4 Chapter 3 Roughing It

Chapter 3 Roughing It "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." —Mark Twain Sam might have been a riverboat pilot all his life. But in the spring of 1861, after Abraham Lincoln became president, the Civil War broke out in the United States. Suddenly, Americans were fighting one another. All commercial traffic on the Mississippi River stopped.

The Civil War split the country into the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederacy). FOR DECADES BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR BEGAN, NORTHERN STATES AND SOUTHERN STATES HAD ARGUED OVER SLAVERY. THE NORTH WAS A REGION OF SMALL FARMS AND FACTORIES, WHERE WORKERS WERE PAID FOR THEIR LABOR. THE SOUTH WAS AN AREA WITH MANY LARGE PLANTATIONS THAT DEPENDED ON UNPAID SLAVE LABOR TO BRING IN CROPS LIKE TOBACCO AND COTTON. FOR MANY YEARS, SOUTHERNERS HAD FELT CONTROLLED BY

NORTHERN BANKS, WHICH SET THE PRICES FOR THESE CROPS. IN ALL, ELEVEN SOUTHERN STATES LEFT THE UNION AND FORMED THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA. THE NORTH SAID NO STATE HAD THE RIGHT TO DO THAT AND WENT TO WAR IN 1861 TO PRESERVE THE UNION. AFTER THE NORTHERN VICTORY IN 1865, SLAVERY WAS ABOLISHED. THE FOUR YEARS OF FIGHTING CLAIMED 620,000 LIVES. Sam did not have strong opinions about the conflict. He made his way home to Hannibal, hoping the war would end quickly. He wanted to return to the river. Even though it was a slave-holding state where most people sided with the South, Missouri remained part of the Union.

Some of Sam's boyhood pals formed a small unit of Confederate irregulars. (Irregulars were soldiers who were not part of the regular army.) The men called themselves the Marion Rangers. For lack of anything better to do, Sam joined them.

The Marion Rangers spent most of their time hiding from Union troops. "I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating," Sam later said. After two weeks, the men were tired and hungry. They called it quits.

Luckily for Sam, his brother Orion had just been named Secretary of the U.S. Territory of Nevada. Pioneers had been settling the West since the Oregon Trail opened in the 1840s. Now Sam would head out there, too, as Orion's personal secretary. Sam didn't feel bad about skedaddling and leaving others to fight the war. He was eager to explore the West. In July, the brothers climbed aboard a stagecoach for the three-week journey from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Carson City, Nevada. Sam wrote that they were leaving the States and "all sorts of cares and responsibilities" behind them.