Читать книгу On the Mexican Highlands, with a Passing Glimpse of Cuba - Edwards William Seymour - Страница 4

(Written on the train and mailed at Laredo, Texas.)

November 16th.

The journey from New Orleans was somewhat tedious, but yet so crowded with new sights that the time passed quite too quickly for me even to glance at the copy of Lew Wallace’s Fair God, which I had bought in New Orleans for reading on the way.

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. (The enormous traffic of the Great Lakes is now urging Congress to give them ship canals and unimpeded access to New Orleans.)

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 to take the through San Francisco Express, and I had anticipated a fine transcontinental train, something like our own “F. F. V.” which takes us from Kanawha to Cincinnati, or New York. But I was disappointed. The “Sunset Limited,” as it is called, consisted of two sleepers, hitched behind a number of shabby immigrant cars and old-fashioned passenger day coaches. None of these were vestibuled, and there was no dining car attached. I had secured, fortunately, several days in advance, a lower berth as far as San Antonio; but many passengers applied who could obtain no berths, and were allowed to crowd into the sleepers for lack of accommodation in the day coaches, into which the swarming immigrants had overflowed.

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.

We passed Houston near midnight, and in the morning by eight o’clock were at San Antonio, a city of wide streets, and spacious parks adorned everywhere with palms and palmettoes and semitropical shrubs. We entered a ’bus and drove a mile to the station of the International and Great Northern Railway, which comes down from St. Louis and runs south seventy miles to Laredo, on the Rio Grande and the Mexican border. We passed the bullet-battered walls of the famous Alamo, the hallowed shrine of every loyal Texan, then a large Roman Catholic Cathedral with Spanish roof and bell tower, a huge convent and several stately public buildings. San Antonio is a city of forty thousand people and the last American town of magnitude north of Mexico. At the station, where we waited half an hour, I saw my first Mexican greasers, in their prodigious sombreros and began to feel myself nearing a strange land.

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.

Leaving San Antonio, we traversed a country still flat, always flat, covered with sand and mesquit for miles and miles and miles. As far as the eye could see in every direction, hour after hour stretched this illimitable monotonous wilderness. The mesquit trees looked like ill-grown peach trees. To my unaccustomed eye, we seemed to be passing through endless barren orchards, the trees standing generally thirty or forty feet apart. Here is the home of the jack rabbit, and toward the Mexican border and within reach of the waters of the Rio Grande, deer abound. Quail are also common, but of other life there is little or none. Here and there the mesquit trees were cut away, and wide, sandy fields were planted with cotton. Cattle also were cropping the short, dry native grass. As we traveled south the grass diminished, the sand increased and the prickly cactus became increasingly plentiful. At one of the stations where we stopped for the engine to take water, I talked with a tall white-bearded planter, who stood holding his horse, the horse accoutered with Mexican saddle and lariat, the man in high Mexican sombrero. “The labor hereabouts is all Mexican,” he said. “Mexican peons you can import in unlimited numbers, who are glad to work for thirty cents per day and board themselves. Hence there are no negroes south of San Antonio, for no negro will work and live on such small pay. Moreover, the soil is so poor and water is so scarce that neither cotton nor cattle could here be raised with profit, if it were not for the low wage the Mexican is glad to accept.”

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.