Josh,” and the second was “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.” But, the author wrote his best-known works, including such American classics as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , under the pen name Mark Twain . Both books center on the adventures of two boys, the namesakes for the novels, on the Mississippi River. Not surprisingly, Clemens adopted his pen name from his experiences piloting steamboats up and down the Mississippi.

Navigational Term

"Twain" literally means "two." As a riverboat pilot, Clemens would have heard the term, "Mark Twain," which means "two fathoms," on a regular basis. According to the UC Berkeley Library, Clemens first used this pseudonym in 1863, when he was working as a newspaper reporter in Nevada, long after his riverboat days.

Clemens became a riverboat "cub," or trainee, in 1857. Two years later, he earned his full pilot's license and began piloting the steamboat  Alonzo Child  upriver from New Orleans in January 1861. His piloting career was cut short when riverboat traffic ceased at the start of the Civil War that same year.

"Mark Twain" means the second mark on a line that measured depth, signifying two fathoms, or 12 feet, which was a safe depth for riverboats. The method of dropping a line to determine the water's depth was a way to read the river and avoid submerged rocks and reefs that could "tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated," as Clemens wrote in his 1863 novel, " Life on the Mississippi ." 

Why Twain Adopted the Name

Clemens, himself, explained in "Life on the Mississippi" why he chose that particular moniker for his most famous novels. In this quote, he was referring to Horace E. Bixby, the grizzled pilot who taught Clemens to navigate the river during his two-year training phase:

"The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them 'MARK TWAIN,' and give them to the 'New Orleans Picayune.' They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison."

Twain lived far from the Mississippi (in Connecticut) when The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876. But, that novel, as well as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , published in 1884 in the United Kingdom and in 1885 in the United States, were so infused with images of the Mississipi River that it seems fitting that Clemens would use a pen name that so closely tied him to the river. As he navigated the rocky path of his literary career (he was beset with financial problems through much of his life), it's fitting that he would choose a moniker that defined the very method riverboat captains used to safely navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of the mighty Mississippi.

• The Story of Samuel Clemens as "Mark Twain"
• Mark Twain's Feel for Language and Locale Brings His Stories to Life
• Mark Twain: His Life and His Humor
• Who's the Real Huckleberry Finn?
• A Photo Tour of the Mark Twain House in Connecticut
• Reading Quiz: 'Two Ways of Seeing a River' by Mark Twain
• 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' Summary and Takeaways
• What Were Mark Twain's Inventions?
• 'The Adventure of Tom Sawyer' Quotes
• Mark Twain Satire
• Enslavement in Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
• 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' Quotes
• Motivational Quotes for Teens
• 5 Novel Setting Maps for Classic American Literature
• Mark Twain's Colloquial Prose Style
• The Top Coming-of-Age Novels