The following Sketches of New-Orleans originally appeared in theAlabama Journal of Montgomery. For the purpose of presentingthem to the perusal of his friends at a distance, the author has causedthem to be embodied in the present form.
These pages were written from the recollection of only a few dayssojourn in the Crescent City. The period allowed the author ofcollecting information was very limited. It is also his first essay atdescriptive and historic writing. The author fondly indulges the hopethat these things will be taken into consideration by his charitablefriends, and will cause them to cast the veil of compassion over imperfections.
May 18th, 1847.
On a recent excursion to the Crescent City, I collected somefacts and statistics which are respectfully submitted to the public.In attempting a description of this magnificent emporium of commerce,as it exists at the present day, I will briefly allude to itsearly history, commencing with the great "drain" of the westernworld, which is destined to bear upon its turbid bosom halfthe commerce of the American Union.
Three hundred and thirty years ago the noble Mississippi rolledits waters to its ocean home in native silence and grandeur, hithertoseen by no European eye, when suddenly one morningHernandez De Soto stood upon its banks. How awfully sublimemust have been the contemplations of that man. He haddiscovered it a thousand miles from its mouth, two thousand fromits source. No one had ever seen its rise,—no one its exit intothe ocean. But it was reserved for the Governor of Cuba to findit through a wilderness, at a place and under circumstances themost thrilling and romantic. Four years previous to this discovery,he embarked for Florida with an outfit of a thousand men,with arms, munitions, priests and chains. His object, the conquestof a country teeming with wealth and splendour, like that whichhis former Captain found in the conquest of Peru. He penetratedFlorida, Georgia and Alabama, finding no gold—no splendid Montezuma—nothingbut savages breathing out an innocent and monotonousexistence, inhabiting a country in a state of nature alone.After hardships the most unheard of, disappointments the mostmortifying, the proud and enterprising De Soto threw his troopsinto Mauville, a large town near the confluence of the Bigby andAlabama. Here a most disastrous battle attended him, for[pg 6]although he routed the enemy in the death of thousands, he lost allhis baggage and most of his horses. His fleet then lay at the bayof Pensacola, awaiting his arrival, and by reaching it in a few dayshe could have terminated his disastrous campaign. But the proudCastilian was not to be subdued by misfortunes and disappointments.He determined to find just such a country as he had constantlysought. Fired with fresh intelligence of the magnificenceof the people who lived near the "Father of Waters," we findhim pursuing his expedition in a sun-set direction in companywith his jaded, reduced and dispirited force, with a fortitude andcourage which none but a Spaniard knows. He surmounted innumerabledifficulties, which both nature and man interposed toarrest his progress; and finally, through a dense and almost endlessforest, he suddenly gratified his vision with the majestic Mississippi.Crossing over the great river, he toiled in the prairiesand swamps of Arkansas and Missouri, until wants and vi