The adventure of huckleberry fin

Life

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on Nov. 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. Several years later, in 1839, the family moved to nearby Hannibal, where Clemens spent his boyhood years.
During his youth, Clemens had a strong tie to the Mississippi River, along which his town was located. Steamboats landed at the prosperous town three times a day, and Clemens' boyhood dream was to become a steamboatman on the river.
Clemens' newspaper career began while still a boy in Hannibal. In 1848, a year after his father's death, he was apprentice to printer Joseph Ament, who published the Missouri Courier. By the age of 16, in 1851, Sam was working for his brother Orion's Hannibal Western Union, for which he wrote his first published sketches and worked as a printer. Over the next two years, he continued at the Western Union, occasionally taking stints as editor in Orion's absence. In 1852, Sam published several sketches in Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post.
Clemens left Hannibal in 1853, at age 18, and worked as a printer in New York City and Philadelphia over the next year. During his trip east, he published travel letters in the Hannibal Journal. Upon returning to the Midwest in 1854, Clemens lived in several cities on the Mississippi; the most prominent of these was Keokuk, Iowa, where his brother Orion founded the Keokuk Journal.
By 1857, a 21-year-old Clemens was in New Orleans, seeking a berth on a ship going to South America, when he met steamboat pilot Horace Bixby. He persuaded Bixby to accept him as an apprentice and teach him the Mississippi for a fee of $500. After living on the river for two years as a cub pilot, Sam received his pilot's license in 1859, at the age of 23.
With the start of the Civil War, in April 1861, river traffic on the Mississippi was suspended, and Clemens' steamboat pilot career came to an end. He joined a volunteer militia group called the Marion Rangers,