9 March 1858 • St. Louis, Mo. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00014)
I must take advantage of the opportunity now presented to write you, but I shall necessarily be dull, as I feel uncommonly stupid. We have had a hard trip this time.1explanatory note Left Saint Louis three weeks ago on the Pennsylvania. The weather was very cold, and the ice running densely. We got 15 miles below town, landed the boat, and then one pilot, Second Mate and four deck hands took the sounding boat and shoved out in the ice to hunt the channel.2explanatory note They failed to find it, and the ice drifted them ashore. The pilot left the men with the boat and walked back to us, a mile and a half. Then the other pilot and myself, with a larger crew of men started out and met with the same fate. We drifted ashore just below the other boat. Then the fun commenced. We made fast a line 50 20 Ⓐemendationfathoms long, to the bow of the yawl, and put the men, (both crews) to it like horses, on the shore. Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep her head out, with and I took the tiller. We would start the men, and all would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many ten-pins, while b Brown Ⓐemendationassumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. After an hour’s hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars. Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (the first mentioned pilot,) and myself, took a double crew of fresh men and tried it again. This time we found the channel in less than an hour, and landed on a island Ⓐemendationtill the Pennsylvania came along and took us off. The next day was colder still.3explanatory note I was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us. We went ten miles further, landed, and George and I cleared out again—found the channel first trial, but got caught in the gorge and drifted helplessly down the river. The Ocean Spray came along and started into the ice after us, but although she didn’t succeed in her kind intention of taking us aboard, her waves washed us out, and that was all we wanted. We landed on an island, built a big fire and waited for the boat. She started, and ran aground!4explanatory note It commenced raining and sleeting Ⓐemendation, and a very interesting time we had on that barren sandbar for the next four hours, when the boat got off and took us aboard. The next day was terribly cold. We sounded Hat Island,5explanatory note warped up around a bar and sounded again—but in order to understand our situation you will have to read Dr. Kane.6explanatory note It would have been impossible to get back to the boat. But the Maria Denning was aground at the head of the island—they hailed us,—we ran alongside and they hoisted us in and thawed us out.7explanatory note We had then been out in the yawl Ⓐemendationfrom 4 o’clock in the morning till half past 9 without being near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over men, yawl, ropes, and everything else, and we looked like rock-candy statuary. ¶ ⒶemendationWe got to Saint Louis this morning, after an absence of ◇ Ⓐemendation3 weeks—that boat generally makes the trip in 2.8explanatory note
Henry was doing little or nothing here, and I sent him to our clerk to work his way for a trip, by measuring woodpilesⒶemendation, counting coal boxes, and other clerkly duties, which he performed satisfactorily. He may got down with us again, for I expect he likes our bill of fare better than that of his boarding house.9explanatory note
I got your letter at Memphis as I went down. That is the best place to write me at. The post office here is always out of my route, somehow or other. Remember the direction: “S.L.C., Steamer Pennsylvania, Care Duval & Algeo, Wharfboat, Memphis.”10explanatory note I cannot correspond with a paper, because when one is learning the river, he is not allowed to do or think about anything else.
I am glad to see you in such high spirits about the land, and I hope will Ⓐemendationremain so, if you never get richer. I seldom venture to think about our landed wealth, for “hope deferred maketh the heart sick.”11explanatory note
I did intend to answer your letter, but I am too lazy and too sleepy, now. We had had Ⓐemendationa rough time during the last 24 hours working through the ice between Cairo and Saint Louis, and I have had but little rest.
I got here too late to see the funeral of the 10 victims by the burning of the Pacific hotel in 7th street. Ma says there were 10 hearses, with the fire companies (their engines in mourning—firemen in uniform,)—the various benevolent societies in uniform and mourning, and a multitude of citizens and strangers, forming, altogether, a procession of 30,000 persons! One steam fire-engine was drawn by four white horses, with crape festoons on their heads.12explanatory note
Well, I am—just—about—asleep—
The trip described here began about 10:00 a.m. on 17 February in a falling, ice-choked river made particularly treacherous by a rapidly changing channel. The captains of most New Orleans boats at the St. Louis levee elected to await better conditions before sailing. Captain Klinefelter’s decision to get under way was based on his belief that the Pennsylvania had “power enough to plow through the ice even if the river should be full of it” (“Pennsylvania for New Orleans,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 16 Feb 58, 3).
The pilot was George G. Ealer, a respected St. Louis–New Orleans riverman who served on the Crescent City, the Pennsylvania, and other major packets. Clemens wrote warmly of Ealer—a devotee of Shakespeare, Goldsmith, chess, and the flute—whose kindly disposition was in contrast to William Brown’s maliciousness (see Life on the Mississippi, chapters 18, 19, 24, and “Is Shakespeare Dead?” SLC 1909, 4–19). Unfortunately for Clemens it was Brown who was his direct superior on the Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania’s second mate was James M. Thompson of Georgetown, Pennsylvania.
By daybreak on 18 February, after twenty-one hours on the river, the Pennsylvania had managed to reach only Rush Tower, just forty miles below St. Louis (“Steamer Rodolph’s Memoranda,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 19 Feb 58, 3).
Captain Waldo P. Marsh’s Ocean Spray, coming upriver from New Orleans with one wheel damaged by the ice, reported reaching “the foot of Ste. Genevieve Island [sixty miles below St. Louis], where we found Pennsylvania sounding. While we were trying to get over she grounded. We crossed below her on 5½ feet water, at 9 a. m.” (“Memoranda,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 21 Feb 58, 3).
A dangerous crossing near Wittenburg, Missouri, about a hundred miles below St. Louis and eighty above Cairo, Illinois. In chapter 7 of Life on the Mississippi it is the site of some spectacular piloting by Horace Bixby.
Elisha Kent Kane (1820–57), a U.S. Navy surgeon, participated in two unsuccessful Arctic expeditions in the 1850s in search of Sir John Franklin, the explorer who died in 1847 while trying to find a northwest passage to the Orient. Kane published two popular accounts of the expeditions: The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative (1853), and Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin 1853, ’54, ’55 (1856).
Soon after Clemens and the sounding crew were thawed out on board Captain Hercules Carrel’s Maria Denning, the Pennsylvania got under way and arrived at Cairo on Friday afternoon, 19 February (Way 1983, 307; “Pennsylvania Arrived at Cairo—Special Dispatch,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 21 Feb 58, 3). The Denning, bound for St. Louis, remained aground at Hat Island for at least five days.
The Pennsylvania docked at St. Louis in the early morning of 9 March, having taken twenty days, six or seven more than usual, to complete the trip to New Orleans and back.
Henry Clemens returned for five more trips as a “mud-clerk” on the Pennsylvania. The mud clerk was “so called because it was his duty to go on shore, often at a mere mud-bank, to receive or check off freight” (Lex , 150). “Mud clerks received no salary,” Clemens recalled in 1906, “but they were in the line of promotion. They could become, presently, third clerk and second clerk, then chief clerk—that is to say, purser” (AD, 13 Jan 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 1:307). The regular clerks at the time of this letter were Lewis J. Black and William Drum.
Duval, Algeo and Company of Memphis, Tennessee, were steamboat agents and receiving, forwarding, and commission merchants for the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, specializing in cotton shipments to eastern terminals. They had purchased the unprofitable steamer St. Louis and in 1856 converted it to a wharf-boat anchored at the lower Memphis levee, where it remained until it sank on 9 December 1860 (advertisement, Memphis Appeal, 13 Oct 58, 2; “River Intelligence,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 14 Dec 60, 3; Way 1983, 412).
Clemens’s quotation is from Proverbs 13:12. He alludes to the tract of some seventy-five thousand acres near Jamestown, Fentress County, Tennessee, that John Marshall Clemens had purchased for $400 in about 1830, thereby saddling his family with the “heavy curse of prospective wealth” (“The Tennessee Land,” CU-MARK, in MTA , 1:3–7). Although after the father’s death in 1847 responsibility for realizing income from the land fell chiefly to Orion, every member of the Clemens family, at one time or another, cherished schemes for exploiting it. Orion, having sold his Keokuk print shop in June 1857, had been in Jamestown with his wife since October of that year. There he studied law, was admitted to the bar, and also surveyed the family land, no doubt in hopes of a sale. Mollie Clemens returned to Keokuk in late April 1858, and Orion followed her that July, without having disposed of any of the property (MEC, 6–9).
On 20 February 1858, three days after the Pennsylvania left St. Louis, fire destroyed the new Pacific Hotel, killing twenty-one guests (Scharf, 2:1446; St. Louis Missouri Republican: “The Late Catastrophe,” 24 Feb 58, 2; “Two More Victims,” 25 Feb 58, 2). St. Louis civic leaders organized an impressive funeral procession to Bellefontaine Cemetery for ten of the victims on 24 February. The Missouri Republican of the following day expressed confidence that the citizens in the procession and the twenty-five thousand spectators were inspired by sorrow and respect, rather than a “love of funeral pomp” or “mere curiosity” (“Burial of the Pacific Hotel Victims,” 25 Feb 58, 2). Annie Moffett Webster later recalled attending the procession with her grandmother, Jane Clemens, who did love such occasions (see MTBus , 41).
Clemens artfully inscribed his closing and signature to suggest a gradual loss of control over his pencil.
Clemens wrote the letter in pencil; unfortunately Orion also wrote on the MS in pencil. Orion’s hand here can usually be readily distinguished, but positive identification sometimes becomes difficult in very short additions like those discussed below.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 76–79; MTB , 1:133–34, excerpts; MTL , 1:36–38.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61. About 1880 Orion Clemens marked the MS for inclusion in the autobiography he was then writing.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.