95
CHAPTEB X.
COMPLETING   MY   EDUCATION.
whosoever has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which
have preceded this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with
piloting as a science. It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and
I am not quite done yet. I wish to show, in the most patient and pains-
taking way, what a wonderful science it is. Ship channels are buoyed
and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to
learn to run them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change
their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them
but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to
vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial
banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up
new quarters, whose sand-bars are never at rest, whose channels are
for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be con-
fronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single
light-house or a single buoy ; for there is neither light nor buoy to be
found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous
river.^1 I feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the
reason that I feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about
it who had piloted a steamboat himself, and so had a practical know-
ledge of the subject. If the theme were hackneyed, I should be
obliged to deal gently with the reader; but since it is wholly new,
I have felt at liberty to take up a considerable degree of room with it.
When I had learned the name and position of every visible fea-
ture of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that I could shut
my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans; when I had
^1 True at the time referred to ; not true now (1882).