"I entered upon the small enterprise of 'learning' twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life... I supposed that all a pilot had to do was keep his boat in the river, and I didn't consider that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide."       

"Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi" is a celebration in Twain's own words of a boy's transformation into a Mississippi River steamboat pilot,  "the only unfettered and entirely independent being that lived on the Earth." Drawing from Twain's "standard work" and from letters and other documents, the show presents a master storyteller recounting the most joyous time of his life, the people he met and the events, both happy and tragic, that set the young Sam Clemens on the road to becoming Mark Twain.