Excerpt from Letters From the Southwest

As luck would have it, the heating pipes in our sleeper burst before we left Jersey City, and we made the trip to New Orleans in a refrigerator car instead of the comfortably warmed Pullman for which we had paid.

The trip through Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama was anything but interesting. The country was covered with snow, and might as well have been in the northern part of New York, near the lakes, as in the South.

When we approached Montgomery the train passed through cedar swamps for hours, and forthe first time we saw trees draped with Florida moss. At Westport we made our first acquaintance with the turkey buz zard, and it looked as if these birds knew that things were not as they should be. They would take a lazy flight upward, and a short view of the surroundings, which seemed to be unsatisfactory, and then perch on the fences and out-houses near the station.

We arrived at New Orleans twenty hours behind time and thoroughly disgusted with our experience. Our search after sunshine, so far, had not been a success.

New Orleans, with its long line of wharves loaded with cotton bales, sugar hogsheads, and other merchandise, piled tier upon tier, looked like an industrious place. But the French market, with the French and Span ish creoles and the negroes of all shades, made a strange picture for an American city.

Our stay there extended over a week, and what amused me more than anything else was that every one we met insisted that we must see the burying-grounds. Well, they were interesting enough all the burials are above ground in sepulchral structures highly ornate. But to send a visitor, who has left home to restore his health, all over the city to see how New Orleans takes care of its dead, did not strike me as a very judicious move.

Our trip to San Antonio took us over a plain that was well cultivated in parts, and contained here and there a thriving village but the vegetation constantly reminded us that we were going south. Along the fences were large cacti, and occasionally a Spanish bayonet. We passed by large grain fields and cotton plantations, and in one of the latter saw a gang of convicts in striped suits hard at work, while mounted men, armed to the teeth, guarded them.

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