Readers familiar with the life of Mark Twain know that none of the would-be adventurers found their way to the Amazon:  His two associates gave up the plan, probably for lack of means.  Young Clemens himself found a fifty-dollar bill one bleak November day blowing along the streets of Keokuk, and after duly advertising his find without result, set out for the Amazon, by way of Cincinnati and New Orleans.

     “I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day,” he
     once declared, a statement which we may take with a literary
     discount.

He remained in Cincinnati that winter (1856-57) working at his trade.  No letters have been preserved from that time, except two that were sent to a Keokuk weekly, the Saturday Post, and as these were written for publication, and are rather a poor attempt at burlesque humor—­their chief feature being a pretended illiteracy —­they would seem to bear no relation to this collection.  He roomed that winter with a rugged, self-educated Scotchman—­a mechanic, but a man of books and philosophies, who left an impress on Mark Twain’s mental life.

In April he took up once more the journey toward South America, but presently forgot the Amazon altogether in the new career that opened to him.  All through his boyhood and youth Samuel Clemens had wanted to be a pilot.  Now came the long-deferred opportunity.  On the little Cincinnati steamer, the Paul Jones, there was a pilot named Horace Bixby.  Young Clemens idling in the pilot-house was one morning seized with the old ambition, and laid siege to Bixby to teach him the river.  The terms finally agreed upon specified a fee to Bixby of five hundred dollars, one hundred down, the balance when the pupil had completed the course and was earning money.  But all this has been told in full elsewhere, and is only summarized here because the letters fail to complete the story.

Bixby soon made some trips up the Missouri River, and in his absence turned his apprentice, or “cub,” over to other pilots, such being the river custom.  Young Clemens, in love with the life, and a favorite with his superiors, had a happy time until he came under a pilot named Brown.  Brown was illiterate and tyrannical, and from the beginning of their association pilot and apprentice disliked each other cordially.

It is at this point that the letters begin once more—­the first having been written when young Clemens, now twenty-two years old, had been on the river nearly a year.  Life with Brown, of course, was not all sorrow, and in this letter we find some of the fierce joy of adventure which in those days Samuel Clemens loved.

To Onion Clemens and Wife, in Keokuk, Iowa: