Traveling with Twain

In 1856, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) followed his brothers, Orion and Henry, to sleepy Keokuk, Iowa, to help with Orion’s Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. Twain dreamed of exotic Brazil, “fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon” to collect coca and “make a fortune.” He left for Cincinnati, a center of steamboat building and drydocks, which turned out to be not much livelier than Keokuk. A generation earlier, Frances Trollope had labeled the city a boring burg: “I never saw any people who appeared to live so much without amusement as the Cincinnatians.” Twain is quoted as echoing Trollope (though the quote cannot be authenticated): “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times.” Twain worked for four months as a printer for T. Wrightson & Co. at 167 Walnut Street and lived at a nearby boardinghouse. He then resumed his Brazil-bound odyssey, boarding a packet, the Paul Jones, headed by way of the Ohio and Mississippi for New Orleans. He met Horace Bixby, a veteran river pilot who agreed—for $500 over time—to teach Twain how to navigate a steamboat on the Mississippi and other rivers.

November 3-November 4