Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

One hears a great deal of accidents on American railways, and they certainly appear to be very frequent, and often to be most fearful. It is not an uncommon consequence of a railway accident in winter that a great part of the passengers are burnt to death. This arises from the fact that an American railway car is a long box containing between fifty and sixty people, generally with a red-hot stove in winter at each end, and without any possible means of egress except by the doors at each end. The natural issue of this is that when an accident takes place, the carriages are forced close together, the doors are thus shut, and the stoves being overturned, or the crushed-in ends of the carriages brought in contact with them, the train is in a few minutes in flames. But as the Americans have more than thirty-eight thousand miles of railway at work, which is more than three times as much as we have in the United Kingdom, they are entitled to a good many accidents. My own experience, but it is limited to eight thousand miles, is in favour of the safety of American railway travelling. No train I was in ever met with an accident. The only delay I ever had to submit to was caused by a luggage train ahead having crushed a rail. And this delay of four hours was not altogether wasted time, for besides giving one an opportunity for taking a little walk in an American forest, it was the cause of one’s hearing the following piece of wisdom: ‘There are two things a man ought to bear well: what he can help, and what he cannot help;’ and the following specimen of infantile Transatlantic English: ‘Mother! Fix me good. Fix me good.’ The first came from a gentleman ‘on board’ the train, whom his friends called General, and was addressed to some impatient passengers. The latter came from a little sobbing child of two or three years of age, who wanted to be placed in an easier position.

No Concealing One’s Nationality.

In my tour throughout the greater part of the Union I was never mistaken for a native. On some occasions, before I had spoken a word I was addressed as an Englishman. I could not imagine what it was that revealed my nationality. Was it my dress? or the look of my luggage? or was it my manner? It once happened—it was between Gordonsville and Richmond—that a gentleman in the train even went still further, by divining at a glance not only my nationality, but also that I was a clergyman; for he began, ‘I suppose, sir, I am addressing an English clergyman.’ I was puzzled, and could only be certain that it was not my dress that had enabled him to make the discovery. The single point at which their sagacity was ever at fault, appeared to be the motive which had induced me to undertake so long a journey (of course I am only speaking of the persons one casually meets in a railway car). In the South, and up the Mississippi, I frequently heard the supposition that I had come across the water to establish some kind of business. I was supposed on the prairies to be speculating in land; in the Rocky Mountains to have an eye to gold mining. But to go back to the original point. I was once told what it was that had betrayed me on that particular occasion, and to that particular gentleman. He had taken his seat at the same breakfast table as myself, at the Gayoso Hotel, at Memphis. We had not been talking together long, when he announced to me that I was an Englishman, and how he had made the discovery. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it is impossible for a foreigner to escape detection in this country. His speech always betrays him. There is a harshness and a coarseness in foreign tones which an American instantly observes, because Americans themselves all speak with soft and musical intonations; it is natural to them.’

Memphis.

The railway cow-catcher, of which we used to see frequent mention in books of American travel, appears now to have been superseded by another contrivance with a different form; for in the United States nothing remains long in one form. The new form resembles that of the snow-plough, and it must act by partially lifting what it comes in contact with, and then throwing it off to the right or left, as it may happen. This cow-plough, though evidently superior to any contrivance for picking up or catching the cow, does not always do its work. Not far from the town of Jackson, we came up with one of these poor animals that happened to be lying on the rails. On this occasion the plough went over it, and so did the first two or three carriages; till at last the unhappy brute got fast fixed among the springs and wheels of the car I was in. The train was stopped, and the cow taken out, which, though horribly mangled, proved to be still alive. The conductor called out for the loan of a pistol to enable him to put it out of its misery. In an instant almost from every window on that side the train a hand was extended offering the desired instrument. On my making some observation on the number of pistols that were forthcoming ready loaded, at a moment’s notice, the gentleman seated next to me replied, ‘that it was quite possible that I was the only man unarmed in the train. That formerly in that part of the country many people carried revolvers, but that now, from apprehension of the blacks, in consequence of the frequent robberies committed by them, no one ever thought of moving without his six-shooter.’

Memphis is on a bluff of the Mississippi. How strange does this juxtaposition of the names of hoar antiquity and of yesterday sound in the ears of a European! And it will also seem strange to many that this city, whose name they had never heard mentioned, except as being that of a great city of the Pharaohs, has already a population of 84,000 inhabitants, and is so well situated that it is destined to become, under the reign of freedom, one of the largest of the second-class cities of the Union. A bluff is a river-cliff. It may be either an old and abandoned one (many miles of such bluffs are to be seen in the valley of the Platte, at considerable distances from the existing channel of the river), or it may be one at the foot of which the stream still runs. To the latter class belongs the bluff on which Memphis is built. It is of a soft sand, and large spaces of it have been escarped and graded between the city and the water’s edge, in such a manner as to enable the traffic to be carried on easily. A great many cotton bales were standing ready for shipment on the great river steamers. As these bales were spread out over the quays, occupying in this way much space, they suggested the idea of a great deal of traffic. One might perhaps have counted a thousand of them. But then I remembered that the whole of them would be but a very sorry cargo for one of the enormous steamers, the General Robert Lee, or the General Putman, on board of which I had lately been, and which were the largest vessels, excepting the Great Eastern, I had ever seen. They had stowage, I understood, for three thousand bales, and yet as you looked through their gilded and splendidly furnished saloons, 180 yards in length, and saw how great was the number of sleeping berths they contained, you would have supposed they were constructed for passengers only.

Emigration Deprecated.

In this most modern city with most ancient name, there were many fine shops and good buildings, but little that was continuously good; unoccupied spaces, or spaces occupied only with poor wooden tenements, were everywhere interposed. The streets were generally totally uncared for. This unsightliness and neglect are to be set down to the past, and not to the present state of things. They are some of the legacies of slavery.

I found that from Memphis, as from many other places in the South, a considerable emigration was going on. While I was there names of intending emigrants were being collected for a settlement in British Honduras: this however, I believe, was abandoned on account of the unsuitableness of the climate for white labour. As in their own State of Tennessee there is so much good land, and so delightful a climate, it could have been political reasons only that prompted this thought of leaving their country. For such persons Brazil appears just now one of the most favourable fields for commencing life anew; as the government is there offering, at a merely nominal price, in the hills in the neighbourhood of the capital, land well suited for coffee plantations, and where the climate is such as to admit of European labour. This has been done with the especial view of attracting some part of the emigration from the Southern States. No friend, however, of the unhappy people of the South would advise them to accept any offers of the kind. How much more manly would it be, and how much better would it be financially for themselves, and morally for their children and descendants, if they are prepared to labour with their own hands, to do so in their own country, and remain a part of the great Anglo-Saxon race, with all its rich inheritance of laws, literature, and traditions, than to cast in their lot with mongrel Portuguese and Africans!

Among the letters of introduction I carried with me to Memphis was one to the President of the Memphis and Ohio railway. He had just returned from a short stay at the Hot Springs Mountain in Arkansas. He is one of those gentlemen who are doing everything in their power to resuscitate the South by persuading the people to turn their attention to the varied and inexhaustible resources they possess within their own territories. As instances of this he showed me two specimens; one of a creamy white stone he had lately brought from the Hot Springs Mountain in Arkansas, and which could cut steel as readily as a file does soft iron. Of this stone he was having hones and grindstones made, which would probably be the best things of their kind anywhere to be had. The other specimen he showed me was that of iron ore from the Iron Mountain in Alabama. It looked almost like the metal itself. He said it contained sixty per cent. of iron, and that the Confederates had made use of it in the late war. This mountain is sixty miles north of Montgomery, and there is in its neighbourhood plenty of limestone, and of coal. For this district he expected (as who would not?) a great future; for not only is the consumption of iron in agriculture every year increasing, in the form of new machinery as well as tools, of which the South now stands greatly in need, but the place itself, from its contiguity to several large navigable streams, is admirably situated for a great manufacturing centre.