In fact, piloting a steamboat at most times of the year was an extremely hazardous occupation. The boats were hardly the “floating palaces” of legend, but mostly cheaply constructed, wooden, rickety tinderboxes. As Robert Sattelmeyer explains, “Boats were profitable to the extent that they ran risks: carrying too much steam, overloading freight or passengers, running dangerous chutes to save time, venturing into rivers at marginal water levels, and so forth. ... Not surprisingly, the life expectancy of a Mississippi steamboat was four to five years.” Flimsily built with flat bottoms to glide over sandbars, steamboats might sink in as little as three or four feet of water. About a thousand steamboat accidents—on average, one every two weeks—were reported on western rivers between 1811 and 1851, and the remains of some two hundred wrecked steamboats were submerged between St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois, a distance of only about two hundred miles. As Bernard DeVoto notes, of the thousand boats that plied the Mississippi when Sam worked the river, “the soundly built boat was the exception, a product of occasional pride or responsibility; the average boat was assembled from inferior timber and machinery, thrown together with the least possible expense, and hurried out to snare her portion of the unimaginable profits before her seams opened or her boiler heads blew off. Once launched, she entered a competition ruthless and inconceivably corrupt.” Captains and pilots were personally liable to criminal and civil penalties in the event of accidents, including explosions, and unless they owned part of the boat they enjoyed “minimal job security, berths that were usually transient, [and] wages that fluctuated greatly.” For two years after he earned his pilot's license, Sam earned a salary equal to that of the vice president of the United States or an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court while at work, but his periods of employment were punctuated by unpaid layoffs and layovers. His workday was divided into six four-hour shifts—three shifts on duty, the other three devoted to sleep and a little leisure. Riverboat officers were also liable to be punished for their support of unionization, and while in port pilots were subject to the orders of their captains. Gambling and prostitution flourished on the boats and in the towns along the river, and Sam was complicit in “this trade in greed and corruption” during a formative era of his life. Yet he omitted “the squalid venery” of the boating profession, as DeVoto called it, from both his extant private letters of the period and from Life on the Mississippi, his most complete public account of his piloting career.”
(page 98)
Sam Clemens on the Outbreak of the Civil War:
Sam's career on the river ended soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. He seems to have been largely oblivious to events that precipitated the conflict. He chewed the war talk without tasting it, as the saying went. Or, as Arthur Pettit has remarked, he “gave little thought or attention to the approaching collision between North and South or to his own position on the twin issues of slavery and sectionalism.” Sam was in New Orleans on January 26, 1861, when Louisiana seceded, and he remembered “Great rejoicing. Flags, Dixie, soldiers.” At Vicksburg en route to New Orleans on April 19, he heard about the firing on Fort Sumter the day before, and the crew of the Alonzo Child, on orders from its secessionist captain, David DeHaven, “hoisted the stars & bars & played Dixie” in celebration. While the gesture may seem innocuous enough, it was in fact an act of treason. According to Horace Bixby, who had by this time retired from the Alonzo Child, Sam “piloted .. . for the Confederacy between March and May 1861 before “he got through the lines and went home.” For many months as a pilot on the lower Mississippi, Sam had landed at no free port except those in southwestern Illinois such as Cairo, so the “Irrepressible Conflict” must have seemed Distant and/or Eminently Avoidable. The states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, all of which he passed every couple of weeks while piloting, seceded from the United States to join the Confederacy. Sam was earning $250 a month at a job for which he had been painstakingly trained, and the war seemed more a nuisance to him than a moral crusade. “I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel,” he wrote in Life on the Mississippi. Instead, he was bumped off his boat in New Orleans in mid-May 1861, nearly a month after the war began, because the owners of the Child had decided to sell it at nominal cost to the Confederate Navy. Its engines were removed and installed on the CSS Tennessee, an ironclad warship seized in February 1864 by the Union at the Battle of Mobile Bay. The shell of the Child was converted into a barge.
(page 127-8)
Running the Blockade:
After some sixty round-trips piloting on the lower Mississippi, Sam was again out of work. He hastily returned to Missouri as a passenger aboard the Nebraska, piloted by his friend Zeb Leavenworth, leaving New Orleans on May 14 and arriving in St. Louis on May 21. It was the last steamboat allowed through the Union blockade at Memphis before the lower Mississippi was closed to civilian traffic. As the Nebraska approached the federal arsenal at Jefferson Barracks below St. Louis, the boat was attacked. A bomb exploded near the pilothouse, breaking the windows. Bixby saw bullet holes in its smokestacks a few days later, “and the Civil War had only begun.” In the days to come, according to Sam, the pilots who remained on the river “used to hold up a spittoon or a cane seat chair to protect their heads & hide behind a bit of canvass or lie down on the floor. One in white linen held a spittoon to his head, with the breaking glass rattling around him; the content spilt on his clothes.” Soon after the Nebraska docked in St. Louis, Sam and his friends Sam Bowen and Absalom Grimes, an upper Mississippi pilot, embarked aboard the packet Hannibal City for refuge in their hometown.”
(page 128)