Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on the Maddening ‘Shape of the River’)

“I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it! No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics. Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had borne when I went up.”—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)

On this day in 1859, 23-year-old Samuel Clements (later known as Mark Twain), after two years of apprenticeship, received his full steamboat pilot’s license in St. Louis, certifying his navigational mastery of the mighty Mississippi. Or as great a mastery as it was possible for a river as changeable and threatening as the one in this “Quote of the Day.”

In Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot memorably likened the Mississippi to a “a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.” Given the famously tortured relationship that Twain displayed toward the real deity in his writings, it’s not a surprise that he regarded the river with equal ambivalence. It was as capricious as a being who could try to destroy the human race at the time of Noah’s Ark—or change the course of the life of a Missouri boy.

His job even provided him with a new identity: “Mark Twain” is a pseudonym derived from a nautical term for two fathoms, or 12 feet, deep.

Twain spent another two years as a steamboat pilot before the Civil War broke out, closing off river commerce and forcing him to seek another occupation. But the experience completely reshaped his world—a fact you can still view graphically in a visit to the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Conn., a 19-room red mansion whose whimsical design--filled with turrets, balconies, verandas and embrasures--also looks, from a certain angle, like a steamboat.

If the river made an impression on Twain with its beauty and wildness, the mass of humanity who journeyed on it and lined its banks made an entirely different kind on the young man. "In that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the familiar types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history.” That included, inevitably, more than a few ruffians and rogues he would later satirize.

All of this would be recorded, in prose as stunning and original as anything America had seen to date, on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which followed on the heels of Life on the Mississippi. Indeed, the rush of inspiration that produced Twain’s picaresque gem of a novel about a river boy and a runaway slave probably would not have resulted if not for the labor of love that was his earlier reminiscence.

Like much of his work, Life on the Mississippi is a travelogue, but it is also one of the first attempts in American literature of the nostalgic commemoration of a once-vital commercial enterprise. Twenty years after the outbreak of hostilities between North and South—a period marked by the coming of an even mightier transportation revolution, the railroad—Twain was shocked and saddened by the changes in riverine life that occurred in the interim. Still, from his deep well of memory, he created an unforgettable picture of the American steamboat of his childhood and how its appearance could transform a sleepy river town:

“Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote 'points;' instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, 'S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin'!' and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the boat IS rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, a glass and 'gingerbread', perched on top of the 'texas' deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys-- a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town.”

 
Twain’s masterpiece of creative nonfiction—an amalgam of memoir and history, with even a sneak preview of Huckleberry Finn—confirmed the promise of his opening sentence: “The Mississippi is well worth reading about.”

This Day in Exploration History (Marquette and Joliet Reach the Mississippi)

June 17, 1673 – Canoeing down the Wisconsin River, Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and fur trader Louis Joliet encountered a broad, swift current of a mighty stream that Indians told them surged south—the Mississippi River.

Several years ago, while visiting one of my favorite states, Minnesota, I looked from a bus traveling across a bridge connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul. It was the first time I had ever encountered the northern part of the Mississippi, and I took a deep breath at what I beheld and imagined what lay just beyond my sight.

But my vision was nothing compared with what greeted Marquette and Joliet. I had guidebooks, friends offering sightseeing advice, bus schedules, and countless tales of travelers and historians recounting adventures along the river over the years. Marquette and Joliet had nothing but the word of natives, which could be excellent reporting, fabulous fantasy or a mixture of the two.

Moreover, while I encountered a post-industrial, digitally conscious metropolis; the two Frenchmen beheld a primeval wilderness, the fulfillment of Edmund Burke’s later criteria of “the sublime and beautiful”—i.e, "that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”

As a kid, I thought of “Marquette and Joliet” as practically a brand name, a phrase that ran together fast—like Ruth and Gehrig, Smith and Dale, Sears & Roebuck. But the phrase only represented names and dates to be memorized for a test. Years later, I knew little or nothing about where they came from, what motivated them, what they found, and how it affected them.

At the time of their discovery, Marquette was a 37-year-old priest who had used seven years in Canada to establish Indian missions and become fluent in six different Native American dialects. Joliet, nine years his junior, at one time might have followed his fellow explorer into the priesthood, but decided instead to venture out into the Canadian wilderness and make his fortune as a trapper.

From a mission outpost in Lake Superior, Marquette heard accounts from the Illinois Indians about a great river. Yet nobody seemed to know the mouth of this body of water. But along its banks lived thousands of Indians—potential new souls to be instructed in Christ and saved. Marquette jumped at the chance to go. The governor of New France, Count Frontenac, dispatched Joliet--one "experienced in these kinds of discoveries and who had been already very near the river”—to join him. The two spent the winter of 1672-73 eliciting information from the Indians and creating maps.

With five other Frenchmen, Marquette and Joliet embarked from St. Ignace Mission on their voyage of discovery in two canoes, moving first along the northern shore of Lake Michigan, then entering Green Bay. The Menonomee natives they encountered here gave them an unmistakable warning: don’t go any further—not only would the tribes along the great river massacre any stranger, but monsters and demons lay in danger for them.

The explorers chose to go on into the then into the Fox River, where they reached the Mascouten village on June 7. Joliet addressed the tribe elders, requesting two guides—and received two Miami Indians. The guides proved handy, Marquette noted in a report, because “the road is broken by so many swamps and small lakes that it is easy to lose one’s way, especially as the River leading thither is so full of wild oats that it is difficult to find the Channel.” The guides led them to a portage, then the Frenchmen plunged ahead into the Wisconsin River, “alone in this Unknown country, in the hands of providence.”

Their great discovery might be described best by Francis Parkman in La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, part of his historical epic France and England in the New World. Having seen the river in something close to its untouched beauty, the 19th-century New England was undoubtedly better able to appreciate than us the thrill of discovering this majestic river:

“On the 17th of June, they saw on their right the broad meadows, bounded in the distance by rugged hills, where now stand the town and fort of Prairie du Chien. Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.”

At this point, it might be useful to discuss here the source of Marquette’s exploration zeal—his religious faith. Mark Twain’s explanation, in Life on the Mississippi, evinces something of the satirist’s deep religious skepticism, but there’s also a kind of admiration for the Jesuit’s persistence:

“Marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the salvages.'”

After paddling along further, Marquette’s canoe was struck by “monstrous fish” so violently, the missionary observed, that “I Thought that it was a great tree, about to break the Canoe to pieces.” At this point, he undoubtedly called to mind the warning they had received earlier from Indians about a demon “whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt.”

The explorers passed the mouth of the Missouri, then the mouth of the Ohio River, then all the way down to Arkansas. The Frenchmen were ready to risk Indians they did not know, but not Spaniards who, they were told now, were further south. The Spaniards, they knew, would seize their notes and maps, and possibly subject them to Indian allies expert in the use of firearms. In any case, the Frenchmen had learned what they’d come to find out: the mighty Mississippi did not empty into the Gulf of California or the Atlantic Ocean, but instead the Gulf of Mexico.

Ironically, after making his way all the way back to Montreal, Joliet lost all his papers from his journey when his canoe was overturned. Nevertheless, his oral report of the journey back in France guided the colony’s administrators in its policy of fortifying the Mississippi and its tributaries, erecting a barrier against English encroachment that would not be breached for nearly another 100 years.

Nearly two years to the day after his great voyage of discovery, Marquette died at age 39 of a lingering cold. His remains were transported back to the Catholic mission at Mackinac in present-day Michigan. Joliet lived on for another quarter century, still restless in his quest to carve out a niche in what he believed to be a mercantile empire in the making for himself and his descendants.