Publication Coming Tuesday

Reading Rivers

It took Samuel Clemens two years to earn his license as a steamboat pilot, and during that time his mentor--Horace Bixby--drove him relentlessly to master the perilous task of steering a big boat through the turbulent waters of the Mississippi.
 
When Sam was overcome with exasperation one day and despaired of ever navigating the twists and turns of the river after dark, Bixby taught him the important lesson that he could steer at night in the same way “that you follow a hall at home in the dark. . . . because you know the shape of it.” 

Like writing, piloting was an imaginative act. You observed the river closely, and then used those observations to create another river in your imagination. “Steer by the shape that’s in your head,” commanded Bixby, “and never mind the one that’s before your eyes.”
 
With his background as a printer, young Sam found it easier to understand the river if he thought of it as a book that he was both reading and composing in his head. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book,” he recalls in Life on the Mississippi. “And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest.”

A Gilded Garden

Mark Twain's coauthor for The Gilded Age--Charles Dudley Warner--wrote his first book about a garden he tended one summer in Hartford, where he edited the Courant. In 1870 he gave readers of his newspaper a weekly report on the progress of his latest hobby—vegetable gardening.  It may not sound promising, but the subject brought out the best in him, inspiring a series of essays rich in lyrical prose and practical wisdom.  Readers began not only to await eagerly each new installment, but also to cut out the old columns and paste them in their scrapbooks. Interest was so great that the essays were reprinted at the end of the year in a little volume called My Summer in a Garden.  

A modest, sociable man’s Walden, the book is a minor masterpiece.  It features one of the more endearing animal characters in American literature: Warner’s faithful cat—and chief defender of the pea patch against marauding birds—Calvin, so named “on account of his gravity, morality, and uprightness.” 

A gift from Harriet Beecher Stowe, the cat was a beautiful, silky creature who seemed indifferent to the charms of the human race until he met Warner.  Each afternoon, when Charles came home from the newspaper office, Calvin was waiting for him at the gate. Together, they spent the summer in the garden, Charles working with his shovel and hoe while Calvin sat in the grass under the hawthorn trees and kept a sharp eye on the birds.

 

Near the end of the book the cat studies the dry remnants of the garden in its autumn desolation, and wisely surrenders his post under the trees:  “Calvin, aware that the summer is past and the harvest is ended, and that a mouse in the kitchen is worth two birds gone south, scampers away to the house with his tail in the air.”

Mark Twain's Desk

Lots of people like a clean desk, but real work always creates a little mess. If your mind is clicking along nicely, your desk will naturally pile up with things you need for work--and all the other things you're postponing until the real work is done.

There is a fine line, however, between the organized chaos of a mind fully engaged and the rampant anarchy of a mind spinning nowhere. Twain's desk seems to set a good example with a healthy degree of disorder. The clutter is there, but it's manageable.

"You may not think I know where everything is," Twain's expression seems to say, "but I do--and anyway, what business is it of yours? This is the way I work." 

Mark Twain and Black Hawk

Only a few years before Mark Twain's family settled in northeast Missouri, the area was still home to scattered bands of the Sac and Fox tribe, headed by the great warrior Black Hawk. The tribe used it not only for hunts but also--in earlier times--for assemblies at the council grounds near the modern town of Palmyra.
 

If Europeans treated Black Hawk well, he left them in peace. If anyone offended him, his response was brutal and swift. His men were renowned for their prowess as hunters and were feared for their merciless treatment of enemies. Until the nineteenth century the tribe directed most of their violence against other tribes who dared to encroach on their hunting grounds. But then the Europeans began to be a problem.  

Settlers in Illinois and Missouri frequently clashed with the Indians and, finally, when the chief of the Sac and Fox was in his 60s, a full-scale war broke out. There were atrocities on both sides in what came to be called the Black Hawk War of 1832. At a pioneer village near Galena, Illinois, several children were found hacked to death and their mothers strung up by the feet. A St. Louis paper demanded 100 Indian dead for each settler killed, and an Illinois paper called for a “war of extermination until there shall be no Indian (with his scalp on) left in the north part of Illinois.”
 

A young Kentuckian who had recently moved to Illinois–Abraham Lincoln–commanded a militia company in the war.  Lincoln spent most of his military service in fruitless pursuit of the enemy, and joked later that he wasted a lot of time “in charges upon wild onions” and “bloody experiences with the mosquitoes.”   

He did witness, however, the gruesome results of a few skirmishes, including one in which Black Hawk and his men ambushed five settlers and left their scalped bodies rotting in the sun. Lincoln helped to bury the dead and never forgot what he had seen, later recalling that each man “had a round, red spot on top of his head, about as big as a dollar where the redskins had taken his scalp.”  

In a few months the fighting ended and proud Black Hawk was taken prisoner by Winnebago warriors hoping to collect reward money. Colonel Zachary Taylor, the future president, placed the chief on a steamboat and sent him to Jefferson Barracks, outside St. Louis, where he was put in chains.  The officer who escorted him to St. Louis was Colonel Taylor’s future son-in-law, and Abraham Lincoln’s future enemy, Lieutenant Jefferson Davis.
 

Only three years after the conclusion of this short but bloody war, Samuel L. Clemens was born in Missouri on land that had once belonged to Black Hawk and his people.

Humble Beginnings

At the height of his prosperity, Mark Twain lived in a mansion, but he started life in a tiny backwoods cabin. He was born in the village of Florida, Missouri, where his family had settled in the 1830s after moving to the area from Jamestown, Tennessee. In later years Twain used to say that little Florida had 100 people. It has nine now, according to the 2000 census.

  

At a state park not far from the original site of Twain's birthplace, there is a small museum housing the cabin. In old age Twain was amused by rumors about the cabin's fate. When told it was for sale, he responded, "It is about time it was. It has been burned down four times."