Life on The Mississippi Read Online Free

the Mississippi, the great river serves chiefly as a dramatic backdrop for scenes depicting Midwestern American life prior to the Civil War. During that time—roughly the 1840s—the river was enjoying its hegemony as the chief agent of transportation and the dominant symbol of progress in Western regions. But his most extended account of his river experiences, Life on the Mississippi, differs from his fiction, starting with the fact that it is a mixture of autobiography and travel narrative and ending with the fact that it is overwhelmingly what its title advertises. Published the year before Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and containing an episode that was cut from that narrative, Life on the Mississippi presents a contrasting picture of the river experience—a different perspective from that found in his greatest novel.
    As a passenger on a raft floating down the Mississippi, Huck is a passive spectator of the passing scene, whose movements are keyed to the motions of his craft, which in turn are caught in the power of the river’s currents. His is a vessel at all times at the mercy of the river’s whims, whether flood, fog, or thunderstorms, and which passes through vistas of unsurpassed beauty and permits moments of tranquillity undisturbed. Set in an extended moment of the past, some forty years before the book’s publication, Huck’s raft is a pastoral asylum surrounded by a world in which barbarism is rampant, violence and crime are daily facts of life, and slavery is protected by the laws of the land. It is, moreover, a world seldom disturbed by steamboat or other traffic, this in a time when the river would have been crowded with all manner of vessels. The steamboat, when it does appear, is either a distant prospect or a fearful apparition, whether the ghostly Gothic wreck of the Walter Scott or the dragonlike craft that tears apart the floating idyll of Huck and Jim.
    Admittedly, this anachronistic emphasis has a rhetorical purpose, for Mark Twain beheld the 1840s as through Reconstructionist spectacles—darkly—but the result is a book that seems antithetical to Life on the Mississippi, which not only limits that “life” to Mark Twain’s own experiences aboard riverboats, past and present, but concentrates on the dramatic differences between steamboat life on the river before and after the Civil War. Technology is the dominant subject matter, whether it is the detailed knowledge that the antebellum pilot had to master in order to master the river or the improvements in navigational aids made since the war, which have acted to diminish the pilot’s former heroism and grandeur. How different from the drowsing Huck floating down the river on his prelapsarian raft!
    There is also detectable in Life on the Mississippi a materialistic emphasis virtually absent from Huckleberry Finn . Money for Huck is at best a necessary evil and those characters in the novel who pursue it are characterized as fools and knaves. But in Life it is an essential quantity, not only supporting the pilot’s luxurious habits but permeating all aspects of riverboating, most often personified as Progress, seen mainly as speed, that glamourous and exciting manifestation of the cash nexus. The steamboat is the vehicle of acceleration, the pilot its most prominent agent, and drifting rafts and raftsmen figure as anachronisms and impediments to steam-powered craft: the pilots of the latter are not averse to “borrowing an oar” from a hapless raftsman or flatboat man in order to cut a tight corner for the sake of greater speed.
    The desire for speed manifested itself in every boat owner and captain, a desire that enriched those pilots like Horace Bixby who could develop the skills necessary to perform great feats of navigational daring, and who were assigned the fastest and fanciest boats on the river, but that also led to disastrous maneuvers, resulting in burst boilers and collisions. We are never told, however, why it was that such