But all this does not advance the journey from New Orleans to San Francisco. If you look them up on the map you will see how far they are apart—some 2500 miles as the crow flies, and by rail, say, 3000 miles. You traverse the states of Louisiana, Texas, a little of New Mexico, Arizona, and California. A state in America is, speaking generally and leaving out the smallest, as large as England, some much larger, twice as big. Thus it was no small journey; it took me five days' and nights' incessant travel by rail. But what must the distances in America have been before the days of railroads. Here in England, between the old waggon era and the rail time, we had an interregnum of coaches, which for speed were the best in the world. Thus from one end of the kingdom to the other was then only an affair of three or four days. It was different in the United States. As far as I could ascertain there never had been a coaching-time, except for short distances. The long ones were done by waggons, at the rate of, say, fifteen miles a day, the passengers sleeping in or under the said vehicles at night. From New York to California at that time took a good six months. It is now done by the direct route in something less than that number of days.
Louisiana, the first state we traversed on leaving New Orleans, is an uninteresting and swampy country, and must be very unhealthy. The vegetation is luxurious and semi-tropical. Mosquitoes exist in swarms. Some of the jungle we passed through (it has that character) reminded me of the jungles in the south-east of Bengal. Louisiana cannot be a good state for emigrants.
Texas, the next, is very different. No swamps, indeed not much water. Vast and interminable plains of grass, very thinly inhabited, and almost entirely destitute of trees. The soil in many parts seemed good; the climate, though hot, is not bad, and millions of emigrants might find homes here. This is the largest cattle-breeding state, and the ranches there are of enormous size. I have said much on this head previously, so we need not linger here.
New Mexico comes next. We only traversed a corner of this; it was all desert, and from this point, all through Arizona and well into California, there was nothing else as far as the eye could reach on either side but sand, sand, desert sand, and not a drop of water. If I remember right, we were nearly two days and nights traversing it. I was astonished beyond measure; I had read much about the United States, and I knew that there was a desert around Salt Lake, the abode of the Mormons, but I had never heard of any other. When later, both from what I saw and what was told me, I found that a very considerable part of the States is desert, I wondered more that such a great and important fact is not at all known in England, and that none of the numerous writers on America have brought it forward.[5] In the following, I may in one or two cases be open to correction, but substantially I know I am right, for most cases are the result of my own experience.
A great, if not the best part of Arizona, Nebraska, Nevada, and Utah are mostly desert.
More or less of California and New Mexico are the same.
A small part of Daho and Texas may, I believe, be included, but my information on these is from hearsay.
There may be much more than the above. I cannot doubt, from what I have seen in the parts I traversed, that there is, but the above is enough to justify my assertion that "a very considerable part of the States is desert."
I would I could give a map here of the States with all the deserts painted yellow. No map extant delineates these vast wastes. I am afraid to hazard a guess what proportion the said painted parts would bear to the whole, but enough, I am sure, to make the reader wonder as I did.