II.

Early Years

Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, and moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, a port on the Mississippi River, when he was four years old. There he received a public school education and spent his childhood in contact with the people who made their living from the river. After the death of his father in 1847, Clemens was apprenticed to two Hannibal printers, and in 1851 he began setting type for and contributing sketches to his brother Orion’s Hannibal Journal. Subsequently he worked as a printer in Keokuk, Iowa; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and other cities.

In 1857 Clemens set out for New Orleans by riverboat, with the intention of going on to South America in search of adventure. Talks with the boat’s pilot, however, revived Clemens’s boyhood dream of “learning the river,” and he was taken on as an apprentice. He received his license as a pilot in 1859 and worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River until the American Civil War (1861-1865) brought an end to travel on the river. In 1861 Clemens served briefly as a volunteer soldier in the Confederate cavalry. Later that year he accompanied Orion to the newly created Nevada Territory, where he tried his hand at silver mining.