1 Strother Nimrod Wiley (1814?–99) was born in Virginia, and spent his youth as a raftsman on the Kanawha River. While still very young, he piloted steamboats on the Ohio, Cumberland, and Red rivers, later moving to the Missouri and then the Mississippi. By the 1850s he was the most respected and beloved pilot on the river. Known for his “inexhaustible fund of good spirits mingled with an irresistible humor,” he was a skilled fiddle player and storyteller whose “unusual good nature and alacrity in answering the thousand questions people ask about the Mississippi” and “unusual gallantry and presence of mind in time of alarm or danger . . . endeared him to everybody” (“Wylie, the Pilot of the Mississippi,” New Orleans Picayune, 24 Oct 52, 1). Wiley almost certainly helped teach Clemens the river in 1857 and 1858, possibly on the Crescent City and the John H. Dickey. He figured briefly as “Mr. W——” in the second (February) and third (March) installments of Clemens’s “Old Times” series in the Atlantic (Branch 1986, 3–4, 24–25; SLC: 1875 [MT02539], 222; 1875 [MT02541], 284–85). When Wiley read the excerpt from the first of these reprinted in the St. Louis Times for 24 January (“A Lightning Pilot,” 3), he recognized himself and wrote to Clemens. The day after he received Wiley’s letter, Clemens sent it to Howells. Since it is conjectured that he did so on 14 February (see the next letter, n. 2), it also seems likely that he replied to Wiley on 13 February.