Horace bixby biography

Horace Ezra Bixby

Region	Occupation	Born	Died
North America, South & Gulf	Navy	1826	1912

Steamboat pilot.

After running away from home when he was thirteen, Bixby made his way to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he first worked in a tailor shop. Like many river-town youths, he was attracted to steamboating, which was rapidly expanding in the 1840s.

He started as a second, or mud, clerk on the Olivia and at age twenty became a pilot.

Bixby was regularly employed by various Mississippi and Ohio river lines during the 1850s, usually considered to have been the "Golden Age of Steamboating." In 1857, while navigating the Paul Jones from Cincinnati to New Orleans, he agreed to teach piloting to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who later gained fame as Mark Twain.

Their seventeen-month association earned Clemens a license as a Mississippi River pilot.

After the Civil War disrupted St. Louis-New Orleans commerce, Bixby piloted the Union gunboat Benton during the unsuccessful 1862 river c