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North Little Rock’s Mark Twain Riverboat is one of the few authentic paddle wheel boats in existence, a stern wheeler offering dining, charters, and cruises on the Arkansas River.

Many people don’t realize that the name “Mark Twain” is actually a Mississippi riverboat term meaning “mark number two” or two fathoms = twelve feet: the safe depth for a steamboat’s passage. The writer, Samuel Clemens, once a “cub” steamboat pilot himself, first started using this phrase as a pen name in 1863 and, with his success, forever cemented the phrase as a name.