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When the youthful Sam Clemens turned his back on printing to follow his fortune on the river and in the West, he may be said, in a modern overworked phrase, to have ‘found himself.’ Put very simply, he turned into Mark Twain.

It was the West, the river and the prairie, the Nevada desert and the Rocky Mountains and the sunlit shores of the Pacific, and with it the new civilization of the West, raw but virile, that nurtured the genius that never could have blossomed in a New York boarding-house or a Philadelphia printing-room. The West made Mark Twain. All that he wrote has its basis there. It supplies the point of view, the ‘eye of innocence,’ with which he was able later on to look upon Europe. His western life began on the Mississippi River. It resumed the play of childhood, broken ten years before.

Readers of the book that was published later as Life on the Mississippi do not need to be reminded of the romance, the interest and the humours of Mark Twain’s pilot days. He has told the story so well that no one can follow him. The fascination of the river steamers, the pomp and luxury with which they seemed to glitter in an age of ox-waggons, mules, framehouses and log churches, make the position of the pilot, seated sky-high in the pilot-house, almost one of majesty. Mark Twain, as a young man, had no higher ambition than to go on the river as a pilot. No doubt, in the dull hours of trying to set ‘10,000 ems of type a day,’ he often dreamed himself just such a sky-high pilot, the envy of mankind. In vain he had often sought an opening. And now by chance fate threw it in his way when he was stranded in New Orleans looking vainly towards South America. Chance threw him into the company of one Mr. Horace Bixby, a famous pilot of his day, and afterwards his lifelong friend. He agreed with the young man to ‘teach him the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis’ for the sum of five hundred dollars chargeable against his future wages.

Mark Twain records how he ‘entered on the small enterprise of “learning” twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the Mississippi River’ with easy confidence, and records how he felt disillusioned, appalled and hopeless to find that he must know the river not only by day but in total darkness, not only upwards but downwards, not only at high water but at any water; must learn to follow all the shifts of sand-bars and snags, and that, too, at a day when the Mississippi bore neither buoys nor lights to indicate its tortuous channels. ‘If my ears hear aright,’ he reflected, in the course of his early instruction, ‘I have not only to get the names of all the towns and islands and bends, but I must get up a warm personal acquaintance with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood and obscure wood-pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles!’

What is more, he did it. Within eighteen months he got his licence; before the job ended (with the Civil War) he was second to few on the river. His knowledge of the great river and his abiding feeling for it became part of his life and the inspiration, as in the pages of Huckleberry Finn, of the finest of his work.

From his Mississippi days Samuel Clemens also carried away his pen-name of Mark Twain, which presently nullified the work of his godfather’s and godmother’s.

The origin of the nom de plume runs this: ‘Mark Twain’ is the pilot’s designation for two fathoms of water. Now it happened that there was in Sam Clemens’s pilot days an ancient and experienced pilot, a Captain Sellers, who sometimes contributed to the New Orleans papers little bits of wisdom and forecast about the river, as crude in form as they were valuable in fact. These contributions to the press were signed ‘Mark Twain.’ Clemens, still something of a journalist at heart, wrote a little burlesque of his senior’s prophecies which called forth a laugh that echoed up the Mississippi—and incidentally broke old Sellers’s heart with its ridicule. Young Clemens learned for ever a lesson in the cruelty of ‘fun,’ and seldom sinned again. But later on, when Sellers was dead and beyond injury, he annexed the pen-name for himself.

Mark Twain’s pilot days were ended by the outbreak of the Civil War and the blockade of the river. He succeeded in getting north from New Orleans to his own State on the last boat that got up the river (January 1861). The part he took at the opening of the war was unheroic if not inglorious. He enlisted, as a Confederate, in some sort of irregular band which professed to be cavalry. Their aim was to ‘liberate the soil of Missouri’—from what, it was not clearly understood.

But Mark Twain dropped out of the conflict almost at once and saw nothing of warfare. He himself has narrated the episode with that characteristic mixture of fact and exaggeration which baffles foreign readers in all his ‘western’ books, in his sketch called A Campaign That Failed.

But the truth is that his heart was not in the Civil War on either side. His common sense showed him that the war, in spite of the urgent denials of President Lincoln and the rest, had something to do with slavery. He could not fight to maintain that. But he was equally far from being a ‘Yankee.’ His brief sojourn as a youth at New York and Philadelphia was that of a stranger in a strange land. Of New England and its traditions of liberty, piety, intolerance and ‘culture’ he as yet knew nothing at all; nor ever sympathized with it later. His heart was neither in the North nor the South, but in the new West.

Thither he decided to go. His older brother, Orion Clemens, had contrived to secure an appointment as secretary of the new territory of Nevada. Sam Clemens offered to go along with his brother as ‘private secretary to the secretary,’ an office which he himself describes as a ‘unique sinecure,’ there being ‘nothing to do and no salary.’ Indeed, it was Sam Clemens’s savings as a pilot which financed the journey to the West, his brother Orion being invited by the United States, as was Mr. Pickwick by the Pickwick Club, to travel at his own expense.

These, of course, were the days of the rise of the American West, from a vast untraversed wilderness to an El Dorado of gold and silver. The gold discoveries in California had started the ‘ ’forty-niners’ on the trail. In the decade following, a flock of prospectors found their way into the mountains and disclosed the fabulous wealth of silver-bearing loads of the district of the Carson Valley, a part of the Mormon territory of Utah. It was the organization of this district as the territory of Nevada which gave to the two Clemens brothers the opportunity of taking part in the western movement. To get to Nevada they must go overland by the stage. There was as yet no railway across the continent, nor was there till some years after the Civil War. To reach California one might make the stormy voyage around Cape Horn; or choose the dangerous Isthmus route, by Panama or Nicaragua; or the stage route over the prairies and mountains. For Nevada the stage route—only seventeen hundred miles!—was the obvious choice.

Behold, then, the Clemens brothers mounting the coach at St. Jo, Missouri, climbing up on the mail-sacks to bid farewell to warfare in the East and seek peace among the savages.