It was to be more than sixty years from publication in 1883 that Life on the Mississippi came near the 100,000 sale its author hoped for it.
In 1880, a twelve-year-old Dallas schoolboy named Wattie Bowser sent Mark Twain a fan letter asking him for his autograph and to say whether he would be willing to change places with Wattie and to be a boy again. The answer was yes, but with one main condition: “That I should emerge from boyhood as a ‘cub pilot’ on a Mississippi boat, and that I should by and by become a pilot, and remain one.... And when strangers were introduced I should have them repeat ‘Mr. Clemens?’ doubtfully, and with the rising inflection—and when they were informed that I was the celebrated ‘Master Pilot of the Mississippi, ’ and immediately took me by the hand and wrung it with effusion, and exclaimed, ‘O, I know that name very well!’ I should feel a pleasurable emotion trickling down my spine and know I had not lived in vain.” He was remembering the grandeur that surrounded the lightning pilot, the gold-leaf, kidglove, diamond-breastpin sort of pilot who answered to no man and spoke in commands, not requests.
“Master Pilot of the Mississippi” is a figure of speech for the literary achievement of Mark Twain, a name born on the river and meaning two fathoms, or twelve feet of depth: for the moment safe water, but not by much, for a shallow draft steamboat. It was a name so linked with the river that Mark Twain’s young daughter, Clara, hearing the leadsman on a steamboat sing out his soundings, once said, “Papa, I have hunted all over the boat for you. Don’t you know they are calling for you?”
“Your true pilot,” he writes, “cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.” The evolution under Horace Bixby of “cub” into licensed pilot is also the story of Sam Clemens’s evolution from novice writer to the literary master Mark Twain. The lessons he learned on the river have the resonance of lessons learned about writing and put into practice year after year. “There is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it. . . . With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase ‘I think,’ instead of the vigorous one ‘I know!’ ” Along with memory, intuition, and trust in instinct, “he must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.” The great river itself had been an alphabet, a language, a primer, and a book with “a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one you could leave unread without loss.” The next such story, after Life on the Mississippi, was to be Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
—Justin Kaplan
The “Body of the Nation”
But the basin of the Mississippi is the BODY OF THE NATION. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of the La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about 
of its area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about 
; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tsekiang, and Nile, 
; the Ganges, less than ½; the Indus, less than ⅓; the Euphrates, ⅕; the Rhine, 
. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. It would contain Austria four times, Germany or Spain five times. France six times, the British Islands or Italy ten times. Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of Siberia, the lofty plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon more adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population. As a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe.
—EDITOR’S TABLE, Harper’s Magazine, February, 1863.
Afterword
There is, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, a symmetry to the continent of North America, a classical proportion provided by the great river that bisects the United States. The Mississippi provides a diagonal that stretches from the southernmost to the northernmost continental extremities, pointing toward Canada at one end and the Gulf of Mexico at the other. Toward the east, the contributory Ohio River stretches into the foothills of the Allegheny range; toward the west, there is the Missouri, whose tributaries flow out of the Rocky Mountains. This east-west configuration was viewed by Colonial geopoliticians like Thomas Jefferson as a riverine corridor for expanding empire, and in fact the three great rivers served for nearly a century as the route for westering Americans. By 1825 it was abetted by the Erie Canal and in 1832 by the Ohio system of canals, connecting the Hudson River with its western counterparts.
Although the Mississippi contributed a relatively short length along this great diagram, from the start it was seen as the single most important river on the American continent, serving as a vital commercial waterway joining the North to the South. As an adjunct to an expanding empire, however, the Mississippi seemed an often unwilling ally, thanks in large part to the muddy might of the Missouri, which drew a turbulent flood from the far-western regions.
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