Riverboat Pilot

Twenty-one-year-old Samuel Clemens decided he needed a change. He would leave his dull job as a printer and head to New Orleans. From there, he would get passage on a ship to South America. He hoped to have great adventures and become a wealthy businessman.

- Jerry Miller

The trip changed his life but not in the way he expected. Almost as soon as Clemens boarded the steamer in April 1857, his dreams of South America began to fade. An old childhood dream-to pilot a Mississippi steamboat-grew stronger. He soon made friends with the vessel's pilot, Horace Bixby. He spent hours in the pilothouse.

Years later, Clemens wrote, "When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman." The king among steamboat men was the pilot, the man who "drove" the boat.

It was no wonder that boys dreamed of piloting a Mississippi riverboat. With the exception of ocean steamers, they were the largest, most powerful vehicles of their time. Large riverboats were powered by eight or more huge boilers. They were longer than a football field and weighed more than 350 tons. Many riverboats carried about 1,000 tons of freight and more than 200 passengers and crew members. And pilots earned excellent pay: A good pilot earned as much as the nation's vice president.