mark twain riverboat history

American South

A Smithsonian magazine special report

How the Mississippi River Made Mark Twain… And Vice Versa

No novelist captured the muddy waterway and its people like the creator of Huckleberry Finn, as a journey along the river makes clear

David Carkeet

Josh. Rambler. Soleather. Sergeant Fathom. Thomas Jefferson Snod­grass. W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab. A Son of Adam.

I ran through the names in my head as I devoured dry-rub barbecue and piled up napkins at Memphis’ bustling Rendezvous. The restaurant’s slogan—“Not since Adam has a rib been this famous”—had reminded me of Mark Twain’s fondness for comic allusions to Adam, to the extent that he based an early pen name on him. But “A Son of Adam,” along with “Josh” and “Rambler” and his other experiments, belonged to an amateur, a man who occasionally wrote while otherwise employed as a printer, steamboat pilot and miner. Not until he became a full-time journalist, far from the river, in the alkali dust of the Nevada Territory, did he settle on “Mark Twain.”

You work up a hunger walking half the length of the Mississippi—even along a virtual version of the river. I had come to the Rendezvous from the Riverwalk on Mud Island near downtown Memphis—a gurgling scale model of the lower half of the Mississippi from its confluence with the Ohio all the way to the Gulf. The Riverwalk affords an outdoor stroll that covers 1,000 miles on a scale of one step to the mile. A mockingbird kept me company as I sauntered on the buff-colored concrete mosaic and watched kids tumble over the elevation intervals layered on the model’s riverbank, rising from the channel like a stairway of stacked pancakes. What would Samuel Clemens have made of the Riverwalk? He was a grown child who readily took a God’s-eye view of life on earth. He would have loved it.

All that the model lacked was the highway running the Mississippi’s length—the Great River Road, my home for the next several days. My guiding star would be the signs with the pilot-wheel logo that beckons all who are willing to suspend time and turn off the GPS. The Great River Road is a map line drawn in many inks, consisting of federal, state, county and town roads, and even, it sometimes seems, private drives. In Illinois alone, it comprises 29 different roads and highways. Touted as a “scenic byway,” it is often not scenic and occasionally a thruway. But it is a unique way to sample this country’s present and past; its rich, its formerly rich and everyone else; its Indian mounds and Army forts; its wildlife from tundra swans to alligators; and its ceaseless engines of commerce.

One of which was the steamboat—indigenous, glorious and preposterous.

Indigenous. Europe had nothing like it. Charles Dickens, who in 1842 rode three different steamboats down the Ohio and up to St. Louis and back again, had the vocabulary knocked out of him when he first saw one. In American Notes , he writes that they were “foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats. I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.” Lacking any “boat-like gear,” they looked as if they were built “to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountaintop.”

Glorious. They were “floating palaces,” and their tiers and filigrees made them “as beautiful as a wedding cake but without the complications,” as Mark Twain did not say. And they transformed the movement of people and goods on the river, formerly limited to flatboats and keelboats borne by the current, which were destroyed for scrap wood at the river’s mouth or laboriously pulled and poled back upriver. Nicholas Roosevelt (great-grand-uncle of Teddy) introduced the steamboat to the Mississippi when he steered the New Orleans into the river from the Ohio in 1811. During his journey, when he had occasion to turn the boat around and steam upriver, onlookers gaped and cheered.

Preposterous. You can heat an average New England house for an entire winter on four or five cords of wood; the larger steamboats in mid-century burned 50 to 75 cords of wood in one day. And thanks to commercial greed, frontier recklessness and the lust for showboating speed, steamboats were mayflies of mortality. In 1849, of the 572 steamboats operating on the Western rivers, only 22 were more than five years old. The others? Gone to a watery grave from snags, logs, bars, collisions, fires and boiler explosions. Smokestacks discharging the exhaust of open furnaces belched cinders onto wooden decks and cargoes of cotton, hay and turpentine. The most calamitous blows came from boiler explosions, which hurled boat fragments and bodies hundreds of feet into the air. When they didn’t land back on the boat or in the water, victims flew clear to shore and crashed through roofs or, in the words of one contemporary account, “shot like cannonballs through the solid walls of houses.”

Memphis saw the aftermath of many river tragedies. Mark Twain sadly chronicles one in Life on the Mississippi , his river memoir that treats his four years of steamboat piloting before the Civil War. In 1858, Sam, still a “cub” or apprentice pilot, encouraged his younger brother, Henry—sweet-tempered and cherished by the family—to take a job as an assistant clerk on the Pennsylvania , Sam’s boat at the time. On the way to New Orleans, the abusive pilot, under whom Sam had already been chafing for several trips, went too far and attacked Henry. Sam intervened, and the two pilots scuffled. Sam was forced to find a different boat for the upriver return, but Henry remained on the Pennsylvania . Two days behind his brother on the river, Sam received the awful news of a boiler explosion on the Pennsylvania . Henry, fatally injured, was taken to a makeshift hospital up the river in Memphis. When Sam reached his bedside, the sheer pathos of the meeting moved a newspaper reporter to single out the pair of brothers by name. The sympathetic citizens of Memphis—which Clemens would later call “the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi”—worried that Sam was unhinged by grief and sent a companion to accompany him when he took Henry’s body north to St. Louis.

Fortunately I had no need of the ministrations of the city, though I did find myself delighted to receive many a “sir,” “my man” and “my friend.” An encounter with a stranger on an isolated street in Memphis seemed to call for a nod or greeting, not the averted gaze of a Northern city. Such is the South. But so is this: On my way to my car to head north, I swung through Confederate Park, which sits on the bluff from which Memphians watched the Southern river fleet lose the battle for the city in 1862, and I wandered over to a bronze statue that had caught my eye. It was Jefferson Davis. Etched into the granite base: “He was a true American patriot.” A Yankee leaves a tribute like that scratching his head.

The Great River Road often hugs the river for miles; at other times it seeks high ground. In the Kentucky stretch, to see the river you must take a side trip, say, to the Columbus-Belmont State Park, peaceful now but not always—some of its gentle hills are trench walls from the war. In December of 1861, Ulysses S. Grant, based just up the river in Cairo, Illinois, led 3,000 Federals in a harassing attack here, not on the dug-in Confederate force on the bluff but against a smaller encampment on the Missouri side of the river. The long day of advance and retreat, essentially a draw, included several close calls for the Union brigade commander. Looming over the site is a Confederate cannon, unearthed by a local historian 16 years ago from under 42 feet of soil.

The river has a long history of diggers and salvagers. A few miles up the road, another side trip delivers you to Wickliffe Mounds, site of one of the many Mississippian culture villages along the river. This one dates from circa 1100 to 1350 and was first excavated in the 1930s by a Kentucky lumber magnate and devoted amateur archaeologist, Fain King, who created a tourist attraction that presented the exposed bones of Native Americans as objects of curiosity. But, more important, they are the remains of venerable ancestors, as Congress declared in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. This requires that disposition of native skeletal remains be transferred to tribal descendants or, if unknown, to a tribe best representing them. The “Ancient Buried City” skeletons were ceremonially reinterred by members of the Chickasaw Nation, and the mounds were restored to their original form.

I drove on to St. Louis to meet Kris Zapalac, an energetic historian and preservationist—and debunker. Don’t be surprised if her first words to you address misconceptions she suspects you are laboring under. She might warn you to be suspicious of memorials: “Just because there’s a tunnel somewhere doesn’t mean it was part of the Underground Railroad.” Or she might tell you that slaves escaping to freedom weren’t invariably helped by outsiders, white or otherwise: “People are always looking for a Harriet Tubman.”

Kris picked me up outside the city’s Old Courthouse, where I had spent the morning studying the comprehensive Dred Scott display. Driving north on Broadway, she pointed to the 1874 Eads Bridge, for which she had managed to find a railing design that met code requirements and also closely matched the original. James B. Eads—“B” for Buchanan, but it should stand for “Brainstorm”—was a dynamo of ingenuity. He devised ironclad gunboats for the Union, created the navigation channel for deep-water ships at the mouth of the Mississippi and—my personal favorite—invented a diving bell. Like Henry Clemens, Eads began his river career as an assistant clerk, and as he watched steamboats all around him go down, he saw money to be made from reclaiming their cargo and fittings. He invented a contraption that for years only he was willing to use, and no wonder. It was a 40-gallon whiskey barrel with one end removed and the other linked to a boat by a supporting cable and an air hose. Once he was installed in it, the barrel would be submerged, open end first to capture the air (imagine an inverted glass in a full dish tub). At the bottom, he would wander the underwater terrain, fighting the current and the dismal murk in search of treasure. Eads should have died many times. Instead, he established himself as a pioneering, if somewhat zany, engineer.

Four miles north of the St. Louis Arch, Kris and I arrived at our destination—an Underground Railroad site she had discovered. Here, in 1855, a small group of slaves attempted to cross the river to Illinois, among them a woman named Esther and her two children. However, authorities lay in wait for them on the Illinois riverbank. A few slaves escaped, but most were apprehended, among them Esther, who was owned by Henry Shaw—a name known to all St. Louisans for the vast botanical garden he developed and bequeathed to the city. To punish Esther for the attempt, Shaw sold her down the river, separating her from her two children. Kris, working from newspaper accounts and receipts of slave sales, put the facts together and arrived at the likely spot on the river where the skiff had cast off. In 2001, the site was recognized by the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

At the crossing, I tried to imagine the silent nighttime boarding and departure and the bitter disappointment across the river. Because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act requiring citizens of free states to aid in the capture of freedom seekers, Illinois represented not freedom to a slave but rather a different kind of danger. I thought of Mark Twain’s Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , hiding on the island to avoid the fate ultimately dealt to Esther. Meanwhile, Huck, disguised as a girl, learns from an otherwise kindly Illinois woman that she suspects a runaway slave is camped on the island and that she has alerted her husband, who is about to head out to capture him. That scene leads to the most famous use of the first-person plural pronoun in literature: Huck dashes back to the island, awakens Jim, and instinctively signs on to his struggle with the words, “They’re after us.”

Kris and I stepped into the nearby information center housed in a square metal former Coast Guard building and were welcomed by a lively, loquacious host. Kris hadn’t been to the site in a while, and when our host learned that she was the one who had discovered the facts of the crossing, he beamed and high-fived her and included me as well, though entirely undeserving. He said to her, “You’re a great lady. You’re a great lady.” Kris shook her head. “I’m a historian,” she said.

I left Kris to her current project—researching hundreds of freedom suits filed by slaves in Missouri courts—and drove up the Missouri segment of the Great River Road known as the Little Dixie Highway. I passed through the small town of Louisiana, where young Sam Clemens was put ashore after being found stowed away on a steamboat from Hannibal, 30 miles up the river. He was 7 years old. I thought about the difference between the boy who had grown up in Hannibal in the 1840s and ’50s and the Mark Twain who had written the island scene in Huckleberry Finn . I had recently read Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World , a book by Terrell Dempsey, a former Hannibalian now living not far from that town in Quincy, Illinois. Dempsey had long doubted that Hannibal’s full slave history had been properly told, and he and his wife, Vicki—an attorney like himself—began to spend evenings and weekends spooling through the local newspaper archive.

To read Searching for Jim is to understand the racist cruelty of the society in which Clemens grew up—the grinding labor that was the slaves’ daily lot; the beatings they endured, sometimes to the point of death; the white citizens’ loathing for abolitionists and free blacks; the racist jokes passed from one newspaper to another, some of which young Sam, as an apprentice printer, set in type. The Clemens household kept slaves, and Sam’s father sat on a jury that sent three abolitionists to prison for 12 years. To reread Mark Twain with a fuller sense of that world is to appreciate the long moral journey he had to make in order to—like Huck—sign on to Jim’s struggle.

I met Terrell and Vicki in their home in Quincy—an 1889 Queen Anne, one of dozens of enviable Victorian homes in the town’s East End Historic District. Terrell proposed a boat ride despite threatening weather. We drove to the dock on Quinsippi Island, unwrapped their modest pontoon boat and headed out. We passed close by a tow pushing nine covered barges and speculated about their contents. Three of the barges rode high in the water—empties, Terrell explained to his landlubber guest.

We talked about Clemens’ early environment and what he wrote—and didn’t write—about it. I mentioned something that had struck me in my recent rereading of Life on the Mississippi , a book not just about Clemens’ piloting years but also—the bulk of it, in fact—about life on the river when he revisited it in 1882. Slaves were a constant presence on antebellum steamboats, both as forced laborers on the deck and in chained droves being taken downriver. Yet there is no mention of them on the boats in the memoir portion, nor is there reflection on their absence in 1882.

Terrell, a bluff fellow, said, “He didn’t want to remind people where he came from.”

As the hum of the outboard stirred large carp into the air (but not into the boat), we talked of other omissions and shadings in Mark Twain’s works. A memoir by a piloting colleague of Clemens’ tells of how they both avoided being drafted as Union pilots in the summer of 1861 when the general in the St. Louis office who was about to complete the paperwork became distracted by some pretty women in the hall and stepped out the door. This allowed the near-conscripts to desert via a different door. It’s a perfect Mark Twain story that Mark Twain never told.

Vicki, huddling against the wind off the river, said, “He also never wrote about defrauding the abolitionist society.”

This was a curious episode uncovered by literary scholar Robert Sattelmeyer and then skillfully sleuthed by him. The Boston Vigilance Committee was an abolitionist group that rendered financial support to fugitive slaves and occasionally put its funds to other uses. For example, if someone wrote to the society from, say, Missouri, that he needed financial help to go to, say, Boston, the committee might very well respond with cash if the circumstances were right—as they seemed to be in this case, according to a September 1854 entry in the treasurer’s ledger book: $24.50 paid to one “Samuel Clemens” for “passage from Missouri Penitentiary to Boston—he having been imprisoned there two years for aiding Fugitives to escape.” Sattelmeyer established that only one Samuel Clemens lived in Missouri in this period and that no Samuel Clemens had served in the state penitentiary. The explanation must be that young Sam, like his later creation Tom Sawyer, enjoyed a good joke at others’ expense, and what better dupes to hoodwink than those meddling abolitionists?

Why would Clemens do such a thing? Because he was an 18-year-old who had grown up in a slave state. A little over a decade later, he would woo Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, daughter of an abolitionist not just in theory but in practice: Her father, Jervis Langdon, helped fund the work of John W. Jones, a former slave and Underground Railroad conductor who aided hundreds of escaped slaves on their flight north. I wondered aloud, there on the boat, if Clemens’ anti-abolitionist prank ever made it into the Elmira dinner table conversation during his two-year courtship.

“Doubtful,” said Terrell. He revved the outboard, looked back at the carp leaping in our wake, and grinned. “That really pisses them off,” he said.

The next day I visited Hannibal, a town that will always feel as small as it was when Clemens grew up, bounded as it is by a bluff on its north side, another bluff just 12 blocks to the south, and the river to the east. I was curious about changes in the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, which I hadn’t visited for two decades. The concise narrative in the museum’s “interpretive center” (completed in 2005) presented Clemens’ early life without overload. Mercifully free of the looping banjo and fiddle music that had dogged me through other river museums, the room was silent save for a single whispered comment I heard from one museumgoer to another, “I didn’t know he was so poor.”

I was happy to see a large photograph of Sam’s older brother Orion in the interpretive center, looking more distinguished than his reputation. Orion was a bumbler with a disastrous career record, but he was earnest and good-hearted. Sam, in adulthood, showed an anger toward him that had always seemed excessive to me. Now, looking at the portrait on the heels of that one overheard comment, I wondered if Sam’s anger could have gone back to the fact that when he was just 11 and his father died, poverty forced his mother to remove him from school and apprentice him to a stern local printer, and this would not have been the case if Orion, ten years his senior, hadn’t been an incompetent from birth and had been able to provide for the family.

I next went to the boyhood home, sliced down one side from front to back like a dollhouse, its three rooms on each of its two levels protected by glass but still allowing an intimate view. A high-school boy behind me, upon bursting into the parlor from the gift shop, said to himself, with feeling, “This is sweet!” The home was working its magic on him. On the wooden floor of the kitchen lay a thin rug with a sign explaining that a slave would have slept here, rising early to light the fire for the household. This pallet was installed at the suggestion of Terrell Dempsey, who has agitated over the years for the museum to give more attention to slavery. Before him, in the 1990s, Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin made a similar appeal, and the museum indeed now does the subject justice.

After my tour, I sought out the museum’s executive director, Cindy Lovell. While I was in her office, curator Henry Sweets looked in on us long enough to hear me express delight in the exhibits before he hurried off to attend to his many duties, as he has done since 1978. The two of them are Twainiacs even beyond what you would expect from their positions. Cindy, speaking of other curators and scholars, will say, “He’s a geek for Twain,” and “She’s got the bug” and “She gets it.” Or the death sentence: “He gets things wrong.” Don’t try to quote Mark Twain in her presence. She will finish the quotation—with corrections—and extend it beyond your intentions.

Cindy gave me a director’s-eye view of Twain World—a place with at least five headquarters (in addition to Hannibal: Berkeley, California; Hartford, Connecticut; Elmira, New York; and his birthplace in nearby Florida, Missouri). “They’re wonderful people,” she said. “It’s a great community.” Unfortunately, though, Clemens’ artifacts are spread hither and yon. A 12-foot mirror from his Fifth Avenue New York apartment is in a Dubuque river museum. “It’s crazy!” she said. “They’re all over the place. Florida has the family carriage!” The carriage properly belonged in Hartford, where it had seen regular use by Sam, Olivia and their three daughters, not in the Missouri burg Sammy had left at age 3. I imagined a coordinated multi-party swap happening, like a kidney exchange, where each museum received the goods that suited it.

At Cindy’s suggestion, we repaired in my rental car to two Twain geek haunts—the Mount Olivet Cemetery, where many Clemenses repose (father, mother and brothers Henry and Orion; as for Sam, Olivia and their children, they are all buried in Elmira), and then the Baptist cemetery, where Tom Sawyer read “Sacred to the Memory of So-and-so,” painted on the boards above the graves, and you can read it now on the tombstones that have replaced them. Here, before Tom’s and Huck’s terrified eyes, Injun Joe murdered Dr. Robinson. Cindy told me of her fondness for bringing school-age writers to the cemetery at night and reading that passage to them by candlelight. They huddle close. (Alas, no more. As if to demonstrate the comity in Twain World, not long after my visit, Cindy became executive director of the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford.)

It’s a big river, as they say, and I had to move on. Comedian Buddy Hackett once said that words with a “k” in them are funny. By this measure Keo­kuk is overqualified. Orion moved to this Iowa river town just across the border from Missouri, and although he characteristically struggled as a newspaper editor, he succeeded in becoming an opponent of slavery, much to the chagrin of young Sam.

I stayed at a B&B on Keokuk’s Grand Avenue, well named for the view of the river the broad street commands from the bluff. In the morning, two bright-eyed, white-shirted couples joined me at the breakfast table. They said they were from Salt Lake City, I said I was from Vermont, and we agreed not to discuss politics. Each couple had a son “on mission,” one in Russia, the other in New Caledonia, and the four of them were on a weeklong pilgrimage along the Mormon Pioneer Trail that traces the migration of the faith’s persecuted forebears from western Missouri east to Illinois, then west again, finally to Utah. They asked about my travels, and I mentioned Mark Twain. One of the men, with an ambiguous smile, said that Mark Twain had written that the Book of Mormon was “a cure for insomnia.” (Actually, “chloro-form in print,” which I didn’t recall at the table. Where was Cindy when I needed her?)

I wanted to ask about their pilgrimage, but I hung fire on the phrasing. “Do all Mormons do this?” would sound as if I saw them as a herd. My every thought seemed rooted in stereotype. The sole coffee drinker at the table, I felt like an alcoholic with each sip. When one of the men checked something on his iPad, I thought, “Hmm, so Mormons are allowed to use iPads.” We parted on the friendliest of terms, but I felt the gulf of a vast difference, created mainly by my ignorance.

I drove north on Grand Avenue, passing homes in a range of styles—Queen Anne, Dutch Colonial Revival, Gothic Revival and Prairie School—all in a six-block stretch. But these piles, unlike the Quincy houses I had admired, did not suggest a neighborhood as much as isolated testaments to an earlier prosperity. The road dropped down, wound along the river and then delivered me without fanfare into the tranquil village of Montrose, with churches sized to match its population. Just to the north, I happened upon one of the reasons the B&B pilgrims had come here. Across the river in Nauvoo, Illinois, beginning in 1839, Mormon settlers cleared swamps and established a town that swiftly grew into the largest in the state. The surrounding communities, threatened by the Mormons’ beliefs—and their success—murdered leader Joseph Smith in 1844, and in 1846 they began to drive the Mormons out of the area. The first to flee crossed the river on ice in February, though many perished, and, at the site where I now stood, the survivors huddled and looked back on the temple and the town they had lost. On the trip so far I had passed several crossings along routes once traveled by Native Americans being forcibly relocated to Indian Territory. This place too, I thought, is a Trail of Tears. I looked down the road, hoping that my B&B pilgrims might come while I was there so that we could become reacquainted on their turf, but the timing wasn’t right.

Onward. The 250-mile Wisconsin segment of the Great River Road recently won a “Most Beautiful Road Trip” survey conducted by the Huffington Post , beating out Hawaii’s Hana Highway and California’s Big Sur Coast Highway. I needed to see it for myself. The next day, I headed out from Dubuque before dawn, crossed into Wisconsin and panicked when the highway seemed to take me at right angles away from the river. But the pilot-wheel signs reassured me and steered me through rolling farmland back to the river. The landscape began to feel different from what I had experienced so far, and I knew why: I was in “the driftless area.” The most recent glacial period in North America, the Wisconsin Glaciation, spared this part of the river basin for reasons “that are poorly understood,” especially by me. “Drift” is the deposit left behind by a glacier (thus the name), but what most distinguishes the terrain is its unscoured range of towering bluffs along the river. These begin to appear about 50 miles north of Dubuque.

The bluffs are one of two surprises in the driftless area. The other is that the river sometimes becomes a lake. Locks and dams are often the cause, flooding upriver sloughs and bottomlands. But Lake Pepin, 21 miles long and so wide that the sight of it is initially disorienting, has a natural origin. At its southern end, Wisconsin’s Chippewa River flows on a steep gradient that delivers massive amounts of sediment into the Mississippi. Over the centuries, the encroaching deposit created a “delta dam,” backing the Mississippi up until it flooded to the bases of the confining bluffs.

Not far from Lake Pepin, I came across a sign for Maiden Rock. The “historical” marker told the tired story of the Indian maiden forcibly betrothed to a brave who was not the brave she loved, the tale climaxing in her despondent plunge to the rocks below. Winona was the maiden’s name, and the cliff looming over me was perfect for the job. Clemens passed by here in 1882—new territory for him, having plied the St. Louis-New Orleans line—and in Life on the Mississippi he tells the tale of Maiden Rock, not in his language but in the inflated style of a professional tour guide who has happened onto the steamboat. In the guide’s version, however, Winona lands on her matchmaking parents, who are gazing upward from below, wondering what their daughter is up to. The impact kills the couple while cushioning Winona’s fall, and she is now free to marry whomever she wishes. The unorthodox denouement, though ostensibly spoken by the humorless guide, is pure Mark Twain. What better way to blast a cliché to flinders?

At one point on the Wisconsin stretch I pulled over to watch a tow approach. I counted the barges: 15, three across and five long, the maximum on the upper river; south of St. Louis, up to 25 barges can be combined. Since the tow was going downriver, it was probably carrying corn or soybeans; upriver loads are more likely to be coal or steel. I watched the pilot navigate a tricky turn, although “tricky” is relative. In Clemens’ day, a pilot navigated by memory and skill at reading nuances in the river’s surface; today, buoys mark a channel 300 feet wide and nine feet deep. Still, it’s not easy. At a museum at the Alton, Illinois, lock and dam, I had entered a pretend pilothouse and bravely manned a panoramic simulator to pilot a tow along a digital St. Louis riverfront—a challenging stretch because of its many bridges with nonaligned pilings. In short order I crashed into the Eads Bridge, but mainly because I was distracted by the anachronistic Admiral I saw moored on the riverfront, a bygone restaurant boat where my wife once had some really bad fish. Later, outside the museum, I watched a northbound tow “lock through”; it rose 20 feet in just 30 minutes, thanks to massive inflow pipes that fill the lock, large enough to drive a truck through. Animals sometimes end up in the pipes—deer, pigs, cattle—and wash into the lock. No human bodies though—I asked. A nice first chapter for a mystery novel, I would think.

Satisfied that the Wisconsin Great River Road deserved its renown, I crossed to Red Wing, Minnesota, and turned around for the trip south.

“Do you love the river?” Terrell Dempsey had surprised me with this blunt question as he guided his pontoon boat toward the dock in Quincy. Before I could answer, his wife said, “We love the river” and then elaborated. As a young woman, Vicki interviewed for her first job in Louisiana, Missouri. Coming from St. Louis, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to live in such a small place until she got a view of the river from a vista above the town. “I’d never seen anything so beautiful,” she said. “I had to live there.” And they did. After a year, what seemed like a better job opportunity arose in Clinton, Missouri. “We hated it,” she said—because it was inland. They moved to Hannibal, to a house three blocks up Hill Street from the Clemens home, and they have lived on the Mississippi ever since.

I met many lovers of the river. An artist at the Applefest in Clarksville, Missouri, told me she had come there decades earlier “with a guy”—she said it in a way that foreshadowed the ending—and then she had happily stayed on “after the guy was long gone.”

In Dubuque, where I toured an old dredge boat called the William M. Black , the amiable guide, Robert Carroll, told me he grew up in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to the grinding roar of dredge boats cleaning out the river channel. He spoke so authoritatively about the William M. Black that I had taken him for a former deckhand. But no—he had spent his adult life as a court reporter in landlocked Cedar Rapids. He moved to Dubuque after he retired. “I missed the river,” he said, though he didn’t have to—I knew it was coming. Carroll now spends his days happily introducing visitors to every rivet on a boat much like the one he heard as a boy.

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Mark Twain Riverboat

The Mark Twain Riverboat goes on a gentle cruise around Tom Sawyer Island. That's the same route that the Sailing Ship Columbia and Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes take, and I'd suggest choosing only one of these three attractions. You don't need to see that same scenery three times.

What You Need to Know About the Mark Twain Riverboat

TripSavvy / Betsy Malloy Photography

We polled 131 of our readers to find out what they think about the riverboat. 74% of them said It's a must-do or ride it if you have time, making it one of the lower-rated things to do at Disneyland.

• Location:  Mark Twain Riverboat is in Frontierland
• Rating:  ★
• Restrictions:   No height restrictions. Children under age seven years must be accompanied by a person age 14 years or older.
• Ride Time:   12 minutes
• Recommended for:   Everyone
• Fun Factor:  Low
• Wait Factor:  Low    
• Fear Factor:  Low
• Herky-Jerky Factor:  Low
• Nausea Factor:  Low
• Seating:   You just get on and ride, and you can move around while it's going
• Accessibility:   This ride is fully accessible, and you can stay in your wheelchair or ECV for the whole thing, but you'll only get onto the lower level. Go to the access gate on the right side of the turnstile or enter through the attraction exit and ask a Cast Member for help.  More about visiting Disneyland in a wheelchair or ECV

How to Have More Fun on the Mark Twain Riverboat

• If you want to  rest your feet , head for the seats in the front as soon as you get on.
• This ride  closes before dark
• Watch the kids.  They may be tempted to climb on the railings and could fall off.
• If you ask a cast member, the  pilot might let you ride inside with him . This is limited to just a couple of people per trip.

Next Disneyland Ride: Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes

More about disneyland rides.

You can  see all the Disneyland rides at a glance on the Disneyland Ride Sheet . If you want to browse through them starting with the best-rated,  start with the Haunted Mansion  and follow the navigation.

While you're thinking about rides, you should also  download Our Recommended Disneyland Apps (they're all free!)  and  Get Some Proven Tips to Minimize Your Disneyland Wait Time .

Fun Facts About Mark Twain Riverboat

Built in 1955, this was the first paddle wheeler built since shortly after 1900. It was built at the Disney Studios, except for the hull which was constructed at a shipyard in San Pedro. But don't let that fool you. It's a working reproduction of the historic vessels that ferried people up and down the mighty Mississippi, with a working steam engine that powers the large paddle, which in turn propels the boat.

The Mark Twain made its first voyage four days before Disneyland opened to the public, for Walt and Lillian Disney's 30th wedding anniversary. 

The Mark Twain was christened by actress   Irene Dunne who starred in the 1936 movie "Showboat" on Disneyland's Opening Day.

The boat is 28 feet tall and 105 feet long, with four decks.

The writer Mark Twain was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi river when he was younger, and one of Walt Disney's personal heroes, which is why Walt named the boat after him.

A riverboat ride was in the plans from the earliest days, when Walt Disney started the first plans for building an amusement park near Walt Disney Studios in Burbank.

Every Disney theme park throughout the world has their own version of the Mark Twain riverboat. 

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No engineer, author, pilot, poet, inventor or artist can claim a greater role than Mark Twain in making the Mississippi River known and loved throughout the world. Twain brought America’s greatest writing genius to America’s most picturesque era – steamboating on the river.

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens at Florida, Missouri in 1835, grew up along the banks of the Mississippi at Hannibal. His formal schooling ended with the death of his father; at age 12 he apprenticed to a printer for board and clothing.

At 21 Twain took passage aboard the Paul Jones from Cincinnati to New Orleans, enacting his boyhood dream. “When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboat man.” Twain persuaded Horace Bixby to teach him piloting, a 17 month apprenticeship. During this time, he saw his brother Henry die from the boiler explosion on the Pennsylvania, a boat he had piloted the previous trip. Twain continued his apprenticeship and piloted cargo boats on the Missouri as well. He received his license in 1859 and served as a respected pilot for the next two years.

When the Civil War interrupted commercial traffic along the Mississippi, Twain served a two week stint as a confederate soldier, then went west where he worked for the Virginia City, Nevada Enterprise. Here Clemens adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain, the sounding call for two fathoms or 12 feet of depth. Twain falsely asserted that Captain Isaiah Sellers had first used the name, which the public already believed, proving his lament that nothing he had written in truth was believed and nothing had written in jest was doubted.

Twain’s experiences in Hannibal and on the Mississippi were used in his writings: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twain once recalled,”[I] got to telling…about the old Mississippi days of steamboating glory and grandeur as I saw them from the pilot house.” This became “Old Times on the Mississippi,” running from January through August, 1876 in the Atlantic magazine and later became the basis for Life on the Mississippi. He observed, “Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812. At the end of 30 years, it had grown to mighty proportions, then in less than another 30 years it was dead.”

Twain’s writing also include The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Tragedy of Pudd’n Head Wilson, and The Gilded Age, among others, and he was one of the most popular lecturers of his day as well. He was a master of regional dialect and humor. Ernest Hemingway called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the greatest American novel. William Dean Howells called Twain “the Lincoln of our literature,” a title he deserves for his outstanding contribution not only to American literature but to American life. Twain left this world as he came in, with Haley’s comet in 1910.

Mark Twain was an author, steamboat pilot, newspaper reporter, publisher, humorist, philosopher and lecturer, and is best known for his association with steamboating on the Mississippi. No other man in the world is so universally identified with riverboating; Twain made the Mississippi known to the world and his inspired genius put the Father of Waters in the center of American lore. Because of him, the Mississippi is recognized as the symbol of America’s vigorous spirit and individualism. Mark Twain did more to make America’s rivers famous than any other individual, and he richly deserves the fame he holds as America’s greatest riverman.

Sailing Down the Rivers of America on the Mark Twain Riverboat at Disneyland

All aboard.

Step aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat at Disneyland and embark on a nostalgic journey back in time. This iconic attraction, inspired by the legendary Mississippi paddle-wheel steamboats, offers guests a unique experience that combines history, relaxation, and breathtaking views. The Mark Twain Riverboat, named after the famous American author, Mark Twain, takes you on a leisurely cruise along the scenic Rivers of America.

As you step onto the ornate deck, you’ll be transported to an era when steamboats ruled the waterways. Admire the intricate details of the ship, from the authentic steam-powered engine to the elegant Victorian-inspired decor. Find a comfortable spot on one of the decks and feel the gentle breeze as the boat sets sail.

During the voyage, keep your eyes peeled for the picturesque sights that unfold along the riverbanks. Catch glimpses of Frontierland, New Orleans Square, and Critter Country, as well as stunning wildlife that call the river their home. You may even experience a live performance of traditional American folk music onboard.

Whether you’re a fan of history, Disney, or simply want to relax and enjoy the scenery, the Mark Twain Riverboat offers an enchanting experience for all. Step aboard and let the magic of this classic attraction transport you to a bygone era.

History of the Mark Twain Riverboat

The Mark Twain Riverboat has a rich history that dates back to its opening on July 17, 1955, the same day Disneyland first opened its doors to the public. It was one of the original attractions at the park and quickly became a beloved favorite among guests. The riverboat was designed to replicate the steam-powered paddle-wheel boats that were a common sight on the Mississippi River during the 19th century.

The name “Mark Twain” was chosen in honor of the famous American author, Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain. Clemens himself was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River in his youth and often incorporated his experiences into his writings. The Mark Twain Riverboat serves as a tribute to his legacy and the era he immortalized in his works.

Over the years, the riverboat has undergone several renovations and enhancements to ensure its longevity and maintain its charm. The riverboat just returned from it’s most recent, but very long refurbishment only a few days ago and it looks brand new. Over time, the riverboat has been fitted with modern safety features while preserving its authentic steam-powered engine and vintage aesthetics. The Mark Twain Riverboat continues to be a beloved attraction at Disneyland, offering guests an opportunity to step back in time and experience the magic of a bygone era.

Features of the Mark Twain Riverboat

The Mark Twain Riverboat offers a variety of features that make it a must-visit for Disneyland guests. As you explore the ship, you’ll come across several points of interest that add to the overall experience.

One of the main highlights of the riverboat is the authentic steam-powered engine, which is fully functional and powers the boat along the Rivers of America. The engine is an impressive piece of machinery. It’s a fascinating piece of technology of the past and a testament to the engineering marvels of the time.

The decks of the Mark Twain Riverboat are designed to provide guests with the best views of the surrounding scenery. From the top deck, also called the Pilothouse, you can enjoy panoramic vistas of Disneyland’s Frontierland, New Orleans Square, and Critter Country. The lower deck, also called the Main Deck, offers a more intimate experience, with cozy seating areas where you can relax and take in the sights and sounds of the river. The Main Deck also includes the boiler and pistons that run the paddlewheel.

Throughout the cruise, you may be treated to live performances of traditional American folk music. Talented Disneyland musicians bring the riverboat to life with their melodic tunes, adding to the ambiance and creating a truly immersive experience. It’s a wonderful opportunity to sit back, relax, and enjoy the sounds of a bygone era.

Mark Twain Riverboat Ride Experience

The Mark Twain Riverboat ride experience is a leisurely and serene journey that allows you to unwind and take in the beauty of the Rivers of America. The boat sets sail from the Frontierland dock and takes you on a 14-minute cruise along a half-mile stretch of the river.

As the boat glides through the water, you’ll have ample time to admire the picturesque scenery that unfolds along the riverbanks. Keep your camera ready as you may spot various wildlife species, including birds, ducks, and even the occasional deer. The natural beauty of the surroundings creates a sense of tranquility that is sometimes hard to find in the bustling Disneyland theme park.

The riverboat ride is an excellent opportunity to learn more about the history and lore of the Mississippi River. Along the journey, you’ll come across several displays and signage that provide interesting facts and anecdotes about life on the river. It’s a chance to deepen your understanding of the era that inspired the attraction and gain a newfound appreciation for the role riverboats played in shaping American history.

Mark Twain Riverboat Schedule and Operating Hours

The Mark Twain Riverboat operates throughout the day, with varying schedules depending on the season and park hours. When Fantasmic! returns to the Rivers of America on May 24, 2024 , the Mark Twain Riverboat will sail it’s final cruise each operating day a few hours before the performance. This is not only due to the riverboats appearance in the performance but also so the river can be prepared for the nighttime spectacular. To make sure you have an opportunity to experience the riverboat cruise, check the Disneyland app or Disneyland website for up-to-date operating hours on the day of your visit.

Mark Twain Riverboat Trivia and Fun Facts

Here are some fascinating trivia and fun facts about the Mark Twain Riverboat:

• The Mark Twain Riverboat is the largest working riverboat in Disneyland, measuring approximately 105 feet in length.
• The steam-powered engine that propels the riverboat is capable of generating 150 horsepower.
• The riverboat can carry up to 450 passengers per cruise, making it a popular attraction for large groups and families.
• The riverboat’s paddlewheel is purely decorative and is not used for propulsion. The boat is actually propelled by underwater thrusters.
• The Mark Twain Riverboat has been featured in several films and television shows, including the 1989 movie “Parenthood” and the television series “Full House.”

Other Attractions Near the Mark Twain Riverboat

After disembarking from the Mark Twain Riverboat, there are several other attractions nearby that you won’t want to miss. Here are a few recommendations:

• Adventureland Treehouse: Located only a short distance away in the corner of Adventureland, the Adventureland Treehouse inspired by Walt Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson offers guests a fun opportunity to explore fascinating rooms built by a family who lives in the tree house.
• Big Thunder Mountain Railroad: Just a short walk from the riverboat’s dock, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is a thrilling coaster-style ride aboard a mine train. It’s the “wildest ride in the wilderness!”
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Located in New Orleans Square, this classic Disneyland attraction takes you on a swashbuckling adventure through a pirate-infested Caribbean island.
• Tom Sawyer Island: If you’re looking for a bit of adventure, head over to Tom Sawyer Island, located in the middle of the Rivers of America. Explore caves, cross suspension bridges, and enjoy the natural beauty of this hidden gem.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The Mark Twain Riverboat at Disneyland offers a timeless and enchanting experience that transports guests to a bygone era. From the moment you step aboard, you’ll be immersed in the rich history and charm of steam-powered paddle-wheel boats making the riverboat a must-visit attraction.

As you cruise along the Rivers of America, take in the picturesque views of Frontierland, New Orleans Square, and Critter Country. Admire the stunning wildlife that call the riverbanks their home and savor the melodies of traditional American folk music. The Mark Twain Riverboat offers a unique blend of relaxation, entertainment, and education that is sure to leave a lasting impression.

So, the next time you find yourself at Disneyland Park, don’t miss the opportunity to step aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat. Allow yourself to be transported to a time when steamboats ruled the waterways, and let the magic of this classic attraction create memories that will last a lifetime.

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8 Things You May Not Know About Mark Twain

By: Elizabeth Nix

Updated: September 11, 2023 | Original: December 2, 2014

1. As a baby, he wasn’t expected to live.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born two months prematurely on November 30, 1835, in tiny Florida, Missouri, and remained sickly and frail until he was 7 years old. Clemens was the sixth of seven children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. In 1839, Clemens’ father, John Marshall, a self-educated lawyer who ran a general store, moved his family to the town of Hannibal, Missouri, in search of better business opportunities. (Decades later, his son would set his popular novels “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in a fictionalized version of Hannibal.) John Marshall Clemens became a justice of the peace in Hannibal but struggled financially. When Samuel Clemens was 11, his 49-year-old father died of pneumonia.

2. Twain’s formal education was limited.

In 1848, the year after his father’s death, Clemens went to work full-time as an apprentice printer at a newspaper in Hannibal. In 1851, he moved over to a typesetting job at a local paper owned by his older brother, Orion, and eventually penned a handful of short, satirical items for the publication. In 1853, 17-year-old Clemens left Hannibal and spent the next several years living in places such as New York City, Philadelphia and Keokuk, Iowa, and working as a printer.

3. His career as a riverboat pilot was marred by tragedy.

In 1857, Clemens became an apprentice steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. The following year, while employed on a boat called the Pennsylvania, he got his younger brother, Henry, a job aboard the vessel. Samuel Clemens worked on the Pennsylvania until early June. Then, on June 13, disaster struck when the Pennsylvania, traveling near Memphis, experienced a deadly boiler explosion; among those who perished as a result was 19-year-old Henry.

Samuel Clemens was devastated by the incident but got his pilot’s license in 1859. He worked on steamboats until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, when commercial traffic along the Mississippi was halted. Clemens’ pen name, Mark Twain, comes from a term signifying two fathoms (12 feet), a safe depth of water for steamboats.

4. Twain briefly served with a Confederate militia.

In June 1861, shortly after the Civil War began, 25-year-old Clemens joined the Marion Rangers, a pro-Confederate militia. Although his family had owned a slave when he was a boy, Clemens didn’t have strong ideological convictions about the war and probably enlisted with the militia primarily out of loyalty to his Southern roots. His time with the group turned out to be brief: After two weeks of conducting drills, the poorly supplied Marion Rangers disbanded upon hearing a rumor that a Union force—led by Ulysses Grant, as Clemens eventually learned—was headed their way.

The following month, Clemens left Missouri and the war behind and journeyed west with his brother Orion, who had been named the territorial secretary of Nevada. Once there, Clemens tried his hand at silver mining and then, after failing to strike it rich, took a job as a reporter with a Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper in the fall of 1862. The following February, he used the pen name Mark Twain for the first time. Prior to that, he had tried out other pseudonyms, including W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab and Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.

As it happened, later in life Clemens became friends with Ulysses Grant, and in 1885 published the former president’s memoir, which became a best-seller and rescued Grant’s widow from poverty after her husband lost most of their money to bad investments.

5. He struck literary gold in California.

In May 1864, Twain challenged a rival Nevada newspaperman with whom he was feuding to a duel but fled before an actual fight took place, supposedly to avoid being arrested for violating the territory’s anti-dueling law. Twain headed to San Francisco, where he got a job as a reporter but soon grew disenchanted with the work and eventually was fired. Later that year, Twain posted bail for a friend who’d been arrested in a barroom brawl. When the friend skipped town, Twain, who didn’t have the funds to cover the bond, decided he too should get out of San Francisco for a while and traveled to the mining cabin of friends at Jackass Hill in Tuolumne County, California (the Jackass Hill area was booming during the 1849 gold rush, but when Twain visited just a small number of miners remained).

While at a bar in the nearby town of Angels Camp in Calaveras County, California, Twain heard a man tell a tale about a jumping frog contest. When Twain returned to San Francisco in February 1865, he received a letter from a writer friend in New York asking him to contribute a story to a book he was putting together. Twain decided to send a story based on the jumping frog tale he’d heard; however, by the time he got around to finalizing it the book had already been published. As it happened, though, the book’s publisher sent Twain’s piece, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” to the Saturday Press in New York, which ran it on November 18, 1865. The humorous story turned out to be a big hit with readers and was reprinted across the country, eventually retitled “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

6. Twain based Huckleberry Finn on a real person.

Set in the antebellum South, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is the story of the title character, a young misfit who floats down the Mississippi River on a raft with Jim, a runaway slave. Huck Finn made his literary debut in Twain’s 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , appearing as Sawyer’s sidekick. The model for Huck Finn was Tom Blankenship, a boy four years older than Twain whom he knew growing up in Hannibal. Blankenship’s family was poor and his father, a laborer, had a reputation as a town drunk.

As Twain noted in his autobiography: “In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.” It’s unknown what happened to Blankenship later in life. Twain indicated he’d heard a rumor Blankenship became a justice of the peace in Montana, but other reports suggest he was jailed for theft or died of cholera.

What is certain is that from the time of its publication, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been controversial. Just a month after its American release in 1885, it was banned by the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, for its supposedly coarse language and low moral tone. In the mid-20th century, critics began condemning the book as racist and in the ensuing decades it was removed from some school reading lists. Many scholars, however, contend the book is a criticism of racism.

7. He was a bad businessman.

After becoming a successful writer, Twain sank money into a number of bad investments and eventually went bankrupt. One investing debacle, involving an automatic typesetting machine, cost him nearly $200,000 by some estimates, an enormous sum considering that in 1890 the majority of American families earned less than $1,200 per year. Conversely, when offered the chance to invest in a new invention, the telephone, Twain reportedly turned down its creator, Alexander Graham Bell. Twain himself invented a variety of products, including a self-pasting scrapbook, which sold well, and an elastic strap for pants, which didn’t.

In 1891, Twain closed up his 25-room Hartford home, where he had lived since 1874, and relocated with his family to Europe in order to live more cheaply (he also hoped the change of scenery would help his wife, who was in poor health). Nevertheless, in 1894, following the failure of the publishing company he had founded a decade earlier, Twain declared bankruptcy. The next year, he embarked on an around-the-world speaking tour in order to earn money to pay off his debts, which he was able to do within several years.

8. Twain has no living direct descendants.

In 1870, Clemens married Olivia Langdon, who was raised in an abolitionist family in Elmira, New York. The couple was introduced by Olivia’s younger brother, who had met Clemens during a voyage to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the steamship Quaker City in 1867. (Clemens wrote about this excursion in his best-selling 1869 travel book, The Innocents Abroad .)

The Clemenses had four children, including a son who died as a toddler and two daughters who passed away in their 20s. Olivia Clemens died in 1904 at age 58, while on April 21, 1910, her renowned husband, whose health had been in decline for a number of months, died at age 74 at his home in Redding, Connecticut. Their surviving child, Clara, died in 1962 at age 88. Clara Clemens had one child, Nina Gabrilowitsch, who passed away in 1966. Gabrilowitsch was childless, so there are no direct descendants of Samuel Clemens alive today.

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Old Times on the Mississippi (Part VI)

The sixth installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot

VI. Official Rank and Dignity of a Pilot. The Rise and Decadence of the Pilots’ Association.

In my preceding articles I have tried, by going into the minutiæ of the science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension of what the science consists of; and at the same time I have tried to show him that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very worthy of his attention. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for 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 . The captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders, while the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper’s reign was over. The moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed, the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words. I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere. His interference, in that particular instance, might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It will easily be guessed, considering the pilot’s boundless authority, that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes. But then, people in one’s own grade of life are not usually embarrassing objects.

By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands. It “gravels” me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.

In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days, on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman, up town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and everything in readiness for another voyage.

When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars a month on the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain to keep such a pilot in idleness, under full pay, three months at a time, while the river was frozen up. And one must remember that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a salary of almost inconceivable splendor. Few men on shore got such pay as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to. When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest, and treated with exalted respect. Lying in port under wages was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated; especially if they belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday of that trade (Kansas times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip, which was equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month. Here is a conversation of that day. A chap out of the Illinois River, with a little stern-wheel tub, accosts a couple of ornate and gilded Missouri River pilots: —

“Gentlemen, I’ve got a pretty good trip for the up-country, and shall want you about a month. How much will it be?”

“Eighteen hundred dollars apiece.”

“Heavens and earth! You take my boat, let me have your wages, and I’ll divide!”

I will remark, in passing, that Mississippi steamboatmen were important in landsmen’s eyes (and in their own, too, in a degree) according to the dignity of the boat they were on. For instance, it was a proud thing to be of the crew of such stately craft as the Aleck Scott or the Grand Turk. Negro firemen, deck hands, and barbers belonging to those boats were distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were well aware of that fact, too. A stalwart darkey once gave offense at a negro ball in New Orleans by putting on a good many airs. Finally one of the managers bustled up to him and said, —

“Who is you, anyway? Who is you? dat’s what I wants to know!”

The offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself up and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not putting on all those airs on a stinted capital.

“Who is l? Who is l? I let you know mighty quick who I is! I want you niggers to understan’ dat I fires de middle do’ 1 on de Aleck Scott!”

That was sufficient.

The barber of the Grand Turk was a spruce young negro, who aired his importance with balmy complacency, and was greatly courted by the circle in which he moved. The young colored population of New Orleans were much given to flirting, at twilight, on the pavements of the back streets. Somebody saw and heard something like the following, one evening, in one of those localities. A middle-aged negro woman projected her head through a broken pane and shouted (very willing that the neighbors should hear and envy), “You Mary Ann, come in de house dis minute! Stannin’ out dah foolin’ ’long wid dat low trash, an’ heah’s de barber off ’n de Gran’ Turk wants to conwerse wid you!”

My reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot’s peculiar official position placed him out of the reach of criticism or command, brings Stephen W—— naturally to my mind. He was a gifted pilot, a good fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him. He had a most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easy-going and comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most august wealth. He always had work, he never saved a penny, he was a most persuasive borrower, he was in debt to every pilot on the river, and to the majority of the captains. He could throw a sort of splendor around a bit of harum-scarum, devil-may-care piloting, that made it almost fascinating—but not to everybody. He made a trip with good old gentle-spirited Captain Y—— once, and was “relieved” from duty when the boat got to New Orleans. Somebody expressed surprise at the discharge. Captain Y—— shuddered at the mere mention of Stephen. Then his poor, thin old voice piped out something like this: —

“Why, bless me! I wouldn’t have such a wild creature on my boat for the world—not for the whole world! He swears, he sings, he whistles, he yells—I never saw such an Injun to yell. All times of the night—it never made any difference to him. He would just yell that way, not for anything in particular, but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of it. I never could get into a sound sleep but he would fetch me out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful war-whoops. A queer being, — very queer being; no respect for anything or anybody. Sometimes he called me ‘ Johnny .’ And he kept a fiddle, and a cat. He played execrably. This seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl. Nobody could sleep where that man—and his family—was. And reckless? There never was anything like it. Now you may believe it or not, but as sure as I am sitting here, he brought my boat a-tilting down through those awful snags at Chicot under a rattling head of steam, and the wind a-blowing like the very nation, at that! My officers will tell you so. They saw it. And, sir, while he was a-tearing right down through those snags, and I a-shaking in my shoes and praying, I wish I may never speak again if he didn’t pucker up his mouth and go to whistling ! Yes, sir; whistling ‘Buffalo gals, can’t you come out to-night, can’t you come out to-night, can’t you come out to-night;’ and doing it as calmly as if we were attending a funeral and weren’t related to the corpse. And when I remonstrated with him about it, he smiled down on me as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to be good, and not be meddling with my superiors!” 2

Once a pretty mean captain caught Stephen in New Orleans out of work and as usual out of money. He laid steady siege to Stephen, who was in a very “close place,” and finally persuaded him to hire with him at one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, just hail wages, the captain agreeing not to divulge the secret and so bring down the contempt of all the guild upon the poor fellow. But the boat was not more than a day out of New Orleans before Stephen discovered that the captain was boasting of his exploit, and that all the officers had been told. Stephen winced, but said nothing. About the middle of the afternoon the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck, cast his eye around, and looked a good deal surprised. He glanced inquiringly aloft at Stephen, but Stephen was whistling placidly, and attending to business. The captain stood around a while in evident discomfort, and once or twice seemed about to make a suggestion; but the etiquette of the river taught him to avoid that sort of rashness, and so he managed to hold his peace. He chafed and puzzled a few minutes longer, then retired to his apartments. But soon he was out again, and apparently more perplexed than ever. Presently he ventured to remark, with deference, —

“Pretty good stage of the river now, ain’t it, sir?”

“Well, I should say so! Bank-full is a pretty liberal stage.”

“Seems to be a good deal of current here.”

“Good deal don’t describe it! It’s worse than a mill-race.”

“Isn’t it easier in toward shore than it is out here in the middle?”

“Yes, I reckon it is; but a body can’t be too careful with a steamboat. It’s pretty safe out here; can’t strike any bottom here, you can depend on that.”

The captain departed, looking rueful enough. At this rate, he would probably die of old age before his boat got to St. Louis. Next day he appeared on deck and again found Stephen faithfully standing up the middle of the river, fighting the whole vast force of the Mississippi, and whistling the same placid tune. This thing was becoming serious. In by the shore was a slower boat clipping along in the easy water and gaining steadily; she began to make for an island chute; Stephen stuck to the middle of the river. Speech was wrung from the captain. He said, —

“Mr. W——, don’t that chute cut off a good deal of distance?”

“I think it does, but I don’t know.”

“Don’t know! Well, isn’t there water enough in it now to go through?”

“I expect there is, but I am not certain.”

“Upon my word this is odd! Why, those pilots on that boat yonder are going to try it. Do you mean to say that you don’t know as much as they do?”

“ They ! Why, they are two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots! But don’t you be uneasy; I know as much as any man can afford to know for a hundred and twenty-five!”

Five minutes later Stephen was bowling through the chute and showing the rival boat a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of heels.

One day, on board the Aleck Scott, my chief, Mr. B——, was crawling carefully through a close place at Cat Island, both leads going, and everybody holding his breath. The captain, a nervous, apprehensive man, kept still as long as he could, but finally broke down and shouted from the hurricane deck, —

“For gracious’ sake, give her steam, Mr. B——! give her steam! She’ll never raise the reef on this headway!”

For all the effect that was produced upon Mr. B——, one would have supposed that no remark had been made. But five minutes later, when the danger was past and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a consuming fury, and gave the captain the most admirable cursing I ever listened to. No bloodshed ensued; but that was because the captain’s cause was weak; for ordinarily he was not a man to take correction quietly.

Having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting, and likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the fraternity of steamboatmen, this seems a fitting place to say a few words about an organization which the pilots once formed for the protection of their guild. It was curious and noteworthy in this, that it was perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men.

For a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month; but curiously enough, as steamboats multiplied and business increased, the wages began to fall, little by little. It was easy to discover the reason of this. Too many pilots were being “made.” It was nice to have a “cub,” a steersman, to do all the hard work for a couple of years, gratis, while his master sat on a high bench and smoked; all pilots and captains had sons or brothers who wanted to be pilots. By and by it came to pass that nearly every pilot on the river had a steersman. When a steersman had made an amount of progress that was satisfactory to any two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot’s license for him by signing an application directed to the United States Inspector. Nothing further was needed; usually no questions were asked, no proofs of capacity required.

Very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to undermine the wages, in order to get berths. Too late—apparently—the knights of the tiller perceived their mistake. Plainly, something had to be done, and quickly; but what was to be the needful thing? A close organization. Nothing else would answer. To compass this seemed an impossibility; so it was talked, and talked, and then dropped. It was too likely to ruin whoever ventured to move in the matter. But at last about a dozen of the boldest—and some of them the best—pilots on the river launched themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances. They got a special charter from the legislature, with large powers, under the name of the Pilots’ Benevolent Association; elected their officers, completed their organization, contributed capital, put “association” wages up to two hundred and fifty dollars at once—and then retired to their homes, for they were promptly discharged from employment. But there were two or three unnoticed trifles in their by-laws which had the seeds of propagation in them. For instance, all idle members of the association, in good standing, were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month. This began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks of the new-fledged pilots, in the dull (summer) season. Better have twenty-five dollars than starve; the initiation fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required from the unemployed.

Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw twenty-five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their children. Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association’s expense. These things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances, — any way, so they got there. They paid in their twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month and calculate their burial bills.

By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones, were in the association, and nine tenths of the best pilots out of it and laughing at it. It was the laughing-stock of the whole river. Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent. of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached. Wages had gone up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. Some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chaffing the members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked like. However, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was “out of luck,” and added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars—the association figure—and became firmly fixed there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired. The hilarity at the association’s expense burst all bounds, now. There was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to put up with.

However, it is a long lane that has no turning. Winter approached, business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of Missouri, Illinois, and Upper Mississippi River boats came pouring down to take a chance in the New Orleans trade. All of a sudden, pilots were in great demand, and were correspondingly scarce. The time for revenge was come. It was a bitter pill to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed that there was no other way. But none of these outcasts offered! So there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed: they must be sought out and asked for their services. Captain —— was the first man who found it necessary to take the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization. He hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said, —

“Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so I’ll give in with as good a grace as I can. I’ve come to hire you; get your trunk aboard right away. I want to leave at twelve o’clock.”

“I don’t know about that. Who is your other pilot?”

“I’ve got I. S——. Why?”

“I can’t go with him. He don’t belong to the association.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you won’t turn a wheel with one of the very best and oldest pilots on the river because he don’t belong to your association?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, if this isn’t putting on airs! I supposed I was doing you a benevolence; but I begin to think that l am the party that wants a favor done. Are you acting under a law of the concern?”

“Show it to me.”

So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary soon satisfied the captain, who said, —

“Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S—— for the entire season.”

“I will provide for you,” said the secretary. “I will detail a pilot to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o’clock.”

“But if I discharge S——, he will come on me for the whole seasons wages.”

“Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S——, captain. We cannot meddle in your private affairs.”

The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge S——, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot in his place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way, now. Every day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged captain discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity, and installed a hated association man in his berth. In a very little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired. The laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably. These victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the revenge they would take when the passing business “spurt” was over.

Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and crews of boats that had two non-association pilots. But their triumph was not very long-lived. For this reason: It was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never, under any circumstances whatever, give information about the channel to any “outsider.” By this time about half the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders. At the first glance one would suppose that when it came to forbidding information about the river these two parties could play equally at that game; but this was not so. At every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other, there was a “wharf-boat” to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was stored in it for transportation, waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon each of these wharf-boats the association’s officers placed a strong box, fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but one—the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government had been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every association man carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger, — for the success of the St. Louis and New Orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighboring steamboat trades, — was the association man’s sign and diploma of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his question was politely ignored. From the associations secretary each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a bill-head, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns; a bill-head worded something like this:

STEAMER GREAT REPUBLIC JOHN SMITH, MASTER. Pilots, John Jones and Thos. Brown. Crossing. Soundings. Marks. Remarks.

These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. For instance, as soon as the first crossing, out from St. Louis, was completed, the items would be entered upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus: —

“St. Louis. Nine and a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head on dead cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up square.” Then under head of Remarks: “Go just outside the wrecks; this is important. New snag just where you straighten down; go above it.”

The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding to it the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis) took out and read half a dozen fresh reports (from upward bound steamers) concerning the river between Cairo and Memphis, posted himself thoroughly, returned them to the box, and went back aboard his boat again so armed against accident that he could not possibly get his boat into trouble without bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his aid.

Imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve or thirteen hundred miles long, whose channel was shifting every day! The pilot who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal place once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch it for him, now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to run it. His information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old. If the reports in the last box chanced to leave any misgivings on his mind concerning a treacherous crossing, he had his remedy; he blew his steam-whistle in a peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching; the signal was answered in a peculiar way if that boat’s pilots were association men; and then the two steamers ranged alongside and all uncertainties were swept away by fresh information furnished to the inquirer by word of mouth and in minute detail.

The first thing a pilot did when he reached New Orleans or St. Louis was to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlors and hang it up there, — after which he was free to visit his family. In these parlors a crowd was always gathered together, discussing changes in the channel, and the moment there was a fresh arrival, everybody stopped talking till this witness had told the newest news and settled the latest uncertainty. Other craftsmen can “sink the shop,” sometimes, and interest themselves in other matters. Not so with a pilot; he must devote himself wholly to his profession and talk of nothing else; for it would be small gain to be perfect one day and imperfect the next. He has no time or words to waste if he would keep “posted.”

But the outsiders had a hard time of it. No particular place to meet and exchange information, no wharf-boat reports, none but chance and unsatisfactory ways of getting news. The consequence was that a man sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that was a week or ten days old. At a fair stage of the river that might have answered; but when the dead low water came it was destructive.

Now came another perfectly logical result. The outsiders began to ground steamboats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble, whereas accidents seemed to keep entirely away from the association men. Wherefore even the owners and captains of boats furnished exclusively with outsiders, and previously considered to be wholly independent of the association and free to comfort themselves with brag and laughter, began to feel pretty uncomfortable. Still, they made a show of keeping up the brag, until one black day when every captain of the lot was formally ordered immediately to discharge his outsiders and take association pilots in their stead. And who was it that had the gaudy presumption to do that? Alas, it came from a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne itself. It was the underwriters!

It was no time to “swap knives.” Every outsider had to take his trunk ashore at once. Of course it was supposed that there was collusion between the association and the underwriters, but this was not so. The latter had come to comprehend the excellence of the “report” system of the association and the safety it secured, and so they had made their decision among themselves and upon plain business principles.

There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp of the outsiders now. But no matter, there was but one course for them to pursue, and they pursued it. They came forward in couples and groups, and proffered their twelve dollars and asked for membership. They were surprised to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added. For instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars; that sum must be tendered, and also ten per cent. of the wages which the applicant had received each and every month since the founding of the association. In many eases this amounted to three or four hundred dollars. Still, the association would not entertain the application until the money was present. Even then a single adverse vote killed the application. Every member had to vote yes or no in person and before witnesses; so it took weeks to decide a candidacy, because many pilots were so long absent on voyages. However, the repentant sinners scraped their savings together, and one by one, by our tedious voting process, they were added to the fold. A time came, at last, when only about ten remained outside. They said they would starve before they would apply. They remained idle a long while, because of course nobody could venture to employ them.

By and by the association published the fact that upon a certain date the wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month. All the branch associations had grown strong, now, and the Red River one had advanced wages to seven hundred dollars a month. Reluctantly the ten outsiders yielded, in view of these things, and made application. There was another new by-law, by this time, which required them to pay dues not only on all the wages they had received since the association was born, but also on what they would have received if they had continued at work up to the tune of their application, instead of going off to pout in idleness. It turned out to be a difficult matter to elect them, but it was accomplished at last. The most virulent sinner of this batch had stayed out and allowed “dues” to accumulate against him so long that he had to send in six hundred and twenty-five dollars with his application.

The association had a good bank account now, and was very strong. There was no longer an outsider. A by-law was added forbidding the reception of any more cubs or apprentices for five years; after which time a limited number would be taken, not by individuals, but by the association, upon these terms: the applicant must not be less than eighteen years old, of respectable family and good character; he must pass an examination as to education, pay a thousand dollars in advance for the privilege of becoming an apprentice, and must remain under the commands of the association until a great part of the membership (more than half, I think) should be willing to sign his application for a pilot’s license.

All previously-articled apprentices were now taken away from their masters and adopted by the association. The president and secretary detailed them for service on one boat or another, as they chose, and changed them from boat to boat according to certain rules. If a pilot could show that he was in infirm health and needed assistance, one of the cubs would be ordered to go with him.

The widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association’s financial resources. The association attended its own funerals in state, and paid for them. When occasion demanded, it sent members down the river upon searches for the bodies of brethren lost by steamboat accidents; a search of this kind sometimes cost a thousand dollars.

The association procured a charter and went into the insurance business, also. It not only insured the lives of its members, but took risks on steamboats.

The organization seemed indestructible. It was the tightest monopoly in the world. By the United States law, no man could become a pilot unless two duly licensed pilots signed his application; and now there was nobody outside of the association competent to sign. Consequently the making of pilots was at an end. Every year some would die and others become incapacitated by age and infirmity; there would be no new ones to take their places. In time, the association could put wages up to any figure it chose; and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing too far and provoke the national government into amending the licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit, since there would be no help for it.

The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed. Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it themselves. When the pilots’ association announced, months beforehand, that on the first day of September, 1861, wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established. It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it. It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to cover the new wages.

So straightway the captains and owners got up an association of their own, and proposed to put captains’ wages up to five hundred dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights. It was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been produced once could be produced again. The new association decreed (for this was before all the outsiders had been taken into the pilots’ association) that if any captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be forced to discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars. Several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains’ organization grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership; but that all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the pilots to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association captain; but this proposition was declined. The pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances.

As I have remarked, the pilots association was now the compactest monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible. And yet the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new railroad stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern railway centres, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time; then the treasurer of the St. Louis association put his hand into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights; so straight-way some genius from the Atlantic coast and behold, in the twinkling of an eye, introduced the plan of towing a dozen as it were, the association and the noble steamer cargoes down to New Orleans science of piloting were things of the at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; dead and pathetic past!

• Considering a captain’s ostentatious but hollow chieftainship, and a pilot’s real authority, there was something impudently apt and happy about that way of phrasing it. ↩

Mississippi River Boat Cruise

Experience the mississippi river like never before.

February 2, 2024

November 11, 2023

Teresa Starnes

Steven Garrison

K Theiszmann

Auldine Ferrell

October 10, 2023

Charles Brodell

Family-Friendly Tours Full Of Adventure, Storytelling, And Fun

History, literature, and travel enthusiasts unite for a unique sightseeing and dining experience aboard riverboat cruises on the Mississippi River from beloved author Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Witness firsthand what inspired the writer to create iconic characters, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. At Mark Twain Riverboat Co., you get to experience the Mighty Mississippi River in a truly memorable way, a Mississippi river boat cruise complete with storytelling, scenic views, and fine dining.

We provide a unique experience perfect for individuals, families, and groups. The cruise takes place on the Mississippi River from Mark Twain's boyhood home town of Hannibal, MO.

Mark Twain shared his unique perspective of life on the Mississippi River throughout his writings and characters. Get a glimpse of the Mississippi River as Mark Twain might have seen it.

The Mark Twain has been a unique feature on the Hannibal riverfront for more than 30 years. As a family-owned business since 1997, we strive to offer you a unique riverboat experience on the Mighty Mississippi, whether you’re a Hannibal resident or visitor. Choose between our two daily cruise offerings: our Sightseeing Cruise and our evening Dinner Cruise which includes live entertainment and a two entree buffet-style dinner.

Whether you are looking for a sightseeing adventure on the Mississippi River, taking in the sights, or dining on the river at sunset, Mark Twain Riverboat has something for everyone.

Set Sail on Our Riverboat Cruises

Sightseeing Tour

This one-hour sightseeing cruise travels along the mighty Mississippi River, allowing you to soak up the scenery at a relaxing, rhythmic pace. Listen as the captain guides your cruise with historical commentary on the history, legends, and sights of the Mississippi River.

A cruise aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat is great for family events. Whether you are a visitor or resident of Hannibal, you can make wonderful memories aboard our unique riverboat experience! Looking forward to having you onboard!

Departure time: Varies - check calendar Yearly availability: April 1 - Nov. 4 Weekly availability: Daily

Dinner Cruise

Enjoy a night of dinner and dancing on this cruise on the Mighty Mississippi. Indulge in a delicious buffet and share a wonderful dinner with your family or friends, then enjoy live music from the dance floor or the deck.

Once on board, you are escorted to your table, then you are free to roam the boat until the captain announces that dinner is ready. After dinner, you are free to dance or sit back and enjoy the music. Live entertainment is included on our Dinner Cruises. It may be The Rivermen playing modern jazz (Saturday night from Memorial Day thru September), or you might get to enjoy the music of Tim Hart (Mondays & Tuesdays), or Adam Ledbetter and David Damm (Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday). Listen or dance to their favorite tunes — and they have been known to take a request or two. And you never know when a crew member or two may step up on the stage and join in.

Departure time: 6:30 p.m. Yearly availability: May 3 - Oct 28 Weekly availability: Varies - check calendar

Why choose us?

A Glimpse At Missouri Through The Lens Of A Famous Author On The Mississippi River

A Mississippi River cruise aboard Mark Twain Riverboat Co. allows you to enjoy a short excursion from Hannibal during the more pleasant weather months of the year. Just 100 miles away from St. Louis, our Mississippi River boat cruise is the only cruise that departs from Mark Twain's boyhood home.

River cruising gives you the time and space to fully immerse yourself in Mark Twain's story and the Mississippi River, getting to know the inspiration behind his books. We handle every detail for you from departure to dinner on our Mississippi river cruises, making it possible for you to fully relax and enjoy our modern riverboat.

Cruising down the river is a great way to unwind and enjoy nature after a busy week. Hannibal, Missouri is home to some of the most scenic riverfront views in the Midwest!

Informative

Our cruise guides are experts in their field and love to share their knowledge about this beautiful city. They'll educate you all about the history of the area and its inhabitants, so you can really get an insider's look at this fascinating area.

Family-friendly

Our cruises are great for families with children of all ages, so bring your whole crew along with you! We have plenty of activities that will keep you occupied during the day and night.

Hannibal, Missouri

Despite its small size, Hannibal, MO is full of history and immersive learning experiences. It is there that you can visit Mark Twain's boyhood home and museum, take a Mississippi River cruise, or even attend a festival in his honor. That's not all there is to do in the area, though. You can explore caves and even take a ghost tour. Although, we are sure our cruise will be one of your favorite experiences yet.

Upper Mississippi River cruises are a great way for people of all ages to take a break from the normal day-to-day. Instead you'll enjoy an afternoon taking in the beautiful scenery or an evening of entertainment and dining. Our cruises are perfect for anyone who wants adventure but doesn't want the length of trip that most American cruise lines offer. A short trip aboard our Mississippi River cruises is just the evening out you need to feel refreshed, educated, and creative.

Frequently asked questions

Can we modify existing itineraries.

To some extent – yes. Sometimes we will have to because the weather isn’t always ideal and we want to stay in shallow, calm waters to keep the trip enjoyable.

What is the duration of the cruises?

Our cruises last approximately one to two hours

Are food and drinks available on board?

Yes, we offer a variety of food and drinks, including a snack bar and a full-service bar.

Is smoking allowed on board?

No, smoking is not allowed onboard.

Is the Mark Twain Riverboat wheelchair accessible?

We are wheelchair accessible on the lower deck. However, there is no lift to the upper deck and wheelchairs do not fit in the bathrooms.

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Mark Twain Riverboat

• Water Rides

Steam into the Past

Board an old-fashioned steam-powered vessel for a half-mile journey into the heart of the American frontier. 

During the charming, 14-minute trip around Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island , spot delightful sights along the river’s edge, including: 

• The north bank of the Columbia Gorge, complete with a beautiful waterfront and 5 sparkling waterfalls 
• A rustic frontier cabin 
• An idyllic Native American village 
• A busy beaver at work chewing on the train trestle 
• Mountain lions relaxing in the sun 
• The Disneyland Railroad steaming into the wilderness 

Along the way, hear lively narration about a time gone by.

Along the Mississippi

The Mark Twain is an authentic reproduction of the historic vessels that ferried people up and down the mighty Mississippi River. A working steam engine converts the water from the Rivers of America into steam that in turn powers the large paddle that propels the boat. 

Featuring meticulously detailed wood craftsmanship, the 28-foot tall, 105-foot-long riverboat is comprised of 4 pristine decks: 

• Pilothouse , also known as the top deck, features the wheelhouse and Captain’s Quarters 
• Promenade Deck includes a salon and a collection of vintage photos and maps 
• Texas (or Sun) Deck is the perfect place to enjoy the outdoors as you float down the river 
• Main Deck includes the boiler and pistons that run the paddlewheel 

Limited seating is available.

A Tribute to America’s Writer

Walt Disney named the Mark Twain after the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The famed author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn —and Walt’s personal hero—Clemens was also a riverboat pilot as a young man. 

That experience inspired his pen name: “mark twain” is a boating term that means a vessel is at a safe depth.

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Hannibal River Cruises on the Mark Twain Riverboat

The Mark Twain Riverboat brings the mystique of the Mississippi River and the history of Hannibal to life through one-hour sightseeing cruises, two-hour dinner cruises, and the Captain's Sunday Lunch events.

Schedule can vary, call for times.

Cruises on the Mark Twain Riverboat have been a tradition for decades

The Mark Twain Riverboat has been a unique fixture on the banks of the Mississippi for more than 30 years, offering visitors an up-close view of the Mississippi River during either 1-hour narrated sightseeing cruises or 2-hour dinner cruises.

Hannibal river cruises give visitors the opportunity to explore the Mississippi just like Tom and Huck. This Mississippi River Cruise departs from Center Street Landing three times daily between Memorial Day and Labor Day, with two departures daily during September and October. Dinner cruises depart at 6:30 p.m; check for availability. Built in 1964, the Mark Twain Riverboat is 120 ft. long, 33 ft. wide and has a 400-passenger capacity, so there is plenty of room aboard the vessel, which is wheelchair accessible (w/ some limitations.)

1-Hour Sightseeing Mississippi River Cruise

If you have an afternoon to spare in Hannibal, the Mark Twain Riverboat is a must-stop. One-hour sightseeing cruises on the river include commentary on river history, legends and sights. You will see Jackson’s Island, Lover’s Leap and of course, the Mighty Mississippi rolling along. Beverages and sandwiches are available on-ship for purchase during these tours. A cruise aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat is great for family events. Whether you are a visitor or resident of Hannibal, you can make wonderful memories aboard our unique riverboat experience!

2-Hour Dinner Cruises on the Mark Twain Riverboat

For an extended Mississippi River cruise, be sure to reserve your spot on a 2-hour dinner cruise aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat.

Guests aboard Mark Twain Riverboat dinner cruises are treated to live music, a buffet meal featuring Riverboat Roast Beef, Baked Boneless Chicken Breast, Baked Potatoes, Seasoned Green Beans, the Captain’s Favorite Pasta Salad, a Deluxe Tossed Salad, Dinner Rolls and Dessert. Iced Tea and Coffee are included, and a cash bar is also available.

Once on board, you are escorted to your table, then you are free to roam the boat until the captain announces that dinner is ready. After dinner, you are free to dance or sit back and enjoy the music. Live entertainment is included on Dinner Cruises. It may be The Rivermen playing modern jazz (Saturday night from Memorial Day thru September), or you might get to enjoy the music of Tim Hart (Mondays & Tuesdays), or Adam Ledbetter and David Damm (Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday). Listen or dance to their favorite tunes — and they have been known to take a request or two. And you never know when a crew member or two may step up on the stage and join in.

It’s a fun night of music for the young and the young at heart! The dancefloor is available after dinner if you are so inclined, or you can choose to dance under the stars on the outer decks (no dancing on the tables and chairs, please).

The Captain’s Sunday Lunch

Enjoy lunch and a cruise on a lovely Sunday! The dockside meal includes a buffet of Roast Beef, Mashed Potatoes and Gravy, Seasoned Green Beans, Deluxe Lettuce Salad with dressing, Dinner Roll, and the Captain’s Favorite Pasta Salad. Iced tea, coffee and water accompany the meal. Top all of this with a delicious Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Brownie.

Following lunch, enjoy a delightful one-hour sightseeing cruise on the “Mighty Mississippi” complete with river history, facts about Mark Twain, riverboat stories and a few (or more!) tall-tales.

Lunch begins at 12:30 pm. Departure from the dock will be at 1:30 pm and returns at 2:30.

We hope you will join us for a delicious meal and casual river cruise; where you’re sure to become more like family by the time the landing whistle blows across the hills of Hannibal!

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Historical Guide to Mark Twain

Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens), a former printer's apprentice, journalist, steamboat pilot, and miner, remains to this day one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain  addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Twain's work, including religion, commerce, race, gender, social class, and imperialism. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographic essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times.

About the Author

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's principal concern throughout her career has been literature and social justice. Much of her work has focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. 

Her broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the challenge of doing transnational American Studies; the place of humor and satire in movements for social change; the role literature can play in the fight against racism; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; the relationship between public history and literary history; literature and animal welfare;  the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; American theatre history; and the development of feminist criticism.   Although many of her publications have centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Malkiel, Tillie Olsen, Tino Villanueva, and Walt Whitman.  

After receiving her B.A.from Yale College ( summa cum laude, phi beta kappa ), she stayed on at Yale for a masters degree in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies, and was Director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism there. She taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas at Austin from 1985 to 2003, and was Chair of the Department of American Studies. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, England, where she was a Visiting Fellow,  has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender and has been a Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and at Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.  She has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan, and was the winner of a Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas.

Dr. Fishkin is the author, editor, co-author,  or co-editor of forty-eight books and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays, columns, and reviews. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian, and Italian, and has been published in English-language journals in China, Turkey, Japan, and Korea.

Her most recent monograph is  Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee  (named runner-up for the best book award in the general nonfiction category, London Book Festival, 2015) (Rutgers University Press, 2015; paperback, 2017), a book that Junot Díaz called "a triumph of scholarship and passion, a profound exploration of the many worlds which comprise our national canon....a book that redraws the literary map of the United States." She is also the author of:  From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America  (winner of a Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award for outstanding research in journalism history) (Johns Hopkins, 1985);  Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices  (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book " by  Choice ) (Oxford, 1993);  Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture  (Oxford, 1997);  and  Feminist Engagements: Forays Into American Literature and Culture  (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by  Choice ) (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009).  She is the editor of the 29-volume  Oxford Mark Twain  (Oxford, 1996; Paperback reprint edition, 2009) - an edition that  Modern Language Review  called "an act of genius." She is also editor of the  Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain  (Oxford, 2002),  "Is He Dead? " A New Comedy by Mark Twain  (University of California, 2003),  Mark Twain's Book of Animals  (University of California Press, 2009), and  The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his LIfe and Work  (Library of America, 2010).

She helped guide  Is He Dead?,  a neglected play by Mark Twain that she uncovered in the archives, to Broadway.  She was a producer of  Is He Dead?,  adapted by   David Ives, which had its world debut on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 2007, and was nominated for a Tony Award. Since it closed on Broadway, it has had 478 productions in 48 states and Australia, Canada, China, Romania, Russia, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.

She is the co-editor, most recently, of  The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad  (Stanford University Press, 2019), as well as  Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism  (Oxford, 1994);  People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity  (Wisconsin, 1996);  The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America  (3 vols., M.E. Sharpe, 1997);   'Sport of the Gods' and Other Essential Writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar  (Random House, 2005),  Anthology of American Literature, ninth edition  (Prentice-Hall, 2006),  Concise Anthology of American Literature, seventh edition  (Prentice-Hall, 2011), a special issue of  Arizona Quarterly  on  Mark Twain at the Turn of the Century, 1890-1910  (2005);and a special issue of  African American Review  devoted to the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar (autumn 2007). From 1993 to 2003 she co-edited Oxford University Press's  "Race and American Culture "  book series with Arnold Rampersad.

She has served as President of the American Studies Association and of the Mark Twain Circle of America. She was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and was chair of the MLA Nonfiction Prose Division.   She has given keynote talks at conferences in Basel, Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jiangmen, Kolkata,  Kunming, Kyoto,  La Coruña, Lisbon, Mainz, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, and across the U.S. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the  New York Times,  and twice on the front page of the  New York Times  Arts section.

In 2023, she was awarded the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for “Lifetime Achievement And Outstanding Contribution to American Studies” by the American Studies Association.

In June 2019, the American Studies Association created a new prize, the "Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies." The prize honors publications by scholars outside the United States that present original research in transnational American Studies. In its announcement of the new award, the ASA said, "Shelley Fisher Fishkin's leadership in creating a crossoads for  international scholarly collaboration and exchange has transformed the field of American Studies in both theory and practice. This award honors Professor Fishkin's outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world."

In 2022, she was awarded the Olivia Langdon Clemens Award for “Scholarly Innovation and Creativity” by the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 2017, she was awarded the John S. Tuckey lifetime achievement award by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (the first woman to receive this award, which was established in 1991, and is given every four years). The award announcement recognized her efforts "to assure that a rigorous, dynamic account of Twain stays in the public consciousness," and stated that "Nobody has done more to recruit, challenge, and inspire new generations and new genres of Mark Twain studies." In 2009 she was awarded the Mark Twain Circle's Certificate of Merit "for long and distinguished service in the elucidation of the work, thought, life and art of Mark Twain."  

The Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford, she is Director of Stanford's American Studies Program. She served as  a member of the Board of Governors of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, and was a member of the international jury for the 2013 Francqui Prize (awarded to an outstanding young scholar in Belgium). In 2009 she co-founded the online, open-access, peer-reviewed  Journal of Transnational American Studies.  

She is co-founder and co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project  with Gordon H. Chang, the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Stanford.  The Project is a  collaborative transnational, bilingual research project dealing with the Chinese Railroad Workers whose labor helped establish the wealth that allowed Leland Stanford to build Stanford University.  Its goal is to try to recover their experience and their world more fully than ever before, and to understand how these workers have figured  in cultural memory in the U.S. and China. Her recent publications related to this project include “Seeing Absence, Evoking Presence: History and the Art of Zhi Lin ”  in   Rock Hushka, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Shawn Wong,  Zhi LIN: In Search of the Lost History of Chinese Migrants and the Transcontinental Railroads.  Tacoma, Washington: Tacoma Art Museum, (2017);   從天使城到長島：美洲橫貫鐵路竣工後在美國的鐵路華工[“From Los Angeles to Long Island: Chinese Railroad Workers in America after the Transcontinental”] in  北美鐵路華工：歷史、文學與視覺再現 [ Chinese Railroad Workers in North America: Recovery and Representation ], edited by Hsinya Huang [黃心雅] Taipei: Bookman  [台北：書林出版社]  (2017); and "The Chinese as Railroad Workers after Promontory" in  The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental,  edited by Fishkin and Chang (Stanford University Press, 2019).  Her edition of  Why and How the Chinese Emigrate, and the means they adopt for the purpose of reaching America  by Russell Conwell (1871), was published in China  in 2019 as  《为何与如何：中国人为何出国与如何进入美国》 (1871)   edited, with original introduction, notes and appendices, by Fishkin,  and translated by YAO Ting [姚婷]  (Beijing: China Overseas Chinese Publishing House). It is the first Chinese translation of this important but neglected nineteenth-century text which is a surprising precursor to  the New Journalism of the 1960s.

The Chinese Railroad Workers Project has received support from the President of Stanford, the UPS Fund at Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  In 2019, a jury of top professionals in architecture, engineering, planning and history awarded a  60-panel bilingual  Chinese Workers and the Railroad Traveling Exhibit  organized by the Project  a Preservation Design Award and a Trustees' Award for Excellence from the California Preservation Foundation. (The exhibit, which debuted at Stanford, has traveled to venues around the US including Boston City Hall and the Utah State Capital; public libraries in California, Ohio, Michigan, and Utah; San Diego State University and Menlo College; the California State Railroad Museum and the Stanford Mansion in Sacramento; the Niles Canyon Railway Museum (Fremont, CA), and Blackhawk Museum (Danville, CA); community centers and Asian festivals around the country; and Wuyi University (Jiangmen, China). 

Two other current projects involve collaborations with colleagues in translation studies and computer science at the Université de Lille in France (Ronald Jenn and Amel Fraisse).  One is a transnational print and digital project that tracks  the global circulation of Mark Twain's  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn    and the cultural work the novel performs in a wide range contexts, a project supported by Maison Européenne des Science de l’Homme et de la Société (MESHS). A Special Forum entiitled "Global Huck: Mapping the Cultural Work of Translations of Mark Twain's  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"  was published in the  Journal of Transnational American Studies , co-edited by Fishkin and Jenn with Tsuyoshi Ishihara (Uniiversty of Tokyo), Holger Kersten (University of Halle-Wittenberg), and Selina Lai-Henderson (Duke Kunshan University).    The second is the ROSETTA Project - Resources for Endangered Languages Through Translated Texts, a project designed to develop resources for digitally under-resourced languages through translations of  Huckleberry Finn , a project supported by the France-Stanford Center. The ROSETTA Project recently organized a workshop at Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) on Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage that will become a special issue of the  Journal of Digital Humanities and Data Mining.  The ROSETTA Project and Global Huck are also supported by Huma-Num (la TGIR des humanités numériques).

She has two current book projects. One is a book entitled  Jim (Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade),  which will appear in the “Black Lives” biography series edited by David Blight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jacquelyn Goldsby for Yale University Press. The other is a book about how Hal Holbrook made Mark Twain a social critic for our time.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is interviewed by CGTN about the history of Chinese immigrants in the U.S.

New American Studies Prize named for Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Giving Voice to Chinese Railroad Workers

Chinese Railroad Workers on the Long Island Railroad

Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Website

Lifetime Achievement Award in Mark Twain Studies

Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee

Featured Interview in Inside Higher Education

The Oxford Mark Twain

The Journal of Transnational American Studies

Feminist Engagements

Mark Twain's Book of Animals

The Mark Twain Anthology

American Studies Program at Stanford

Featured Interview in Americana

"Is He Dead?" Production History

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Mark Twain Riverboat

Mark Twain Riverboat Frontierland attraction at Disneyland; opened on July 17, 1955. The Disneyland Publicity Department originally trumpeted the fact that this was the first paddle wheeler built in the United States in 50 years. Its 105-foot-long hull was built at the Todd Shipyards in San Pedro, California, but the superstructure was constructed in a soundstage at the Disney Studio in Burbank, and then trucked down the Santa Ana Freeway to Disneyland. The Mark Twain travels around Tom Sawyer Island, seeing views of a Native American village and assorted wildlife, brought to life by the Disney Imagineers. The riverboat weighs 150 tons and is designed to carry 300 passengers. Also a riverboat in Frontierland at Disneyland Paris, opened April 12, 1992, where it shares the Rivers of the Far West with the Molly Brown . Also in Westernland at Tokyo Disneyland, opened on April 15, 1983. The Walt Disney World riverboats were the Admiral Joe Fowler (retired in 1980) and the Richard F. Irvine (later named the Liberty Belle ).

Past Factory

Facts About The Life Of Mark Twain

Posted: November 10, 2023 | Last updated: November 11, 2023

Adventurous, eloquent and funny, Mark Twain wrote the classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . He is quoted every day for his wit and wisdom. But this author did much more than write stories. Learn how Twain's early steamboating and gold mining careers influenced his future works. From inventions to personal passions you probably didn't know about, here are mind-boggling facts about the life of Mark Twain. How much do you know about this influential author?

In His Early Life, He Witnessed A Lot Of Death

Mark Twain was born as Samuel Clemens in 1835. The sixth of seven children, Clemens remained frail and sickly until he turned seven. Of his six siblings, only four would survive until adulthood. The family grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, where violence occurred frequently.

When Clemens was nine, he witnessed a local man murder a cattle rancher. At ten years old, he watched a slave die when a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron. With the Civil War fast approaching, young Clemens would continue to confront death for the forseeable future.

His Family Owned Slaves

In his early life, Clemens grew up around slaves and therefore perceived slavery as normal. His Uncle Dan owned slaves that were well treated, and Clemens would often listen to their stories. Dan later became the inspiration for the character Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

Unfortunately, when Clemens was young, his father mistreated one slave in front of his son. Throughout Mark Twain's writings, he struggled with these different sides of slavery. Later, his wife Olivia would persuade Twain to support the abolitionist movement.

He Had Little Formal Education

Samuel Clemens only attended school up until his preteen years. He began working after his father died of pneumonia in 1847. Clemens was 12 years old when he began his first full-time job as an apprentice printer. He studied at local libraries in his free time.

However, his work did teach Clemens in its own unique way. In 1851, he worked in typesetting for a newspaper owned by his older brother Orion. There, he eventually wrote short, satirical articles for publication. By 17, Clemens already moved out and started working in cities such as New York City and Philadelphia.

His Brother's Death Scarred Him

In 1857, at 22-years-old, Clemens apprenticed as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. A year later, he convinced his younger brother Henry to join him. Then, in June, a boiler exploded near Memphis in Pennsylvania. Nineteen-year-old Henry was one of the victims who perished in the blast.

Though Clemens ached from the incident, he still managed to get his steamboat license in 1859. He left the river boating career when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Sadly, Clemens felt responsible for his brother's passing for the rest of his life.

He Joined The Confederate Army

In 1861, the Civil War swept through Hannibal, Missouri. Clemens joined the Marion Rangers, a pro-Confederate militia, for a couple of weeks. The group ended up disbanding after hearing that Union general Ulysses Grant headed their way.

At the time, he did not have strong ideological convictions about the Civil War, likely joining the militia out of loyalty to the Southern states. Oddly enough, later in life, Clemens would befriend Ulysses Grant, later publishing the president's memoir in 1885.

He Tried Gold Mining

In the 1860s, Twain's older brother Orion worked as a secretary to the governor of Nevada. Having no other job, Twain decided to assist his brother in Nevada and aimed to strike it rich through gold mining. Eventually, he traveled 40 miles across the desert to Humbolt County.

He found plenty of fools gold and quartz veins, but nothing worth the mass of wealth he had sought. Disappointed, he returned to Nevada. His gold mining experience can be summed up in the famous quote, "A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it."

To Avoid Duels, He Traveled All Over California

In May 1864, Mark Twain challenged a rival newspaperman to a duel in Nevada. Before the fight took place, however, Twain fled. He headed to San Francisco, supposedly to avoid the territory's anti-dueling laws.

After working a tedious job as a reporter for about a year, Twain posted bail for his friend who got arrested in a bar brawl. Twain didn't have the funds to cover the bond, so he skipped town with his friend and traveled to Tuolumne County. There, he published his first hit story.

Mark Twain Was Not His Original Pen Name

Before he began publishing under his famous pen name in 1863, Clemens juggled other name ideas. These failed names included W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab and Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.

Eventually, Clemens settled on a name inspired by his steamboating years. Steamboats ideally sailed on rivers two fathoms deep, or 12 feet. In sailing slang, "mark" means fathom (six feet) and "twain" means two. The sailor checking the river depth would call out "mark twain" to mean the river depth equals 12 feet, "safe water" for riverboats back then.

His First Hit Story Sprung From Jumping Frogs

While at a bar in Calaveras County, California, Twain listened to a man tell a story about a jumping frog contest. This story would later inspire him in 1865, when, back in San Francisco, his friend wrote him asking for a contribution to his storybook.

By the time Twain wrote and finalized his jumping frog story, the book had already been published. But the publisher sent the piece to the Saturday Press in New York, where it became a hit. "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was reprinted in various newspapers throughout 1865.

He Anonymously Reviewed His Own Work

In 1867, Twain published his first full novel, Innocents Abroad . The work stemmed from a five-month Mediterranean cruise where Twain wrote humorously about the sights for American newspapers. The book became a bestseller, but not without a little help from Twain himself.

Innocents Abroad reached the top charts after an anonymous critic raved about the work. The anonymous critic was none other than Twain himself. Fortunately, this 'anonymous' review was followed up by another review in The Atlantic by critic William Dean Howells, who eventually became Twain's good friend.

His Wife Had Been Miraculously Healed

When Twain met Olivia Langdon, he witnessed a miraculous healing session. A faith healer named Dr. Newton prayed over Olivia, had her sit up, and watched her take several steps. Before then, she couldn't stand without nausea and fainting spells.

Twain later asked Newton how he performed this. Newton didn't know for sure, but believed some subtle electric energy in the body might have had something to do with it. In any case, Twain was grateful because he married Olivia in 1870. Unfortunately, she still suffered from poor health for the rest of her life.

He Was Fascinated With The Paranormal

Along with his wife's healing, Twain had witnessed some unexplained phenomena in his early life. Years before getting his steamboat license, Twain had a dream in which his brother Henry lay dead in a coffin. Sadly, his premonition came true years later when a Pennsylvania boiler exploded.

Twain remained intrigued by the paranormal for the rest of his life. When the Society for Psychical Research formed in 1882, he was one of their first members. That society still exists today.

He Loved Cats More Than People

Mark Twain always wanted a cat around him. He wrote cats into his fiction and even owned nineteen of them at one point. "If a man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat," he once wrote.

His cats all had fantastical names, such as Beelzebub, Buffalo Bil, Satan, Sin, Sour Mash, Tammany, Soapy Sal, Blatherskite and Bambino. When he left home to travel, he would rent cats to stay with him.

Huckleberry Finn Was Inspired By A Childhood Friend

In his home town of Hannibal, Mark Twain befriended an older boy named Tom Blankenship. Blankenship later became his inspiration for Huck Finn in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . Blankenship grew up in a poor family with a notoriously drunk father.

In his biography, Twain wrote, "In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; be he had as good a heart as ever any boy had." No one knows what happened to Blankenship later in life, though some reports suggest he died of cholera.

He Was Great Friends With Nikola Tesla

In the 1890s, Nikola Tesla met up with Twain in New York. Even though Twain lived in Europe at the time, he frequently visited New York. After Tesla told Twain about his lifelong illness, and how Twain's books helped him in recovery, Twain was moved to tears.

Since then, Twain often visited Tesla in his lab. Tesla experimented with electricity, which fascinated Twain. Reportedly, Tesla even shot an x-ray gun at Twain's head at one point. The two remained friends until Twain's death in 1910.

He Sold His Own Inventions

Mark Twain patented many of his own inventions. One was a garment fastener with a removable band that he envisioned on vests and pantaloons. The fastener never caught on with vests or pantaloons, but it did evolve into our modern bra strap.

His other successful patent was a self-pasting scrapbook, which, according to The St. Louis Post Dispatch, made him $50,000 . But his other investments, including a history trivia game and Paige typesetting machine, flopped. Even his own publishing house eventually spiraled into bankruptcy.

He Was A Terrible Businessman

After achieving wealth from his writing, Mark Twain poured his money into several terrible investments. In one case, Twain invested $200,000 in an automatic typesetting machine. That's a lot of money, considering that in 1890, the average American family earned less than $1,200 per year.

In 1891, Twain moved to Europe to live more frugally and aid his wife's poor health. Even so, in 1894, his self-established publishing company sank, forcing Twain to declare bankruptcy. Fortunately, he made back that money within the next several years when he embarked on an around-the-world speaking tour.

He Didn't Wear His Famous White Suit Until Later In Life

In December 1906, Twain wore a white suit to the House of Representatives. The New York Tribune recorded his wardrobe as "The most remarkable suit seen in New York this season." Up until his death in 1910, he would continue to display the white suit that most Americans imagine him in today.

In his autobiography, Twain listed hygiene as his reason for wearing all white. He also mentioned that it caught the eye of reporters and expressed his unconventionality.

He Was Filmed Only Once

Another inventor by the name of Thomas Edison was also good friends with Twain. One year before Twain's death, in 1909, Edison would arrive in Connecticut to film Twain and his family. The silent film he captured is the only existing footage of Mark Twain.

The footage first appeared at the production of Twain's "The Prince and the Pauper." In 2014, TFG Film & Tape restored the film so that modern audiences can watch it online.

He Has No Living Descendants

In 1870, Twain married Olivia Langdon, an abolitionist from New York. The two had four children. Their only son tragically passed away as a toddler, and two of their daughters died in their 20s. Sam Clemens himself died at age 88 in Connecticut in 1910, and Olivia Clemens died in 1904 at age 58.

Their surviving child, Clara Clemens, had one child herself, Nina Gabrilowitsch. Nina had no children and died in 1966. With that, the Samuel Clemens line disappeared. No direct descendants of Mark Twain are alive today.

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View of the Kremlin and surrounding area from 1825. From The Album of Ancient Views of the Moscow Kremlin , by Ivan Zabelin. Available online from the Yeltsin Library .

The Kremlin: Moscow’s Historical Heart Through the Ages

Published: December 3, 2021

The Moscow Kremlin has long been the main symbol of Moscow and Russia – and for good reason. It was with the Kremlin that city of Moscow officially began and from which it grew. The Prince of Moscow, ruling from the Kremlin and drawing on the growing power of his city, united and conquered the cities and lands around him to create Russia.

While the Kremlin can be seen as something of a constant in Russian history, the Kremlin itself has seen major changes within its walls and to its own status. It has lost and gained buildings. It has changed from the seat of government to an ancillary structure, back to the governmental seat, and finally to a museum complex.

The resource below unites the work of multiple SRAS students writing on Home and Abroad , Challenge Grants , and Online Research Internships to bring you an overarching view of this iconic complex.

The Kremlin Walls

By Hudson Dobbs

The Kremlin was first established in 1156 by Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy. This post-dates the first mention of Moscow, which dates back to 1147, when Prince Dolgorukiy invited Prince Sviatoslav of Chernigov to Moscow to celebrate their alliance.

The actual site of this stronghold has likely been occupied since the second millennium BCE. It likely had fortifications built there as early as the 10th century, by the then-resident Vyatichi, a tribe of Slavic peoples.

Eventually, Prince Dolgorukiy ordered the construction of what would become the Kremlin walls. These first walls were tall and expansive and built out of wood. Although this structure was built for protection, it also served as a symbol for the power and strength of the new city of Moscow.

While the first walls did their job well, they were eventually burnt down by Tatar-Mongol forces and later upgraded to more fire-resistant oak in 1339. As the city grew, the Kremlin also further developed, and with it the popularity of building fortresses in town centers. Cities such as Smolensk, Kazan, Novgorod, and Pskov all constructed a Kremlin of their own. In fact, the word “kremlin” simply means “a fortress within a city.”

By the 13th century, the Kremlin housed the political and spiritual power of the state, with residences, workshops, churches, and state buildings all residing within its walls. In the 1360’s, Prince Dmitry Donskoy rebuilt the walls in limestone and a gleaming white Kremlin soon became the iconic image of Moscow. These walls were credited in helping the city defend itself from sieges by Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania in the late 1360’s.

The walls and towers that exist today are still another iteration, and were built on the order of Grand Prince Ivan III, also known as Ivan the Great, from 1485 to 1495. Ivan wanted to build something grander and more worthy of being his residence – something that would be comparable to Constantinople in terms of size and importance.

Wanting what would be specifically a “Third Rome,” Ivan invited Italian architects such as Aristotele Fioravanti and Pietro Antonio Solari. Their involvement is why the current fortress closely resembles castles of Northern Italy. Its red brick made the Kremlin unique for the time, as it was the first structure in Russia built from such material.

These brick walls have stood, with minor adjustments, since that time. One noticeable change came in the late 1600s, when Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich ordered the red brick to be whitewashed in limestone, returning it to gleaming white the city had been hitherto known for. Eventually, the whitewash stopped being maintained and was allowed to wear off, a process that was complete by the 1900s.

Grand Kremlin Palace Tour

By Jack Fisher

Formerly the Moscow residence of the Russian tsars, the Grand Kremlin Palace (not to be confused with the State Kremlin Palace) is a complex inside the Kremlin. It now hosts diplomatic meetings and official state ceremonies including presidential inaugurations. It is also designated as a residence of the President of the Russian Federation, but is rarely used for that purpose.

When SRAS gave me the opportunity to take an exclusive tour of this complex, which is an exclusive tour that is normally off-limits to the general public, I had to take it.

This particular tour is different from those that cover the more public areas inside the Kremlin and requires signing up early and submitting your documents for a security check.

I met the tour group on a Friday afternoon in Aleksandrovski Sad, which borders the Kremlin walls. From there, we made our way towards the Kremlin grounds entrance. There was a huge line to get into the grounds through a first security checkpoint, but we were able to skip straight to the front of it since we had registered for our tour ahead of time. Once we were through the gate, the crowd thinned out significantly.

As we walked through the Kremlin grounds, we saw other tour groups taking photos of the landscaping, palace, and other historical buildings. Unlike us, they didn’t have the permission of the Russian government to enter the actual palace. When we got to the palace, we walked through the front doors, crossed a second security checkpoint, met our guide, and started the tour.

Our tour guide inside the building was a woman that worked in preservation. She only spoke Russian, so everything was translated for us by an SRAS-hired guide to English. We began on the first floor of the newer section of the palace and saw several ornate living rooms and guest rooms, followed by the empress’s and emperor’s chambers. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to see the emperor’s office and bathroom as President Putin had decided to use them as his personal study for the remainder of his time in office.

After the first floor, we headed upstairs to the second. From the outside the palace appeared to have three floors, but in reality the second floor just had massive, vaulted ceilings and two levels of windows. From what I saw, the second floor seemed to be where the fun happened. The first major room we walked into was the Hall of the Order of St. George, built to house major military meetings and balls and today used as a large conference room. There were names of famous military officers and soldiers inscribed on the walls, and the hall looked like it could hold hundreds of guests. Then it was on to the Hall of the Order of St. Vladimir, which was way less cool. It did, however, have the largest chandelier in the palace, for what that’s worth.

Next, we moved into the oldest section of the palace. It was built in the late 1400s and the newer sections of the palace were built out to connect with it. Our guide told us that by the time of the last czars, the older section was used strictly for ceremonial purposes. The walls were covered with paintings of historical rulers and religious figures. It was definitely my favorite room as there seemed to be an aura of timelessness hanging about the place.

Then we went back through the Hall of the Order of St. Vladimir and through another hall to the older bedchamber of the czar and an older, smaller meeting room for the czar and his nobles. This section was markedly different as there was none of the opulence of the newer palace. It had a utilitarian feel due to its practical layout with comfortable but plain looking chairs, reasonably sized paintings, low ceilings and large traditional Russian stoves.

Finally, we visited the throne room. It was massive, just like the Hall of the Order of St. George, and had polished stone and gilding everywhere. Unfortunately, it was a reconstruction. Our guide let us know that the soviets had torn it apart when they came to power, creating what looked like a massive classroom to house the first meetings of the Soviet Congress. The Russian government had restored it completely within the past decade. She also let us know that the current heir to the Russian throne is Prince Harry of England, which is an interesting fact I’ve been surprising Brits with lately.

On our way out, we exited through a portrait hall. Most of the portraits were typical Enlightenment and Victorian era paintings with stuffy looking people. However, one painting caught my eye: the portrait of Knyaz Sbyatoclav. The man looked absolutely hardcore (and you can see him below in a photo I took).

In my opinion, it was definitely worth $75. While I wouldn’t go twice, the fact of the matter is that you get to see the inside of a beautiful building and stand in rooms that very powerful people meet in and have met in for hundreds of years – which is an opportunity that few regular people are given. Don’t think that it’s too expensive, because you’ll have the experience and memory with you for the rest of your life.

The Kremlin Without a Capital (1712-1918)

By Lee Sullivan

The Kremlin has always been a symbol of Russian power and authority. It is often used interchangeably with the Russian state in journalism and academic literature. This is not surprising considering the Kremlin is situated in the heart of Moscow and has typically housed Russian rulers and their offices – and continues to contain an official residence and office for Russian president Vladimir Putin. However, not all of Russia’s leaders have always called the Moscow fortress home. This article covers the nearly 200 years of Kremlin history when Moscow was not the capital.

Peter the Great moved Russia’s capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1712. Despite the continued crowning of tsars in the Annunciation Cathedral and symbols of power in the Kremlin vaults, Moscow’s role in state life was minimal compared to that of the new capital. This changed when a new stage of construction began under Catherine the Great. Even though St. Petersburg was the new capital, she was crowned in Moscow following ancient tradition. A commission to replace the code of laws from Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich’s time was called in Moscow and its session was held in the Kremlin’s Faceted Palace. This was a sign that under Catherine the Great the state would be ruled from both St. Petersburg and Moscow. Additionally, the Senate was divided into departments under Catherine. Four were in St. Petersburg and two were in the newly commissioned Senate Building, which still stands in the Moscow Kremlin.

Catherine additionally planned a grand reconstruction of the Kremlin interior, one that would have seen most of its buildings demolished, save for the historic cluster of churches, and replaced with modern imperial architecture built with long, straight roads, much like St. Petersburg itself. Demolition was started, including to parts of the original Kremlin walls, when cracks began to appear in one of the cathedral walls due to the resulting disruption of the soil. Because of this, and because of the project’s already enormous cost, it was cancelled, and the original walls re-built.

In September of 1812, French troops occupied Moscow. Napoleon, who led them, planned to occupy the Kremlin as his residence. It is widely thought that in defense against the French, the Moscow mayor ordered fires be set across the city. They raged for days so and were so intense that Napoleon was forced to leave the Kremlin due to the smoke. Upon returning he declared an intention to remain in the Kremlin for winter and ordered additional fortification of the Kremlin walls. However, the French army was weakening due to battle loss and poor supply.

Napoleon ordered his troops to retreat and blow up the Kremlin in the process. Mines were laid but their effectiveness was reduced by rain and prompt Muscovite response. Still, considerable damage was done, including to the Vodozvodnaya Tower, which was completely destroyed.

The Kremlin quickly underwent restoration under Tsar Alexander I and Nicolas I. Despite the war’s considerable drain on state funding, Tsar Alexander I prioritized restoring many parts of the Kremlin including towers, walls, palaces, and cathedrals. He often traveled to Moscow to observe the restoration progress. Many of Russia’s best architects were included in the restoration efforts. Order was progressively restored to the Kremlin and new gardens, now called the Alexander Gardens, were laid out along its exterior. Buildings like the Senate were brought back to their original appearance.

Restoration was completed under Nicholas I, who gave special attention to the restoration of ancient Kremlin churches and other old buildings. He also commissioned the construction of new buildings like the Great Kremlin Palace, after having the old one demolished. The entire imperial family attended the palace blessing during an official ceremony in April 1849. It was constructed and designed with techniques that were ahead of their time – vaulted construction for walls and ceilings, inlaid stone floors, and iron rafters.

Shortly after the revolution, the Communists restored Moscow as the official capital in 1918 when Moscow was reinstated as Russia’s capital. Construction and restoration were completed by the mid-19 th century. During the Soviet years, the Kremlin housed Soviet leaders and saw the development and then dissolution of the Soviet state. Today the Kremlin stands in Russia’s capital as a unique architectural ensemble.

The Kremlin Under the Soviets

The new Bolshevik government made sweeping changes to the historic Kremlin complex to, as they saw it, better represent the character of the new socialist state.

During the revolution of November 1917, the Kremlin was ransacked, leaving it with broken glass, destroyed icons, and parts of the complex in disrepair. Restoration of the walls and towers began in 1918, but further restoration stalled for lack of funding and because the communists had not yet decided on a plan for their changes to their seat of government.

The first targets were churches and royal symbols. Nuns and monks who had long lived in the Kremlin were removed. Churches had valuables removed and transferred to the new Commissariat of Finances to fund state projects. Many royal treasures and even crown jewels were similarly transferred. The double-headed eagles on the top of the buildings were promptly removed.

Many buildings were repurposed. Initially, many were converted to housing for Communist functionaries as the revolution and war had depleted Moscow’s housing stock while driving immigration from the countryside to the city. At one point, over two thousand people lived inside the Kremlin. By 1939, however, Kremlin residents consisted of only about three dozen high ranking officials.

Other notable repurposings included turning the Palace of Facets into a canteen with its kitchen inside the Tsarina’s Golden Chamber. The Ivan the Great Bell Tower was turned into a workshop, the Small Nicholas Palace became a worker’s club, and a gym was placed in the Church of St. Catherine. In 1932, the Andrew and Alexander Halls within the palace were gutted to make room for a party congress.

Many of the buildings and statues within the complex were destroyed, often to make way for new construction; only 26 of the original 54 buildings survived the Soviet period. The Chudov Monastery and Ascension Convent were both destroyed to make way for a military academy and eventually the Kremlin Presidium was built on the ground to house the Supreme Soviet, the supreme legislative body of the USSR.

In 1929, the Maly Nikolaevsky Palace, a former royal residence, was replaced by a new administrative building.

In the 1920s, the Russian royals buried in the Archangel Cathedral on the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square were exhumed and autopsied. They and the items in their sarcophagi were turned over to the Kremlin museum. Some valuable artifacts were requisitioned to the state treasury.

In 1935, five stars of rubied glass replaced the double-headed eagles that once topped the Kremlin gate towers.

Throughout WWII, the Kremlin was disguised under mock construction and painted roofs. Despite this, several bombs still fell on the Kremlin grounds, but did not cause major damage.

In 1947, Stalin painted the Kremlin walls red in an unmistakable ode to socialism, a drastic change from the traditional white that the walls had carried for centuries.

In 1955, the Kremlin opened to the public as an open air museum. In that same year, a ban on living in the Kremlin was introduced, lessening any security risk opening it to the public might create.

The last wave of demolitions came in 1958-1961, when the Palace of Congresses, built to house the congresses of Communist Party and cultural events, replaced the Old Amoury and part of the Patriarch’s Palace.

In part due to the outcry from this massive renovation, greater care of the Kremlin grounds began. The official Kremlin museum system was established in 1966, and Elena Gagarin, daughter of Yuri Gagarin, was hired as museum director. Today, that system includes the large armoury, several churches, and items outside of the Kremlin, such as St. Basil’s Cathedral.

The changes made during the Soviet period have left the Kremlin with a striking architectural contrast between traditional, tsarist-era architecture with Soviet-style buildings and the iconic, ancient red walls and remaining cathedrals. Despite the destruction and changes that were carried out, the compound still offers an unforgettable look into Russian and Soviet history that is impossible to get from anywhere else.

The Kremlin Stars

Translated by Caroline Barrow

The following was originally posted to the the Russian 7 website . It has been translated here by SRAS Home and Abroad Translation Scholar Caroline Barrow. Additional edits and updates were applied in 2021.

On October 24, 1935, two long-standing symbols of the Russian monarchy—the two-headed eagles which stood on top of the Kremlin towers, were ordered to be brought down and replaced with five-pointed stars.

Why a five-pointed star became the symbol of the Soviet regime is unknown, but what is known is that Lev Trotsky supported this symbol. Greatly fascinated by the esoteric, he knew that stars and pentagrams have a strong energetic potential and are one of the strongest symbols. The swastika could have easily become the symbol of the new government, since it had a strong following in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Swastikas were displayed on the currency of the temporary government led by Alexander Kerensky, and swastikas were painted on the walls of Empress Alexandra Fedrovna’s Ipatiev House before the royal family was executed there. This swastika trend was stopped almost solely by Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, who opted for the five-pointed star. The history of the twentieth century even showed that stars are stronger than swastikas… Stars shone over the Kremlin, in the place of two-headed eagle.

Erecting the thousand-kilogram stars on the Kremlin towers was not a simple thing to do. The problem was that the needed technology did not exist in 1935. The smallest of the Kremlin Towers, Borovitskaya, rose to 52 meters, and the tallest tower, Troitskaya, reached a height of 72 meters. Throughout the country, there were no tower cranes capable of reaching these heights. However, for Russian engineers, the word “no” did not exist, only the phrase “we must.” Engineers designed and built special cranes that could be installed on the upper deck for each tower. A metal base, called the console, was mounted at the base of each turret window, and on each console the engineers mounted a lifting crane. Thus, the process occurred in several stages: first the two-headed eagles were dismantled, and second, the stars erected.

Each star weighs about one ton. Given the height at which the stars would be placed and the fact that each star has a surface area of 6.3 square meters (potentially excellent for catching the wind), there was a danger that the stars might be blown away along with the top of the towers. So, it was decided to stress test the towers and, it turns out, with good reason: the upper part of each tower and its console was completely destroyed in the process. So, builders reinforced the masonry at the upper levels of the towers, and for the Spasskaya, Troitskaya, and Borovitskaya Tower, metal bracing was added to the base of the tower. The console on Nikolskaya Tower was so damaged that it had to be completely rebuilt.

All the stars were not made identical; four stars differ from one another in their artistic forms. On the Spasskaya Tower star, rays go out from the center. However, on Troitskaya Tower’s star, the rays look like spikes. The star on Borovitskaya Tower is made up of two contours, one inscribed in the other, and, finally, the rays on Nikolskaya Tower’s star have no pattern. In terms of length, the Spasskaya and Nikolskaya Towers were similar, with the distance between the ends of the rays being about 4.5 meters. On Troitskaya and Borovitskaya Towers, the star rays were shorter, and the distance between the ends of the rays was less, measuring 4 and 3.4 meters, respectively.

A star is good, but a spinning star is twice as nice. Moscow is large, its people many, and all must see the Kremlin stars. For the base of each star, special bearings were produced by the First Bearing Plant. These special bearings allow the stars to rotate with the wind even despite their significant weight. Consequently, it is possible to know the direction of the wind given the position of the stars.

Installation of the Kremlin Stars was a true celebration for Muscovites. The stars were not carried under the cover of night to Red Square. The day before the stars were placed on the towers they were put on display in Gorky Park. District and City Secretaries of the Communist Party came together with the ordinary mortals below to see the stars. The stars were lit from the outside to make the Ural stones shine and the rays sparkle. The eagles, taken off the towers, were also displayed to visually demonstrate the dilapidation of the “old” world and the beauty of the “new” world.

The Kremlin stars were not always ruby glass. The first stars, installed in October, 1935, were made from high-alloy stainless steel and red copper. In the center of each star, on both sides, the stars were embedded with precious stones outlining the hammer and sickle emblem. Over the course of a year, the glitter of the gems dimmed. The stars were also found to be too big, not fitting well with the architectural ensemble. In May, 1937, it was decided to install new, illuminated glass ruby stars. Also, they added a star to a fifth tower, the Vodovzvodnaya Tower. The ruby glass was produced at a factory in the city of Konstantinov, according to the method of the Moscovite glassmaker, N. I. Kurochkina. It was necessary to prepare 500 square meters of ruby glass, and for that, a new type was invented—selenium ruby glass. Before that, gold was used to color the glass; selenium was cheaper and produced a deeper color.

The Kremlin stars don’t only rotate, they also light up. In order not to overheat and cause damage, about 600 cubic meters of air is blown through the stars per hour. The stars are not affected by power outages, because they have their own, independent generators.

For the original lighting, the Moscow Electrical Lamp Plant produced the lights for the stars. The stars on Spasskaya, Troitskaya, and Nikolskaya Towers all had 5000-watt bulbs, and the other two operated at 3700 watts. In each star, two parallel filaments were installed. That way, if one burned out, the other filament still shone and a control panel is was notified of the burnout.

To change a bulb, one need not need to climb up to the star. Rather, the bulb comes down on a special rod that runs straight through the bearing. The whole process takes 30-35 minutes. In the stars’ history, the stars stopped shining only twice—once during the war, and another time for the filming of the now-classic movie The Barber of Siberia .

Editorial Note: Update 2021. Starting in 2015, the lighting of the Kremlin stars was updated with one star’s lighting system replaced each year. The old incandescent lamps were replaced with modern metal halide lamps. These lamps are approximately four times more energy efficient than the old bulbs and provide a more intense, higher-quality light. Metal halide lamps are often used for sports stadiums and other places where strong, high-quality light is needed.

In preparation for this switch, Employees of the Central Scientific and Restoration Design Workshops (TsNRPM) measured the illumination of each arm of each star separately to make sure that each would still be lit evenly and brightly. They also created models of the stars lit with various methods including LED matrices and optical fiber. In the end, metal halide was determined to be the closest in historical appearance to the existing incandescent lamps.

Within this update, each star was also given its first compressive maintenance since 1946. Damaged panes were replaced, the stars were cleaned inside and out, and the lubricants within the rotation system were replaced with modern fluids.

The State Kremlin Palace

By Benjamin Bradley Mulick

Finished in 1961 after three years of work, the Palace of Congresses, later renamed as the State Kremlin Palace (not to be confused with the Grand Kremlin Palace), opened its doors for the first time for the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, welcoming thousands of party delegates as well as communist leaders from around the world. Today, it is still the Kremlin’s newest building and a multipurpose facility, housing large conventions, cultural displays from around the world and even its own ballet troupe. With these functions giving it continued purpose, the Kremlin’s most modern and out of place building is also one of its most significant.

The Kremlin State Palace stands out from the gilded, pastel buildings around it with its hulking angular lines, and large windows divided by tall marble columns. It’s crowned by a glass banquet hall, which was the brainchild of Khrushchev himself.

It features three main halls: The Great Hall, the Small Hall, and the Diplomatic Hall. The Great Hall is the largest, featuring the palace’s main stage and hosting its most important events. With a seating capacity of six thousand, it is where party congresses were held, and where some of Russia’s most prominent cultural programs take place today. The Small Hall hosts smaller musical performances, and by virtue of having removable seating, also hosts dance events, such as the World Cup of Latin American Dance, as held in June of 2021. The Diplomatic Hall provides a smaller and more intimate setting in which to enjoy performances. Last but not least, the Diplomatic Hall often hosts lesser-known artists, often performing genres that do best in closer settings, such as jazz and folk.

The facility also holds many smaller meeting rooms, intended as breakout rooms for conventions, but also used for various purposes today.

The construction of the State Kremlin Palace came with considerable controversy. Not only is it stylistically wildly inconsistent with the rest of the Kremlin’s buildings, one of Russia’s most oldest and most important historical ensembles, but it also resulted in the destruction of several older buildings to make ways for the Palace’s massive presence.

The demolished buildings included the Old Kremlin Armory Building, originally built in 1851 to house the Kremlin’s ceremonial guard and a collection of state documents and treasure. The northern wing of the Patriarchal Chambers was torn down, formerly part of the private quarters of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Because these were officially designated historic buildings, the legality of razing them was questionable and likely would not have taken place had not the decision been made from the office of Khrushchev himself.

Perhaps the real loss, however, came from underground. The original plans for the palace, before the Second World War, envisioned it as truly massive facility built where Christ the Savior Cathedral now stands. In the Khrushchev era, it was planned to build a smaller but still very large building near MGU, along the river, in what were then the still-developing outskirts of the city. When Khrushchev decided to place it inside the Kremlin, its footprint was again shrunk and it faced restrictions on its height so that the view of the Dormition Cathedral would not be entirely lost.

To make up for this, the bottom part of the building was sunk sixteen meters into the valuable archeological depths of the Kremlin’s soil. The buildings torn down to make room for the Palace were themselves built over much older foundations.

Archeologists were given a short window to explore the former Palace of Natalya Narishkina, the mother of Tsar Peter I, as well the former sites of churches, royal kitchens, workshops, and studios in what was once an economic center based within the historic Kremlin.

Teams of archaeologists were assigned to the area, who, in addition to expected finds, also found a number of secret tunnels. Unfortunately, while the archaeologists did their best to learn and preserve what they could, the limited timeframe allowed by the construction of the State Kremlin Palace meant that the archaeological potential of the site was, in large part, wasted. The tunnels were filled in, the old foundations built over, and the ruins lost to history.

Today, the Palace is perhaps best known as the home of The Kremlin Ballet, which was specifically formed in 1990 under esteemed Russian artist and choreographer Andrey Petrov with the purpose of performing there after the Bolshoi Ballet stopped performing at the palace and returned to the Bolshoi, then under renovations.

While the Kremlin Ballet was created with a strong basis in the classics, they have made more recent contributions to the ballet world with a number of their own classically-inspired modern works, including a ballet adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer .

The State Kremlin Palace also hosts the Moscow Classical Ballet, which has been dancing in Moscow since 1966. Demonstrations of this tradition in the upcoming year will include the Moscow Classical Ballet’s dancing reinvention of Romeo and Juliet (which was considered scandalous when it was first performed in 1972), and a performance of Swan Lake , one of Russia’s most important contributions to dance, as performed by the Kremlin Ballet.

Built to hold important political events, the State Kremlin Palace is more a cultural building than a political one. The stage’s relatively short history promises to be subsumed by its promising future. Whatever the next big musical or cultural phenomenon in Russia is, the State Kremlin Palace will be a part of it.

• Read a review of The Snow Maidan as performed at the State Kremlin Palace on this site.

A Tour of the Moscow Kremlin Today

Tour as reviewed by Helen McHenry, 2019

As part of our SRAS cultural program, we were given the opportunity to take a tour of the Kremlin, a historic complex and symbol of the Russian government. We met our guide outside of Red Square before walking along the Kremlin walls to the visitors’ entrance. She pointed out the swallowtail merlons bordering the wall, a design popular in 15th century Italian-style architecture, before we mounted the battlement. To travel behind the Kremlin walls, we crossed a bridge that used to span the Neglinnaya River but today acts as an archway covering part of the footpath.

Inside the Kremlin is an intriguing mix of old and new – from the 15th century walls to the 20th century block of modernism known as the State Kremlin Palace. Our guide informed us of the controversy over the palace’s design, which stands in such contrast to the more traditional styles surrounding it. The building, built under Khrushchev’s leadership primarily as a government meeting hall, has almost as many floors underground as it does above ground. Although many cried out against the building when it was built, it still stands today, where it is now used mainly to host concerts.

A brief walk along a path lined with cannons from the state artillery collection brought us to what appeared to be the mother of all cannons. Indeed, the Tsar Cannon is the largest bombard by caliber ever manufactured and has never been used due to its vast size. Just around the corner lay a similarly large but unused item – the Tsar Bell. Commissioned during the time of Empress Anna, niece of Peter the Great, an almost life-size image of her adorns the bell’s surface.

We then traveled to Cathedral Square, which, as its name suggests, features a number of beautiful cathedrals. The overcast day did nothing to accentuate the gold domes that capped their many towers, but no amount of gloom could dim their impressive stature – so immense that photographing them from my vantage point proved a challenge. Each cathedral was adorned with more stunning iconography than the last, overwhelming to the point of monotony as we shuffled through the throngs of tourists.

Our next visit was to the State Armoury, a neoclassical building resplendent with the wealth of the tsars. We traipsed through room after room of riches, from icons, dishware, and diplomatic gifts to clothing, carriages, and thrones. What stood out to me the most was the two distinct – and sometimes warring – natures of Russian identity on display at the Armoury, East and West. The contrast was particularly obvious amongst the collections of clothing, weaponry, and thrones. The older pieces hearkened back to the time before the Western pivot of Peter the Great. While these remained just as ornately decorated as their modern counterparts, they were, on the whole, a lot less outlandish than those done in the styles of the West.

The Armoury marked our last stop within the Kremlin, so we traveled across the city center to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Although the cathedral is the world’s largest Orthodox church, the current building is not the original. Christ the Saviour was demolished under the reign of Stalin and was only rebuilt in the late 1990s. Since then, the cathedral has gained fame as the site of Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance, which landed three members in jail for “hooliganism.”

Our guide let us explore the church on our own, as the church requires groups to be led by its own guides. Looking forward to lunch, we opted for a quick pass through the cathedral. Had I not been so hungry, I could have spent hours inside, as every surface held intricately-painted religious imagery intermixed with adornments heavily gilded with gold. Photographs were not allowed within the cathedral, reserving this spectacle to be seen first-hand.

The Kremlin in its entirety is a spot I recommend to all visiting Moscow, as four hours within its walls was not enough for our group to even scratch the surface of the wonders within.

Tour as Reviewed by Joseph Ozment, 2016

As part of SRAS’s Russian as a Second Language (RSL) program at Moscow State University, I had the opportunity to attend a guided walking tour of the Kremlin and its museums. We had a professional tour guide provided by SRAS who was very well informed about all aspects of the Kremlin’s sites and always willing to answer questions.

The tour, as offered by SRAS each session, can differ slightly based on availability and timing. We began our day’s tour not at the Kremlin, but at the nearby Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Russia’s largest Orthodox cathedral and one of the largest Christian structures in the world. Note that there are wardrobe requirements for entering the church (men and women both must have their shoulders covered, while men cannot wear shorts and women must wear skirts at least beneath the knee).

Before going inside, we were taken around the massive structure, and given a brief yet informative overview of its history. We learned that, despite the classical style of the building, it is actually only about 20 years old, having been constructed to resemble the church that once stood on the same ground.

During Communist times, the ground on which the Church now stands was a massive swimming pool, having been filled with water after the original Church was destroyed. The plans that the Communists originally had for the site were to construct the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which would be one of the tallest structures in the world and house the office of the Soviet Union’s premier inside the head of a giant Vladimir Lenin statue adorning the top.

The Cathedral is a truly stunning structure. Comparable only to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in my mind, the sheer amount of open air is amazing when one considers how still and tranquil it is on the inside.

We then continued onwards to the Kremlin itself, which was teeming with guided tours from all over the world, just like ours. Seeing other groups from America, but also some from France, Italy, China, and several other European and Asian countries was very interesting, as people tend not to think of Russia as a popular tourist destination. However, tourism here has grown rapidly in recent years, particularly since the ruble lost about half its value on world markets, making Russia a much more affordable location.

Anna informed us of the purposes of all of the first structures we encountered within the Kremlin walls. First of all, though, she made sure that we were aware that the word “Kremlin” does not refer just the center of government in Moscow, but is a general word that means fortress. Most Russian cities and towns of reasonable size and with a medieval history possess a Kremlin.

We saw one of the offices in which President Putin occasionally works, as well as the large, semi-controversial event and concert hall that resides just inside the main entrance to the Kremlin. Despite its modern style that clashes somewhat with the comparatively ancient structures around it, the fact that the building is covered in glass at least ensures that it reflects the beauty and history that abounds within the Kremlin.

After seeing the aptly named Tsar Cannon and Tsar Bell, both of which are two of the largest objects of their kind in the world, and neither of which have been used for their structural purpose in their existence, we moved on to see several of the many churches that stand within the walls of the Kremlin.

Inside the Church of the Annunciation, we were informed of some of the basic components of any Russian Orthodox Church. For starters, every inch of wall is covered in some image or another, from icons of Saints to giant murals that depict judgment day and the people of earth being sent either to heaven or hell. We also learned that the altar in an Orthodox church is given its own room, to which only the priests are allowed entry. The mysticism that is native to Orthodoxy and inherent to its liturgy was embodied in all aspects of these churches.

After our tour of the Kremlin’s outside squares, we were taken on a tour of the Armory Museum, which houses outfits, household items, carriages, armor, weapons, and various sundry items that belonged to the Tsars and Tsarinas of Russia. Anna knowledgeably led us through the various styles worn by different Russian rulers, and explained the significance(s) behind the appearance of what they wore and the carriages in which they rode.

We were in awe of the beautiful jewels that encrusted everything the royals wore and every vessel out of which they drank or off of which they ate, not to mention of the thrones on which they sat. We saw gifts from foreign dignitaries and rulers, and even the museum’s collection of Faberge creations.

All in all, it was a day rich with history and made even more enjoyable by our friendly and incredibly knowledgeable tour guide, Anna. There is hardly a more essential Russian experience to have during your time in Moscow than a guided tour of the Kremlin.

Incidentally, Anna, a guide that SRAS has worked with for years, helps run a guiding collective in Moscow called Bridge to Moscow . They run many private tours and are available for custom tours and travel as well.

Latest Updates

By Josh Wilson

In addition to the changes to how the Kremlin stars are lit and renovations to the Kremlin bells in Spasskaya Tower , for instance, several recent events are of interest.

In the mid-2000s, the Russian Orthodox Church lobbied for the restoration of the Chudov Monetary and the Ascension Convent within the Kremlin walls. The idea was seriously considered and even discussed on television by President Vladimir Putin, although only in the sense of rebuilding them as cultural monuments and part of the museum complex, rather than as working religious institutions. In the end, however, the Kremlin Presidium was simply torn down in 2016 and the area left mostly open with fragments of the old foundations left under glass for viewing. The result is a Kremlin even more dominated by open space and gardens.

Wind has damaged the Kremlin walls on a few occasions. In June 1998, several of the iconic sparrow tail structures on the wall were damaged by strong winds. In April 2018, strong wind damaged the Senate Palace roof. In October 2021, scaffolding being used to restore a section of the inner wall was blown over the top of the wall, also damaging several of the iconic sparrow tail structures. In all cases, the damage was quickly repaired.

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About the authors

Serena Keenan

At the time she wrote for this site, Serena Keenan was a rising junior at Smith College in Northampton, MA. She was majoring in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies with a minor in Government and a concentration in Translation Studies. She hoped to study abroad in Moscow during the spring 2022 semester. After college, she hoped to go on to work in nuclear nonproliferation. In her free time, she likes to read and crochet.

Program attended: Online Interships

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Caroline Barrow

Caroline Barrow is a graduate of Texas A&M University with a degree in International Studies and Russian. She loves traveling and hearing people’s stories. Out of the places she’s been able to visit, her favorite was Kiev, Ukraine for its beauty, history, and friendly people. She received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship and, at the time she wrote for this site, was spending year teaching English in Kostanay, Kazakhstan. Additionally, she was been named SRAS’s Home and Abroad Translation Scholar for the 2013-2014 cycle. Her contributions included mostly translations of articles and blog posts that will be of interest to students.

Program attended: Home and Abroad Scholar

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Lee Sullivan

Lee Sullivan is an undergraduate student at Stetson University. She is currently pursuing a BS in cybersecurity and a BA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies. Next semester Lee will be in Vladivostok, Russia – studying the Russian language and participating in the Home and Abroad internship with SRAS. She aspires to pursue a master’s degree upon graduating.

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Benjamin Mulick

Ben Mulick, at the time he wrote for this site, was a fourth year Global Studies major at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

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Jack Fischer

Jack Fischer, at the time he wrote for this site, was majoring in Physics with Russian and Economics minors at Iowa State University of Science and Technology in Ames, Iowa. He is studied Russian as a Second Language with SRAS over the summer of 2016 to improve his command of the Russian language. In the future, he’d like to work for himself and run a business, preferably abroad.

Program attended: Challenge Grants

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Joseph Ozment

Joseph Ozment is a fourth-year International Studies and Russian Studies major at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. He is minoring in music minor and has spent a lot of free time on music projects. He is studying Russian as a Second Language and also working an internship with The Moscow Times. He hopes to increase his Russian skills and cultural awareness so as to use his knowledge of the country and language in a professional setting in the future.

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Helen McHenry

Helen McHenry, at the time she wrote for this site, was a double major in international relations and Russian at the Ohio State University, with minors in Spanish and public policy. She studied with Russian as a Second Language with SRAS at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in order to advance her proficiency in Russian and appreciation for Russian culture. She hoped to use the knowledge gained during her time abroad to advocate for foreign policy that strengthens relations between East and West in her future career.

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Julia Brock

Julie Brock, at the time she wrote for this site, had returned to University of Kentucky to pursue a Global Studies Certificate, with an emphasis on Russia and the travel industry. She earned prior BA and MA degrees in psychology. A few years ago, she traveled to Russia, Estonia, and Finland, and loves the culture and history of these areas. She works at the campus library, and enjoys reading, running 5Ks, and spending time with her dogs. She lived for five years in Minnesota and loved the snow, winter sports, and Museum of Russian Art.

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Hudson Dobbs

Hudson received his BA in Russian Studies with a minor in Corporate Communications from Baylor University. At the time he wrote for this site, he was serving as a Home and Abroad Scholar as part of a Spring, 2022 session of SRAS’s Language and Society program St. Petersburg. While abroad, Hudson will be researching the Russian coffee culture, as well as the evolution of specialty coffee in Russia. His goal is to open his own coffee shop in the US - taking his experiences abroad and applying them to his future business.

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