Horace Ezra Bixby (May 8, 1826 – August 1, 1912) was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio river system from the late 1840s until his death in 1912. Bixby is notable in his own right for his high standing in his profession, for his technical contributions to it, and for his service in the American Civil War. However, he is best known for having had as his "cub pilot" (that is, apprentice or trainee) the young man known to him as Sam Clemens, later to become famous under his pen name as American author Mark Twain. Twain's descriptions of Bixby's character and pedagogic style form a good part of his memoir Life on the Mississippi, and it was through this medium that Bixby—much to his annoyance—became well-known beyond the circles of his family, friends and profession.
Early life Horace Bixby was born in Geneseo, New York, a town near Rochester in the Finger Lakes region of New York, on May 8, 1826, to Sylvanus and Hanna Bixby. While still in his teens, he left home and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where he first worked in a tailor's shop, and then became a mud clerk on the packet boat Olivia. Within two years, he had become the Olivia's pilot.
Pre-Civil War career As Twain describes at length in Life on the Mississippi, a rare combination of skills and talents, honed to perfection and maintained there by unremitting drill, was required in the mid-nineteenth century, in order to safely navigate a steamboat on the Mississippi and the Missouri, "vast streams...whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without [at that time] the aid of a single light-house or a single buoy." The pilot needed to have total, perfect, and instantaneous recall for every detail of the river's meandering and ever-changing channel, with its chutes, islands, sandbars, underwater rocks, "reefs", snags, and sunken wrecks. He needed to be able to intuit exactly how any rise or fall in the river would affect its minimum depth at hundreds of shoal places, and know how to read the surface of the water "like a book." Finally, and most importantly, the successful pilot required "good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake." Successful pilots were able to command a salary variously reported as six times that of a clergyman and greater than that of the Vice President of the United States. In this demanding profession, Horace Bixby was an acknowledged master. A steamboat's pilot had not only to keep the boat safe from navigational hazards, but also to complete each journey in the shortest possible time. The unusually good speed that he was able to make without compromising safety earned him the title "Lightning" Bixby. Switzer attributes this sobriquet to his having once completed the voyage from New Orleans to St. Louis in only 4 days, 14 hours and 20 minutes. Twain recounts an incident in which Bixby saved his steamboat a full night's delay by a tour de force of piloting, prompting another pilot aboard at the time to exclaim, "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" Bixby was also unusual in that he held a pilot's licence for all three of the major inland waterways—the lower Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio—rather than only for one, as was the case with most pilots. Piloting on the Missouri during Bixby's first years there (1856–58) presented special challenges due to the undeveloped nature of the country through which it passed; a steamboat might find its forward progress impeded "by buffalo herds crossing the river one day and by Sioux warriors the next." A partial list of the boats on which Bixby was employed as pilot during this period includes Olivia, Hungarian, Paul Jones, Colonel Crossman, Crescent City, Rufus J. Lackland, William M. Morrison, New Falls City, and Aleck Scott. Bixby's time on the Colonel Crossman included an explosion in which 14 people were killed.
Early relationship with Twain Bixby first met Twain in February 1857, when the latter was 21 years old. Twain was traveling to New Orleans on the Paul Jones, on the way to South America, where he planned to raise coca, a legal crop at the time, as the process of extracting cocaine from it had not yet been invented. However, he had harbored a boyhood dream of becoming a river pilot, which he decided to make one more effort to pursue. After some negotiations, Bixby agreed to teach him the lower Mississippi for $500, of which $100 was paid in advance and the balance was to be paid out of his salary after becoming a pilot. As it happened, Twain was able to pay only $300 before the outbreak of the Civil War shut down all commercial traffic on the Mississippi. He and Bixby agreed between them to cancel the remaining balance. For much of the next two years, Twain served his apprenticeship under Bixby, though occasionally his mentor placed him with other pilots, such as during the period when Bixby was learning, and working on, the Missouri River. After Twain got his licence, the two of them worked together as pilots on the Crescent City and the New Falls City. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain portrays Bixby as an "irascible but lovable mentor." One point on which Bixby's friends took issue with Twain was his portrayal of Bixby as "a profane man," that is, as someone who occasionally used profanity for emphasis in conversation. They reported him to be a person who was always "gentle of speech." Note however that there was a difference in the etiquette of shore-based discourse and that on board a vessel, where the use of bad language by the crew (among themselves) was commonplace, and even expected.
Civil War service Horace Bixby served as pilot of the USS Benton from October 25, 1861 until August 28, 1862. The Benton was the flagship of the Mississippi River Squadron, and both Twain and Bixby's obituary refer to him as having been the squadron's "Chief Pilot" at the time of the First Battle of Memphis. Bixby's obituary states that he "always held the Union victory at Memphis due to the information he gave Commodore Foote."
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