Pilot’s Cantankerous Spirit Lives On in This Century : Mark Twain Would Still Feel at Home on Mississippi River Boat

On a fine fall Sunday, the stern-wheeler Mississippi Queen “backed out and straighted up,” to use Mark Twain’s phrase, and serenaded the levee loungers with three toots of her whistle and a steaming rendition of “Ole Man River” from her panting calliope.

Hannibal’s red brick Hill Street, with the Becky Thatcher bookstore, Huck’s Pipe Shop, John Clemens’ law office and Tom Sawyer’s house and recently whitewashed fence, disappeared around the bend as the river boat lowered her smokestacks to pass under the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge and slide by Jackson’s Island, where Huck and the runaway slave Jim boarded their famous raft.

Lighthouse Diamonds

The noonday sun sparkled facets of diamonds in the lens of the lighthouse on Holiday Hill, where the widow Douglas hung a lantern to guide steamboats around the shoals.

Up in the pilothouse, enthroned between “the sticks,” the brass handles that control the rudders and take the place of the huge knobbed wheel that used to give helmsmen hernias, pilot Adrian Hargrove mused over the undying popularity of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his two-fathom pen name, Mark Twain.

“We have a personality conflict,” complained Capt. Hargrove about the most famous of all Mississippi River pilots. “When a man out-lies me, I don’t have much use for him. Just let him live in the bygone days, and I’ll try as best I can to get along in the present.”

In the 150th anniversary year of Mark Twain’s birth, the 75th of his death and the 100th anniversary of the publication of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” this may strike some as high heresy from the very pulpit where Mark Twain preached his sermons wreathed in cigar smoke. However, now, as then, the Mississippi River pilot embodies Twain’s job description as “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.”

And there is no change in the scarlet and gold autumn beauty of the upper Mississippi, which Twain thought “could give the Hudson points.”

“He was certainly telling no lies there,” allowed Capt. Hargrove in the drawling accents of his native Paducah, Ky., as a great blue heron flapped its enormous wings for a graceful touchdown on a “tow head,” an island, complete with full-grown trees, floating by in the fast-moving current.

The long-necked wading bird reminded Hargrove of “a Cajun cook from Breaux Bridge we had on a towboat working the lower river. He came out on deck with a single-barrel shotgun and blasted away at a swooping heron. Feathers flew everywhere. Then he jumped overboard and retrieved it like a bird dog. He claimed it made the best gumbo you ever tasted.”

A huge tree trunk bobbing in the churning wake of our rainbow-spilling paddle wheel provoked a pensive stroke of his long sideburns and another yarn from Hargrove.

“Several years ago, coming up below Chester, Ill., the radio warned of an escape from the state pen at Menard. Just then, Capt. Pete Thomas, a powerful man, stood 6-feet-4, saw a convict floating by on a log. He stopped the tow, reached over and hauled that convict onto a barge and whupped his stern so bad he was pleading to go back to prison.”

‘Shining in the Sun’

More than a dozen decades after Mark Twain coaxed Capt. Horace Bixby to teach him the river “for $500 payable out of the first wages after graduation,” the “great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi,” as he saluted it, was “rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.” The back benches in the pilothouse still reverberated with tales of famous wrecks, captains’ daughters who could “swear a hole through a brick fence” and “alligators so big you had to blow a passing whistle.”

Maybe someday a Ph.D. candidate in behavioral psychology will deal with the question of why airline pilots are by nature or training spare, thin-smiling, laconic types given to understatement, while river boat pilots are garrulous, broad of beam and congenial as a synod of sidewalk Santa Clauses.

Certainly the difference in volubility doesn’t result from any shortage of instrumentation in the pilothouse or any decline in the hazards of navigation.

In Mark Twain’s day, the only technology available to the pilot was the wheel, the whistle, a speaking tube to cuss out the engineer and the “sounder’s” sobbing tremolo “no-o-o-o bottom, there is no-o-o-o bottom” or “o-mark four,” which meant four fathoms, or 24 feet, as he took soundings with a lead weight on a line and sang out the river’s depth.

Modern Technology

Now the pilot has at his fingertips two radars, a Fathometer, a couple of ship-to-shore radios, a voice-activated telephone, an engine room telegraph, thrusters to control the bow and backup systems in everything including the electric coffeepot and the ever-present popcorn popper (unaccountably, the favorite food above the Texas deck). The cry of “mark twain,” meaning 12 feet and safe water, is heard no more on the river.

Old Man Mississippi has changed a good deal since Sam Clemens earned a reputation on the paddle-wheeler City of Memphis, then “the largest boat in the trade,” as he wrote to his brother Orion. However, piloting is still an art and a gift, even though the U.S. Corps of Engineers has tamed the rapids with dams and locks, cut out hundreds of miles of looping bends and guaranteed a nine-foot deep channel from St. Paul, Minn., to the Head of Passes below New Orleans.

During pilot Mark Twain’s tenure on the river from 1857 to 1861, there were no Coast Guard navigation lights or buoys to mark an immensely wide, fast-flowing river that could be perilous with creeping sand bars, hidden reefs and invisible stumps, snags and sunken wrecks.

As a cub learning the river, Twain complained that not only must he recognize every town, landing, island and bend in the river, but he “must even get up a warm personal acquaintance with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and obscure woodpile that ornaments the banks for 1,200 miles and, more than that, I must actually know where these things are in the dark.”

Bigger Cargo Loads

Cargo capacity has changed too. When Mark Twain was dreaming up Huckleberry Finn a century ago, the steam packet Henry Frank tied up in New Orleans with a record 2,390 tons of cotton bales stacked so high the pilot could hardly see out of the wheelhouse. Today, a single towboat pushing 15 barges can move 22,500 tons of freight, the equivalent of 225 boxcars or 900 trailer-trucks.

The Mississippi is still untamed, unpredictable and capable of bursting out of the concrete corrals built for her by the Corps of Engineers. Testimony to that comes from high-water marks on the brick buildings of the river towns, houses up on stilts all along the banks and the 42-foot-high statue of Our Lady of the Rivers at Portage des Sioux, Mo., erected after the town was spared the devastating 1951 floods and whose feet were lapped by cresting floodwaters in 1973.

“There’s sand bars and islands out there that weren’t here on our last trip, but one thing constant on this river is that wind is always blowing onshore when you’re trying to make a lock,” said Capt. Hargrove, studying the wind sock on the dam wall as he negotiated Lock No. 20 at Canton, Mo.

Hargrove, whose career on the river began in 1943 as a teen-ager pushing wheelbarrows of coal down to the engine room of tugs working the Cumberland River, returned to the river for good in 1956 after achieving three of his four boyhood dreams.

The Big Dream

“I got to be a fireman on an Illinois Central steam locomotive, drove a Greyhound bus and learned to fly a plane under the GI Bill,” he mused over a tray of fried catfish and pecan pie sent up from the galley. “The only dream left was the big one: becoming a pilot on the Mississippi.”

In a year, he progressed from towboat deckhand to the engine room to the wheelhouse, answering some of the same questions that Mark Twain had been asked when he earned his pilot’s license on April 9, 1859, and, like him, drawing a map, to the scale of one inch to the mile, of “every bend, chute, steeple and bull alligator on the river.”

Every six hours, Hargrove turned over the sticks to 74-year-old Capt. Bill Foley, a legendary spinner of river lore. Foley began as a dishwasher on a dredge at age 14, “hiding under the bunk when the truant officer came aboard” in his native Rock Island, Ill., and has held a pilot’s license for 3,700 miles of just about every river in mid-America.

Both pilots were under the command of handsome, 34-year-old Capt. Charlie Ritchie, also of Paducah, the master of the Mississippi Queen.

Ritchie had been taken on board his father’s towboat when he was 4 weeks old. He earned his pilot’s license at age 21 and had his master’s paper at 26.

He had charge of the care, coddling and feeding of our 377 passengers and 155 crew members, as well as every detail of the boat’s safety and performance. Mark Twain might have dismissed him as “the roof pilot in charge of kidding the ladies,” but he was out on the bridge wing for every passage through the 27 locks climbing up from St. Louis to St. Paul, no matter what the hour, giving calm, crisp orders to the helmsman over his walkie-talkie.

Wreck Sites

Foley could point out the site of every steamboat wreck and explosion since the Effie Afton on May 6, 1856, hit the railroad bridge at Rock Island, the first ever built over the Mississippi. A former flatboat man named Abraham Lincoln won the suit for the railroad, arguing that “one man has as good a right to cross the Mississippi as another has to sail down it.”

Foley’s proudest possession was “a gold-lipped white pitcher off the Grey Eagle, the second steamer to hit the bridge and sink,” given to his great-grandfather, who owned the First Avenue Hotel in Rock Island and helped get the injured ashore.

Foley could still recite the newspaper story handed down by his grandfather, who was then 12 years old: “A terrible thing happened last night, the beautiful Grey Eagle sank.” The pilot’s heart seemed to sink with the recitation.

Thanks to mile after mile of state parks and U.S. wildlife preserves, much of the upper river scenery is as timbered and wild and beautiful as when James Audubon saw it.

‘True Sunset Land’

The golden glow of turning foliage in what Mark Twain called a “true sunset land” when he first traveled the upper river, the chevrons of geese honking south, the flocks of teal and mallards marshaling along the great Mississippi flyway, and the numerous duck blinds in the tall reeds foretold the approach of winter.

“Soon we’ll hear gunfire in the woods and see deer swimming the river in large numbers to get away from the dogs,” said Capt. Hargrove, who came on duty just as dawn was breaking over the high palisades and marshy plains of Savanna, Ill.

Above Dubuque, Hargrove turned over the sticks to Foley and retired to his cabin threatening to “set a bear trap for that jogger.” He recalled with glee that when Jimmy Carter and his family took a vacation on the sister steamboat Delta Queen in 1979, the President had to desist from jogging on board because it disturbed the repose of the off-duty pilot.

The fact that a pilot’s pique could silence the thud of presidential feet on the hurricane deck verifies Capt. Ritchie’s favorite quotation from Mark Twain:

“Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride of occupation surpasses the pride of kings.”