April 20 Thursday – From Ch. 22, LM:

Next Morning we drove around town in the rain. The city seemed but little changed. It was greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can’t persuade a thing to look new; the coal-smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of four hundred thousand inhabitants.

Sam noticed “melancholy” and “woeful” changes on the docks—“Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones!…Here was desolation indeed.” It was the railroads that killed the steamboats, Sam wrote.

Sam and company left St. Louis at 5 PM, headed south aboard the Gold Dust, a “Vicksburg packet…neat, clean, and comfortable.” Nevertheless, they were delayed at East St. Louis at 10 PM [LM, Ch 23; MTNJ 2: 436].

Paine on the Mississippi excursion:

“The New Orleans excursion with Osgood, as planned by Clemens, proved a great success. The little party took the steamer Gold Dust from St. Louis down river toward New Orleans. Clemens was quickly recognized, of course, and his assumed name laid aside. The author of “Uncle Remus” made the trip to New Orleans. George W. Cable was there at the time, and we may believe that in the company of Mark Twain and Osgood those Southern authors passed two or three delightful days. Clemens also met his old teacher Bixby in New Orleans, and came back up the river with him, spending most of his time in the pilot-house, as in the old days. It was a glorious trip, and, reaching St. Louis, he continued it northward, stopping off at Hannibal and Quincy” [MTLP 419-20].

One trip schedule may be found at: www.twainquotes.com/steamboats/Itinerary1882.htm