Horace Ezra Bixby
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Captain Horace Ezra Bixby |
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|---|---|
| Born |
May 8, 1826 Geneseo, New York, US |
| Died | 1 August 1912 (aged 86) Maplewood, Missouri, US |
| Resting place | Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri, US |
| Occupation | Steamboat pilot, Steamboat captain, Inventor |
| Years active | 1848-1912 |
| Spouse(s) | Susan Weibling 1860(?)–1867 Mary Sheble 1869–1912 |
| Children | Edwina, Edwin, George Mason |
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.
Horace Bixby was born in Geneseo, New York, a town near Rochester in the Finger Lakes region of New York, on 8 May 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.
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.
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