The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851

Transcriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. Table of Contents has been created for the HTML version.

We have here a capital portrait of the editor in chief of the New Orleans Picayune , George W. Kendall, who, as an editor, author, traveller, or bon garçon , is world-famous, and every where entitled to be chairman in assemblies of these several necessary classes of people. Take him for all in all, he may be described as a new Chevalier Bayard, baptized in the spirit of fun, and with a steel pen in lieu of a blade of Damascus. He is a Vermonter—of the state which has sent out Orestes Brownson, Herman Hooker, the Coltons, Hiram Powers, Hannah Gould, and a crowd of other men and women with the sharpest intellects, and for the most part the genialist tempers too, that can be found in all the country. His boyhood was passed in the delightful village of Burlington, from which, when he was of age, he came to New-York, and here he lived until about the year 1835, when he went to New Orleans, where his subsequent career may be found traced in the most witty and brilliant and altogether successful journal ever published in the southern or western states.
Partly for the love of adventure and partly for advantage to his health, in the spring of 1841 Mr. Kendall determined to make an excursion into the great south-western prairies, and the contemplated trading expedition to Santa-Fe offering escort and agreeable companions, he procured passports from the Mexican vice-consul at New-Orleans, and joined it, at Austin. The history of this expedition has become an important portion of the history of the nation, and its details, embracing an account of his own captivity and sufferings in Mexico, were written by Mr. Kendall in one of the most spirited and graphic books of military and wilderness adventure, vicissitude, and endurance, that has been furnished in our times. The work was published in two volumes, by the Harpers, in 1844. It has since passed through many editions, and for the fidelity and felicity, the bravery and bon hommie , that mark all its pages, it is likely to be one of the choicest chronicles that will be quoted from our own in the new centuries.