Traveling with Twain

Shortly after Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) arrived in New Orleans on February 28, 1857, his dream of going to Brazil to become a wealthy trader in cocaine gave way to a plan to pilot Mississippi River wedding-cake paddlewheelers. A river steamboat pilot, Twain said, was “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on earth.” During the next four years he traveled to New Orleans possibly fifty times, dining one afternoon with three pilots on a four-hour, $10-luncheon at a French restaurant—“breathe it not unto Ma!” he wrote to his brother Orion. They ate sheepshead fish with mushrooms, shrimp, oyster and game birds, smoked cigars and drank coffee flavored with burnt brandy. Twain reveled in Mardi Gras, where Santa Claus marched with genii “grotesque, hideous & beautiful in turn.” He walked streets that teemed with “men, women, and children of every age, color and nation.” He met not only Germans, Italians and Chinese, Andrew Beahrs writes in Twain’s Feast, but also Natchez, Houma and Chitimacha Indians, rural Cajun from the bayou, French and Spanish Creole planters and blacks from the West Indies as well as the South. Twain was in New Orleans in 1861 when Louisiana seceded from the Union and the Civil War started. He returned with G. W. Cable in 1882 to a New Orleans that he labeled the metropolis of the South—“a wealthy, far-seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants.”

November 12-November 15