Life on the Mississippi and Travel Writing

Travel writing is nonfiction about a journey: where the writer went, what they saw, and what it meant to them. In the nineteenth century, when few people could travel far, travel books and newspaper letters were how most readers saw the world. Many were serious and admiring. Twain’s were funny, and they often made fun of the traveler as much as the place.

Two of these books began as paid newspaper work. Twain’s place on the 1867 voyage was funded by the San Francisco Alta California in exchange for letters about the trip, and he later reshaped those letters into The Innocents Abroad. In Roughing It he describes being sent to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) to “write some letters for the Sacramento Union.”

Context. Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi, and in 1857 he became a “cub” (apprentice) pilot under Horace Bixby, who agreed to teach him the river for five hundred dollars. The chapters about learning the river were first printed as a series called “Old Times on the Mississippi” in The Atlantic Monthly in 1875. In the spring of 1882 Twain went back to the river to gather material for the rest of the book, and the finished Life on the Mississippi was published in 1883, in the United States and Britain at the same time.

Summary. The book opens with the river itself and its history. Then Twain turns to his boyhood: “there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades” in his village. “That was, to be a steamboatman.” The day comes alive only when a boat arrives and someone shouts “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!”

The young narrator becomes a “cub” pilot under Mr. Bixby, and the long middle section tells how he learned the trade. He sets out to learn “twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River,” then discovers he must learn it “both ways,” by day and by night, and that the channel keeps shifting. The last part of the book jumps ahead: “after twenty-one years’ absence,” an older Twain travels the river again, down to New Orleans and up to the upper river, and finds the steamboat age fading.

Context. In June 1867 the chartered steamship Quaker City left New York on a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. Twain went along as a correspondent, sending letters to the Alta California, and the ship was back in New York in November. He rewrote the letters, toning down slang for a national audience, and the book was published in 1869. It became the best-selling of his books during his lifetime.

Summary. The book follows the voyage stop by stop: the Azores, Gibraltar and Tangier, France, Italy, Greece, Constantinople and the Black Sea, then the Holy Land and Egypt. Twain sorts his shipmates into the solemn “pilgrims” and the less pious “sinners.” He is honest about what disappointed him and sharp about tourists who pretend to love everything. He mocks guides, souvenir-hunters, old paintings, and above all his fellow Americans.

Context. Roughing It was written in 1870–71 and published in 1872, after The Innocents Abroad. It covers Twain’s years in the West, 1861 to 1867. It begins: “My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory.” The narrator goes along, and admits, “I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother.”

Summary. The brothers cross the plains by overland stagecoach, since “There was no Pacific railroad in those fine times.” They see the Pony Express, visit Salt Lake City, and reach Carson City, Nevada. The narrator catches silver fever, tries prospecting and mining, and is briefly a millionaire on paper before losing it through carelessness. He becomes a newspaper reporter in Virginia City, drifts to San Francisco, and finally sails to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) as a correspondent. Near the end he gives his first public lecture, and then heads home.

Travel books promise the truth, and Twain mostly delivers it: real routes, real dates, real people like Horace Bixby. But he also tells tall tales, invents dialogue, and stretches events to make them funnier. He even jokes about it. The preface to Roughing It says, “This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation,” then apologizes that “information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter.”

How can you tell when he is stretching? Use these tests:

• Size. A dust storm can be huge; one “the size of the United States” cannot. When the numbers get too big, he is joking.
• Checkable facts. Dates, places and depths (“mark twain” is two fathoms) can be checked, and usually hold up.
• Dialogue. Long, perfectly timed speeches remembered years later were probably polished, or invented.
• The narrator’s age. The young narrator is often more foolish than Twain probably was, because a fool is funnier.

Ask yourself: does exaggeration make a travel book less honest, or can it tell a truth about how a place felt?

Twain’s travel books show the prejudices of white Americans in his time, sometimes mocked and sometimes shared. Reading them well means noticing both.

• Condescension in The Innocents Abroad. Twain laughs at American tourists, but he also looks down on the people they visit. In the Holy Land he describes the village of Magdala as “thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly.” Ask: when is he mocking the ignorant tourist, and when is he being one?
• Native Americans in Roughing It. The book describes the Goshute people with open contempt, calling them “the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen,” and judges a whole people from a brief meeting by the stage road. (Twain spells the name “Goshoot.”) The chapter goes on in the same way, and we have not reprinted more. Discuss: what does this passage show about the narrator, rather than about the Goshutes?
• Chinese immigrants in Roughing It. In Virginia City, Twain writes with real sympathy: “They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long.” He condemns their unequal treatment in court: “Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man.” Yet the chapter also uses “Chinaman,” a term now considered offensive, and treats Chinese customs as curiosities. It is sympathetic and stereotyped at the same time.
• Slavery and race on the river. Life on the Mississippi remembers the river before the Civil War, when Missouri was a slave state. The shout “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!” comes from a Black dray driver, described in the language of 1883. Notice how rarely the book stops to think about these workers.

Twain wrote that travel is fatal to prejudice. These books suggest it takes more than one trip.

Twain’s views also changed later in life. He first spoke in favor of American interests in Hawaii but later reversed his position, and around 1900 he became an outspoken anti-imperialist: he served as a vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 until his death in 1910, and in 1901 published To the Person Sitting in Darkness, criticizing imperialism in China, South Africa and the Philippines (source: Wikipedia, “Mark Twain”).

• Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Project Gutenberg eBook #245 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/245).
• Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Project Gutenberg eBook #3176 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/3176).
• Mark Twain, Roughing It, Project Gutenberg eBook #3177 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/3177).
• Wikipedia, “Life on the Mississippi” (published 1883 in the U.S. and Britain), “Old Times on the Mississippi” (serialized in The Atlantic Monthly, 1875), “Horace E. Bixby” (met Twain in February 1857; Twain’s return to the river in spring 1882), “The Innocents Abroad” (the 1867 Quaker City voyage, the Alta California letters, the 1869 book and its sales), “Roughing It” (written 1870–71, published 1872, covering 1861–1867) and “Mark Twain” (his later reversal on Hawaii, his years as a vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, 1901–1910, and To the Person Sitting in Darkness, 1901).
• Summaries are our own paraphrases. Every quotation on this page was checked against the Project Gutenberg texts above.
• Art: the pilot-house illustration and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami.