Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Horace E. Bixby
6? February 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(Paraphrase: New Orleans Times-Democrat,
7 May 82, UCCL 00400)

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Thirty tons of paper have been used in publishing my book Innocents Abroad. It has met with a greater sale than any book ever published except Uncle Tom’s Cabin.1 The volumes sell from $3 to $5, according to finish, [& ] I get one-half the profit. Not so bad for a scrub pilot, is it? How do you run Plum Point—a son-of-a-gun of a place?2 I would rather be a pilot than anything I ever tried.3

[enclosures of wedding cards] 4

[ [on the flap of the inside envelope:] lc ]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a benchmark for Clemens in gauging sales of Innocents (L3, 440). But Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) sold in excess of 100,000 copies during its first six months, whereas Innocents sold 39,000 (Hart 1950, 110–12; Hirst 1975, 314, 316).

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2 According to an 1857 river guide, Plum Point, near Osceola, Arkansas, was “one of the most difficult places to pass on the Mississippi. . . . Quite a number of boats have been lost here” (James, 33, 34). In 1875, in the second installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Clemens had a group of pilots answer the same question he here asked Bixby, his piloting instructor in 1857–59 (SLC 1875, 221–22).

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3 An assertion that Clemens made repeatedly (see L1, 327, 358). In 1875 he expanded on it in his sixth installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi”:

I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two thirds of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his parish’s opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we “modify” before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none. (SLC 1875, 721)

See also chapter 14 of Life on the Mississippi and the Autobiographical Dictation of 7 July 1908 (CU-MARK, in MTE, 304, and AMT, 291).

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4 The text of this letter is based on Bixby’s report of it in an 1882 interview in which, asked if he ever heard from Clemens, he said, somewhat inaccurately: “Yes, he used to write, and let me know of his whereabouts. On his return from the Holy Land, he sent me a letter which contained his wedding card” (“Mark Twain. How the Boy Became a Pilot and the Pilot a Humorist,” New Orleans Times-Democrat, 7 May 82, 3, reprinted in part in Turner, 15–17). The cards and envelope are not known to survive: see 6? Feb 70 to Barnes.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

“Mark Twain. How the Boy Became a Pilot and the Pilot a Humorist,” New Orleans Times-Democrat, 7 May 82, 3.

glyph Previous publication: L4, 58–59; In addition to the copy-text, Will M. Clemens 1892, 94–95; “Pilot, 85, to Celebrate,” unidentified 1911 newspaper, PH in CU-MARK; MTMF, 114, excerpt; Turner, 16–17.

glyph Provenance:Bixby reported that a trunk of his effects, including the MS of this letter, was destroyed by fire in 1885 (“Pilot, 85, to Celebrate”).

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

& • and

[on . . . lc • [adopted from envelope of 6? Feb 70 to Stoddard]