The Complete Non-Fiction Writings of Mark Twain: Old Times on the Mississippi + Life on the Mississippi + Christian Science + Queen Victoria's Jubilee + My Platonic Sweetheart + Editorial Wild Oats. Mark Twain
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pilots in the Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances, — any way, so they got there. They paid in their twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month, and calculate their burial bills.
By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones, were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out of it and laughing at it. It was the laughing-stock of the whole river. Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent. of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached. Wages had gone up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. Some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chaffing the members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked like. However, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was ‘out of luck,’ and added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars — the association figure — and became firmly fixed there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired. The hilarity at the association’s expense burst all bounds, now. There was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to put up with.
However, it is a long lane that has no turning. Winter approached, business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of Missouri, Illinois and Upper Mississippi River boats came pouring down to take a chance in the New Orleans trade. All of a sudden pilots were in great demand, and were correspondingly scarce. The time for revenge was come. It was a bitter pill to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed that there was no other way. But none of these outcasts offered! So there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed: they must be sought out and asked for their services. Captain — — was the first man who found it necessary to take the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization. He hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said —
‘Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so I’ll give in with as good a grace as I can. I’ve come to hire you; get your trunk aboard right away. I want to leave at twelve o’clock.’
‘I don’t know about that. Who is your other pilot?’
‘I’ve got I. S — — . Why?’
‘I can’t go with him. He don’t belong to the association.’
‘What!’
‘It’s so.’
‘Do you mean to tell me that you won’t turn a wheel with one of the very best and oldest pilots on the river because he don’t belong to your association?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, if this isn’t putting on airs! I supposed I was doing you a benevolence; but I begin to think that I am the party that wants a favor done. Are you acting under a law of the concern?’
‘Yes.’
‘Show it to me.’
So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary soon satisfied the captain, who said —
‘Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S — — for the entire season.’
‘I will provide for you,’ said the secretary. ‘I will detail a pilot to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o’clock.’
‘But if I discharge S — — , he will come on me for the whole season’s wages.’
‘Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S — — , captain. We cannot meddle in your private affairs.’
The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge S — — , pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot in his place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way now. Every day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged captain discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity, and installed a hated association man in his berth. In a very little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired. The laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably. These victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the revenge they would take when the passing business ‘spurt’ was over.
Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and crews of boats that had two non-association pilots. But their triumph was not very long-lived. For this reason: It was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never, under any circumstances whatever, give information about the channel to any ‘outsider.’ By this time about half the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders. At the first glance one would suppose that when it came to forbidding information about the river these two parties could play equally at that game; but this was not so. At every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other, there was a ‘wharfboat’ to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was stored in it for transportation; waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon each of these wharfboats the association’s officers placed a strong box fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but one — the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government had been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every association man carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger — for the success of the St. Louis and New Orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighboring steamboat trades — was the association man’s sign and diploma of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his question was politely ignored. From the association’s secretary each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a billhead, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns; a billhead worded something like this —
STEAMER GREAT REPUBLIC.
JOHN SMITH MASTER
PILOTS, JOHN JONES AND THOMAS BROWN.
+ — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — +
| CROSSINGS. | SOUNDINGS. | MARKS. | REMARKS. |
+ — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — +
These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and deposited in the several wharfboat boxes. For instance, as soon as the first crossing, out from St. Louis, was completed, the items would be entered upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus —
‘St. Louis. Nine and a half (feet). Stern on courthouse, head on dead cottonwood above woodyard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up square.’ Then under head of Remarks: ‘Go just outside the wrecks; this is important. New snag just where you straighten down; go above it.’
The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding to it the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis) took out and read half a dozen fresh