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Flying Impressions Between Charleston-Kanawha and New Orleans

When the New York and Cincinnati Flyer came into Charleston yesterday, it was an hour late and quite a crowd was waiting to get aboard. Going with me as far as Kenova were D, H, and eight or ten of "the boys." They all carried Winchesters and were bound on a trip to the mountains of Mingo and McDowell, on the Kentucky line, to capture a moonshine still which was reported to be doing a fine business selling to the mines. D wanted me to go along, and offered me a rifle or a shotgun, as I chose. They are big men, all of them, and love a scrap, which means the give and take of death, and have no fear except of ambush. I still carry in my pocket the flat-nosed bullet D took from the rifle of Johnse Hatfield two years ago, when he caught him lying-in-wait behind a rock watching for Doc. Ellis to come forth from his front door. Johnse was afterward hanged in Pikeville for other crimes. Then, a few months later, his brother "Lias," just to get even, picked off Doc. Ellis as he was getting out of a Pullman car. Now "Lias" is said to be looking for D, also, but D says he's as handy with his gun as "Lias" is, if only he can get a fair show. D is captain of this raid and promises to bring me tokens of a successful haul, but I am apprehensive that, one of these days, he or some other of "the boys" will not come back to Charleston.

At Ashland my Louisville car was attached to the Lexington train, and we turned to the left up the long grade and soon plunged into the hill country of eastern Kentucky. Here is a rough, harsh land, a poor, yellow soil, underlying miles of forest from which the big timber has long since been felled. Here and there small clearings contain log cabins, shack barns, and soil which must always produce crops as mean as the men who till it. We were traversing the land of the vendettas. At the little stations, long, lank, angular men were gathered, quite frequently with a rifle or a Winchester shotgun in their bony hands. It was only two or three years ago that one of these passenger trains was "held up," by a rifle-armed gang, who found the man they were looking for crouching in the end of the smoker, and shot him to death right then and there--but not before he had killed two or three of the assassins.

I had gone forward into the smoking car, for it is in the day coaches where one meets the people of the countryside when traveling. I had seated myself beside a tall, white-haired old man who was silently smoking a stogie, such as is made by the local tobacco growers of this hill country. He had about him the air of a man of importance. He was dressed in homespun jeans and wore the usual slouch felt hat. He had a strong, commanding face, with broad, square chin and a blue eye which bespoke friendliness, and yet hinted of inexorable sternness. I gave him my name and told him where I lived, and whither I was going, introducing myself as one always must when talking to these mountain people. He was a republican, like myself, he said, and had several times been sheriff of his county; but that was many years ago and he declared himself to be now "a man of peace." We talked of the vendettas and he told me of a number of these tragedies. When I made bold to ask him whether he had ever had any "trouble" himself, he replied, "No, not for right smart o' yearn;" and then he slowly drew from his trousers pocket, a little buckskin bag, and unwound the leathern thong with which it was fast tied. Having opened it he took out three misshapen pieces of lead and handed them to me, remarking, "'T was many yearn ago I cut them thar pieces of lead, and four more of the same kind, from this h'yar leg of mine," slapping his hand upon his right thigh. "But where are the other four?" I queried. For an instant the blue eyes dilated and glittered as he replied, "I melted 'em up into bullets agen, and sent 'em back whar they cum from." "Did you kill him?" I asked. The square jaws broadened grimly, and he said, "Wall, I don't say I killed him, but he ain't been seen aboot thar sence." I offered him one of my best cigars, and turned to the subject of the horses of Kentucky. He was going to Lexington, he said, to attend the horse sales the coming week and he begged me to "light off with him," for he was sure I would there "find a beast" I would delight to own. I promised to visit him some day when I should return, and he has vouched to receive me with all the hospitality for which Kentucky mountaineers, as well as blue grass gentlemen, are famed.

When we had come quite through the hill region, we rolled out into a country with better soil, and land more generally cleared, and much in grass. It was the renowned blue grass section of Kentucky, and at dark we were in Lexington. Twinkling lights were all that I could see of the noted town. The people who were about the station platform were well dressed and looked well fed, and a number of big men climbed aboard.

We arrived at Louisville half an hour late. This was fortunate, for we had to wait only an hour for the train to Memphis, via Paducah. Two ladies, who sat behind me when I entered the car at Charleston, stood beside me when I secured my ticket in the Memphis sleeper and took the section next to mine. It had been my intention to change trains at Memphis, take the Yazoo Valley Railway and go via Vicksburg, thinking that I might see something of the Mississippi River; but in the morning I met a young engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad, who told me that this route had a very bad track, the cars were poor, the trains slow, while the line itself lay ten or twelve miles back from the river so that I should never see it; therefore, I decided to stick to the through fast train on which I had started, and go on to New Orleans by the direct route down through central Mississippi.

When I awoke we were speeding southward through the wide, flat country of western Tennessee. We passed through acres of cornstalks from which the roughness and ears had been plucked, through broad reaches of tobacco stumps, and here and there rolled by a field white with cotton.

In the toilet room of the sleeper I found myself alone with a huge, black-bearded, curly-headed planter, who was alternately taking nips from a gigantic silver flask and ferociously denouncing the Governor of Indiana for refusing to surrender Ex-governor Taylor to the myrmidons of Kentucky law, to be there tried by a packed jury for the assassination of Governor Goebel. I finally felt unable to keep silent longer, and told him that I did not see the justice of his position, and reminded him that the Governors of the neighboring States of West Virginia, Ohio and Illinois had publicly expressed their approval of the Governor of Indiana, and their disapproval of the political methods then prevailing in Kentucky. He looked steadily at me with an air of some surprise, then stretching out his flask begged me to take a drink with him. He thereafter said no more on politics, but talked for half an hour of the tobacco and cotton crops of western Tennessee.

We arrived in Memphis at about ten o'clock of the morning and stopped there some time. In the big and dirty railway station I felt myself already in a country other than West Virginia.

Memphis, the little I saw of it, appeared to be a straggling, shabby town, with wide, dusty streets, and many rambling dilapidated buildings. The people had lost the rosy, hearty look of the blue grass country, and were pale and sallow, while increasingly numerous everywhere were the ebony-hued negroes. We were passing from the latitude of the mulattoes to that of the jet-blacks, the pure blooded Africans.

Leaving Memphis, we turned southeastward and then due south, through the central portions of the state of Mississippi. Here spreads a flat country, with thin, yellow soil in corn and cotton. Everywhere were multitudes of negroes, all black as night. Negro women and children were picking cotton in the fields. There were wide stretches of apparently abandoned land, once under cultivation, much of it now growing up in underbrush and much of it white with ripened seedling cotton. In many places the blacks were gathering this cotton, apparently for themselves. There were a few small towns, at long intervals. Everywhere bales of cotton were piled on the railway station platforms; generally the big, old-fashioned bales, occasionally the small bale made by the modern compress. This is the shipping season, and we frequently passed teams of four and six mules, hauling large wagons piled high with cotton bales coming toward the railway stations. We passed through great forests of the long-leaved yellow pine, interspersed with much cottonwood and magnolia, while the leaves of the sumach marked with vivid red the divisions of the clearings and the fields. The day was dull and cloudy and a chill lingered in the air. The two lady travelers sat all day long with their curtains down and never left their books. The scenery and life of Mississippi held no interest for them.

In the dining car, I sat at midday lunch with a round-faced, pleasant mannered man some forty years of age, with whom I fell into table chat. He was a writer on the staff of a western monthly magazine and was well acquainted with the country we were traversing. He pointed out places of local interest as we hurried southward, while many incidents of history were awakened in my own mind. All of this land of swamp and bayou and cotton field had been marched and fought over by the contending armies during the Civil War. Here Grant skirmished with Johnston and won his first great triumphs of strategy in the capture of Vicksburg. Here the cotton planters in "ye olden time" lived like lords and applauded their senators in Congress for declaring in public speech that "Mississippi and Louisiana wanted no public roads." Here Spain and France contended for supremacy and finally yielded to the irresistible advance of the English-speaking American pioneer, pressing southwestward from Georgia, Carolina and Tennessee.

It was still the same flat country when, near dusk, we entered Louisiana. At the first station where we stopped an old man was offering for sale jugs of "new molasses" and sticks of sugar cane--the first hint that we were surely below the latitude of the frosts.

It was a murky night, no stars were out, only a flash of distant electric lights told us that we were approaching New Orleans. We were in the city before I was aware. Quickly passing many unlighted streets, we were suddenly among dimly lighted houses, and then drew into an old-time depot, a wooden building yet more dilapidated than that of Memphis. We were instantly surrounded by a swarm of negroes. There were acres of them with scarcely a white face to be seen. I made out one of the swarthy blacks to be the porter of the new St. Charles Hotel. Giving him my bags, I was piloted to an old-fashioned 'bus and was soon driving over well asphalted streets amidst electric lights, and found myself in the thoroughfares of a really great city. From broad Canal Street we turned down a narrow alley and drew up in front of a fine modern hotel. This is an edifice of iron, stone and tile, with seemingly no wood in its structure, large, spacious and filled with guests, the chief hostelry of New Orleans, and worthy of the modern conditions now prevailing in this Spanish-French-American metropolis of the Gulf States.

The Life and Color of New Orleans

After a well-served dinner in the spacious dining-room of the hotel, where palms and orange trees yellow with ripened fruit and exhaling the fragrance of living growth were set about in great pots, I lighted my cigar and strolled out upon narrow St. Charles street. Following the tide of travel I soon found myself upon that chief artery of the city's life,--boulevard, avenue and business thoroughfare all in one--stately Canal street. It was crowded with a slowly moving multitude, which flowed and ebbed and eddied, enjoying the soft warm air beneath the electric lights and stars. I quickly became a part of it, taking pleasure in its leisurely sauntering company.

The typical countenance about me was of the dark, swarthy Latin south, and tall men were rarely met. Among the gossiping, good natured promenaders of Canal street there is none of the haste which marks New York's lively "Rialto;" none of the scurry and jam which jostles you in brusque Chicago. In New Orleans there is an air of contented ease in the movement of the most poorly clad. Even the beggars lack the energy to be importunate.

In the afternoon I rode many miles upon the trolley cars through and about the city, and particularly along by the levees and through the fine avenue St. Charles, and the upper modern section. Low, very low, lies New Orleans, the greater part of it only a few feet above the water, really below the level of the Mississippi in times of flood. Many streets are now asphalted and kept comparatively clean, but the greater portion of the city is yet unpaved, or, when there is pavement at all, is still laid with the huge French blocks of granite put down two centuries ago. The city lies too close to perpetual dead water to permit of modern drainage and there are few or no underground sewers. The houses drain into deep, open gutters along the streets between the sidewalks and the thoroughfares over which you must step; fresh water is pumped into these gutters and, combining with the inflowing sewerage, is pumped out again into the Mississippi. It is in this crude and unsanitary manner that New Orleans strives to keep measurably clean.

The residence section, in the American city, contains many handsome mansions with wide lawns and a profusion of semitropical trees, and everywhere are gardens--flower gardens that are riotous masses of roses and jasmines and splendid blooms. Just as the glory of England is her flowers, where no home is too humble for a window box, so, too, is it in New Orleans. However dirty she may be, however slovenly and slipshod, you must yet love the city for her flowers. Even the laborer's most humble cottage glows with its mass of color.

New Orleans has no parks to boast of--Audubon Park is a mere ribbon of green--but the cemeteries on her borders are really her parks. The live oaks in them hang with masses of drooping moss, and blossoming magnolias and shrubs are everywhere. So near is the water to the surface, however, that there can be no burials within the earth, and the cemeteries are therefore filled with tombs built above the ground. Many of these are costly works of art.

The city clings to the river where the Mississippi makes a great bend, like a half moon, to the southwest, whence its name, the "Crescent City." Only the big embankments, fourteen to fifteen feet in height, prevent the homes and gardens, as well as the entire business portion of the city, from being sometimes submerged by the angry waters of the great river. I found it strange, from a steamer's deck, lying at the levee, to be looking down into the city, ten or twenty feet below. It reminded me of Holland and of Rotterdam, except that there the waters are the dead and quiet pools of Dutch canals, while here they are the swelling restless tide of the more than mile-wide Mississippi.

Along the levees were many ocean liners loading with molasses, sugar and cotton, chiefly cotton, in which there is an enormous and constantly increasing trade. The biggest ships now come up right alongside the wooden wharves of the levees, and for several miles lie there bow to stern.

The theatres and business blocks, the customhouse, and city hall and other public buildings of New Orleans are none of them modern, but appear to have been built long years ago, yet, notwithstanding their marks of antiquity, the business part of the city is animate with stir and action. There is hope in men's faces in New Orleans, and the younger men are finding in the city's waxing commerce opportunity for achievement which their forefathers never knew. With the completion of the Panama Canal, New Orleans will become one of the greatest of commercial ports.

From New Orleans I shall go via the Southern Pacific Railway, crossing the Mississippi and traveling westward through Louisiana and Texas to San Antonio, Texas, and then I shall go south into Mexico.

Southwestward to the Border

At 9:45 A. M. I left the Hotel St. Charles and took the 'bus for the Southern Pacific Station, which is a shabby, weatherworn wooden building down by the water side, in the French quarter of the city. A large, ill-kept waiting room was crowded with emigrants--chiefly "crackers" and "po' white trash" from the cotton states. A wide gangway led to the clumsy puffing ferryboat which took us across the Mississippi to a series of long, low, wooden sheds where our transcontinental train awaited us.

The ferry crosses the Mississippi from near the center of the bow, where the river sweeps in a giant curve against the crescent shore. The current is swift, and whether the waters be high or low, the river always hurries on with relentless eagerness toward the Gulf of Mexico, one hundred miles away.

As I stood upon the boat and my eye swept up and down the river, the city stretched before me black and sombre beneath a heavy pall of smoke, flat and uninteresting, only here and there a spire or steeple lifting itself solitarily above the level monotony. But along the miles of levees there was activity and life. Ocean steamers were taking on cargo, and multitudes of river steamboats were discharging freights of cotton bales and other upstream products, brought from the coal mines and wheat fields and plantations of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee, of Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa, even from the Dakotas and Nebraska and Kansas, and from Missouri and Arkansas and Mississippi and Louisiana, for here converges the vast interior water-traffic of the continent.

It is a prodigious traffic that steadily increases notwithstanding the competition of the railways which are now penetrating everywhere, even into the rich plantation country. For some years after the Civil War, New Orleans seemed to be losing her one-time pre-eminence as a port. The railways to the north threatened to cut off her trade from above, the silting up of the Mississippi's mouths threatened to destroy her access to the sea. Then came the strong, wise hand of Uncle Sam, who built the magnificent jetty system contrived by Captain Eads, and New Orleans began to wake up. Her trade increased by leaps and bounds, the river traffic revived, and she became the mistress of a water commerce far exceeding what she had known before. Now not merely are her suburbs extending along the river, but her trade and commerce have crossed to the western shore, where a new and supplemental city is rapidly growing up. There, the Southern Pacific Railway and other western lines have erected their shops and factories, laid out extensive yards and built great warehouses. There they unload and store the freight which Louisiana, Texas and the farther West send eastward for distribution to the eastern railway connections which carry it to the Gulf and Atlantic seaboard ports for export, and for delivery to domestic consumption by inland water carriage.

We were late in starting; we were late at every station along the road; we were an hour late when we arrived next morning at San Antonio; a poor beginning, surely, for a train that must journey four long days and nights to the Pacific coast.

We traversed a flat land, with many ditches and canals and pools of stagnant water lying a few feet below the level of the surface. The soil was black and rich. We crossed acres and acres, thousands of acres, of sugar-cane, and we saw many large mills, all using modern machinery for grinding cane and making sugar. Then there were fewer ditches, fewer canals, the land was higher, slightly, and there were miles of cotton fields, the cotton yet in the boll, ripe for the picking. Then it was a land with many little ditches, and little dykes; there were rice fields to be flooded; and there were rice mills,--representing a large and rapidly increasing interest. Every extent of forest we passed hung heavy with gray moss and parasitic vines. There were many live oaks and palmettoes and some cypress. The land was still gradually rising, finally becoming drier, grass-covered and grazed by herds of cattle and horses; but it was flat, always flat.

Toward dusk we passed through Beaumont, the famous oil town. This is the fateful place where millions of dollars have been made and lost within a few months. Ten years ago a group of our own Kanawha tenderfeet drilled here a four-hundred-foot dry hole, and abandoned the project, finding no oil within a stone's throw of the spot where, a few years later, Dan Lucas drilled down eight hundred feet, and struck his seventy-thousand-barrel gusher. There was an excited "boom" throng at the station, and the travelers entering our car fairly buzzed thrilling talk of oil. Among them were a number of ladies, more bediamonded, bejeweled and begolded than any group of femininity I ever saw before. The men, too, wore flashing jewels and bore that distinct stamp which marks those who, with nonchalance, win or lose a fortune in a night. They were by all odds the toughest-looking lot of elegantly clad men and women I ever yet beheld.

Our train from the North drew in at nine o'clock, on time, all vestibuled, lighted with electricity, with a dining car attached, and all its equipment greatly superior to that of the Southern Pacific. It was one of the Gould trains from St. Louis to the far South.

We reached Laredo, a city of some five thousand inhabitants, about six o'clock, P. M., where I sent the following telegram, "Cane, cotton, cattle, mesquit, sand and cactus, O. K.," which, though brief, sums up the country I have been traversing for the last two days. Laredo is upon the American side of the Rio Grande, which is crossed by a long bridge to Nuevo Laredo, in the State of Nuevo Leon. Here smartly uniformed Mexican customs officers examined my baggage and passed me through.

On to Mexico City

During the night it grew cold. I awoke shivering and called for blankets. In San Antonio the morning had been warm and, all day, south to Laredo and on to Monterey, the heat had been oppressive. It was cold when I left Kanawha, but the chilly air had not followed me beyond New Orleans, and I had there packed into my trunk all my warm clothing and checked it through to Mexico. Passing westward through Louisiana and Texas, the mild air was delightful and I was comfortable in my thinnest summer garments. Thus dreaming of orange groves and sunny tropics I fell asleep. Now I was shivering with a deadly chill, and the thin keen air cut like a scimiter. I pulled on my overcoat, which I fortunately still had with me, and slept fitfully till the day.

We crossed, during the night, the first great mountain range which shuts out the inland plateau of central Mexico from the lowland plains stretching eastward toward the Gulf and into Texas. We climbed many thousands of feet to Saltillo, where the mercury almost registered frost. Now we were descending the inner slopes of the barrier mountains, passing near the battle field of Buena Vista, where Zachary Taylor smote Santa Anna and his dark-skinned horde, and gained the fame which made him President of the United States. We were entering that vast desolate inland plain which stretches so many hundreds of miles south to Acambaro, where we should begin to climb again yet higher ranges, crossing them at last--at an altitude of eleven thousand feet,--before we should finally descend into the high cool valley of Anahuac to the City of Mexico.

In another hour the bright white sun dissipated the mists. The sky was blue and cloudless. The track ran straight, with rarely a curve, mile after mile into the South. The land lay flat as a table, an arid plain, shut in by towering, verdureless mountains, ranging along the horizon on east and west. All day we thus sped south through illimitable wastes of sand, and sage brush and cactus, and a curious stunted palm, which lifted up a naked trunk with a single tuft of green at the very end. The landscape gave no sign of ever having been blessed by a drop of water, the barren prospect extending upon all sides in apparently unending monotony.

After leaving San Louis Potos?, the great inland plain which we had all day been traversing grew more and more broken. We came among small hills, with here and there deep ravines, and we began turning slightly toward the west and climbing by easy grades toward distant, towering mountains far upon the horizon to the south. Water now became more plentiful. We followed the course of a stream, wide, between high banks, where were long reaches of sand interspersed with well filled pools. There were adoby villages in increasing numbers, and here and there were little churches or chapels, each surmounted with a large cross. I counted more than a hundred of these chapels in the course of a few miles. It was as though the whole population had for centuries devoted its time to building these shrines. Some were dilapidated and in ill repair, others looked as though recently constructed. Each has its Madonna, and each is venerated and cared for by the family who may have erected it. It was eight o'clock and dark when we reached Acambaro where a good supper awaited us in the commodious station.

First Impressions of Mexico City

Leaving my overcoat in the hotel, I took my way toward the lovely Alameda Park, where, choosing a seat beneath a splendid cypress, I sat in the delicious sunshine and watched the moving crowds. Many droves of mules, laden with products of the soil, were coming into the city. Later in the day, these same carriers of freight go out again, laden with merchandise for distribution to all the cities and villages of the mountain hinterlands.

A handsome man riding a fine, black horse, pauses a moment at the curb. He is gratified that I should admire the splendid animal. He reins him in, and I capture a view.

Later, I take my way to the Plaza Grande, fronting the Cathedral, and there again catch glimpses of the life of the city. Here are men bearing upon their shoulders casks, apparently filled, bales of garden produce, crates of chickens. Every sort of portable thing is here borne upon the human back. Now and then one or another seats himself upon the stone and iron benches and engages in gossip. Of these, also, my camera makes note.

There is so much to see in this ancient city, so much to feel! It is so filled with historical romance! As I wander about it, my mind and imagination are continually going back to the pages of Prescott and Arthur Helps, whose histories of Spanish invasion and conquest I used to pore over when a boy, and to the tragedies which Rider Haggard and Lew Wallace so graphically portray. I scarcely dare take up my pen, so afraid am I of retelling what you already know. I am ever seeing the house tops swarming with the dark hosts of Montezuma, hurling the rocks and raining the arrows upon the steel-clad ranks of Cortez and his Christian bandits as they fight for life and for dominion in these very streets below.

I stood, this morning, within the splendid cathedral, built upon the very spot where once towered the gigantic pyramid on whose summit the Aztec priests sacrificed their human victims to their gods, while down in the dungeons beneath my feet, the Holy Inquisition, a few years later, had also tortured men to their death, human victims sacrificed to the glory of the Roman Church. An Aztec pagan, a Spanish Christian, both sped the soul to Paradise through blood and pain, and I wondered, as I watched an Indian mother kneel in humble penitence before an effigy of the Virgin, and fix a lighted taper upon the altar before the shrine, whether she, too, felt clustering about her, in the sombre shadows of the semi-twilight, memories of these tragedies which have so oppressed her race.

All these pictures of the past, and many more, crowd thick upon me as I walk the streets and avenues of this now splendid modern city.

I have also tried to see what I could of the churches,--the more important of them--which here abound, but my brain is all in a whirl, and saints and Madonnas troop by me in confused and interminable train.

Ever since Cortez roasted Guatemozin upon a bed of coals, to hasten his conversion to the Roman faith and quicken his memory as to the location of Montezuma's hidden treasure, the Spanish conquerors have been building churches, shrines and chapels to the glory of the Virgin, the salvation of their own souls and the profit of their private purse. Whenever a Spaniard got in a tight place, he vowed a church, a chapel or a shrine to the Virgin or a saint. If luck was with him, he hadn't the nerve to back down, but made some show of keeping his vow and, the work once started, there were enough other vowing sinners to push the job along. Mexican genius has found its highest expression in its many and beautiful churches, and perhaps it has been a good thing for genius that so many sinners have been ready to gamble on a vow.

So now it is, that the priest wears a "bee-gum" hat and Glengarry coat, and the state takes whatever church-edifices it wants for public use. The church of San Augustin is a public library. Many churches have been converted into schools. Others have been pulled down, and modern buildings erected in their stead. The cloisters and chapel of the monastery of the Franciscans are leased to laymen, and have become the hotel Jardin. What churches the Republic did not need to use, it has been willing to rent to the Roman hierarchy for the religious uses of the people. So many have been these edifices that, despite the government's appropriations and private occupations, there yet remain church buildings innumerable where the pious may worship and the priesthood celebrate the mass. But the Roman hierarchy has no longer the wealth and will to keep these buildings in repair and in all of those I visited there was much dilapidation.

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