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.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
"[4] 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.
"[5] Finally, and most importantly, the successful pilot required "good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.
"[6] Successful pilots were able to command a salary variously reported as six times that of a clergyman[7] and greater than that of the Vice President of the United States.
[12] 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.
[14] 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.
"[1] Horace Bixby was one of the pilots of the steamboat Bertrand, which sank on April 1, 1865, after hitting a snag in the Missouri River, north of Omaha, Nebraska, in what was to become the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge.
[19] The wreck of the Bertrand was excavated in 1968, and much of its cargo as survived—over 500,000 artifacts—are on display at the museum of the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge near Missouri Valley, Iowa.
Although it appears that Bixby did not greatly blame Twain for his portrayal of him, the charm of being associated with him in the public mind, and of being pestered by reporters for yet more details about their time together, quickly paled.