Life on The Mississippi (4 page)

It needs to be said that the emphasis on commerce that distinguishes the second part of Twain’s river book is undoubtedly a subtexual counterpart to the autobiographical element of the first part. By 1885, Sam Clemens was often overextended in his business dealings, leading to his eventual financial ruin, but for whatever reason
Life
is fairly afloat on the facts of finance, extending even to figures of speech. Thus we read that the shifting channel of the river has caused entire islands to “retire from business” and towns and plantations to “retire to the country”; Mark Twain, drawing humorous and exaggerated conclusions from scientific data, “gets wholesale returns of conjecture out of . . . trifling investments of fact”; the steamboat he boards upon his return to the river is so dirty it is “taxable as real estate”; the Mississippi when about to erode away an island is said to have “a mortgage” on which it is about to “foreclose”; and an anonymous author is said to have published a book with “no brand given.” The consistent parade of commercial figures of speech reveals the author’s attitude toward his materials, that “trifling investment of fact” from which he hopes to receive a “wholesale return.”

Uniting these commercial elements is the underlying theme of loss, not only of the steamboat’s hegemony but the heroic status of the river pilots after the war. In effect, Twain’s book is about a “Mississippi Bubble” unimagined by John Law, in which the profitability of steamboat commerce is deflated by the rise in importance of the railroad. Here is another theme painfully relevant to modern Americans, for what Twain expresses in this book is the kind of commercial spirit, enterprise floated by debt, that Americans continue to espouse at great risk.
Life on the Mississippi
is an important cultural artifact, anachronistic perhaps, but, like the Mississippi steamboat itself, it presents a palatial, gilded exterior that hides a few grim and grimy facts, standing as Henry Clay early noted for the most optimistic aspects of nineteenth-century life as well as for a number of those aspects that Clay’s analogy did not accommodate. And if Davy Crockett was celebrated as a hero, it was as a champion of Western expansion, with the concomitant extension of chattel slavery in the same direction, which is the shadowy part of that great diagram to which the Mississippi River was central.

 

—John Seelye

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches
(1867)

The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress
(1869)

Eye Openers
(1871)

Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance
(1871)
Roughing It
(1872)

Screamers
(1872)

Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain
(1873)

The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day
[with Charles Dudley Warner] (1873)

Mark Twain’s Sketches
(1874)

Sketches, Old and New
(1875)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876)

Ah Sin
[with Bret Harte] (1877)

A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime
(1877)

Punch, Brothers, Punch! And Other Sketches
(1878)

A Tramp Aboard
(1880)

“1601” or Conversation at the Social Fireside as It Was in the Time of the Tudors
(1880)

The Prince and the Pauper
(1882)

The Stolen White Elephant, Etc.
(1882)

Life on the Mississippi
(1883)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885)

Mark Twain’s Library of Humor
(1888)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(1889)

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
(1890)

The American Claimant
(1892)

Merry Tales
(1892)

The £1,000,000 Bank-note and Other New Stories
(1893)

The Niagra Book
(1893)

Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
(1894)

Tom Sawyer Abroad
(1894)

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
(1896)

Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer Detective, and Other Stories
(1896)

How to Tell a Story and Other Essays
(1897)

Following the Equator
(1897)

More Tramps Abroad
(1898)

The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches
(1899)

Literary Essays
(1899)

English as She Is Taught
(1900)

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays
(1900)

To the Person Sitting in Darkness
(1901)

A Double Barrelled Detective Story
(1902)

My Debut as a Literary Person with Other Essays and Stories
(1903)

The Jumping Frog in English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient Unremunerated Toil
(1903)

Extracts from Adam’s Diary, Translated from the Original MS.
(1904)

A Dog’s Tale
(1904)

King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Cargo Rule
(1905)

Eve’s Diary, Translated from the Original MS.
(1906)

What Is Man?
(1906)

The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories
(1906)

Christian Science
(1907)

Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven
(1909)

Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography
(1909)

Mark Twain’s Autobiography
(1924)

Letters from the Earth
(1962)

Brooks, Van Wyck.
The Ordeal of Mark Twain.
New York: Dutton, 1920. Revised edition, 1933.

Emerson, Everett.
Mark Twain: A Literary Life.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Howells, William Dean.
My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms.
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910.

Kaplan, Fred.
The Singular Mark Twain.
New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Kaplan, Justin.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966.

Kar, Prafulla C., ed.
Mark Twain: An Anthology of Recent Criticism.
Delhi: Pencraft, 1992.

de Koster, Katie, ed.
Readings on Mark Twain.
San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996.

Lauber, John.
The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography.
New York: American Heritage Press, 1985.

LeMaster, J. R. and James D. Wilson, eds.
The Mark Twain Encyclopedia.
New York: Garland, 1993.

Michelson, Bruce.
Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

Paine, Albert Bigelow.
Mark Twain: A Biography. The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
3 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912.

Powers, Ron.
Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain.
New York: Da Capo, 2001.

——.
Mark Twain: A Life.
New York: Free Press, 2006

Rasmussen, R. Kent.
Mark Twain A to Z: the Essential Reference to His Life and Writings.
New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1995.

Robinson, Forrest G., ed.
The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain.
Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Sundquist, Eric J., ed.
Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994.

Ward, Geoffrey C., Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns.
Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography.
New York: Knopf, 2001.

Wonham, Henry B.
Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

The text of this edition of
Life on the Mississippi
is that of the first edition of the book, published by the American Publishing Company at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1883. Spelling and punctuation have been brought into conformity with modern American usage.

The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope—a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.

It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point halfway down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the “Passes,” above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi’s depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable—not in the upper, but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)—about fifty feet. But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half.

An article in the New Orleans
Times-Democrat
, based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico—which brings to mind Captain Marryat’s rude name for the Mississippi—“the Great Sewer.” This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high.

The mud deposit gradually extends the land—but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific people is that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all—one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.

The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cutoffs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now
two miles above
Vicksburg.

Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cutoff. A cutoff plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi today, a cutoff occurs tonight, and tomorrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him.

The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cutoffs alone: it is always changing its habitat
bodily
—is always moving bodily
sidewise
. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. As a result, the original
site
of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi.
Nearly the whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old Mississippi River which La Salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry ground now
. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places.

Although the Mississippi’s mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the Gulf’s billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet’s Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it.

But enough of these examples of the mighty stream’s eccentricities for the present—I will give a few more of them further along in the book.

Let us drop the Mississippi’s physical history, and say a word about its historical history—so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left of the book.