Captain Isaiah Sellers
1803–1864
Steamboat Captain
Captain Sellers was the most famous of the steamboat men plying the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans for more than 40 years. He was the first of many to use the pseudonym, “Mark Twain”, and after his death, Samuel L. Clemens adopted the same nom de plume because it always stood for truthful writing, as Clemens explains in his “Life on the Mississippi”. Captain Seller’s tombstone depicts the captain standing at the wheel of his riverboat.
