Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than
otherwise—a notion which I was slow to take up. The other night I
was about to “round to” for a storm, but concluded that I could find
a smoother bank somewhere. I landed five miles below. The storm
came, passed away and did not injure us. Coming up, day before
yesterday, I looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees on
the bank were torn to shreds. We couldn't have lived 5 minutes in
such a tornado. And I am also lucky in having a berth, while all
the other young pilots are idle. This is the luckiest circumstance
that ever befell me. Not on account of the wages—for that is a
secondary consideration-but from the fact that the City of Memphis
is the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, and
consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never
could accomplish on a transient boat. I can “bank” in the
neighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for
the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking
their fingers). Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!—and
what vast respect Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago, I could
enter the “Rooms,” and receive only the customary fraternal greeting
now they say, “Why, how are you, old fellow—when did you get in?”
And the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that I could
never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their
chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to “blow my
horn,” for I derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must
confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the
d—-d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out
from amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face I do not
exhibit! You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a
“stern joy” in it.
We are dwelling on this period of Mark Twain's life, for it was a period that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years. He became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of his days. Moreover, it was his first period of great triumph. Where before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner—now all in a moment he had been transformed into a high chief. The fullest ambition of his childhood had been realized—more than realized, for in that day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately proportions. Of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats. Single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings.
And we may pardon his vanity. He could hardly fail to feel his glory and revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in the Association Rooms. To this day he is remembered as a figure there, though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not entirely because of his success. As the boys of Hannibal had gathered around to listen when Sam Clemens began to speak, so we may be certain that the pilots at St. Louis and New Orleans laid aside other things when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell.
He was much given to spinning yarns—[writes one associate of those
days]—so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the
time his own face was perfectly sober. If he laughed at all, it
must have been inside. It would have killed his hearers to do that.
Occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers. He
may have written them himself.
Another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard Sam Clemens tell:
We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents—we were always
talking of such things; then he said:
“Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An old
man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. Everybody
in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. The ladders
weren't long enough. Nobody had any presence of mind—nobody but
me. I came to the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came I
threw the old man the end of it. He caught it and I told him to tie
it around his waist. He did so, and I pulled him down.”
This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far. Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for Horace Bixby remembers that “Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel.”
But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge it later—with one exception. The exception was not intended for publication, either. It was a burlesque written for the amusement of his immediate friends. He has told the story himself, more than once, but it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain.
That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers—a sort of “oldest inhabitant” of the river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of his reminiscent knowledge. He contributed paragraphs of general information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and signed them “Mark Twain.” They were quaintly egotistical in tone, usually beginning: “My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans,” and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as 1811.
Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots, who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of speech. But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length a broadly burlesque imitation signed “Sergeant Fathom,” with an introduction which referred to the said Fathom as “one of the oldest cub pilots on the river.” The letter that followed related a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer “the old first Jubilee” with a “Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew.” It is a gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.—[See Appendix B, at the end of the last volume.]