Life on the Mississippi eBook

This creature’s career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed.  Boy after boy managed to get on the river.  The minister’s son became an engineer.  The doctor’s and the post-master’s sons became ’mud clerks;’ the wholesale liquor dealer’s son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots.  Pilot was the grandest position of all.  The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary—­from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay.  Two months of his wages would pay a preacher’s salary for a year.  Now some of us were left disconsolate.  We could not get on the river—­at least our parents would not let us.

So by and by I ran away.  I said I never would come home again till I was a pilot and could come in glory.  But somehow I could not manage it.  I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines at the long St. Louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks.  I had to make the best of this sort of treatment for the time being, but I had comforting daydreams of a future when I should be a great and honored pilot, with plenty of money, and could kill some of these mates and clerks and pay for them.

Chapter 5 I Want to be a Cub-pilot

Months afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death, and I found myself without an ambition.  But I was ashamed to go home.  I was in Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career.  I had been reading about the recent exploration of the river Amazon by an expedition sent out by our government.  It was said that the expedition, owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a part of the country lying about the head-waters, some four thousand miles from the mouth of the river.  It was only about fifteen hundred miles from Cincinnati to New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a ship.  I had thirty dollars left; I would go and complete the exploration of the Amazon.  This was all the thought I gave to the subject.  I never was great in matters of detail.  I packed my valise, and took passage on an ancient tub called the ‘Paul Jones,’ for New Orleans.  For the sum of sixteen dollars I had the scarred and tarnished splendors of ‘her’ main saloon principally to myself, for she was not a creature to attract the eye of wiser travelers.

When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio, I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration.  I was a traveler!  A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before.  I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since.  I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the